Maverick Philosopher

Why Alabamans Should Vote for Roy Moore

Tully Borland makes the case in The Federalist.  

In so doing he has provoked a crap storm of controversy. See here and here. The quality of the Twitter jabs of an army of thoughtless twits justifies my talk of a crap storm.

It is depressing to realize how few people today are able calmly to follow an argument and evaluate it as opposed to heaping abuse upon its producer.

(I have noted the same thing in popular opposition to the work of David Benatar.)

Politics is almost always about choosing between the better and the worse.  Both Moore and his opponent, Doug Jones, are flawed character-wise. But character is only one consideration. Equally if not more important are the policies the candidates support.  Now Jones is for unrestricted abortion which, as Professor Borland points out, is tantamount to infanticide. Unrestricted abortion is a grave moral evil. So if you refuse to vote for Moore because of his (alleged) sins of 40 years ago, then you indirectly lend support to a pro-abortion candidate.  I should think that the gravity of the evil of future abortions far outweighs one man's (alleged) evil sexual excesses of 40 years ago.

According to David French, "There’s no defensible argument for choosing the 'lesser of two evils' in Alabama."  But I just gave one!

As Borland points out, if one had a policy of voting only for the morally perfect, one would have to abstain from politics entirely.

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UPDATE (12/1). The controversy continues.  I won't link to any of it due to its low quality.  Much of its rests on the assumption that an argument is good if and only if it leads to a conclusion that the consumer of the argument antecedently accepts.  Otherwise it is bad and one is free to mock and malign the producer of the argument.

Islam and the Decalogue

Earlier today I wrote that ". . . the Decalogue is common to the three Abrahamic religions." Then I received a note from Claude Boisson that referred me to Howard Kainz, Islam and the Decalogue:

Just as Islam teaches the reverse of the Golden Rule, it teaches the reverse of the last seven of the Ten Commandments, which have to do with morality . . . .

If Kainz is right, and he may well be for all I know, the argument I alluded to is not affected. My point was simply that the public posting of the Ten Commandments, which are found in the Old Testament, and are common to both Judaism and Christianity, and are therefore not specific to Christianity, cannot be reasonably taken to aid and abet the establishment, let alone establish, Christianity as the state religion of the United States in violation of that clause of the First Amendment that reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ."

I am sorry to have to say something so painfully obvious. But liberals, being the destructive knuckleheads they are, need to be hit over the head on a regular basis with simple truths that even they should be able to understand.  

bridgeUSA

Patrick Kearney, president of bridgeUSA, writes,

This transcends left and right, progressive and conservative. This is a movement to shed labels and engage in politics as free thinkers.  

I sympathize with the sweet sentiment while remaining deeply skeptical. Indeed, I am more than skeptical: I consider the aims of this project incoherent.

First of all, no clear meaning is or can be attached to the notion of 'transcending' the progressive and conservative worldviews.  You want to get beyond both? And end up where?  Or perhaps you want to stand on the ground common to both. But what ground is that?

There are just too many deep, non-negotiable differences.  I sometimes call them 'planetary' differences. If you tell me that a border wall is hateful or racist, I reply that you live on a different planet: what you say is so crazy as to be beneath refutation.  And so on through dozens of issues.  The posting of the Ten Commandments in a public place establishes Christianity as the state religion in violation of the First Amendment? Are you out of your mind? For one thing, the provenience of the Decalogue is the Old Testament, not the New.  For another, the Decalogue is common to the three Abrahamic religions. I could go on. 

Second, it is silliness of a high order to suppose that we can "shed labels." Label we can and label we must if are to understand anything.  For example, 'pro-choice' and 'pro-life' label a real difference in approach to the question of abortion.  To eschew labels is to eschew thought.

Third, social harmony is better served by walls, not bridges. Conflict results when people with radically different beliefs and values are forced to live together. There is much talk of secession these days.  That would be a mistake. But a return to federalism may help. 

Finally, to those pollyannas who think we can just transcend our differences, drop the labels, and form one big happy family, I say read the following from Salon, 11/24/2017:

Are you sick of Republicans? Or just right-wingers in general? Do you want to send a message to Washington that you aren't going to buy into their racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic and classist nonsense for one second longer?   

They left out 'fascist' and 'Islamophobic." The punks don't even know their own litany of abuse. And you think we have common ground with these scumbags?

Is a Thinking Person's Afterlife Conceivable?

A repost from over five years ago. Reposts are the reruns of the blogosphere. You don't watch a Twilight Zone or Seinfeld episode only once, do you?  No you don't. The savoring of the riches therein contained requires many viewings. Same with what follows, mutatis mutandis.  Resurrected due to its relevance to a recent thread on anti-natalism.

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As far as I can tell, the popular Islamic conception of the afterlife is unbelievably crass, a form of what might be called 'spiritual materialism.' You get to do there, in a quasi-physical world behind the scenes, what you are forbidden to do here, for example, disport with virgins, in quantity and at length. And presumably they are not wrapped up, head-to-foot, like the nuns of the 1950s. You can play the satyr with their nubility for all eternity without ever being sated. But first you have to pilot some jumbo jets into some skyscrapers for the greater glory of Allah the Merciful.

That the afterlife is a garden of sensuous delights, a world of goodies with none of the bad stuff endemic to our sublunary sphere, is a puerile conception. It is a conception entertained not only by Muslims but also by many Christians. And even if many do not think of it in crassly hedonistic terms, they think of it as a prolongation of the petty concerns of this life. This, however, is not what it is on a sophisticated conception:

     . . . the eternal life promised by Christianity is a new life into
     which the Christian is reborn by a direct contact between his own
     personality and the divine Spirit, not a prolongation of the
     'natural' life, with all its interests, into an indefinitely
     extended future. There must always be something 'unworldly' in the
     Christian's hopes for his destiny after death, as there must be
     something unworldly in his present attitude to the life that now
     is. (A. E. Taylor, The Christian Hope for Immortality, Macmillan
     1947, p. 64, emphasis in original)

The epitaph on Frank Sinatra's tombstone reads, "The best is yet to come." That may well be, but it won't be booze and broads, glitz and glamor, and the satisfaction of worldly ambitions that were frustrated this side of the grave. So the believer must sincerely ask himself: would I really want eternal life?

At funerals one hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with the Lord. In many cases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? If you have loved the things of this world as if they were ultimate realities, then perhaps you ought to hope that death is annihilation.

In any case, it is the puerile conception with which some mortalists and atheists want to saddle sophisticated theists. (A mortalist is not the same as an atheist, but most of the one are the other.) But is there a non-puerile, a sophisticated, conception of the afterlife that a thinking man could embrace? The whole trick, of   course, is to work out a conception that is sophisticated but not unto utter vacuity. This is a hard task, and I am not quite up to it. But it is worth a try.

Our opponents want to saddle us with puerile conceptions: things on the order of irate lunar unicorns, celestial teapots, flying spaghetti monsters, God as cosmic candy man, and so on; but when we protest that that is not what we believe in, then they accuse us of believing in something vacuous. They would saddle us with a dilemma: you either embrace some unbelievable because crassly materialistic conception of God and the afterlife or you embrace nothing at all. I  explore this at length in Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept.

Self-professed mortalist and former Jesuit Peter Heinegg writes, "It was and is impossible to conceive of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life (harps, houris, etc.), which doesn't  get one very far." (Mortalism, Prometheus 2003, p. 11) Granted, the harps-and-houris conception is a nonstarter. But is it really impossible to conceive of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life?

Suppose that a bunch of young adolescents were to claim that it is  impossible to conceive of adulthood except as an improved version of adolescence. These boys and girls imagine adulthood to be adolescence but with the negative removed: no pimples, no powerlessness, no pestering parents, no pecuniary problems, no paucity of facial hair or mammary deficiency, etc. They simply cannot conceive of anything beyond the adolescent level. If you were to try to convince them that  their horizon is limited and that there is more to life than  adolescent concerns you would not get through to them. For what they  need is not words and arguments; they need to grow up. The notion of growing up, though it entails persisting in time, is distinct from it:  it involves the further notion of maturation. They need to shed false beliefs and values and acquire true ones.

In this life, we adults are like adolescents: confused, unsure of what we really want, easily led astray. We have put away many childish  things only to lust after adult things, for example, so-called 'adult entertainment.' We don't read comic books, we ready trashy novels. We don't watch cartoons, we watch The Sopranos and Sex in the City.  We  are obviously in a bad state. In religious terms, our condition is  'fallen.' We are not the way we ought to be, and we know it. It is also clear that we lack the ability to help ourselves. We can make  minor improvements here and there, but our basic fallen condition  cannot be ameliorated by human effort whether individual or  collective. These, I claim, are just facts. If you won't admit them,  then I suggest you lack moral discernment. (I am not however claiming  that eternal life is a fact: it is a matter of belief that goes beyond  what we can claim to know. It is not rationally provable, but I think  it can be shown to be rationally acceptable.)

Contrary to what Heinegg says is impossible, I am able, employing analogies such as  the foregoing, to conceive of a radical change that transforms us from  the wretched beings that we presently are into beings who are  genuinely and wholly good. (I concede, though, that conceivability is  no sure guide to real possibility; but the issue at the moment is  conceivability.) What is difficult and perhaps impossible is to conceive the details of how exactly this might come about. As I said,  it can't be achieved by our own effort alone. It requires a divine  initiative and our cooperation with it.

It won't occur in this life: I must pass beyond the portal of death, and I must somehow retain my personal identity through the passage.  Much will have to be sloughed off, perhaps most of what I now consider  integral to my selfhood. As noted, the transition is a transformation  and purification, not a mere prolongation. Will anything be left after this sloughing off? I suggest that unless one is a materialist, one  has reason to hope that the core of the self survives.

And this brings us back to what Schopenhauer called the 'world-knot,'  the mind-body problem. If materialism could be demonstrated, then the  foregoing speculations would be mere fancies. But materialism, though  it can be assumed, cannot be demonstrated: it faces insuperable  difficulties. The existence of these difficulties makes it reasonable  to entertain the hope of eternal life.

Elizabeth 'Fauxcahantas' Warren, Undocumented Indian and Cultural Appropriator

The lovable Howie Carr takes the fraud to task:

How much longer do we have to pretend that Elizabeth Warren is anything but a Fake Indian?

It happened again yesterday — President Trump referred to the senior senator from Massachusetts as “Pocahontas,” and the alt-left media went into paroxysms of fake outrage, as if it’s somehow “racism” to call out a fraud like the Fake Indian.

Isn’t the left supposed to despise “cultural appropriation?” What greater cultural appropriation could there be than for Elizabeth Warren to have falsely claimed an ethnic heritage in order to win not one, but two tenured Ivy League law professorships she had absolutely no shot of ever getting until she checked the box?

All of the alt-left pajama boys and trust-funders who were hyperventilating about this yesterday, let me ask you a question:

How come Pocahontas won’t take a DNA test so that we can find out, once and for all, how much Indian blood she really has, if any? Why has she refused my multiple generous offers to pay for her DNA test?

We know she has no card from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, because if she had one, we would have damn well seen it five years ago, when the questions were first raised.

Read it all.  

With Hillary out of the picture, the sorry Dems are stuck with Pelosi the Stupid, Waters the Vile, Warren the Fraud.  Looks good for 2020.  

David French lays into the Cherokee maiden here.

Courage: The Hardest of the Virtues

The cardinal virtues are four: temperance, prudence, justice, and courage. Of the four, courage is the most difficult to exercise. Why is that?

Temperance and prudence are virtues of rational self-regard. Anyone who cares about himself and his long-term well-being will be temperate and prudent, whether or not he is just or courageous.  This is not to say that the temperate and prudent don't benefit others; they do: The temperate who refrain from drunkenness and drunk driving benefit others by not causing trouble and by setting a good example. The prudent who save and invest do not become a burden on others and are in a position to contribute to charities and make loans to the worthy.  This is why it is foolish to glorify the poor and demonize the rich. When was the last time a poor person helped fund a worthy enterprise or gave someone a job?

Temperance and prudence, then, are easy virtues despite the world's being full of the intemperate and imprudent. They are easy in that anyone who values his own life and future will be temperate and prudent.  Such a one will not select as his hero the foolish John Belushi (remember him?) who took the Speedball Express to Kingdom Come.

It is harder to be just: to habitually render unto others that which is due them. For the just man must not only be other-regarding and other-respecting; he must be willing and able to discipline his lust, greed, and anger.

But courage is hardest of all. That man is courageous who, mastering his fear, exposes himself to danger for his cause. One thinks of the firefighters who entered the Trade Towers on 9/11, some of whom made the ultimate sacrifice. But Muhammad Atta and his gang were also profiles in courage. Their ends were evil, but that does not detract from the courageousness of their actions. To think otherwise, as so many do, is to fail to grasp the nature of courage.  

Courage, then, is the most difficult and the noblest of the cardinal virtues.  It is an heroic virtue, a virtue of self-transcendence.  By contrast there is nothing heroic about the bourgeois virtues of temperance and prudence. 

But now a question is lit in the mind of this aporetic philosopher: Is it prudent to be courageous? Is there an antinomy buried within the bosom of cardinal virtues? Can there be such a thing as a virtuous man if such a man must have all four of the cardinal virtues?

At most, there is a tension between prudence and courage.  But this tension does not spill over into an antinomy. In the virtuous, prudence is subordinated to courage in the sense that, in a situation in which acting courageously is imprudent, one must act courageously.  

David Benatar in The New Yorker

This New Yorker piece is worth reading. (HTs: Dave Lull, Karl White)  It helps clarify Benatar's anti-natalism. 

One feature of his position is that death is no solution to the human predicament.  As I would put it, the Grim Reaper is not a Benign Releaser. For while life is bad, so is death.  Not just dying, but being dead. His arguments for this in Chapter 5 of The Human Predicament are fascinating.  I will examine them in due course in my series on Benatar's book. I agree that dying is bad, but not being dead.

People sometimes ask themselves whether life is worth living. Benatar thinks that it’s better to ask sub-questions: Is life worth continuing? (Yes, because death is bad.) Is life worth starting? (No.)

One can see from this that Benatar's position is a nuanced one, and that it is a miserable psychologizing cheap-shot to protest, "Well, if life is so bad, why don't you just kill yourself." That is a perfectly stupid response for two reasons. First, if death is bad, then death is no solution. Benatar describes the human predicament as an existential vise: we are under squeeze both from life and from death.  Second,  Benatar is a  philosopher: he aims to get at the truth of the matter; he is not emoting like the cheap-shot man who is not comfortable with what Benatar believes the truth to be.

A second feature of Benatar's position is that his is not a misanthropic anti-natalism, but a compassionate anti-natalism:

For misanthropic anti-natalists, the problem isn’t life—it’s us. Benatar, by contrast, is a “compassionate anti-natalist.” His thinking parallels that of the philosopher Thomas Metzinger, who studies consciousness and artificial intelligence; Metzinger espouses digital anti-natalism, arguing that it would be wrong to create artificially conscious computer programs because doing so would increase the amount of suffering in the world. The same argument could apply to human beings.

As I read Benatar, his view is that life itself is the problem, insofar as life involves sentience.  So it would be better if all life ceased to exist, which of course includes human life. He is an anti-natalist with respect to all living things, not just humans. 

A further clarification that just now occurs to me, and one with which I think Benatar would agree, is that he is axiologically anti-natalist across the board inasmuch as he holds that it would be better if all life, insofar as it involves sentience, cease to exist. But he is ethically anti-natalist only with respect to humans for the obvious reason that only the latter can have a moral obligation not to procreate.

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More on Christian Anti-Natalism

Inconvenient Truths about Migration

Required reading. Yes, kiddies, this will be on the final. Conclusion:

It seems to me that anyone who thinks about such matters is bound to agree with Goodhart that citizenship, for most people, is something they are born into. Values are grown from a specific history and geography. If the make-up of a community is changed too fast, it cuts people adrift from their own history, rendering them rootless. Liberals’ anxiety not to appear racist hides these truths from them. An explosion of what is now called populism is the inevitable result.

The policy conclusion to be drawn is banal, but worth restating. A people’s tolerance for change and adaptation should not be strained beyond its limits, different though these will be in different countries. Specifically, immigration should not be pressed too far, because it will be sure to ignite hostility. Politicians who fail to “control the borders” do not deserve their people’s trust.

It's true: liberals are terribly anxious about being pegged as racists and this anxiety blinds them. But there is nothing racist about insisting on the rule of law and the defense of the borders.

Besides, illegal immigrants do not constitute a race of people.  Liberals are not stupid, so they must know this, right?

"But Trump's wall is nonetheless racist since the vast majority of illegal immigrants are Hispanic."

Not so. Granted, most of the illegal entrants are Hispanic, but what sane conservatives oppose is not the race or ethnicity of illegal immigrants but the illegality of their mode of entry.  Suppose, per impossibile, that England were directly to our south. We would oppose their illegal entry as well. 

One good thing about Mexicans, however, is that their cuisine is vastly superior to anything the English have on offer.

Control of the borders is a constitutionally-mandated function of the Federal government.  As I said, liberals are not stupid; so they do have the capacity to grasp that when politicians fail to uphold the Constitution, decent law-abiding citizens won't like it. This is perhaps the main reason Hillary was handed her walking papers.  

"But isn't the Great Wall of Trump hateful?"  

Well, is it hateful when you lock your doors at night, screen applicants to your company, supervise with whom your children associate?

Securing one's domicile is not an expression of hatred of the Other, but an expression of love of one's family.

More on Christian Anti-Natalism

I wrote in Christian Anti-Natalism?:

Without denying that there are anti-natalist tendencies in Christianity that surface in some of its exponents, the late Kierkegaard for  example, it cannot be maintained that orthodox Christianity, on balance, is anti-natalist.

Ask yourself: what is the central and characteristic Christian idea? It is the Incarnation, the idea that God became man in Jesus of Nazareth. Thus God, or rather the second person of the Trinity, entered into the material world by being born of a woman, entering into it in the most humble manner imaginable, inter faeces et urinam nascimur. 

The mystery of the Nativity of God in a humble manger in a second-rate desert outpost of the Roman empire would seem to put paid to the notion that Christianity is anti-natalist.

To sum it up aphoristically: Nativity is natalist. Karl White responds, but without crediting the powerful objection I just raised:

Just a few thoughts: Anti-natalism as a potential component of Christianity works best within the time frame of the Gospels themselves. Most commentators agree that Jesus had a very strong eschatological element to his mission, preaching that the end of the world was nigh and people should prepare for it.

Bear in mind his words about the Apocalypse in Matthew 24:19, Luke 21:23, Mark 13:17 "How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women..."

It's notable that he was single, did not have children and disavowed family relationships: Matthew 12:48, Luke 8:21: "Who is my Mother? Who are my brothers?"

Then we have Paul in I Corinthians 7:8 recommending celibacy as the ideal. Of course if staying single is the optimum course then the inevitable outcome is a natural end to humanity.

Once the early Christians concluded the end of the world didn't seem to be happening anytime soon, and especially once the Church became co-opted withing the Empire then the inevitable compromises were reached and Christianity was obliged to become "respectable": family-friendly, conformist, "life-affirming" etc. 

Those are all good points and they do indeed point in an anti-natalist direction.  Karl's points can be extended. Think of monasticism and its anti-natalist world-flight. Kierkegaard too, though decidedly anti-monastic, is in the same line with his talk of Christianity as "hetereogeneity to the world."

As I mentioned earlier, Christianity blends probably incompatible themes. So it may be that there is no way of sorting out whether, in the end, historical Christianity is natalist or anti-natalist.

Related: Kierkegaard: "To Hell with the Pope" and Monkishness

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Christian Anti-Natalism?

To Hell With the Driverless Car

Here:

These days, Real Americans don’t much go to sea to relieve the damp, drizzly Novembers in our souls, but we do like to fire up the muscle Mustang or the F-150 truck with the gun rack and head out on the open road, following our noses and letting the trade winds blow us where they may.

Or at least we used to like it. But with the advent of the abomination known as the “self-driving car,” one of our most precious freedoms is now in jeopardy.

I mean, who asked for this? Communists? Women? (I know, same thing, voting-wise.) Sob sisters, pantywaists, geeks, pencil necks, and nancy boys? I suspect them all. It’s bad enough to climb into the cockpit of a new car these days and be confronted with a home entertainment center on wheels, complete with giant video screens that don’t do a damn thing electronically a 1934 Packard couldn’t do manually back in the day when men were men, women loved them for it, and we had the culture to prove it.

My sentiments exactly. Hat tip: Ingvarius Maximus of LaLaLand who adds "I would go for a 'crawl control' for use in stop-and-go traffic."  Right. L. A. freeways don't count as open road.  There is still plenty of it here in the real West, as opposed to the pussy-wussy Left Coast, not that any of you should migrate to these parts. Stay on the Left Coast and enjoy your freeways.

If you don't thrill to the romance of the Open Road, you are no true American like Neal Cassady here pictured at the helm of a serious hunk of  Detroit iron with one in the hand, four on the road, and a pretty girl by his side:

Filed under: Automotive

Test your literary savvy: Without accessing the full piece, indicate the provenience of "damp, drizzly Novembers in our souls."

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Some 'Song' Songs

Mose Allison, The Song is Ended

Punch Bros., Dink's Song

Dave van Ronk, Dink's Song

Arlo Guthrie, Percy's Song

Fairport Convention, Percy's Song

Doors, Alabama Song

Roberta Flack, Killing Me Softly with his Song

Bob Dylan, Song to Woody

Chad and Jeremy, Summer Song

Simon and Garfunkel, 59th Street Bridge Song

Brook Benton, The Boll Weevil Song

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10 Best Songs For Thanksgiving - hypebot

Infatuation

Infatuation is one part sexual desire, one part restlessness, and one part misdirected love of the Good.

Sages of the Ages Against Rap

Music directly imitates the passions or states of the soul . . . when one listens to music that imitates a certain passion, he becomes imbued with the same passion; and if over a long time he habitually listens to music that rouses ignoble passions, his whole character will be shaped to an ignoble form.ⁱ

Aristotle recognized that music communicates emotion, and that immoral music can shape our character for the worse. 

More here.

Rap sheets of rappers.

Becoming Old and Being Old: A Paradox

Most if not all want to become old, but few if any want to be old.

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That's an old thought, not original with me, but I do not know who deserves the attribution.  

Its literary effect trades on equivocation.

In one sense, an old thing is a thing that has been in existence a long time. Now something can be in existence a long time without getting old in the second sense. Consider a Roman coin in pristine condition, preserved out of circulation by numismatists over the centuries. Very old, but not worn out. 

Something analogous is true of humans. There are 90-year-olds who are hale and hearty and compete creditably in foot races. And there are 40-year-olds whose bodies are shot. 

A man who gets old calendrically cannot help but age physiologically.  But the rates of physiological ageing are different for different people.  

It is conceivable that one  get old without getting old. It is even conceivable  that one get old while getting younger. Those are paradoxical sentences that express the following non-paradoxical propositions:  It is conceivable that one get old calendrically without getting old physiologically.  It is conceivable that one get old calendrically whle getting younger physiologically. The conceivability and indeed imaginability of the latter is the theme of the Twilight Zone episode, A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain. I should adde for the aficionados of  modality that conceivability does not entail possibility.

Now return to the opening aphorism: Most if not all want to become old, but few if any want to be old.

The expression is paradoxical, but the thought is non-contradictory.  The thought, expressed non-paradoxically is: Most if not all want to live a long time, but few if any want to suffer the decrepitude attendant upon living a long time.

One logic lesson to be drawn is that a paradox is not the same as a contradiction.

It is therefore a mistake to refer to Russell's Antinomy as 'Russell's Paradox.' 

Asymmetrical Polarization

Political polarization is said to be asymmetrical when one of the political poles bears more responsibility than the other for exacerbating the polarization. But given the fact of polarization, it comes as no surprise that the Left blames the Right and the Right the Left. We all seem to agree that polarization is not good, but we disagree as to who the main culprit is.

Mirabile dictu, we are polarized over polarization!

As a conservative, it is blindingly evident to me that the Left bears the lion's share of the blame. But leftists don't agree, many of them out of sheer mendacity, a dishonest refusal to own up to their radical agenda. Hillary, for example, is one of the mendacious, as witness this quotation from her What Happened:

We're [the center-left and the left-left] are closer together than any of us are to Trump and the Republicans, who just keep getting more extreme. Bernie Sanders  and I wrote the 2016 platform together, and he called it the most progressive one in history. (422)

Now that's just hilarious. Notice how the second sentence contradicts the first. Notice how she unwittingly betrays her radical agenda. The second sentence is true of course.  The first is not.

What's going on here? It appears to be some sort of strange psychological projection. Not able forthrightly to admit that her agenda is extreme, she projects extremism into her political opponents who are hardly conservative, but simply less liberal that she is.  

We true conservatives are moderates by any reasonable historical standard. I could easily show this with respect to a number of key issues.  But it is Friday night in the holiday season, the sun is setting on another gorgeous Arizona day, and it is time to punch the clock, crack open a beer, and heat up the luscious left-overs of yesterday's repast.

So much to be thankful for. Including Hillary's defeat in 2016.

The Horror of Death and Its Cure

This entry is a companion to On the 'Inconceivability' of Death.

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There is dying, there is being dead, and there is the momentary transition from the one to the other.  

While we rightly fear the suffering and indignity of dying, especially if the process is drawn out over weeks or months, it is the anticipation of the moment of death that some of us find horrifying.  This horror is something like Heideggerian Angst which, unlike fear (Furcht), has no definite object.  Fear has a definite object; in this case the dying process. Anxiety is directed -- but at the unknown, at nothing in particular.

For what horrifies some of us is the prospect of sliding into the state of non-being, both the sliding and the state.  Can Epicurus help?  

If the Epicurean reasoning works for the state of being dead, it cannot work for the transition from dying to being dead.  Epicurus reasoned: When I am, death is not; when death is; I am not.  So what is there to fear?  If death is the utter annihilation of the subject of experience, then, after death, there will be nothing left of me to experience anything and indeed nothing to be in a state whether I experience it or not.  Clearly, a state is a state of a thing in that state.  No thing, no state.

This reasoning strikes me as cogent.  On the assumption that physical death is the annihilation of the person or self, then surely it is irrational to fear the state one will be in when one no longer exists.  Again, no thing, no state; hence no state of fear or horror or bliss or anything.  Of course, coming to see rationally that one's fear is irrational may do little or nothing to alleviate the fear.  But it may help if one is committed to living rationally.  I'm a believer in the limited value of  'logotherapy' or self-help via the application of reason to one's life.

I suffer from a touch of acrophobia, but it hasn't kept me away from high places and precipitous drop-offs on backpacking trips. On one trip into the Grand Canyon I had to take myself in hand to get up the courage to cross the Colorado River on a high, narrow, and swaying suspension bridge.  I simply reasoned the thing out and marched briskly across staring straight ahead and not looking down. But then I am a philosopher, one who works at incorporating rationality into his daily life.  

Why then do so many find the Epicurean reasoning sophistical?  To Philip Larkin in "Aubade" it is "specious stuff":

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear — no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

It seems clear that our boozy poet has failed to grasp the Epicurean reasoning.

Still, there is the moment of death, the moment in which the self helplessly dissolves, knowing that it is dissolving.  My claim is that it is this loss of control, this ego loss, that horrifies us.  Ever since the sense of 'I' developed in us we have been keeping it together, maintaining our self-identity in and through the crap storm of experience.  But at the moment of dying, we can no longer hold on and  keep it together.  We will want to cling to the familiar, and not let go.  This I suggest is what horrifies us about dying.  And for this horror the reasoning of Epicurus is no anodyne.  

So I grant that there is something quick and specious about the Epicurean cure. If one is rational, it has the power to assuage the fear of being dead, but not the fear of dying, the fear of ego loss.

I consider it salutary to cultivate this fear of dying.  It is the sovereign cure to the illusions and idolatries of worldliness.  But the cultivation is hard to accomplish, and I confess to rarely feeling the horror of dying.  It is hard to feel because our natural tendency is to view everything without exception objectively, as an object.  The flow of intentionality is ever outward toward objects, so much so that thinkers such as John-Paul Sartre have denied that there is any subject of experience, any source of the stream of intentionality.  (See his The Transcendence of the Ego.)

Everyone knows that one will die; the trick, however is not just to think, but to appreciate, the thought that I will die, this unique subjective unity  of consciousness and self-consciousness.  This is a thought that is not at home in the Discursive Framework, but straddles the boundary between the Sayable and the Unsayable.  My irreducible ipseity and haecceity of which I am somehow aware resists conceptualization. Metaphysics, just as much as physics, misses the true source of the horror of death.  For if metaphysics transforms the  I or ego into a soul substance, then it transforms it into an object.  (Cf. the Boethian objectifying view of the person as an individual substance of a rational nature.) An immaterial object is still an object.  As long as I think of myself from the outside, objectively, from a third-person point of view, it is difficult to appreciate that it is I, the first person, this subjective center and source of acts who will slide into nonbeing.

Now we come to "that vast moth-eaten musical brocade," religion, "created to pretend we never die."  Although this is poetic exuberance and drunken braggadocio, there is a bit of truth that can be squeezed out of Larkin's effusion.  The religious belief in immortality can hide from us the horror and the reality of death.  It depends on how 'platonizing' the religion is.

Christianity, however, despite its undeniable affinities with Platonism (as well appreciated by Joseph Ratzinger, the pope 'emeritus,' in Introduction to Christianity), resolutely denies our natural immortality as against what is standardly taken to be the Platonic view.  On Christianity we die utterly, and if there is any hope for our continuance, that hope is hope in the grace of God.

Is there then any cure for the horror of death?  In my healthy present, my horror is that of anticipation of the horror to come.  The real horror, the horror mortis, will be upon us at the hora mortis, the hour of death, when we feel ourselves sliding into the abyss.  

In extremis, there is only one cure left, that of the trust of the little child mentioned at Matthew 18:3.   One must let oneself go hoping and trusting that one will get oneself back.  Absent that, you are stuck with the horror.

Nothing would be more foolish and futile than to take the advice of a different drunken poet, and "Rage, rage against the dying of the light."  The dim light of the ego must die to rise again as spirit.  In fact, it is the ego in us that 'proves' in a back-handed sort of way that we are spiritual beings. Only a spiritual being can say 'I' and saying it and thinking it isolate himself, distancing himself from his Source and from other finite selves even unto the ultimate Luciferian conceit that one is self-sufficient.  

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The Epicurean Cure

Mary Jane and the Stupidity of Libertarians

Colorado's pot experiment is having disastrous results. No surprise. We conservatives told you so. A cautionary tale for other states.

Libertarians falsely assume that we are all rational agents who know their own long-term best interest and are willing and able to act upon that knowledge. 

Anyone with any experience of the world and the people in it knows that the characteristic libertarian assumption is manifestly false.

More trenchant critiques of libertarian folly here.

Happy Thanksgiving

To all States-side readers, and best wishes of the season to the rest of you.  Let's make it a politics-free day, shall we? I'll do my best, and you do yours.

I am indeed grateful for your readership!

If you care to read my Thanksgiving homilies and such, go here.

Time Was . . .

. . . when I had space for books, but no money. Now it's the other way around.

So I allowed myself only two purchases today at the antiquarian Mesa Bookshop in downtown Mesa, Arizona, Gary Wills' slim volume, Saint Augustine, Viking 1999, and Joseph Agassi's Faraday as Natural Philosopher, University of Chicago Press, 1971. 

But I resisted the temptation to buy a big fat biography of Richard Brautigan, a poet/novelist of sorts I hadn't thought about in years and whom I last read in the 'sixties. The book of his I read is probably the same one you read if you are a veteran of those heady days and were en rapport with its Zeitgeist.  I refer of course to Trout Fishing in America. Even if you never read it, you will recall the cover from the numerous copies scattered about the crash pads of the those far-off and fabulous times.

But I resisted the temptation to buy the fat, space-consuming biography for which there is no room on my Beat shelf.  Instead, I sat down and  read deep into the opening chapter which recounts in gory detail Brautigan's suicide at age 49 in 1984 achieved by a .44 magnum round to the head.

Brautigan, like Bukowski, had a hard life and writing was their therapy. The therapy proved more efficacious in the case of Bukowski, however.

I have been visiting the Mesa Bookshop for over a quarter of a century now. These days I pop in once a year, every year, on Thanksgiving Eve right after I pick up my T-shirt and race number for the annual Mesa Turkey Trot, Thanksgiving morning, which I run or 'run' every year.  Time was when I ran the 10 K but tomorrow I'll essay the 5 K and see how the old knees hold up.

After the book shop and a snatch of conversation with Old Mike behind the counter I follow my tradition of having lunch nearby either at a good Mexican joint name of Mangoes or as today at a Thai place across the street, Nunthaporn Thai Cuisine. Recommended if you should ever find yourself in the heart of Mesa.

How I love this time of year! And what a pleasure listening to Dennis Prager on the drive over and Michael Medved on the drive back. 

On the 'Inconceivability' of Death

Thomas Merton poses the problem in his Journals, vol. 6, pp. 260-261, entry of 8 July 1967:

Victor Hammer is critically ill . . . . Death is shocking in anyone, but most shocking in the case of someone of real genius and quality and someone you know and love well. The blunt fact is that it is just not conceivable that Victor Hammer should cease to exist. This is a basic absurdity which [Albert] Camus confronted, and which religious explanations may perhaps help us only to evade. [. . .] Yet what is man that his life instinct should translate itself into a conviction that he cannot really altogether die? Where is it illusory and where not? To my mind this is a great and pertinent question and one worthwhile exploring metaphysically -- not by abstractions but by contemplative discipline and by a kind of mystical "pragmatism" if you like . . . . (italics added)

I agree with Merton that the problem needs to be attacked via "contemplative discipline," i.e., in a non-discursive way by meditation. But I disagree with the "not by abstractions" bit whereby Merton advertises his poetic and literary and anti-philosophical bias. The problem has to be addressed both discursively via the discursive intellect and also by meditative Versenkung. (A great German word that suggests sinking below the storm-tossed surface of ordinary mind into its quiet depths.)

But what exactly is the problem?

Some will say that there is no problem at all. Death is perfectly natural and easily conceivable. We know that we are animals and we know that animals die. (And stay dead!) A loved one's death may be shocking, especially if it is sudden, but it is certainly not inconceivable. It is no more inconceivable than the death of a cat or a dog or a flea or a flower.  

Yet when we think concretely and personally about death, our own death, and the deaths of those we love, we find ourselves agreeing with Merton and with Schopenhauer: "The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true." ("The Vanity of Existence" in The Will to Live, ed. R. Taylor, p. 229)  Let us assume that you love and cherish your wife. Your loving her has conferred upon her uniqueness, at least relative to you. (Josiah Royce) Now imagine her lovable and loving unique personality blotted out of existence forever.  Or consider your own case. You have devoted a lifetime to becoming who you are. You have worked steadily at the task of self-individuation. Only to become nothing? Could things be arranged so badly for us? But then the whole thing would be a bad joke.

Of course, what I have written does not show that it is not a bad joke. Maybe it is! (That's an epistemic use of 'maybe.') But then are you prepared to appropriate existentially this putative truth? In plain English: Are you prepared to live as if your life is a bad joke, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?" Or will you live in denial of what you take to be true?

The problem in its sharpest formulation is that it is both conceivable and inconceivable that one should cease to exist.  Assuming that no contradiction  is true, the task is to remove it. The task, in other words, is to show that the apparent contradiction is merely apparent.  Expressed as an aporetic dyad:

A. It is conceivable that one cease to exist utterly.
B. It is not conceivable that one cease to exist utterly.

The problem arises in the collision of two points of view, one objective and external, the other subjective and internal. Objectively viewed, we cease to exist utterly. Subjectively viewed, we don't. The problem is genuine and worth pondering because it is not easy to see how either point of view could displace the other in a fair and rational accounting. For this reason it is not plausible simply to deny one of the limbs of the contradiction. The facile answers of the naive religionist -- one has an immortal soul -- and the naturalist -- one is just a clever land mammal -- won't cut it. There is evasion of the problem on both sides. I will now try to argue this out. One needs to 'marinate' oneself in the problem and not reach for a quick 'solution.' That is the way of philosophy. The other is the way of ideology.

An Objectivist Way Out via Naturalism?

Consider naturalism, which is the dominant form of objectivism. Naturalism, for present purposes, is the metaphysical view according to which  causal reality is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents.  (On this latitudinarian understanding of the term one can be a naturalist while admitting so-called 'abstract objects.') A naturalist in this sense maintains that (1) all causes are natural causes involving only natural entities; (2) "the distribution of minds in the universe is late and local" in a sense that implies that minds are necessarily tied to highly evolved organisms; (3) "there is nothing that is divine, or sacred, or worthy of worship." (Quotations from the Graham Oppy essay in Christianity and Philosophy, pp. 29-30) In other words: there is nothing concrete apart from the causal nexus of nature as understood by current physics; there is no God; there are minds (minded organisms) but they enjoy no higher (divine) origin but are merely products of evolution.

A naturalist would presumably just deny (B). The problem with this objectifying 'solution' is that it leaves out the first-person point of view and with it subjectivity. Or rather it either leaves it out, or, attempting to understand it in objective terms, fails to understand it adequately.

True, I am an object in the natural world. But I am also a subject for whom there is a natural world.  I am a measly bit of the yeast of life, but I am also a "spectator of all time and existence." Subjectivity or mind in the broadest sense includes all of the following: consciousness in the sense of sentience; consciousness in the sense of intentionality; self-consciousness as evidenced in the thoughtful deployment of the first-person singular pronoun; conscience or moral sense; the sense of being a free agent; sensitivity to reasons as opposed to causes, and to the difference between good and bad reasons, in a word, rationality; sensitivity to norms in ethics and in axiology; concern for objective truth and for subjective-existential truthfulness.

Can each of the items on this (incomplete) list be adequately understood in an objectifying, naturalistic way?  No, not even the first rather paltry item.  It is widely recognized that it is a very hard problem indeed to fit so-called qualia into the naturalist picture. It is so hard that it is 'popularly' known among the learned as -- wait for it -- the Hard Problem. We've been over this many times before, so I won't go over it again. See the categories Qualia and Consciousness and Qualia.

For present purposes, suffice it to say that a blisteringly strong case can be made against the conceit that everything can be adequately and exhaustively understood in naturalistic terms.

Naturalism is involved in a vicious abstraction: it abstracts away from the necessary conditions of anything's being cognized or thought about in the first place.  In trying to understand the whole of concrete Being, the naturalist must of course try to understand minds as well.  But what does he have to work with? Only more objects. For example, the functioning brain of a particular animal.  Could a brain be in an intentional state? No, it makes no sense. No physical state is an intentional state. No such state has semantic properties. No physical state can be either true or false. And so on. See the categories Intentionality and Mind.

Long story short, subjectivity or mind in the broad sense sketched above is not just real, but irreducibly real. It can't be eliminated and it can't be reduced.  Obviously, an adequate case for this cannot be made in a single blog post. Besides, as my metaphilosophy teaches, no substantive philosophical thesis can be proven strictly speaking. (And if you are not speaking strictly in philosophy, then you are just fooling around.) But the irreducible reality of mind and truth are reasonably believed.

This goes some way towards showing that our aporetic dyad cannot be easily solved. No doubt we are animals in nature. If that is all we are, then our ceasing to exist utterly at death is easily conceivable. But that is not all we are. We are also subjects with all that that entails: sentience, intentionality, self-awareness, moral sense, reason, etc.  We are not merely animals in a physical environment (Umwelt); we are also subjects for whom there is a meaningful world (Welt). (I am using 'world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense one finds in Husserl and Heidegger and their spiritual descendants.) A mere animal has an environment, but no animal has a world.   (This is not self-evident: perhaps in some low-level sense my cat inhabits a world of meanings meager and mousy as it must be: the dude is, after all, sentient, pace Renatus Cartesius, and it seems we share a sort of emotional bond.) 

We can sum this up by saying that man is a spiritual animal.  Neither angel nor beast, he is a riddle to himself. He asks himself: Could I be just a monstrous fluke of evolution?  But in asking this question he is spiritually outside of and above the horror chamber of nature red in tooth and claw.

But do I have any positive reason to think that my nonexistence as a subject or spirit is inconceivable? Well, everything objective about myself can be conceived not to exist include my body and its brain.  But the I in its ultimate inwardness as pure subject is not objectifiable. The ultimate condition of all objectification cannot itself be objectified. As transcendentally other than every object it is not itself an actual or possible object.  Only what I can think of as an object can I think of as nonexistent. But I cannot think of the transcendental I as an object among objects. Therefore, I cannot conceive of it as nonexistent.  I cannot think my own nonexistence as thinker. 

In short, there is something non-objective and non-objectifiable about me and it is inconceivable that it not exist.

But I hear an objection coming. 

"Granted, you cannot doubt the existence of thinking while it is occurring. But surely you and your thinking might never have existed! After all you have written about modal fallacies, I hope you are not confusing the necessity of the consequence with the necessity of the consequent! Surely you can't infer from 'Necessarily, if I think, then I exist' that 'Necessarily I exist.'"

I plead innocent of that particular fallacy. Both valid and fallacious inferences presuppose what I have called the Discursive Framework. The point I am trying to make lies deeper than the framework in question. The non-objectifiable is transcendentally prior to the Discursive Framework.

My claim is not that I necessarily exist as an object among objects, but that I -- in my inmost egoity if you will -- cannot be conceived by me not to exist. For to do that, I would have to think of myself as an object, either physical or meta-physical -- when that is precisely what I am not, but the transcendental I for whom there are objects.

So there is some sense in which there is something necessary about me that cannot be conceived not to exist.

An Objectivist Way Out Via Metaphysics?

We are in the conceptual vicinity of the Cartesian cogito. Does it follow that I am a res cogitans, a thinking  thing, a soul substance?  Not that either. For wouldn't that just be another object whose existence I could doubt? Not a physical object, of course, but a meta-physical object.  Husserl grapples with this problem but fails to solve it.

One cannot think without objectifying. If I try to think the I behind my thoughts I objectify it and make of it a meta-physical object, a thinking substance. This is what Descartes does.  But then it seems I can conceive its nonexistence.  Buddhists and Humeans have no trouble conceiving the nonexistence of a substantial self behind thoughts.

I cannot be identical to the (live) animal sitting in my chair and wearing my clothes. Let 'A' denote the animal in my chair wearing my clothes. 'I = A' is not a formal identity statement of the form 'x = x.' The latter is a truth of logic.  'I = A' is not a truth of logic. It is in some sense contingent, although not in a sense explicable by ordinary modal means within the Discursive Framework. The thought is not that there are possible worlds in which I exist, but A does not exist, or possible worlds in which A exists but I do not exist. On the other hand, the thought is of course not that in every world in which A exists, I = A.  The logic of objects breaks down at the transcendental boundary of the logical.

I get a sense of this strange contingency when I look into a mirror.  It seems in some sense contingent that I should be this particular man, with these particular features, and this particular ancestry and history and so on.  Again, 'I = A' is not a tautology; it seems to give some sort of information, namely, that this man in the mirror, and no other, is the man that I am.  You might think to make a Fregean move: 'I' and 'A' differ in sense but agree in referent. I can show that this does not work. But not now.

So one might be tempted to make an objectifying meta-physical move: 'I' refers to my soul; 'A' refers to my body.

But if I cannot be identical to a chunk of the physical world, how could I be identical to a meta-physical soul substance?  Doesn't the same problem arise again? Suppose I have such a soul, denote it by 'S.'  'I = S' is not a tautology of the form 'x = x.'  It asserts an identity between me and a metaphysical object, an identity that is 'contingent' in the boundary sense above alluded to.  But then my subjectivity is reduced to an object, and in being reduced, eliminated!  This object, in addition, could cease to exist or be annihilated by God.  So we cannot secure the inconceivability of death by identifying the ego with the soul substance.

A Dialectic Tapering Off into Mystery

Following out the dialectic we arrive at a Grenzbegiff, a boundary notion of transcendental subjectivity that cannot be objectively articulated in a manner to satisfy the discursive intellect. 

So is death inconceivable or not? Objectively, whether physically or meta-physically, death as utter annihilation is conceivable. But I cannot be reduced to anything objective. So there remains an element of inconceivability in the death of any person qua person.  

But this cannot be made clear in the objectifying terms of the Discursive Framework. One cannot have a 'theory' about it. Our aporetic dyad above is insoluble. It is a sort of marker, this side of the Boundary, of the mystery of death and of spirit. We cannot speak of it, and so we must enter into silence, or, like, a positivist, deny the reality of the Transcendent entirely.

Any further understanding will not be discursive in nature. And so Merton is in one sense right: "contemplative discipline" is needed. All philosophy can do is show the way to the Boundary. Crossing it is not in her power. And to make up objectifying theories about the Far Side is arguably profanation. 

Aquinas Falls from the Pedestal

Thomas Merton, Journals, vol.  5 (1963-1965), p. 295:

In the refectory the other day articles on the Council [Vatican II, 1962-1965] were being read and a lot was said about St. Thomas [Aquinas] -- he is no longer on an official pedestal -- he is no longer the one to be followed as chief authority in seminary teaching. This is the best thing that could happen to St. Thomas and to Catholic Truth, if we consider that he himself would never have consented to be the kind of authority the textbooks have made of him (and as a matter of fact the Church did not really constitute him an authority -- but rather a model.)

It would be interesting to hear Ed Feser's take on this.

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Thomas Merton's Hostility to Scholastic Manualism and the Forgotten Fr. Hickie

Sanctuary City Denialism

There are those who attempt to downplay the depth of our social and political disagreements. But no honest and intelligent observer can fail to note just how deep they go. 

One sort of disagreement is over the attributes of an object admitted to exist.  That's bad enough. Worse still are those disagreements over the very existence of the object. And perhaps the worst form of denialism or eliminativism is the form in which the object denied manifestly exists.

For example, it is manifestly the case that there are beliefs and desires. But there is a species of loon in the philosophy of mind who, unable to make sense of these intentional states, denies their existence.

In the political sphere we have a tribal Hispanic such as Francisco Hernandez who denies the very existence of sanctuary jurisdictions. He does not admit their existence and defend them, which would be slightly respectable. The mendacious bastard denies their very existence.  See for yourself.  The brilliant Mark Steyn sits in for Tucker Carlson. Camarota refutes Hernandez.

Is it not obvious that politics is war? There are very nice people who say we need to come together, drop the labels, and have 'conversations.' Their hearts are in the right place, but where are their heads?

Or to change the metaphor: what planet do they live on? Uranus?

Come together? On what common ground?

Have a conversation? What's to discuss?  Should we have a conversation about the validity of arithmetic? (I'm not talking about the foundations of arithmetic, or the Peano axioms, or anything like that, but about the arithmetic you learned or should have learned in grade school.) 

Conrad Black on Hillary on What Happened

Believe it or not, I actually have Hillary Clinton's What Happened checked out of a local library and have read chunks of it.  But there is no need for me to comment on the 492 page exercise in self-deception and outright lying inasmuch as Conrad Black has done a fine job of it.  Here are some excerpts:

More alarming than Mrs. Clinton’s ungraciousness is her dishonesty. She all but accuses Trump of treasonable collusion with Russia, and Russian interference in the election looms even larger than misogyny and Comey’s skullduggery in her demonology of causes of the national tragedy of her defeat. But all the “evidence” she cites of Trump–Kremlin collusion is taken from the now-infamous Christopher Steele dossier. Since the publication of this book, it has come to light that the Clinton campaign paid $10 million for Steele’s unverifiable pastiche of defamatory gossip and fabrications against Trump. The entire case against Trump has, after 16 months of FBI investigation, turned up no evidence. The Clinton campaign denied, until the facts came to light, that it had any knowledge of the origins of the Steele dossier, and now says that it doesn’t matter who paid for it; and she now refers to it as “campaign information.” The bipartisan leadership of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee has confirmed that this dossier is the sole basis for the continuation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

[. . .]

She has an unblemished record, she implies, and the fact that the majority of Americans don’t trust her is due to the “viciousness of the Republican smear merchants.” She says that the timely release of the Billy Bush tape of Trump’s verbal indiscretions eleven years before (about the ease for a celebrity of groping women), though it was clearly fired as an intended game-ender, came as a surprise to her, and that she was heroic in “winning” the second presidential debate two days later, given the pressure she was under. In fact, Trump, with his campaign apparently in shambles and principal figures deserting or taking their distance, was under more pressure than anyone in the history of those debates going back to Kennedy and Nixon in 1960, and he won the debate. Trump’s production, earlier in the day, of a trio of women who alleged sexual assault against her husband was, in Mrs. Clinton’s view, a tawdry and outrageous resurrection of those she memorably described in the past as “the bimbos.” Trump’s coarse locker-room reflections are apparently disqualifying, but Bill Clinton’s scandalous and possibly criminal sexual assaults on various women when he was governor and president do not alter the Norman Rockwell marriage of Bill and Hillary.

The author is a relentless partisan: Republicans are under-educated pessimists, “the deplorables,” as she called them last year. Reagan “sapped the spirit of the country,” though he restored the country’s confidence. (He also led the greatest economic boom in modern U.S. history and won the Cold War, but she doesn’t mention that.) Dwight Eisenhower isn’t mentioned at all, apart from having been Adlai Stevenson’s opponent, and Richard Nixon was a criminal, never mind that Nixon ended school segregation and conscription, extracted the country from the Democrats’ war in Vietnam while preserving a non-Communist government in Saigon, opened relations with China and the Mideast peace process, signed the greatest arms-control agreement in history with the USSR, founded the Environmental Protection Agency, reduced the crime rate, and stopped the endless rioting in American cities.

Since the publication of this book, former party chairman Donna Brazile has written that Mrs. Clinton rigged a number of primaries in her struggle with Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination, and may have violated the Federal Election Campaign Act. Mrs. Clinton dismisses Whitewater (which led, circuitously, to the impeachment of her husband), Travelgate, the Benghazi tragedy (where the American ambassador to Libya was murdered by terrorists and she and Obama pretended that it was mob anger provoked by an anti-Islamic video produced by a private American citizen), and the email controversy that “amounted to precisely nothing” (I think not). She does not mention her speech of apology to the world’s Muslims, a toe-curling embarrassment to the entire Western world, nor her inability to utter or write the words “Islamic terrorism or extremism,” nor the very disconcerting pay-to-play activities of the Clinton Foundation, including the payment or pledge of $145 million and a $500,000 speech fee for Bill Clinton at a time when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s agreement was required to approve a sale of uranium assets in the U.S. to Russian interests.

Democratic senators whom she praises in comradeship have turned on the Clintons: Elizabeth Warren accuses her of cheating Bernie Sanders, and Kirsten Gillibrand says that Bill Clinton, because of his peccadilloes, should have resigned. They may be unjust, but this is what the Clintons’ allies now think of them. Her righteousness is moth-eaten and threadbare.

Here I must register a pedantic objection. A peccadillo is a little sin; but rape is not a little sin. (Juanita Broderick alleges that Bill Clinton raped her.) Nor are perjury and obstruction of justice, the crimes that he was alleged to have committed when he was impeached. And yes, he was impeached, although he was not removed from office.

Mrs. Clinton believes she is a good and sincere Christian, though she makes it clear that joining a church and being a communicant in it should be with the purpose of turning that church into an agency for leftward political action, what she calls “progressive reform.” By this, we are left in no doubt, she means rounding up all those who are beneath the average in prosperity or acceptability in mainstream-majority society, or if not, at least highly dissatisfied with the lot of those who are, and mobilizing them as a democratic majority to impose transfers of wealth and status from those who have earned or inherited it to the less fortunate or successful. This is a constant process of evaluating where the electoral majorities are, pitching to them as victims in the name of a benign state, and representing to those who pay for these transfers that it is their Christian and social duty and that they should rejoice in their opportunity to better the quality and stability of American life and society.

In Mrs. Clinton’s America, spiritual inspiration exists to pursue redistributive materialism, all “progress” apart from a little doughty self-help is the result of state intervention, the state has a practically unlimited right and duty to correct meritocratic as well as inherited or exploitive socioeconomic imbalances, and the U.S. Democratic party must be a secular church militant where those who oppose abortions (about half the American public) are, along with many other large groups, unwelcome. All politics is a constant process of “reform,” in which, miraculously, the majority gain at the expense of the more accomplished (as well as more fortunate) minority. This isn’t really Christianity or democracy; it easily slips into rank acquisition of votes with the money of part of the electorate in a cynical and corrupt manner, and Mrs. Clinton convicts herself of such attitudes with this astonishing display of rage, affected humility, idealism, and myth-making. It is a sobering and a disturbing read.

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From the Mail: Sane Student Comments on Academic Decline

George writes,

Not so long ago I was about to take a philosophy 101 class at a community college in Arizona, but the professor, who I later was told spends a substantial amount of time talking about "white privilege," was going to make it about the "sociology of philosophy." He explicitly said on day one that the class was going to focus on the racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, classism, etc. of thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and so on. I dropped with the ability to get a more sensible professor.

It's really remarkable. A classically liberal education should be about opening minds and considering ideas of past thinkers as they thought, not looking at the greatest minds through a narrow ideological filter promoting today's political ideas. Now I'm fully aware that someone like Aristotle defended slavery. Yet to primarily focus on these aspects, in an introductory course no less, is really to do a disservice. I know something about Aristotle---and I did then. The rest of the students? Probably nothing. What did they learn?

Thanks for reading my note. And thanks for your blog!

You're very welcome, George. What you say is true and important.  I get a fair amount of mail like yours and it is gratifying to receive. 

Leftist termites are hard at work undermining our institutions including the universities, the government, the Christian churches, and the Fourth Estate. Genuine conservatives need to emerge from their private lives and fight back, else it will be all over in a generation.  One reason is precisely to preserve the private life against the Left's totalitarian encroachment.  And notice I said genuine conservatives, not  never-trumping pseudo-conservative, yap-and-scribble-but-do-nothing quislings such as Bill Kristol and George Will.  I don't use the label 'cuckservative,' but I understand why others do.

The sociology of knowledge is a worthy field of inquiry. A branch thereof is the sociology of philosophy.  But any sociology of philosophy will of necessity rest on philosophical assumptions, the examination of which is the office of philosophy.   Philosophy does not allow herself to be outflanked, by anyone or anything, including sociology. She outflanks all possible outflankers. Changing the metaphor, we can can that she always ends up on top.

This is a topic worth developing, but at the moment I need to gear up for a hike.  One exercise for you is to think through the following: If all knowledge is ideology in support of existing societal power relations, then what about that very claim? Does it escape being ideology in support of a different set of power relations? And if it doesn't why should we accept it?  If it does, then not all knowledge is ideology.

As for 'white privilege,' see my Some Questions About White Privilege. It is difficult, but worth the effort. 

 

Al Franken's Porn-O-Rama

What does it say about the Democrat Party that it would support a scumbag like Franken for the U. S. Senate?

Franken's Porn-O-Rama is no Satire

More here (Newsweek), here (Atlantic), and here (WashPo).  No, I won't link to the 'Puffington Host.'

Time to Defund the Humanities in Public 'Universities'?

A strong case can be made.

Have Any of You Read This? Should I Buy It?

Karl White writes, 

Just thought I'd pass this on in case you come across it. I read some of it in a bookstore today. It looks very good: clinical, to the point, merciless. 

(I had no idea that when Francis invited the first ever Imam to speak Koranic verses in the Vatican, the latter chose a verse that urged the killing of infidels!)

www.amazon.com/Among-Ruins-Decline-Catholic-Church/dp/1633883035

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Bill Clinton's Impeachment

I heard Representative Jackie Speier (D-California) say on Face the Nation this morning that former U. S. president William Jefferson Clinton "faced impeachment."

Not so. He was impeached. What he faced, but did not suffer, was removal from office. 

Impeachment is not the same as removal from office. Impeachment is analogous to indictment in regular court proceedings. The House of Representatives votes to impeach, and then the Senate conducts the trial. Clinton was acquitted of the charges brought against him, perjury and obstruction of justice.

You would expect a  member of Congress to know that. But then she's a Dem . . . or maybe she just misspoke.

The trouble with the Democrat Party is that so many of its leading 'lights' are dimwits, Nancy Pelosi heading the list. What gives this airhead such staying power? Answer: a preternatural ability to raise money.

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Rules for Men

Keith Burgess-Jackson offers six items of sound advice, each both prudential and moral. Here is #1:

Don't touch a woman without her specific consent. Consent, to be consent, must be informed. Don't resort to trickery, subterfuge, dissimulation, or manipulation (including getting her drunk or high).

I would add a qualification: unless she is your wife and you have a loving relationship. (And if you don't share a loving relationship, why are you still married to her?)

That is a good point about the nature of consent, by the way.

I would say that the above, even with my qualification, is a rule of thumb (rule of hand?), which is to say that it is broadly accurate. 

Suppose you are seated opposite a woman not your wife whom you find attractive and with whom you are enjoying a tête-à-tête. She strokes your hand. She has given you a signal that may justify your touching her in a similar way even without explicit consent.

Prudent? Moral? The near occasion of sin? You decide!

In any case, don't be an Al Franken. Where is his hand? And what can be inferred from the gal's 'goosey' expression?

 

 

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Channing on Fenelon

Comments on the Character and Works of Fenelon 

(Submitted by Dave Bagwill)

. . . a very common error of exalted minds. He applied too rigorous and unvarying a standard to the multitude. He leaned to the error of expecting the strength of manhood in the child, the harvest in seed-time. On this subject, above all others, we feel that we should speak cautiously. We know that there is a lenity [leniency] towards human deficiencies full of danger ; but there is, too, a severity far more common, and perhaps more ruinous. Human nature, as ordinarily exhibited, merits rebuke ; but whoever considers the sore trials, the thick darkness, the impetuous will, the strong passions, under which man commences his moral probation, will temper rebuke with pity and hope. There is a wisdom, perhaps the rarest and sublimest attainment of the intellect, which is at once liberal and severe, indulgent and unbending ; which makes merciful and equitable allowance for the innocent infirmities, the necessary errors, the obstructions and temptations of human beings, and at the same time asserts the majesty of virtue, strengthens the sense of accountableness, binds on us self-denial, and points upward, with a never-ceasing importunity, to moral perfection, as the great aim and only happiness of the human soul.

Channing, William Ellery, 1780-1842. The works of William E. Channing, D.D (Kindle Locations 2721-2729). Boston : James Munroe.

Fenelon was a quietist. Here is something on quietism with excepts from the writing of Molinos, Guyon, and Fenelon.

Desideratum

It would be desirable to be able to survey one's faults and limitations with an equanimity that does not give way to acceptance, but combines with both a gentle resolve to work at self-improvement, and a detachment from the outcome of such work. 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Some 'Night' Songs

Them, Here Comes the Night. Still gives me shivers up and down the spine as it did in '65. A blend of the Dionysian and the tender. A similar blend in Roy Orbison's Pretty Woman. 

Bob Dylan, "Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you are trying to be so quiet?" Visions of Johanna, live from '66. Marianne Faithfull does a good job with it.

Beatles, The Night Before

Don McLean, Starry, Starry Night

Sam Cooke, Another Saturday Night

The Band, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

Tom Waits, The Heart of Saturday Night

 

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A Little Road Trip . . .

. . . to Sedona, Arizona and back. Left early Friday, back at noon on Saturday. 338 miles round-trip from my place in the foothills of the Superstition Mountains by the leisurely and scenic route via Payson which avoids Phoenix and most of Interstate 17.  Wifey read a paper, so we had posh digs at the Bell Rock Hilton at conference rates.

I've lived in Hawaii, Santa Barbara, Boston, and the Midwest, not to mention other places in the USA and abroad.  No place beats Arizona, all things considered. That is a mighty subjective judgment, to be sure, but if a blogger cannot vent his subjectivity, who can?

For one thing, Arizona is in the West and we all know the West is the best, far, far away from the effete and epicene East, lousy with liberals, and the high taxes they love; but not so far West as to be on the Left Coast where there was once and is no more a great and golden state, California. Geographical chauvinism aside, there is beauty everywhere, even in California, when you abstract from the political and economic and social malaise wrought by destructive leftists, the majestic Sierra Nevada, for example, the Range of Light (John Muir). Herewith, an amateur  shot of the the Sedona red rock country:

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A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment

David Bentley Hart reviews  Edward Feser and  Joseph M. Bessette,  By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment, Ignatius Press, $24.95, 424 pp. (HT: Karl White)

I will add my two cents later if time permits.

Meanwhile, if you care to know where I am 'coming from,' feel free to poke around in my Crime and Punishment category.  Trigger Warning: not for liberals!

Anecdote.  I once asked Dale Tuggy how Ed Feser, a friend of both of us, does it. How does he sire a house full of kids, teach a heavy community college load, read papers all over, maintain an excellent, content-rich blog, and write so many books (see second article below)?

Dale, who has written on mysterianism in connection with the Trinity, replied, "It's a mystery."

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Mayor of Albany Lies on Tucker Carlson Show

Kathy Sheehan, mayor of Albany, New York, while defending sanctuary cities, told an egregious lie on Tucker Carlson's show tonight (11/16) when she said that 'undocumented' (her word) workers were not in the U. S. illegally.  Although Carlson eventually called her on it, he failed to clarify the distinction that Sheehan was mendaciously and confusedly exploiting.  

Is Illegal Immigration a Crime?

It is. Illegal immigrants are subject to criminal penalties. While improper entry is a crime, unlawful presence is not a crime. One can be unlawfully present in the U. S. without having entered improperly, and thus without having committed a crime. 

If a foreign national enters the country on a valid travel or work visa, but overstays his visa, failing to exit before the expiration date, then he is in violation of federal immigration law. But this comes under the civil code, not the criminal code. Such a person is subject to civil penalties such as deportation.

So there are two main ways for an alien to be illegal. He can be illegal in virtue of violating the criminal code or illegal in virtue of violating the civil code. 

Those who oppose strict enforcement of national borders show their contempt for the rule of law and their willingness to tolerate criminal behavior, not just illegal behavior.

This is very serious business especially when the criminally illegal aliens are also criminal in the manner of MS-13 gang members.   

Sheehan may well have her heart in the right place as so many benighted liberals do.  She came across to me as a nice Irish Catholic girl out to make the world a better place. Being of the female persuasion, she probably thinks  of government maternally.  If so, this tendency might help explain why she has trouble with such simple distinctions as the one I drew above. 

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It is. Illegal immigrants are subject to criminal penalties. While improper entry is a crime, unlawful presence is not a crime. One can be unlawfully present in the U. S. without having entered improperly, and thus without having committed a crime. 

If a foreign national enters the country on a valid travel or work visa, but overstays his visa, failing to exit before the expiration date, then he is in violation of federal immigration law. But this comes under the civil code, not the criminal code. Such a person is subject to civil penalties such as deportation.

So there are two main ways for an alien to be illegal. He can be illegal in virtue of violating the criminal code or illegal in virtue of violating the civil code. 

Those who oppose strict enforcement of national borders show their contempt for the rule of law and their willingness to tolerate criminal behavior, not just illegal behavior.

This is very serious business especially when the criminally illegal aliens are also criminal in the manner of MS-13 gang members.   

Sheehan may well have her heart in the right place as so many benighted liberals do.  She came across to me as a nice Irish Catholic girl out to make the world a better place. Being of the female persuasion, she probably thinks  of government maternally.  If so, this tendency might help explain why she has trouble with such simple distinctions as the one I drew above. 

Getting Stoned

It means one thing in the decadent West, quite another in the fanatical Middle East.

The more we become 'stoners,' the more readily do we become objects of 'stonings.'

Clinton Redux

Here:

In the past few days a number of notable liberals have decided to take allegations of sexual assault against former president Bill Clinton seriously. Let’s just say that discarding the Clintons when they’re no longer politically useful to retroactively grab the higher moral ground isn’t exactly an act of heroism. But if we’re going to re-litigate history, let’s get it right.

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I May Have To Eat My Words

A repost from 5 November 2016, just three days before the historic Trump victory that still has lefties fuming and flailing.  And I did have to eat my words. We sane conservatives who voted for Trump have been vindicated in spades and the quisling, never-trumping, pseudo-cons are sliding deeper into irrelevance with every passing day, bow ties and all.

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

In January, in Trump's Traction and Conservative Inaction, I wrote:

. . . there is no way Trump can beat Hillary.  He has alienated too many groups, women and Hispanics to name two.  Add to that the fact that large numbers of conservatives will stay home, and Hillary is in like Flynn.  Mark my words.

A bold asseveration somewhat justified by what had transpired up to that point.  Things look differently now.  I may have to eat my words.  And I hope I do.  I also wrote:

Let's hope that Trump does not get the Republican nomination.  But if he gets it, you must vote for him.  For the alternative is far worse.  Politics is a practical business.  It is not about maintaining your ideological purity, but about getting something accomplished in murky and complex circumstances.  It is always about the lesser or least of evils.  Trump would be bad, but Hillary worse. 

That's right except that I no longer use the misleading phrase 'lesser of evils.'  It seduces people into asking, 'Why vote for either if both are evil?' when in the vast majority of political contests like these none of the contenders is evil in a way that would justify voting for neither.

Not 'lesser of evils' but 'better and worse.'  Trump is better than Hillary policy-wise even if not much better character-wise.

The state is not about to wither away.  She shall abide, to oppress, but also to guide and provide.  It obviously matters who has his hands on the levers of power.  It matters who sets the tone and influences the culture in Washington and beyond.    

Some are tempted to withdraw and have nothing to do with politics.  That would make sense if one could expect politics to reciprocate by having nothing to do with one.  A highly unreasonable expectation, especially when the Dems are in power.  Never forget that the Left is totalitarian to the core and will lie brazenly to achieve its ends. A good example is the pack of brazen lies put forth by Obama and Co. to ram through ObamaCare, the unaffordable Affordable Care Act.

Hillary too lies brazenly as should be evident to all by now when it is helpful unto her personal ambition and the leftist agenda (in that order). 

You know what you have to do come Tuesday.

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

In hindsight, I was wrong to hope that Trump not get the nomination. For now I see that none of the others could  have beaten Hillary. Surely the pathetic Jeb! Bush could not have.

Memo to self: should you really be using 'surely' in affirmation of a counterfactual conditional?

The Consolations of Philosophy for the Middle-Aged

The Economist reviews Kieran Setiya, Mid-Life: A Philosophical Guide.

Related: A Philosopher on the Midlife Crisis

 

What is Ed's Puzzle?

This just in from London:

             A man called ‘Socrates’ is running and Socrates is debating. 

Clearly if anyone verifies ‘a man called ‘Socrates’, and if ‘a man who is debating’ verifies that same person, then the conjunction appears to be true. And any number of men can be called ‘Socrates’, and be running and debating. But there’s the puzzle. The sense, the meaning, the semantics of ‘Socrates’ seems simply to ensure sameness of reference, or rather sameness of predication. ‘Is running’ and ‘is debating’ must be true of the same individual. But then the sense of the name is the same, whoever the sentences are verified of. Which paradoxically contradicts the classical theory of proper names, namely that a proper name cannot apply to different individuals in the same sense. Mill, A System of Logic:

Thus man is capable of being truly affirmed of John, George, Mary, and other persons without assignable limit; and it is affirmed of all of them in the same sense; for the word man expresses certain qualities, and when we predicate it of those persons, we assert that they all possess those qualities. But John is only capable of being truly affirmed of one single person, at least in the same sense. For, though there are many persons who bear that name, it is not conferred upon them to indicate any qualities, or any thing which belongs to them in common; and can not be said to be affirmed of them in any sense at all, consequently not in the same sense.

BV:  More puzzling than Ed's puzzle is the puzzle of what Ed's puzzle is supposed to be.  Call the latter 'the meta-puzzle.' I will try to solve it.

It is a datum that there are many men and animals who rejoice under the name 'Socrates.' When we philosophers invoke the name in philosophical contexts, we refer to the famous teacher of Plato. But there is also Socrates Jones, the rather less distinguished fellow who failed to get tenure at Whatsamatta U. There is also  Socrates of Scranton, the resident bullshitter at the famous coffee house Insufficient Grounds. And so on.

In short, there are many men who bear the name 'Socrates.'  Consider any one of them. Any one of them could verify (make true) the conjunctive proposition:

A man called ‘Socrates’ is running and Socrates is debating.

But then 'Socrates' in the second conjunct of the conjunctive proposition would appear not to refer to a particular person such as Socrates Jones in contradistinction from Socrates of Scranton, Socrates the teacher of Plato, etc.  The name refers to any one person who verifies or make true both halves of the conjunction.  This suggests to Ed, assuming I understand him,  that the semantic function of 'Socrates' in the second conjunct is exhausted by its anaphoric or back-referential function. If so, the semantic function of 'Socrates' is wholly intralinguistic.

But let's not worry now about Ed's positive theory. Let's just ruminate over the puzzle he takes as (part of the) motivation for his positive theory.  We can set it forth as an aporetic dyad:

A. A proper name cannot apply to different individuals in the same sense. (J. S. Mill)

B. A proper name can apply to different individuals in the same sense.

The limbs of the dyad are logical contradictories. And yet both limbs are very plausible.

Mill's point is that once we fix on a uniform usage of 'Socrates' to refer to one single thing such as the famous Greek philosopher who taught Plato, then that name in that sense cannot be used to refer to anything else.  Pretty obvious, eh? Otherwise there would be no proper names.  What makes a proper name proper is precisely that it cannot have more than one bearer.

Ed's point is that a proper name can apply to different individuals in the very same sense in that the 'Socrates' used in the second conjunct has the very same sense as the 'Socrates' mentioned in the first conjunct.

At this point Ed must tell me whether I have finally grasped his puzzle and thereby solved the meta-puzzle as to what his puzzle is.

If he returns an affirmative answer to this question, then we can proceed. If and only if.

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Concupiscence

If we were just animals, no problem. If we were pure spirits, no problem. Concupiscence is a problem because we are spiritual animals. Neither angels nor beasts, we 'enjoy' dual residency in opposing spheres. The problem is not that the flesh is weak while the spirit is willing. The problem is that the spirit is fallen and wills the wrong thing: inordinate sensuous pleasure for its own sake.

The animal in us plays along supplying the playground for the spirit's perversity. The sins of the flesh do not originate there, but in the spirit. The flesh is merely the matter in which they are realized.

Or perhaps what I've just written, which is pretty standard MavPhil 'boilerplate,'  is nonsense. 

Maybe it is like this. Whatever 'spirituality' there is in us is merely a sickness that impedes our vitality and conjures up the ghosts of sin and guilt and free will and moral scrupulosity and talk of concupiscence.  I never did get around to reading Ludwig Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, though I can guess at his dark vision. 

The powerful take what they want. The weak, who want what the powerful want but are too impotent to acquire it, invent morality. 

As I said, a dark vision. And one to be found in the identity-political of the present day, both on the Right and on the Left.

You understand that I am not endorsing the dark vision.

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Ray Monk on Frege

Excerpt:

The single thing I can imagine Russell finding most shocking would be Frege’s endorsement of patriotism as an unreasoning prejudice. The absence of political insight characteristic of his times, Frege says, is due to “a complete lack of patriotism.” He acknowledges that patriotism involves prejudice rather than impartial thought, but he thinks that is a good thing: “Only Feeling participates, not Reason, and it speaks freely, without having spoken to Reason beforehand for counsel. And yet, at times, it appears that such a participation of Feeling is needed to be able to make sound, rational judgments in political matters.” These are surely surprising views for “an absolutely rational man” to express. The man who wanted to set mathematics on surer logical foundations, was content for politics to be based on emotional spasms.

Related: For Veteran's Day, 2015: Patriotism versus Jingoism

Race Matters: Tucker Carlson Versus Ekow Yankah

Here are a couple of quick observations on last night's debate.

1) Carlson is a liberal about race. Dennis Prager provides a good explanation of the difference between being a liberal and being a leftist about race:

Race: This is perhaps the most obvious of the many moral differences between liberalism and leftism. The essence of the liberal position on race was that the color of one’s skin is insignificant. To liberals of a generation ago, only racists believed that race is intrinsically significant. However, to the left, the notion that race is insignificant is itself racist. Thus, the University of California officially regards the statement “There is only one race, the human race” as racist. For that reason, liberals were passionately committed to racial integration. Liberals should be sickened by the existence of black dormitories and separate black graduations on university campuses.

Carlson on his show regularly speaks of race in terms of skin color as Prager does above. Now if race is skin color, then  race is reasonably regarded as insignificant given that one's color is a relatively superficial feature of a person. It would then be 'racist' in some pejorative sense of this term to judge people negatively on the the basis of their race, i.e., skin color.  If you hate me just because of my skin color, what kind of miserable bigot are you?

That, in a nutshell, is the old liberal position on race. It is one shared by many present-day conservatives, many of whom invoke Martin Luther King, Jr.'s admonition that people should be judged "not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."  That famous admonition, as stirring as it is, clearly conflates race with skin color and is therefore superficial, literally.

Interestingly, its superficiality has been recognized on both the Right and the Left. While color of skin is a phenotypical manifestation of race, race is not the same as skin color. One proof of this is that a person can change his skin color but no person can change his racial ancestry. If you were born of two black parents, then you are black, and nothing you now do or have done to your body can change that fact.  Not even Michael Jackson, "the one-man melting pot" as a certain talk jock called him, could pull it off. Jackson, you will recall, took steps to lighten his skin.

It is also clear that attitudes towards blacks are based on their behavior not their color.  Most white liberals would not think of buying a house in a predominantly black area. Is that because of skin color or typical behavior patterns? The question answers itself.

It cuts the other way as well. Why do many blacks hate whites? Because they are white or light in color? No, because they 'act white.' It's about behavior not skin color.

Note that while it would be irrational to avoid a person or group of persons because of his or their color, it would not be irrational to avoid a person or group of persons because of his or their behavior.  

In sum, to speak of race in terms of something as superficial as skin color is to assume that race is of no significance.  But this is a question that ought not be begged.

Why do leftists hold that it is  'racist' to think that race is insignificant or to hold that there is only one race, the human race? This is a very interesting question. Let's leave it for later.

2) Holding as he does that race is a superficial matter of skin color allows Carlson to conclude that we are all the same deep down and that the "definition of 'racism'" is to think that one can infer something about a person's motives solely on the basis of their race/skin color. And so Tucker goes on to accuse Yankow of being a racist. (2:55)

The underlying difference which neither of the discussants manage to bring into the open is that Tucker is a liberal who thinks that race is superficial and insignificant whereas Yankow appears to be a left-wing race realist.

 

A Blogger's Lament

This from a fellow blogger:

My output is down lately. I'm finding it harder not to just look away from it all. There are good books to read, history to study, music and chess to play, hikes to take, questions to ponder, family to love, drinks to drink and food to eat, and so much more. Watching my nation and civilization rot and fester just isn't so much fun anymore.

That said, it's also hard not to be terribly angry about it all, and of course I do have things to say about it. So this is probably just a weary spell that will pass.

What times we live in!

Why follow the disturbing events of the day, thereby jeopardizing one's peace of mind, when one can do little about them? Tranquillity of mind and the news don't go well together.  Withdrawal and retreat remain options to consider. But on the other side of the question:

The temptation to retreat into one's private life is very strong.  But if you give in and let the Left have free rein you may wake up one day with no private life left.  Not that 'news fasts' from time to time are not a good idea.  We should all consume less media dreck.  But there is no final retreat from totalitarians.  They won't allow it.  At some point one has to stand and fight in defense, not only of the individual and the family, but also of the mediating structures of civil society, that precious buffer zone between the individual and familial and Leviathan.

In the Cave

Troppe cose non sono chiare.

Too many things are not clear.

But all is not dark. So perhaps we can say:

La grotta è chiaroscuro.

The cave is clear-dark.

E noi siamo abitanti delle grotte.

And we are cave dwellers.

E così siamo chiaroscuro.

And so we are clear-dark.

Questa è la situazione umana.

This is the human predicament. 

Private Judgment?

Yesterday I commented critically on the Roman Catholic teaching on indulgences. One who refuses to accept, or questions, a teaching of the Church on faith or morals may be accused of reliance upon private judgment and failure to submit to the Magisterium or teaching authority of the Church.  Two quick observations on this accusation.

First, for many of us private judgment is not merely private, based as it is on consultation with many, many public sources.  It is as public as private. Everything I've read over the years from Parmenides on down in the West, the Bible on down in the Near East, and the Upanishads on down in the Far East feeds into my 'private' judgment.  So my 'private' judgment is not merely mine as to content inasmuch as it is a collective cultural upshot, albeit processed through my admittedly fallible and limited pate. Though collective as to content, its acceptance by me is of course my sole responsibility.

Second, the party line or official doctrine of any institution is profoundly influenced by the private judgments of individuals. Think of the profound role that St. Augustine played in the development of doctrine.  He was a man of powerful will, penetrating intellect, and great personal presence.  Imagine going up against him at a theological conference or council.  

So the private is not merely private, and the official is not merely official.

Of course, part of the official doctrine of the Roman church is that its pronunciamenti anent faith and morals are guided and directed by the Holy Ghost. (Use of the old phrase, besides chiming nicely with der Heilige Geist, is a way for this conservative to thumb his nose at Vatican II-type innovations which, though some of them may have had some sense, tended to be deleterious in the long run.  A meatier question which I ought to take up at some time is the one concerning the upsurge of priestly paederasty after Vatican II: post hoc ergo propter hoc?)

What I have just written may sound as if I am hostile to the Church. I am not. Nor have I ever had any negative experiences with priests, except, perhaps to have been bored by their sermons. All of the ones I have known have been upright, and some exemplars of the virtues they profess.  In the main they were manly and admirable men.

I have no time now to discuss the Church's guidance by the third person of the Trinity, except to express some skepticism: if that is so, how could the estimable Ratzinger be followed by the benighted Bergoglio? (Yes, I am aware that there were far, far worse popes than the current one.)

Of course, I have just, once again, delivered my private judgment. But, once again, it is not merely private inasmuch as it is based on evidence and argument: I am not merely emoting in the manner of a liberal such as Bergoglio when he emoted, in response to the proposed Great Wall of Trump, that nations need bridges, not walls. Well, then, Vatican City needs bridges not walls the better to allow jihadis easy access for their destructive purposes. Mercy and appeasement even unto those who would wipe Christianity from the face of the earth, and are in process of doing so.

Addendum

But how can my judgment, even if not merely private, carry any weight, even for me, when it contradicts the Magisterium, the Church's teaching authority, when we understand the source and nature of this authority? ('Magisterium' from L. magister, teacher.)

By the Magisterium we mean the teaching office of the Church. It consists of the Pope and Bishops. Christ promised to protect the teaching of the Church : "He who hears you, hears me; he who rejects you rejects me, he who rejects me, rejects Him who sent me" (Luke 10. 16). Now of course the promise of Christ cannot fail: hence when the Church presents some doctrine as definitive or final, it comes under this protection, it cannot be in error; in other words, it is infallible. 

In a nutshell: God in Christ founded the Roman church upon St. Peter, the first pope, as upon a rock. The legitimate succession culminates in Pope Francis. The Roman church as the one true holy and apostolic church teaches with divine authority and thus infallibly. Hence its teaching on indulgences not only cannot be incorrect, it cannot even be reasonably questioned. So who am I to -- in effect -- question God himself?

Well, it is obvious that if I disagree with God, then I am wrong.  But if a human being, or a group of human beings, no matter how learned, no matter how saintly, claims to be speaking with divine authority, and thus infallibly, then I have excellent reason to be skeptical. How do I know that they are not, in a minor or major way, schismatics diverging from the true teaching, the one Christ promised to protect?  Maybe it was some version of Eastern Orthodoxy that Christ had in mind as warranting his protection.

These and other questions legitimately arise in the vicinity of what Josiah Royce calls the Religious Paradox. 

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Intimacy, Reserve, and Bukowski's Bluebird

We desire intimacy with human others but we must combine it with reserve.

And this for three reasons: out of respect for the Other and her inwardness; from a sober recognition of our fallen tendency to dominate; and out of a need to protect ourselves.

The wise do not wear their hearts on their sleeves, but neither do they suppress Bukowski's bluebird.

Questions Without Answers

Ci sono domande senza alcuna risposta.

There are questions without any answer.

On Indulgences

I linked recently to a piece hostile to Islam, "the saddest and poorest form of theism." (Schopenhauer) I now point out a problem with a rather happier and richer form of theism, that of the Roman Catholic Church. Here:

November is the month the Church especially dedicates to praying for the dead. To encourage this holy practice, the Church offers a daily plenary indulgence for the souls in Purgatory, under the usual conditions (right intention, confession, Communion, prayer for the intentions of the pope) to those who visit a cemetery in the period November 1-8. She offers a partial indulgence at other times.

Essential to anything worthy of the label 'religion' is the belief that there is what William James calls an "unseen order." (Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 53.) (See The Essence of Religion for seven essential characteristics of religion.) What worries me, though, are those who claim to possess an exact cartography of the transcendent country beyond the senses and an exact understanding of the mechanics of salvation.

Purgatory is of course a sound and necessary idea within a classically theistic scheme inasmuch as almost none of us are worthy of immediate access to the Beatific Vision. (Besides, how many so-called Catholics would even want it? I suspect many of them believe in something along the lines of  'hillbilly heaven' complete with BBQs, fiddles and banjoes, cousin Jethro, and his old dog Blue.) Except for a few saints we will all need more or less purgation. For many this will take the form of a weaning-away from one's attachments to earthly loves and a gradual re-direction of one's misdirected desires upon the Absolute.  Death will detach us physically from our bodies, but it is highly naive to think that it will thereby detach us spiritually from our earthly loves.  It is a reasonable speculation that Hugh Hefner, if he survived his bodily death, is still lusting after nubile females; it is just that he no longer has the physical apparatus with which to implement his lust.

Now let's suppose that your child, who committed suicide, is in purgatory and that you are a Catholic.  A plenary indulgence is a full or total indulgence: it is a get-out-of-purgatory-right-now card.  So you do the things listed above, and your child is sprung from Purgatory.

But isn't this incredible?  I at  least find it hard to swallow. You could dismiss my misgivings as merely autobiographical remarks, but I suspect they are more.

What bothers me is the presumption on the part of the Church that it possesses exact knowledge of the afterlife and the mechanics of salvation. This pretense to detailed, indeed quantifiable, information about matters far, far beyond the human horizon strikes me as deeply dubious if not mendacious. Of course, there was something 'infinitely' worse, namely, the sale by greedy clerics of indulgences. That outrage, you will recall, was part of what fueled the protest of a certain failed monk by the name of Martin Luther.

How can I formulate my misgiving?  What bothers me, I suppose, is the dogmatic over-specification of the Unseen Order. Its 'satellite mapping,' if you will is a sort of secularization of the trans-secular which does not respect the transcendence and mystery of the trans-secular.  Appeal to mystery is often made by the Church in defense of doctrines (Trinity, Incarnation, Transubstantiation, et al.) that appear to flout the logical requirements of the discursive intellect; how does that appeal comport with the boringly prosaic  'green eyeshade' quantification and allotment of benefits and allowances pursuant upon so many Pater Nosters, this many Ave Marias, etc?

More later.  There are a number of deep issues here. 

Now, however, I have to take my wife, a good old-fashioned Catholic girl, God bless her, and an exemplar of the Eternal Feminine that leads us upward, to church.  Why do I go to church given how screwed-up the Roman church and its  clergy are (especially those of the American Catholic Bishops who  are leftists first and Catholics second in emulation of their leader Bergoglio the Benighted?)

The highest human pursuit is the pursuit of the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. One has to prosecute the pursuit  in different ways. One is by working from within one's own tradition, despite its manifold limitations and defects, penetrating into it as deeply as possible,  and taking what is good from it. 

Addendum

John B. writes,

I read your two recent posts on indulgences, and I would like to offer a clarification: indulgences obtained for the souls in purgatory operate  per modum suffragii. An indulgence obtained for the dead is seen as a prayer that the faithful can have special confidence in, since it is, after a fashion, an intercessory prayer made by the Church itself. But it remains a prayer and not a juridical act. The Church on earth does not claim to have jurisdiction over the souls of the dead.

 

I doubt that this resolves all of the problems that indulgences present for you. There are still the questions surrounding indulgences for the living, after all. To be honest, I have a hard time with indulgences myself, for a few reasons, and I'm Catholic.  But the clarification seemed worth making.

 

Bernhard Poschmann's Penance and the Anointing of the Sick includes a very good chapter on indulgences if you want to read more on how they are understood and have been understood historically, and how they arose. The whole book is excellent, and at times surprising.

 

Soul Food

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

Why are those so concerned with physical toxins so tolerant of cultural toxins? This is another example of what I call misplaced moral enthusiasm. You worry about global warming when you give no thought to the soul, its foods, and its poisons?

You 'liberals' are a strange breed of cat, crouching behind the First Amendment, quick to defend every form of cultural pollution under the rubric 'free speech.'   But honest dissent you label as 'hate speech' and you shout down those who disagree with you.

You say you want an example of a cultural polluter? How about the 'comedian' Louis C. K.? I was blissfully unaware of this moral cretin until a few days ago. No, I won't link to any of his garbage. Obama, I understand, considers his stuff 'edgy,' as if it good to violate 'bourgeois' standards of moral decency.