Maverick Philosopher

October Ends . . .

. . .  and we say farewell once again to Jack Kerouac, cat man and mama's boy, as he prepares to "leave all San Francisco behind and go back home across autumn America" proving once again to his romantic predecessor Thomas Wolfe that one can go back home again where

it'll all be like it was in the beginning -- Simple golden eternity blessing all . . . My mother'll be waiting for me glad -- the corner of the yard where Tyke is buried will be a new and fragrant shrine making my home more homelike somehow -- On soft Spring nights I'll stand in the yard under the stars -- Something good will come out of all things yet -- And it will be golden and eternal just like that - There's no need to say another word. (Big Sur, 1962, last lines, last page.)

It's a good last word: something good will come of it all: of all of the wandering, all of the searching, all of the pain, and misery, and drunken folly, and lonely nights, and broken dreams.  The vanity will give way to vision.  The beat will taste beatitude.  The road will end and the restless will rest.

More on the Hypostatic Union

I am very impressed with Thomas Joseph White, OP, The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology, The Catholic University of America Press, 2017, xiv + 534 pp. It deserves to be called magisterial, the work of a magister, a master.  I am presently working through Chapter One, "The Ontology of the Hypostatic Union."

White and I are concerned with the intelligibility of the one person, two natures doctrine. (See yesterday's entry for background.)  Fr. White of course considers the doctrine  to be intelligible while I have my doubts. This entry presents one of the problems I am having.

Christ is one person in two distinct individual natures, the one divine, the other human.  The one person is the Word (Logos), the Second Person of the Trinity.  The Word is eternal, impassible, and necessary. In the patois of possible worlds, the Word exists in every metaphysically possible world. The hypostatic union is the union of the Word with the individual human nature (body and soul) of Jesus where the hypostasis or suppositum is the Word. It is that which has the nature or exists in the nature.  White tells us that this union is not

. . . merely an accidental association of two beings, the man Jesus and the Word of God. Rather the Word subsists personally as man in a human nature. Consequently, Jesus's concrete body and soul are the subsistent body and soul of person of the Word. The person of Jesus simply is the person of the Son existing as man. (113)

We are being told that the person of Jesus is the eternal Word, the Son, not a human person.  There is human nature in Jesus, but no human person in Jesus.  So it not as if there are two persons, the person of the Word and the person of Jesus.  There is only one person, the person of the Word. To think otherwise is the Nestorian heresy.

This raises the following question.

If the Word is a necessary being, and the union of the Word with human nature is not accidental, but essential, are we to conclude that the Word has a concrete human body and human soul in every possible world, and thus at every time?   It would seem so.  If x is united with N essentially, then x is united with N in every possible world in which x exists.  So if x is a necessary being, then x is united with  N in every possible world, period, which is to say that there is no possible world in which x is not united with N. Therefore,

1) If the Word is united to a human nature essentially, then there is no possible world in which the Word is not united to a human nature.

But then how is this consistent with the belief that the Incarnation was an historical event that occurred at a particular time and whose occurrence was contingent, not necessary? God became man to save man from the sin he incurred with Adam's fall, a fall that was itself contingent upon Adam's free choice to violate the divine command.   That is,

2) There are possible worlds in which God does not create at all, and possible worlds in which God creates humans but there is no Fall, no need for Redemption, and thus no need for Incarnation.  

Therefore

3) There are possible worlds in which the Word is not united to a human nature.

Therefore

4) It is not the case that the Word is united to a human nature essentially. (From 1, 3 by modus tollens)

Therefore

5) The Word is united to a human nature accidentally.

But this is contrary to the orthodox view at least as explained by Fr. White who draws upon Thomas.  White tells us that "the humanity of Jesus  is united to the Word as an intrinsic, 'conjoined instrument.' The being of the man Jesus is the being of the Word." (83)  We are also told that the unity is "substantial not accidental." (83)

Why does Aquinas think that the Word must be united to the humanity of Jesus intrinsicaly and essentially as opposed to extrinsically and accidentally? Because he thinks that this is the only way to avoid the Nestorian heresy according to which there are two persons, the person of the Word and the person of Jesus.

The reasoning seems to go like this. In an ordinary man, body and soul form a substantial unity.  If in Jesus body and soul formed a substantial unity, then Jesus would be a different substance and a different suppositum (hypostasis) from the Word, and Nestorianism would be the upshot. To avoid this, the proposal was made that body and soul in Christ do not form a substantial unity as they do in ordinary human beings. Thus on the so-called habitus theory, the third theory of the hypostatic union mentioned in Peter Lombard's Sentences,  ". . . both the body and the soul are said to accrue to the person of the Word 'accidentally' as qualities or properties of the Word, but without subsistence in the Word." (85) This implies that body and soul are accidental to each other, which of course is unacceptable given the background Aristotelian commitments of Thomas.

So while the habitus theory aims to be anti-Nestorian, it ends up in an implicit Nestorianism according to White's Aquinas.  You've got the Word and over against it the body of Jesus and the soul of Jesus as an accidental, not a substantial, unity.  On this scheme the individual humanity (body and soul) of Jesus is accidental to the Word.

My point is that, on the one hand, this is how it should be given the contingency of the Fall and the contingency of the Incarnation.  The Word is not essentially incarnated; it is accidentally incarnated. The humanity of the Word is accidental, not essential.  That would seem to fit nicely with the Christian narrative. But on the other hand, if it is not the substance of the Son who dies on the cross, if it is not God himself who enters history and dies on the cross, if it is a man who is only accidentally and for a time united with the Word, then the debt that only God himslef can pay has not been paid in full.

So I think we can understand why the one person, two natures doctrine was deemed orthodox. But if I am right in my reasoning above, the orthodox doctrine entails the absurdity that the Word has a "concrete body and soul" (113) at every time and in every possible world.

To put it another way, the Incarnation makes no sense unless it is a contingent event, but it cannot be on the radically anti-Nestorian view of  White's Aquinas. 

Kerouac in Scollay Square

Beatific October, Kerouac month hereabouts, is at its sad redbrick end once again and it is time for me to stop the hyper-romantic Jacking off.  From On the Road:  

 

Facebook Update

I'm on a roll over there as things heat up and the mid-term elections loom. 

Yes, we've spoken of watershed elections before, but this is the Big One, at least until the next one.  If you want to hear me rock, roll, and rant, send me a friend request, but only if you are a member of the Coalition of the Sane. Otherwise I'll unfriend you in a heartbeat. There is also a bit of hard-core philosophy there that doesn't appear here.

I am still drawing the line at Twitter, but Spencer Case has been urging me to sign up for that as well.  

Word of the Day: Demesne

Merriam-Webster:

1: legal possession of land as one's own

2: manorial land actually possessed by the lord and not held by tenants

3a: the land attached to a mansion

b: landed property : ESTATE

c: REGION sense 2, TERRITORY

4: REALM sense 2, DOMAIN

How does one acquire a large vocabulary? The first rule is to read, read widely, and read worthwhile materials, especially old books and essays.  The second rule is to look up every word the meaning of which you do not know or are not certain of: don't be lazy. The third rule is to compile vocabulary lists. The fourth rule is to review the lists periodically and put the words to use.  Use 'em or lose 'em.

If you think you know the meaning of a word, you are well-advised to check your understanding. Even if you really do know the meaning of a word, you probably don't know all of its shades and variants.

If you work steadily at this, then perhaps someday you will have a vocabulary half as extensive as that of your humble correspondent.

Thomas Joseph White on the Hypostatic Union: Questions

Vito Caiati writes, 

I am struggling, in particular, to understand what [Thomas Joseph] White is proposing with regard to the hypostatic union on pages 82-84 [of The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology, The Catholic University of America Press, 2017].  He follows Aquinas in affirming “a substantial union of God and man. . . . [in which] the two natures remain distinct, without mixture or confusion, and [in which] the union must not occur in the nature of Christ” (82). In this substantial union, “The hypothesis [hypostasis]  of the Word does not replace the human soul of Christ.  . . .  However, just as in man the body is the instrument of the soul, so in the incarnate Word, the human nature of Jesus is the instrument of the Word. . . . [in that] the humanity of Jesus is united to the Word as an intrinsic, ‘conjoined instrument. . .“ (83).

I do not understand what is being affirmed here. If the Word is “united” to the humanity of Jesus “as an intrinsic ‘conjoined instrument’” has not something been done to this humanity that renders it more than human? In other words, can one really hold that in this process of union, the natures remain distinct? I am particularly confused because White appears to argue for precisely this position in affirming that “in Christ there is no autonomous human personhood or human personality. He is the person of the Son and Word made human, subsisting in human nature” (83). Well, if this is so, what import does his human soul have on his thoughts and actions?

The Word (Logos) is the Second Person of the Trinity.  It is the one person (hypostasis) that has the two natures, the divine nature and the human nature.  Thus there are not two persons, the Second Person and the human person of Jesus; there is only one person, the Second Person of the Trinity.  This latter person is the person of Jesus. If there were two persons, a divine person and a human person, then that would be the Nestorian heresy.  (I could explain later, if you want, why this heresy is a heresy.) In other words, the person of Jesus is the eternal Word, not a human person.  There is human nature in Jesus, but no human person in Jesus.

But this is not to say that the man Jesus merely embodies the Word, i.e., it is not to say that the Word is to Jesus as soul to body. That would be the Apollinarian heresy. The Word in Jesus does not merely assume a body; The Word assumes (the nature of) a fully human man, body and soul.   So while there is no human person in Jesus, there is a human soul in Jesus.  Here, perhaps, we have the makings of trouble for the Incarnation doctrine on White's Thomistic construal thereof, as we shall see in a minute.

In sum, one person, two distinct natures, one divine, the other human. The person is divine.  The natures are individual natures. They are not multiply realizable or multiply instantiable like rational animal which is found in Socrates and Plato equally but not in an ass. (Schopenhauer somewhere quips that the medievals employed only three examples, Socrates, Plato, and an ass. Who am I to run athwart a tradition so hoary and noble?) And yet the individual natures are not themselves self-subsistent individuals. They need a support, something that has the natures. This is part of the meaning of hypostasis.  There has to be something that stands under or underlies the natures.  The hypostatic union is the union of the two natures in one subsistent individual, the Word. (White, p. 113) 

Now this one divine person is united to the (individual) nature of Jesus as to an essential, not accidental, instrument. But this union is not identity. There is no identity of natures or confusion of natures. The divine and human natures remain distinct. They are united, but they are united essentially, not accidentally. 

Caiati asks, " Can one really hold that in this process of union, the natures remain distinct?" Yes, if union is not identity.  So I don't see a problem here.

Caiati also asks, "what import does his human soul have on his thoughts and actions?"  This is a much more vexing question, and I rather doubt that we are going to find a satisfying answer to it within the Aristotelian-Thomistic scheme that Fr. White employs.  

Who is it that is thinking when Jesus thinks?  Suppose he is debating some rabbis. He hears and understands their objections and thoughtfully replies. Is it the Word who is the subject of these mental acts? Is the Word thinking when Jesus thinks?  If yes, then his human soul is not the 'seat' of his intellectual operations.  Suppose Jesus feels hunger or thirst or the excruciating pains of his passion.  Does the Word feel these pains?  How could it if it is impassible?  If it is not impassible and does the feel Jesus' pains, then what role does the human soul in Jesus have to play?  How can Christ be fully human, body and soul, if his human soul plays no role either intellectually or sensorially?

There is also the will to consider. If Jesus is obedient to the end, and does the will of the Father, then he wills what the Father wills. "Thy will be done."  He would rather not undergo the Passion, but "not my will but thine be done." This makes sense only if Jesus has his own will, distinct from the Father's will, a will 'seated' in his human soul.  That is, the faculties of willing have to be different, even if the contents of willing are the same. But then it is not the Word that wills in Jesus.

On the other hand, if the human soul in Jesus is indeed the 'seat' of his intellectual and voluntative and sensitive and affective functions, then the person in him, the Word, is severed from his soul.  But this drains 'person' of its usual meaning which includes soulic functions. The one person in two natures threatens to become a mere substratum or support of the two natures. 

White's view is that the Incarnation, although ultimately a mystery, can be rendered intelligible to the discursive intellect in the Thomistic way.  I doubt it. But there are other ways, and they need to be examined.

Is Assertion External or Internal to Logic? A Note on Irad Kimhi

The main point of Peter Geach's paper, "Assertion" (Logic Matters, Basil Blackwell, 1972, pp. 254-269) is what he calls the Frege point: A thought may have just the same content whether you assent to its truth or not; a proposition may occur in discourse now asserted, now unasserted, and yet be recognizably the same proposition. This seems unassailably correct. One will fail to get the Frege point, however, if one confuses statements and propositions. An unstated statement is a contradiction in terms, but an unasserted proposition is not. The need for unasserted propositions can be seen from the fact that many of our compound assertions (a compound assertion being one whose content is propositionally compound) have components that are unasserted.

To assert a conditional, for example, is not to assert its antecedent or its consequent. If I assert that if Tom is drunk, then he is unfit to drive, I do not thereby assert that he is drunk, nor do I assert that he is unfit to drive.  I assert a compound proposition the components of which I do not assert. I assert a relation between two propositions without asserting either of them.

The same goes for disjunctive propositions. To assert a disjunction is not to assert its disjuncts. Neither propositional component of Either Tom is sober or he is unfit to drive is asserted by one who merely asserts the compound disjunctive proposition.

On one view of logic, it studies propositions and the relations between them  such as entailment, consistency, and inconsistency in abstraction from the concrete mental acts in which the propositions are accepted, rejected, or merely entertained. Logic is thus kept apart from psychology. If so, then assertion, as a speech act founded in the mental act of acceptance, is external to logic.  If this were not the case, then how would one account for the validity of the following obviously valid argument?

a) If Tom is drunk, then Tom is unfit to drive
b) Tom is drunk
Therefore
c) Tom is unfit to drive.

For the argument to be an instance of the valid argument form modus ponendo ponens, the protasis of (a) must be the same proposition as is expressed by (b). But then the assertoric force that (b) carries when the argument is given by someone cannot be part of the proposition. For the assertoric force  is no part of the proposition that is the protasis of (a).

So if formal logic studies propositions in abstraction from the concrete episodes of thinking in which they are brought before minds, then assertion is external to formal logic.

But according to the NYT, a philosopher with a cult following among the cognoscenti rejects the above view:

[Irad] Kimhi argues that this view is wrong, and that the distinction between psychology and logic has led our understanding of thinking astray. Consider that the following statement does not, according to the standard view, constitute a logical contradiction: “It’s raining, but I don’t believe it’s raining.” Why? Because the first part of the sentence concerns a state of affairs in the world (“it’s raining”), whereas the second part concerns someone’s state of mind (“I don’t believe it’s raining”).

Kimhi wants to rescue the intuition that it is a logical contradiction to say, “It’s raining, but I don’t believe it’s raining.” But to do this, he has to reject the idea that when you assert a proposition, what you are doing is adding psychological force (“I think … ”) to abstract content (“it’s raining”). Instead, Kimhi argues that a self-conscious, first-person perspective — an “I” — is internal to logic. For him, to judge that “it’s raining” is the same as judging “I believe it’s raining,” which is the same as judging “it’s false that it’s not raining.” All are facets of a single act of mind.

I haven't read Kimhi's book, and I am not sure I should trust the NYT account, but Kimhi seems to be recycling Kant in a confused way. At B 132 of Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes, "It must be possible for the 'I think' to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the representation would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me." (NKS tr.)

Consider a propositional representation.  One's awareness that it is raining need not be accompanied by an explicit act of reflection, the one expressed by 'I think that it is raining,' but it must be possible that this reflection occur. Thus there is a necessary connection between the propositional representation 'It is raining' and Kant's  transcendental unity of apperception. The latter could be described as " a self-conscious, first-person perspective — an “I” — [that] is internal to logic." But it is a transcendental I, one common to all cognitive subjects, and not the psychological I of a particular cognitive subject. Kimhi seems to be speaking of the latter.

Kant's Ich denke points us back to Descartes' cogito. The Frenchman discovers that while he can doubt many things, he cannot doubt that he is doubting these things. He can doubt the existence of the cat he 'sees' -- using 'see' in a strictly phenomenological way -- but he cannot doubt the existence of his 'seeing' as a mental act or cogitatio. His doubting is a thinking, but it is not a believing.  The Dubito ergo sum is but a special case of the generic Cogito ergo sum.  His doubting that he has a body is not a believing that he has a body but it is a thinking in the broad Cartesian sense that subsumes all intentional states or mental acts.

Accordingly, the 'I think' that must be able to accompany all my representations does not have the specific sense of 'I believe.' Belief is one type of mental act among many. One who believes does not doubt, and conversely. But both think. The 'I think' expresses an explicit reflection on the occurrent intentional state one is in, whether one is doubting, believing, wishing, hoping remembering, etc.

So there is a defensible sense in which there is an I internal to logic, but this is the transcendental I of the original synthetic unity of apperception, not the I of the psychophysical subject in nature.   If there is an I internal to logic, it is the I of the transcendental prefix,  the 'I think ___' which must be able to accompany all my representation.  But this 'I think ___' of the transcendental prefix does not have the sense of the ordinary language 'I think so' which means 'I believe so.' 

One consequence of Kimhi’s view is that “It’s raining, but I don’t believe it’s raining” becomes a logical contradiction. Another consequence is that a contradiction becomes something that you cannot believe, as opposed to something that you psychologically can but logically ought not to believe (as the traditional cleavage between psychology and logic might suggest). A final consequence is that thinking is not just a cognitive psychological act, but also one that is governed by logical law.

In other words, the distinction between psychology and logic collapses. Logic is not a set of rules for how to think; it is how we think, just not in a way that can be captured in conventional scientific terms. Thinking emerges as a unique and peculiar activity, something that is part of the natural world, but which cannot be understood in the manner of other events in the natural world. Indeed, Kimhi sees his book, in large part, as lamenting “the different ways in which philosophers have failed to acknowledge — or even denied — the uniqueness of thinking.”

The above strikes me as based on a confusion of the transcendental 'I think' with the psychological 'I believe.'  It seems to me that one can have a reflective awareness as of rain falling without believing that rain is falling. What is impossible, and contradictory, is to have a reflective awareness as of rain falling without thinking (in the broad Cartesian sense that subsumes specific types of mental act) that rain is falling. 

The transcendental I's thinking is governed by logical law, but not the thinking of the empirical I in nature. So the distinction between psychology and logic does not collapse. To the extent that I can make sense of what Kimhi is saying on the basis of the NYT article he seems to be trying to naturalizer Kant's transcendental ego.  Good luck with that.

Perhaps talk of a transcendental I is nonsense if it is supposed to be a real entity that thinks; but only a transcendental I could be internal to formal logic.

If anyone has read Kimhi's book, his comments would be appreciated. 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia

Joe Satriani, May This be Love (Waterfall). The Hendrix tune, masterfully done on acoustic guitars.

Doc Watson, Moody River

Dick Dale and the Deltones, Misirlou.  Before Clapton, before Bloomfield, my first guitar hero.   "King of the Surf Guitar."  Pipeline (with Stevie Ray Vaughan).  Nitro (with So Cal scenes).  Let's Go Trippin', 1961.  Not a drug reference. Pre-LSD. The first surf instrumental?

Cowboy Jack Clement, A Girl I Used to Know

Freddy Fender, Cielito Lindo.  Tex-Mex version of a very old song.

Marty Robbins, La Paloma.  Another old song dating back to 1861. 

Barbara Lewis, Hello Stranger, 1963. 1963 was arguably the best of the '60s years for pop compositions. 

Emmylou Harris, Hello Stranger. Same title, different song.  This one goes out to Mary Kay F-D. Remember the Fall of 1980, Mary Kay? 

Get up, rounder/Let a working girl lie down/ You are rounder/And you are all out and down.

Carter Family version from 1939.

Joan Baez, Daddy, You've Been on My Mind. The voice of an angel, the words of a poet, and Bruce  Langhorne's guitar.

Joan Baez, It's All Over Now, Baby Blue. The voice of an angel, the words of a poet, and Langhorne's guitar.

Joan Baez, A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall. The voice of an angel, the words of a poet, and Langhorne's guitar. The incredible mood of this version, especially the intro, is made by Langhorne and the bass of Russ Savakus, another well-known session player from those days. I've been listening to this song since '65 and it gives me chills every time. 

Carolyn Hester, I'll Fly Away.  Dylan on harp, a little rough and ragged. Langhorne on guitar? Not sure.

Joan Baez and her sister, Mimi Farina, Catch the Wind. Fabulous.

Joan Baez, Boots of Spanish Leather.  Nanci Griffith also does a good job with this Dylan classic. 

Betty Everett, You're No Good, 1963.  More soulful than the 1975 Linda Ronstadt version.

The Ikettes, I'm Blue, 1962. 

Lee Dorsey, Ya Ya, 1961.  Simplicity itself. Three chords. I-IV-V progression. No bridge.

Word of the Day: Costive

Merriam-Webster:

1a: affected with constipation

b: causing constipation

2: slow in action or expression

3: not generous : STINGY

Where did I find it? In a fine analysis of the concept of charm by Joseph Epstein.  Here is a taste that features the word under definition:

Some people I talked with thought charm was synonymous with “cool.” In fact, the two, charm and cool, are all but opposed. Cool aims for detachment, distance; charm is social, bordering on the intimate. Cool is icy; charm warm. Cool is costive; charm often ebullient. Cool doesn’t require approval; charm hopes to win it. Cool began life in jazz under the great saxophonist Lester Young, who first used the term, but it soon descended to the argot of drugs. Cool gave way to hip and hep. In Dave Frishberg’s song “I’m Hip,” the singer proclaims that he watches “arty French flicks with [his] shades on” and is so hip “I call my girlfriend ‘Man.’ ” Miles Davis was cool, Louis Armstrong charming.

How does one acquire a large vocabulary? The first rule is to read, read widely, and read worthwhile materials, especially old books and essays.  The second rule is to look up every word the meaning of which you do not know or are not certain of: don't be lazy. The third rule is to compile vocabulary lists. The fourth rule is to review the lists periodically and put the words to use.  Use 'em or lose 'em.

On Voting, Discrimination, and My Type of Conservatism

My brand of conservatism includes an admixture of classical liberalism. Thus my conservatism is neither of the 'throne and altar' nor of the 'alternative right' variety. But I am open to challenge from intelligent and good-natured critics to my right. Among the intelligent and civil alt-right critics I include Jacques who writes:

In your recent post on abortion, you quote yourself saying there is "no defensible basis for discrimination against women and blacks when it comes to voting".  I think that's too strong.  I guess it depends on what exactly you mean by "defensible".  But there are certainly some seemingly good reasons for that kind of discrimination.

1) Back in the day, almost all of the people paying taxes and working outside the home and fighting in wars were men.  So it wasn't arbitrary or unfair, arguably, that only men were granted the right to have a say in matters of public policy.  If you are going to be conscripted to fight and possibly die in a war, but your wife isn't, maybe it's reasonable that you play a role in deciding whether to go to war and she doesn't.  

More generally, it seems like the natural order in human life is that men are the leaders and women are the followers.  Obviously that's a very rough approximation of how things naturally work.  But isn't it at least a rough approximation?  Most women don't want to lead their families.  They want to find a man who is a good leader and submit to his authority.  When it comes to public affairs, men have always been the ones who were on the whole the most capable and motivated.  Women on the whole have always been more capable and motivated with respect to personal, domestic and small-scale communal life.  Again, I realize there are many individual exceptions and complications and qualifications; but isn't this basically how things have always worked, and doesn't it seem likely that these patterns are rooted in human nature?  If this is even a rough approximation of the natural order, we have a second reason for allowing only (some) men to vote.  And, of course, everyone accepts that rough approximations can be an adequate basis for social order.  There are some children who are better equipped to participate in politics or drive a car than some adults, but those are rare exceptions, so it's reasonable to deny voting rights to children.  (Mainly because we need general rules and social norms, and we don't have the time or resources to evaluate every single case in great depth.)

The Issue

The issue is whether every adult citizen who satisfies certain minimal requirements, e.g., not being a felon, should be allowed to vote regardless of race, sex, religion, property ownership, etc. I incline to a classically liberal view. Nota bene: classically liberal, not leftist. I'm for 'universal' suffrage.  But of course the suffrage cannot be strictly universal.  Thus I deny that children should have a right to vote (say, via proxy votes given to their parents). If you think children should have the right to vote, then why not  pre-natal children? They too live within our borders and are affected, often drastically, by social policies. And, pace the benighted Jesse Jackson, I deny that felons should be allowed to vote. Felons have shown by their destructive behavior that they cannot order their own lives; why then should they be given any say in how society should be ordered? 

What about cats and dogs? They have interests  and needs. They are affected by public policies. But that does not ground a right to vote via proxies. (The idea would be that if Tom has two cats, a dog, and a baby daughter, then he gets five, count 'em five, votes, one for humself and four proxies.) And of course I am opposed to lowering the voting age, as some cynical Democrats want to do, so that under-18 teenagers can vote. And this despite the fact that some 14-year-olds are better equipped to vote that some 40-year-olds. The law cannot cater to exceptional cases.

Skin-in-the-Game

Jacques is mounting what I will call a  'skin-in-the-game' argument.  I am sympathetic to it.

Those who do not face conscription have no 'skin in the game' with respect to fighting in wars and possibly coming home dead or injured. So why should those who do not face conscription have any say in the matter?  Those who own no real property have no skin in the game when it comes to being liable for taxes on real estate. So why should they have a say on what tax rates should be? Some 45% of Americans pay no individual federal income tax.  Why should they have a say in the determination of federal income tax rates?

Why should college students in Berkeley, California or Madison, Wisconsin be allowed to vote on local matters given that they will  be there for only four years and thus lack a long-term stake in those communities, pay no taxes to speak of, and lack the life experience to make wise decisions? 

Jacques continues: 

(2) All historical experience suggests that blacks and whites behave very differently when it comes to voting.  Blacks vote as a tribal block.  They vote for the person they think will benefit blacks.  Again, there are exceptions, but this is true as a rough approximation.  Whites may have done this to some extent in the past, but now almost none of them do.  Huge numbers of whites will knowingly vote for policies that benefit non-whites at the expense of whites.  Whites generally seem to have a much deeper interest in principles and justice.  They are highly individualistic and low in tribalism compared to blacks.  Does it really make sense to extend equal voting rights to groups that have such different and incompatible understandings of the political process?  Arguably, a healthy democracy requires a very broad basic agreement on principles and aims, a shared culture and historical understanding, etc.  But then it would be reasonable to think that blacks should not vote in white societies.  (Maybe they should have their own societies where they can vote and whites can't.)

The Tribalism Question

I agree that blacks as a group are more tribal than whites as a group at the present time. Their political behavior is driven by their self-identification as blacks. This is a fact, but is it the nature of blacks to be tribal? Or could blacks eventually become less tribal, and perhaps as anti-tribal and individualistic as whites? It cannot be denied that black tribalism is largely a response to various contingent circumstances such as their ancestors having been brought to North America as slaves, and their being a minority.   Minority status is surely a driver of tribal identification among all racial, ethnic, and social  groups. As the contingent circumstances change, one can reasonably expect blacks to become less tribal. 

Also to consider is the fact that there is plenty of tribalism among whites as well, for example, white females, white law professors and trial lawyers who vote as a bloc, white union members who vote as their union bosses tell them, and so on.

In an ideal democracy only some people would be allowed to vote. But there is no practical way to determine all and only those who should be allowed to vote beyond the minimal requirements of citizenship, adulthood, etc.  There is no going back, obviously: the franchise cannot be removed from blacks and females, for example. And in any case there are plenty of blacks and females who are more qualified to cast an intelligent, well-informed, and wise vote than many whites and males.

So I would say that justice demands universal suffrage in the qualified sense I explained above.  I stick to my classically liberal line that "there is no defensible basis for discrimination against women and blacks when it comes to voting."   

Facebook

I am posting more frequently over  there now. Shocked? Well, I do draw the line at Twitter. My FB page is listed under 'Bill Vallicella.'

Conscience, Brain, and Scientistic Pseudo-Understanding

Here at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical

Canada Up in Smoke

The benefits of marijuana legalization will surely outweigh the costs. Right?

Maybe not.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Kerouac Goes Home in October

Jack Kerouac quit the mortal coil 49 years ago tomorrow, securing his release from the samsaric wheel of the quivering meat conception, and the granting of his wish:

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead.  (Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus).

The Last Interview, 12 October 1969.  "I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic."  "I just sneak into church now, at dusk, at vespers. But yeah, as you get older you get more . . . genealogical."

As much of a screw-up and sinner as he was, as irresponsible, self-indulgent, and self-destructive, Kerouac was a deeply religious man.  He went through a Buddhist phase, but at the end he came home to Catholicism.  

"Everybody goes home in October." (On the Road, Part I, Ch. 14, Para 1) Here's the whole paragraph:

At dawn my bus was zooming across the Arizona desert -- Indio, Blythe, Salome (where she danced); the great dry stretches leading to Mexican mountains in the south. Then we swung north to the Arizona mountains, Flagstaff, clifftowns. I had a book with me I stole from a Hollywood stall, "Le Grand Meaulnes" by Alain-Fournier, but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing. In inky night we crossed New Mexico; at gray dawn it was Dalhart, Texas; in the bleak Sunday afternoon we rode through one Oklahoma flat-town after another; at nightfall it was Kansas. The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.

 "Pretty girls make graves." (Dharma Bums) 

 Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels (G. P. Putnam 1965), p. 48:

Outside it's October night in Manhattan and on the waterfront wholesale markets there are barrels with fires left burning in them by the longshoremen where I stop and warm my hands and take a nip two nips from the bottle and hear the bvoom of ships in the channel and I look up and there, the same stars as over Lowell, October, old melancholy October, tender and loving and sad, and it will all tie up eventually into a perfect posy of love I think and I shall present it to Tathagata, my Lord, to God, saying "Lord Thou didst exult -- and praise be You for showing me how You did it -- Lord now I'm ready for more -- And this time I won't whine -- This time I'll keep my mind clear on the fact that it is Thy Empty Forms."

. . . This world, the palpable thought of God . . . [ellipsis in original]

Alela Diane, We Are Nothing  

Jack Kerouac, Tristessa (written 1955-56, first published in 1960), p. 59:

Since beginningless time and into the never-ending future, men have loved women without telling them, and the Lord has loved them without telling, and the void is not the void because there's nothing to be empty of.

Henry Mancini, Moon River.  Video with shots of Rita Hayworth. YouTuber comment: indimenticabile Rita, stupenda Rita, vivi nei nostri ricordi, vivi nei nostri cuori. This was Jack Kerouac's favorite song.  Ellis Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac (St. Martin's 1998), p. 324:

One night he [Kerouac, during a 1962 visit to Lowell, Mass.] left a bar called Chuck's with Huck Finneral, a reedy, behatted eccentric who carried a business card that read: "Professional killer . . . virgins fixed . . . orgies organized, dinosaurs neutered, contracts & leases broken."  Huck's philosophy of life was: "Better a wise madness than a foolish sanity."  They drove to a friend's house in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and on the way, Jack sang "Moon River," calling it his favorite song.  Composed by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, "Moon River" was the theme song of the popular Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast at Tiffany's.  Sobbed by a harmonica, later swelling with strings and chorus, the plaintive tune's gentle but epic-like lyrics describe a dreamer and roamer not unlike Kerouac.

Indeed they do.  A restless dreamer, a lonesome traveller, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of mist, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore.  

Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard, California Zephyr

10,000 Maniacs, Hey Jack Kerouac

Tom Waits, Jack Kerouac on the Road!!

Aztec Two-Step, The Persecution and Restoration of Dean Moriarty

Some readings:

Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues, 228th Chorus

Jack Kerouac, Safe in Heaven, Dead.  Good sound quality.  "I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel, safe in heaven, dead."

Jack Kerouac, Charlie Parker.  "Charlie, Parker, lay the bane off me, and everybody."

It's About Time

Typepad has finally secured its hypertext transfer protocol. My URL now sports an 's': https.  That's reassuring to me and to you, dear reader. Now they need to work on their on-board back-up utility to expedite the back up of huge blogs like mine.

Credible Testimony

I just discovered an entry at James N. Anderson's weblog with which I agree entirely, not that I disagree with many of Professor Anderson's other posts.  His Credible Testimony makes some of the same points that I made in Is She Believable? Interestingly the posts were uploaded on the same day, October 1st. I hadn't read his piece and there is no evidence he had read mine. In these trying times of deep disagreement we should take some pleasure from any agreement that comes our way.

Both posts are examples of how philosophers can help raise the level of public discourse. 

But who reads us? And how many have the mental stamina to 'process' our distinctions?

Burden of Proof, Appeal to Ignorance, Safety Considerations, and God

Here at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical

Habermas on the Judeo-Christian Origin of Equal Rights

Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a postnational constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk. (Jürgen Habermas - "Time of Transitions", Polity Press, 2006, pp. 150-151, translation of an interview from 1999). 

Source

Addendum (10/18)

Kai Frederik Lorentzen usefully contributes the following contextualization of the above Habermas quotation:

It strikes me as strange to see - he of all people! - Jürgen Habermas presented on your blog as a defender of the West's Judeo-Christian roots. Not that he didn't say that in 1999, but the utterance is not representative for his thinking. Habermas is not only an elitist proponent of a quick EU unification (---> United States of Europe) crashing the sovereignty of the European peoples (his idea is to legitimate that later by a referendum), he's also absolutely pro migration and does not want to know about the dangers of Islamization. In fact he's an enemy of enlightened patriotism & the idea of an Europe of nations. I've read "Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit", "Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns", "Moralbewußtsein und kommunikatives Handeln", "Nachmetaphysisches Denken", "Faktizität und Geltung" and others. I know the theory of Habermas, and I know his political agenda. I don't think it's an agenda you would like to support.         

Quite right. That is not an agenda I would like to support.  The quotation intrigued me, though, and I wanted to capture it for my files. I should add that I was intensely interested in Habermas in the early 'seventies around the time I began graduate studies (1973).  I read Erkenntnis und Interesse and some other things by him. But then my interests shifted to Husserl and Heidegger und die Seinsfrage and from there to classical metaphysics of Being and then to the analytic approach to existence in Frege and Russell and Quine and so I became more and more analytic and less and less Continental.  My youthful interest in the Frankfurter Schule has pretty much petered out,  except for a residual fascination with Theodor Adorno's Negative Dialektik. Also gone is  my enthusiasm for Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics whose lectures I attended when he visited Boston College in the 'seventies. My copy of Wahrheit und Methode bears his autograph.   Mesmerized by Heidegger as he was, he didn't know Husserl very well. He was surprised when I pointed out a passage in Cartesiansiche Meditationen in which Husserl speaks of a transzendental-faktisches ego. "Wooden iron!" the last student of the neo-Kantians said to me.

Here's what Habermas wrote in 2006 and in terms of religious & migration policies this still is - „Keine Muslima darf dazu genötigt werden, beispielsweise Herrn de Maiziere die Hand zu geben“ (2017) - his position today. 

> ... The fourth pressing problem is the fundamentalist challenge to cultural pluralism in our societies. We have approached this problem from the perspective of immigration policy for far too long. In times of terrorism, there is a threat that it will only be dealt with under the heading of domestic security. Yet the burning cars in the banlieues of Paris, the local terror of inconspicuous youths in English immigrant neighbourhoods and the violence at the Rütli School (more) in Berlin have taught us that simply policing the Fortress of Europe is no real answer to these problems. The children of former immigrants, and their children's children, have long been part of our society. But since they are simultaneously not a part of it, they pose a challenge to civil society, not the Minister of the Interior. And the challenge we face is to respect the different nature of foreign cultures and religious communities while including them in national civil solidarity.

At first glance the integration problem has nothing to do with the future of the European Union, since every national society must deal with it in its own way. And yet it could also hold the solution to a further difficulty. The second objection of Euro-sceptics is that there could never be a United States of Europe, because the necessary underpinnings are lacking. In truth the key question is whether it is possible to expand civil solidarity trans-nationally, across Europe. At the same time, a common European identity will develop all the quicker, the better the dense fabric of national culture in the respective states can integrate citizens of other ethnic or religious origins. Integration is not a one-way street. When it is successful, it can inspire strong national cultures to become more porous, more sensitive and more receptive both domestically and abroad. In Germany, for example, the more a harmonious coexistence with citizens of Turkish origin becomes a matter of course, the better we will be able to understand other European citizens – from the Portuguese winegrower to the Polish plumber. In opening up domestically, self-contained cultures can also open up to each other.

The integration problem hits a raw nerve in European nation-states. These developed into democratic constitutional states through the forced creation of a romantically inspired national consciousness that absorbed other loyalties. Without the moving force of nationalism, the Bavarians and the Rhinelanders, the Bretons and Occitanians, the Scots and the Welsh, the Sicilians and the Calabrians, the Catalans and the Andalusians would never have merged to become citizens of democratic nations. Because of this tightly-knit and easily combustible social fabric, the oldest national states react far more sensitively to the integration problem than immigration societies like the USA or Australia, from whom we can learn a great deal. 

Whether we're dealing with the integration of gastarbeiter families or citizens from the former colonies, the lesson is the same. There can be no integration without a broadening of our own horizons, and without a readiness to tolerate a broader spectrum of odours, thoughts and what can be painful cognitive dissonances. In addition, Western and Northern European secular societies are faced with the vitality of foreign religions, which in turn lend local confession new significance. Immigrants of other faiths are as much a stimulus for believers as for non-believers.

The Muslim across the way, if I can take the current situation as an example, confronts Christian citizens with competing religious truths. And he makes secular citizens conscious of the phenomenon of public religion. Provided they react sensibly, believers will be reminded of the ideas, practices and attitudes in their Church that fell afoul of democracy and human rights well into the 20th century. Secular citizens, for their part, will recognise that they have taken matters too lightly by seeing their religious counterparts as an endangered species, and by viewing the freedom of religious practice as a kind of conservation principle.

Successful integration is a reciprocal learning process. Here in Germany, Muslims are under great time and adaptation pressure. The liberal state demands of all religious communities without exception that they recognise religious pluralism, the competence of institutionalised sciences in questions of secular knowledge and the universal principles of modern law. And it guarantees basic rights within the family. It avenges violence, including the coercion of the consciences of its own members. But the transformation of consciousness that will enable these norms to be internalised requires a self-reflexive opening of our national ways of living.

Those who denounce this assertion as "the capitulation of the West" are taken in by the silly war cry of liberal hawks. "Islamofascism" is no more a palpable opponent than the war on terrorism is a "war". Here in Europe, the assertion of constitutional norms is such an uncontested premise of cohabitation that the hysterical cry for the protection of our "values" comes across like semantic armament against an unspecified domestic enemy. Punishing violence and combating hatred require calm self-consciousness, not rabble-rousing. People who proclaim against their better knowledge that the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Orhan Pamuk is proof of an unavoidable clash of civilizations are themselves propagating such a clash. We should not follow in the footsteps of George W. Bush in militarising the Western spirit as well.

In Germany, the tensions between Christianity and Islam that have been mounting since 2001 recently set off an exciting, high-level competition among confessions. The subject at issue is the compatibility of faith and knowledge. For Pope Benedict XVI, the reasonableness of belief results from the Hellenisation of Christianity, while for Bishop Huber it results from the post-Reformation meeting of the Gospel with the post-metaphysical thinking of Kant and Kierkegaard. Both sides however betrayed a bit too much intellectual pride. The liberal state, for its part, must demand that the compatibility of faith and reason be imposed on all religious confessions. This quality must not be claimed as the exclusive domain of a specifically Western religious tradition. <

With best wishes! Kai Frederik Lorentzen

https://www.signandsight.com/features/1048.html
https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2018/10/habermas.html

Is it politically sane to want both to crush and to tolerate opposing tribes?

George Packer in The New Yorker on tribalism:

I hear myself say this and think, A solid analysis. At the same time, I hear a Republican reply, Pure tribalism. You’re just proving your own point. I want part of my brain, even a small part, to be always attuned to the frequency of other tribes, ready to pose the essential questions: How would this sound coming from them? How do they see you? I try to keep two thoughts in my head at the same time: the other tribe needs to be crushed, and I have to talk and listen to them. The first thrives on rage, the second on tolerance. These are contradictory states of being, and extremely difficult to maintain in tension, but a sane politics requires both. The alternative isn’t victory but self-destruction. After all, we have to live together.

Surely the above is incoherent. I cannot both tolerate you and seek to crush you.  Toleration does not imply approval, but it does imply a willingness to put up with you, your beliefs, your expressions of your beliefs, and at least some of  the actions flowing from them.  If I tolerate you, then I let you be, which is obviously incompatible with crushing you either physically or politically.

Packer tells us that a sane politics requires both rage and tolerance.  On the contrary such a politics would be insane.

Packer tells us we have to live together. True. But he offers no proposal as to how to do so peacefully.

Secession is out of the question. If so, we are just going to have to battle it out in this age of post-consensus politics. It won't be pretty. Let's hope that political means suffice to beat back the Democrats.  If we can beat some sense into them, then perhaps we can keep the Republic together. 

If God Cannot Cause Himself, How Can He Know Himself?

This from a reader:

If we say God cannot create himself since this implies a contradiction (God existing prior to himself to act on himself), how can we say God does anything with regard to himself?

For instance, we say God knows himself. But how is this possible, seeing as God would need to first exist, in order to know himself? Knowledge is a relation in the mind to what is outside it. If I "know" a thing, I have the thing, the thing that is not me, in my mind. But if there is only simply God, how does he "have" himself in his mind?

An interesting question worth thinking about.

I grant that God cannot create himself. For if he creates himself then he causes himself to exist, and nothing can cause itself to exist. For a thing cannot enter into a causal relation unless it exists. So if God causes himself to exist, then his existence is logically, if not temporally, prior to his existence. And that, we agree, is impossible.

The main point is that the existence of a thing cannot be logically prior to its existence. (And if it cannot be logically prior, then it cannot be temporally prior either.) But the existence of a knower not only can but must be logically prior to its self-knowledge.  I cannot know myself unless I exist, but I can exist without knowing myself. In the finite case, then, it is clear that existence is logically prior to self-knowledge, and indeed other-knowledge as well.

Now God is omniscient and exists in all possible worlds.  So there is no possible situation in which he does not know himself or fails to know everything there is to know about himself. If we think of God as omnitemporal as opposed to eternal, then at every moment he enjoys full self-knowledge. At every moment, his existence and self-knowledge are simultaneous. But this is not a problem since there is no problem with God's existence being logically prior to his self-knowledge even if the former is not temporally prior to the latter.  We get the same result if God is eternal.

In sum, God's existence cannot be logically prior to God's existence as it would have to be if God creates himself. But God's existence can be logically prior to God's self-knowledge.

There is a second problem that the reader conflates with one I just discussed.   If God alone exists, how can God know himself if "Knowledge is a relation in the mind to what is outside it"?  This problem is solved by denying the assumption. Self-knowledge is NOT a relation to what is outside the mind.  I feel good right now, and I know it. The object of my knowledge is an internal state. God's self-knowledge can be said to be analogous to finite self-knowledge. 

Word of the Day: 'Ultracrepidarian'

Here:

adjective 

1. 1.

   expressing opinions on matters outside the scope of one's knowledge or expertise.

   "“Dad, how do we know the universe is expanding?” inquires your six-year-old. Try answering that without resorting to an ultracrepidarian trick here or there"

noun 

1. 1.

   a person who expresses opinions on matters outside the scope of their knowledge or expertise.

   "most patients are ultracrepidarians when it comes to medicine"

Cactus Ed on Sweet Gone Jack

Here:

Some of Abbey's most entertaining letters involve skirmishes over literary reputation, one of his enduring obsessions. In a letter to the Nation, he contrasted Kurt Vonnegut's "concern for justice, love, honesty and hope" with "novels about the ethnic introspection project (Roth, Bellow)" and "the miseries of suburban hanky-panky (Updike, Cheever, Irving)."

He disparaged Jack Kerouac as "that creepy adolescent bisexual who dabbled in Orientalism and all the other fads of his time, wrote stacks of complacently self-indulgent, onanastic [sic] books and then drank himself to death while sitting on his mother's lap, down in Florida." He called Tom Wolfe a "faggoty fascist little fop" but later defended "Bonfire of the Vanities" as a "novel that reminds us, in the end, that defiance and resistance, manhood and honor, are still possible."

Mary Midgley on Complaints about Clarity

Here at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical.

Mary Midgley (1919 - 2018)

The Guardian reports,

Mary Midgley, who has died aged 99, was an important writer on ethics, the relations of humans and animals, our tendency to misconstrue science, and the role of myth and poetry.

Read it all.

The Telegraph obituary, behind a paywall, begins:

Mary Midgley, who has died aged 99, was one of Britain’s leading moral philosophers, though she was more effective in wielding philosophical objections to other people’s beliefs than promoting a coherent philosophical viewpoint of her own.

That's a bad sentence. Do you see why? Strike 'coherent' and it is just fine.

There are women in philosophy such as Midgley who are much better than many men.  Why then female 'under-representation' in our discipline?

Here are excerpts from a longer piece which is sure to elicit the impotent rage of leftists:

Why are women 'under-represented' in philosophy?  Because women as a group are not as good at it as men as a group, because women as a group are not as interested in it as men as a group, and because the feminine nature is conciliatory and averse to what they perceive as the aggressive, combative, and hostile aspects of philosophical dialectic.  This is surely a large part, if not the whole, of the explanation, especially given the Affirmative Action advantage women have enjoyed over the past half a century.

The hostility often felt by women reflects something about the nature of philosophy, namely, that its very lifeblood is dialectic and argument. Argument can be conducted civilly, often is, and of course ought to be.  But it still looks to the female nature as a sort of 'fighting,' a sublimated form  of the physical combat that men are wont to engage in, even when dialectic at its best is no such thing.  So there is something in the nature of philosophy and something about females that explains their 'under-representation.' Those are sneer quotes, by the way.  Anyone with an ounce of philosophical intelligence can see that the word I am sneering at conflates the factual and the normative.  Therefore  it shouldn't be used without sneer quotes.

[. . .]

Anecdote.  I once roomed with an  analytic philosopher at a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute.  I recall a remark he made about philosophical discussion: "If you are not willing to become a bit of an asshole about it, you are not taking it seriously." The guy was obnoxious, but he was right.  In a serious discussion, things can get a little tense.  The feminine nature shies away from contention and dispute.  

If you deny that, then you have no knowledge of human nature and no experience of life.  Ever wonder why women are 'over-represented' among realtors? It is because they excel men when it comes to conciliation and mediation.  I don't mean this as a snarky put-down of the distaff contingent.  I mean it as praise.  And if females do not take it as praise are they not assuming the superiority of male virtues?

It is a non sequitur to think that if the Xs are 'under-represented' among the Ys, then the Xs must have been the victims of some unjust discrimination.  Men are 'under-represented' among massage therapists, but the explanation is obvious and harmless: men like to have their naked bodies rubbed by women in dark rooms, but women feel uncomfortable having their naked bodies rubbed by men in dark rooms.   It is not as if there is some sort of sexism, 'institutional' or individual, that keeps men out of massage therapy.

Blacks are 'over-represented'  in the NFL and the NBA. Is that because of some racism 'institutional' or individual, that keeps whitey out?  Of course not. Blacks are better than whites at football and basketball. Jews are just terrible.  Chess is their athletics.  Jews dominate in the chess world.  Is that because the goyim have been suppressed?  Is a Jewish conspiracy at work?

Does my talk of blacks and Jews make me a racist and an anti-Semite ?  To a liberal-left dumb-ass, yes. For they are incapable of distinguishing between a statement whose content is race and a racist statement.   

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Tom Merton, Baez, Dylan, and Ry Cooder

Thomas Merton, though 51 years old in 1966, was wide open to the '60s Zeitgeist -- all of it.  The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume Six, p. 93, entry of 10 July 1966:

Borrowed  a record player and  played Joan Baez over again -- and now really know "Silver Dagger" (before I had the melody confused with "East Virginia"). One record I like more and more is Bob Dylan's Highway 61 [Revisited].  

On p. 324, Merton references Dylan's Ballad of a Thin Man.

In the same volume we find "A Midsummer Diary for M" and on p. 305:

All the love and death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez's song, "Silver Dagger." I can't get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself -- and yourself for me, in a way.

Ry Cooder, He'll Have to Go. The old 1960 Jim Reeves country crossover hit.

Ry Cooder, Good Night Irene.  Leadbelly.  Eric Clapton's rendition at a 1982 English Christmas party. 

Ry Cooder, Yellow Roses. The old Hank Snow tune.

Ry Cooder, Maria Elena. An old standard from circa 1932.

Ry Cooder, Paris, Texas. Excellent evocative video.  Great YouTuber comment:

Man I have been gone way too long. I miss America, the open road, the wild west. I remember staying in hotels with just a dozen rooms or so, and only maybe four of them in operation. Twenty seven bucks and bed springs so squeaky we had to make love on the floor. Walking out to the pay phone, a billion stars in the sky, I need to try and find my way back again.

A. E. Taylor on F. H. Bradley on Religion

Here at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical

Remembering Henry Veatch and Rational Man

Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl

Nietzsche, Truth, Power, and the Left

According to Victor Davis Hanson, the following is one of the tenets of contemporary leftism as represented by the Democrat Party:

Truth is not universal, but individualized. [Christine Blasey] Ford’s “truth” is as valid as the “Truth,” given that competing narratives are adjudicated only by access to power. Ford is a victim, therefore her truth trumps “their” truth based on evidence and testimony.

To understand this adequately you need to understand Nietzsche. Old Fritz has posthumously insinuated himself into our politics, and Democrat politicians, though they are too dumb to know it, are Nietzscheans.  So take a gander at Nietzsche, Truth, and Power.  It concludes thusly:

What Nietzsche wants to say is that there is no truth 'in itself'; there are only various interpretations from the varying perspectives of power-hungry individuals and groups, interpretations that serve to enhance the power of these individuals and groups. At bottom, the world is a vast constellation of ever-changing power-centers vying with each other for dominance, and what a particular power-center calls 'true' are merely those interpretations that enhance and preserve its power.  For the essence of the world is not reason or order, but blind will, will to power.

But if that is the way it is, then there is an absolute truth after all. Nietzsche never extricates himself from this contradiction. And where he fails, his followers do not succeed.  We are now, as a culture, living and dying in the shadow of this contradiction, reaping the consequences of the death of God and the death of truth.

I now add that I count it as one of Nietzsche's great insights to have perceived the link between God and truth, and that between the death of God and the death of truth. For Nietzsche, no God, no truth; no God; ergo, no truth.  For me, no God, no truth;  truth; ergo, God. Nietzsche's  modus ponens is my modus tollens.

I believe it is in De Veritate where the doctor angelicus says something along these lines: If, per impossibile, God did not exist, then truth would not exist either.

Now God cannot die, nor truth. But the disappearance among the educated elites of the God-belief brings with it the disappearance among the elites of the belief in truth which, by its very nature is universal and absolute. 

It is important to appreciate that the statement that truth is perspectival only masquerades as a statement of the nature of truth; in reality it is a denial that there is truth.  Truth simply cannot be perspectival; to call it such is therefore to deny its existence.  The attempt at identification collapses into elimination. Perspectivism is an eliminativist theory of truth.

So all is lost if we allow talk of 'Ford's truth' and 'Kavanaugh's truth' where each has his own truth in the measure that he is 'empowered' by it.

That way the abyss.

The Pig, the Fool, and Socrates

Millian meditations over at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical.

(The 'over' is redundant; but I like the sound of it.)

Epitaph for a Dying Culture

The 'genius' of Donald Trump, if you want to call  it that, is that he is able successfully to bait Democrats  into showing the most deeply-dyed and color-fast of their true colors, colors that are not typically on display but hidden beneath layers of mendacity and obfuscation. They now stand exposed as the destructive hard-leftists that they are and were. Would it be too much to say that they have become enemies of civilization?

I don't think so, nor would Victor Davis Hanson. He mentions ten insidious assaults on hard-won wisdom and "a new legal and cultural standard in adjudicating future disagreements and disputes, an utterly anti-Western standard quite befitting for our new relativist age":

1. The veracity of accusations will hinge on the particular identity, emotions, and ideology of the accuser;
2. Evidence, or lack of it, will be tangential, given the supposed unimpeachable motives of the ideologically correct accuser;
3. The burden of proof and evidence will rest with the accused to disprove the preordained assumption of guilt;
4. Hearsay will be a valuable narrative and constitute legitimate evidence;
5. Truth is not universal, but individualized. Ford’s “truth” is as valid as the “Truth,” given that competing narratives are adjudicated only by access to power. Ford is a victim, therefore her truth trumps “their” truth based on evidence and testimony.
6. Questionable and inconsistent testimony are proof of trauma and therefore exactitude; recalling an accusation to someone is proof that the action in the accusation took place.
7. Statutes of limitations do not exist; any allegation of decades prior is as valid as any in the present. All of us are subject at any moment to unsubstantiated accusations from decades past that will destroy lives.
8. Assertion of an alleged crime is unimpeachable proof. Recall of where, when, why, and how it took place is irrelevant.
9. Individual accusations will always be subservient to cosmic causes; individuals are irrelevant if they do not serve ideological aims. All accusations fit universal stereotypes whose rules of finding guilt or innocence trump those of individual cases.
10. The accuser establishes the conditions under which charges are investigated; the accused nods assent.

The Cross Won, but the Battle Never Ends

I ended my European tour in June at Rome where all roads are said to lead.  After hours of prayer and meditation in Santa Maria Maggiore, I spent a long time in the vicinity of the Coliseum where I noticed something I had missed on previous visits:

The brutal Romans contributed mightily to civilization, but it took Christianity to civilize us truly. But now the Church of Rome is collapsing under the weight of its own decadence. It will most likely survive as a remnant, stripped down to essentials and purified by suffering and worldly losses.  Such losses will do it good. The Church needs to spend a generation or two in the desert, there to examine its collective conscience and to ponder the mission it has abandoned.

All institutions require reform and renewal from time to time, as do their members. But it is not reform or renewal when an institution is diverted from its founding purpose. It is rather destruction. The whole point of the church founded by Christ was to stand against the world and point us, and indeed lead us, beyond it. "My kingdom is not of this world." (John 18:36) Betraying its mandate, the Roman church has become just another piece of cultural junk. Cozying up to secularity, the Church seeks to maintain itself as an organizational hustle for the clerics it serves while abandoning the deposit of faith it is supposed to be preserving.

The vast, ancient edifice needs fumigation. The termites, from Bergoglio on down, need to be sent scurrying. The rotten hierarchy needs to be defunded. My trenchant but  obviously figurative talk of termites and fumigation will elicit howls of protest from some. "Eliminationist rhetoric!"  But consider this report from a correspondent, Dr. Vito Caiati:

In its October 7th edition, Corriere della Sera offered excepts from  Pope Bergoglio’s just released book on the Virgin Mary , including the following paragraph, which well reveals his insidious method of undermining dogma and tradition. I provide the first paragraph of this longer reflection, followed by my translation.

Da quando è nata fino all’Annunciazione, al momento dell’incontro con l’angelo di Dio, me l’immagino come una ragazza normale, una ragazza di oggi, una ragazza non posso dire di città, perché Lei è di un paesino, ma normale, normale, educata normalmente, aperta a sposarsi, a fare una famiglia. Una cosa che immagino è che amasse le Scritture: conosceva le Scritture, aveva fatto la catechesi ma familiare, dal cuore. Poi, dopo il concepimento di Gesù, ancora una donna normale: Maria è la normalità, è una donna che qualsiasi donna di questo mondo può dire di poter imitare. Niente cose strane nella vita, una madre normale: anche nel suo matrimonio verginale, casto in quella cornice della verginità, Maria è stata normale. Lavorava, faceva la spesa, aiutava il Figlio, aiutava il marito: normale.

From her birth until the Annunciation, at the moment of the encounter with the angel of God, I imagine her [the Virgin Mary] as a normal girl, a girl of today, I cannot say a girl of the city, because she is from a hamlet, but normal, normal, educated normally, open to marrying, to having a family. One thing that I imagine is that she loved the Scriptures: she knew the Scriptures; she had carried out catechesis but informally, from the heart. Then, after the conception of Jesus, she was still a normal woman. Mary is normality, is a woman that almost any women in this world is able to imitate. No strange things in life, a normal mother: even in her virginal matrimony, chaste in that frame of virginity, Mary was normal. She worked, shopped, helped her Son, helped her husband: normal.

Leaving aside the triteness of these reflections, they constitute, first, a masked assault on the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which proclaims that “The most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 494). While we cannot know the intimate effects of such “singular grace and privilege” on Mary’s being and consciousness, we are certainly bound to hold that she was no “normal girl.” Moreover, Bergoglio’s words can be taken to deny the perpetual virginity of Mary, in that while he speaks of her being “chaste in the frame of virginity,” he simultaneously regards her “after the birth of Jesus” as “a normal woman” since there are “no strange things in life.” Again, the Church affirms that although Jesus emerged from the body of the Theotokos, her virginity was not in any way altered. Now, if this is not a “strange thing,” that is, an absolutely unique miracle, what is? Bergoglio is constantly at work undermining the foundations of the faith to the benefit of post-modern skepticism and relativism.

Una ragazza normale? One could try to read this as an emphasis on Mary's humanity, or one might say that Bergoglio is a foolish man who doesn't understand the dogmas of the Church of which he is pope; but in the end I believe my learned correspondent is right:  this is an insidious undermining of dogma and tradition.  How could Bergoglio not know the doctrinal content in the Catechism?

 

For a man like me there are two main problems with the RCC, or rather two main impediments to my returning to it, as I would like to do, being a cradle Catholic. One is at the philosophical level: how is it possible that the dogmas including the Mariological dogmas (Virgin Birth, Immaculate Conception, Assumption) be true?  Suppose I solve this problem to my own satisfaction.  Then the second problem, that of the corruption of the institution, jumps out at me.  The church hierarchy and the rank-and-file priests are filled with unbelievers who apparently believe in the Church in precisely the way mafiosi believe in the mafia: it's their thing, a hustle that keeps them fat and happy in a worldly sense and allows free play to their concupiscence.  I am alluding, of course, to priestly pederasty, pedophilia, and ephebophilia. How can I in good conscience support such a church by attendance or monetary contributions? If the Church is now just another pile of secular-leftist junk, and a haven for homosexuals, then it ought to be defunded.

 

Am I suggesting that for every priest the Church is a fraud and a hustle? Of course not. But as Rod Dreher has forcefully documented over many, many entries at the American Conservative, the rot resides in the hierarchy itself from Bergoglio on down. This fact makes the problem very serious indeed.

Humor Video: Hitler Reacts to Kavanaugh Confirmation

1:55

On Civility and a Concession to Hillary

Civility is a good old conservative virtue and I'm all for it.  But like toleration, civility has limits.  If you call me a racist because I argue against Obamacare, then not only do I have no reason to be civil in my response to you, I morally ought not be civil to you.  For by being civil I only encourage more bad behavior on your part.  By slandering me, you have removed yourself from the sphere of the civil.  The slanderer does not deserve to be treated with civility; he deserves to be treated with hostility and stiff-necked opposition.  He is deserving of moral condemnation.

If you call me a xenophobe because I insist that the federal government do what it is constitutionally mandated to do, namely, secure the nation's borders, then you slander me and forfeit whatever right you have to be treated civilly.  For if you slander me, then you are moral scum and deserve to be morally condemned.  In issuing my moral condemnation, I exercise my constitutionally-protected First Amendment right to free speech.  But not only do I have a right to condemn you, I am morally obliged to do so lest your sort of evil behavior become even more prevalent.

Examples can be multiplied, but the point is clear.  Civility has limits.  One ought to be civil to the civil.  But one ought not be civil to the uncivil.  What they need is a taste of their own medicine.

One must also realize that 'civility' is a prime candidate for linguistic hijacking.  And so we must be on our guard lest the promoters of 'civility' attach to this fine word a Leftward-tilting connotation.    We must not let them get away with any suggestion that one is civil if and only if one is an espouser of liberal/left positions. 

We now come to Hillary. “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about,” she said.

I agree with this one sentence. The Dems have transmogrified into a destructive, hard-Left party. We cannot be civil with these extremely uncivil and vicious and violent and mob-stoking scumbags who want to destroy what we of the Coalition of the Sane stand for and care about.

Under the rude tutelage of President Trump, some Republicans are making the transition from pussycon to warrior. One surprising example is Lindsey Graham whose stones have finally descended, to put it crudely. Too bad it took the outrages against Kavanaugh to set the cojones in motion.

Donald J. Trump, as uncouth and flawed as he is, is a necessary corrective to the extremism of the Democrat Party. We are very lucky he came along at just the right time.

Now read this: Trump Against the Pussycons.

Private Property and Individual Liberty

Walter E. Williams:

The essence of private property rights contains three components: the owner’s right to make decisions about the uses of what’s deemed his property; his right to acquire, keep and dispose of his property; and his right to enjoy the income, as well as bear losses, resulting from his decisions. If one or more of those three elements is missing, private property rights are not present. Private property rights also restrain one from interfering with other people’s rights. Private property rights have long been seen as vital to personal liberty. James Madison, in an 1829 speech at the Virginia Constitutional Convention, said: “It is sufficiently obvious that persons and property are the two great subjects on which governments are to act and that the rights of persons and the rights of property are the objects for the protection of which government was instituted. These rights cannot well be separated.”

Something for twenty-something, know-nothing socialist hipsters such as Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow 'ocasionalists' to think about.

The Problem of Dirty Hands

Here at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical

It's All Over for the Never Trumpers

One part of them acknowledges President Trump's manifold accomplishments, in particular his two SCOTUS victories, and will vote for him in 2020. The rest have or will let their mindless hatred of Trump the man drive them out of the Republican Party or out of conservatism altogether.  Victor Davis Hanson:

The character assassination of Brett Kavanaugh by unsubstantiated rumor and gossip put Never Trumpers in a bind, or rather split them in two. Kavanaugh was nominated by the hated Trump, but his record and endorsements by the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society mainstreamed the choice. 

[. . .]

To destroy a judge like Kavanaugh reflected that the New Left’s hatred of Trump had always been incidental to its essential loathing of conservatives in general. For a remnant group of Never Trumpers to oppose Kavanaugh, then, reflected the elevation of their own personal hatred for Trump over the critical elevation of a principled jurist to the Supreme Court. Supposedly, Kavanaugh was soiled by a Trump handprint, and therefore it was better to have a more liberal court than see Trump get any credit for taking the court in a direction only previously dreamed of by conservatives.

Never Trumpers had always assured their former conservative colleagues that Trump would either fail or prove liberal. But he has done neither. And as far as his demonstrable crudity and uncouthness, the hearings showed that the Democrats were far crueler and crass in deed than Trump was in word. So perhaps half of the small minority of Republican Never Trumpers, in horror at the Antifa tactics of the Democrats, retreated to the old adage of “hang together or hang separately.” Those who doubled down by joining leftists in opposing the Kavanaugh nomination revealed that they have crossed their Rubicon and now are either orphaned or unabashedly part of the new progressive Democratic party — at least until their useful obsequiousness no longer serves current progressive agendas.

The Canticle of Jack Kerouac

BY LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

  

1.

 

Far from the sea far from the sea

                                     of Breton fishermen

       the white clouds scudding

                                             over Lowell

            and the white birches the

                                           bare white birches   

                along the blear night roads

                                       flashing by in darkness   

            (where once he rode

                                        in Pop’s old Plymouth)   

And the birch-white face

                                    of a Merrimac madonna   

            shadowed in streetlight

                            by Merrimac’s shroudy waters   

                  —a leaf blown

                                     upon sea wind

                     out of Brittany

                                           over endless oceans

 

 

2.

 

There is a garden in the memory of America

There is a nightbird in its memory

There is an andante cantabile

in a garden in the memory   

of America

In a secret garden

in a private place

a song a melody

a nightsong echoing

in the memory of America   

In the sound of a nightbird   

outside a Lowell window

In the cry of kids

in tenement yards at night

In the deep sound

of a woman murmuring

a woman singing broken melody

in a shuttered room

in an old wood house

in Lowell

As the world cracks by

                                 thundering

like a lost lumber truck

                                    on a steep grade   

               in Kerouac America

The woman sits silent now

                                     rocking backward   

      to Whistler’s Mother in Lowell

                         and all the tough old

                                          Canuck mothers   

                              and Jack’s Mémère

And they continue rocking

 

      And may still on stormy nights show through   

          as a phantom after-image

                            on silent TV screens   

             a flickered after-image

                              that will not go away   

                in Moody Street

                  in Beaulieu Street

                   in ‘dirtstreet Sarah Avenue’   

    in Pawtucketville

       And in the Church of St. Jean Baptiste

 

 

Amazon Pricing

Bezos and the boys are asking a paltry $3,214.79 for a hardbound copy of The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology, but a whopping $34.95 for the same book in paperback.

Now I'll grant you that hardbounds are superior to paperbacks in point of longevity, but 100 times better? 

There is something screwy about the Amazon pricing algorithm. But what do I know about such things?

James Soriano, The Sin of Silence

Yesterday I quoted Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State (1997-2001) in the Clinton Administration: "There's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other." The context was Albright's urging of women to vote for a woman, Hillary Clinton.

This just in from James Soriano,  "a retired Foreign Service Officer who spent three decades in the State Department, most of them in the Middle East." (from his mini-bio):

I remember Madeleine Albright saying that a couple of years ago, and in a bit of rhetorical jiu jitsu I used the phrase as the punch line in an essay Crisis Magazine posted yesterday.

 

I was inspired to write the piece because of what Francis The Leftist said of the Vigano revelations:  "I won't say a word about it."  Francis has many opinions about leftist enthusiasms, but maintains radio silence on issues of great concern to traditionalists.

 

Francis' silence on critical Church teachings somehow reminds me of the scene in the Inferno with Ugolino, who was starved to death in a Pisan tower with his sons. He was a father who said not one word to his children in their pain and anguish. Bergoglio e Ugolino.  I tried to twin them.  The editor thought it was a bit of stretch, but the commenters seem to have gotten the point.   

 

Regards,

Jim

 

Madeleine Albright, Chief of the Tribal Females

"There's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other." Thus Madeleine Albright, urging women to vote for Hillary because she's a woman. 

Now there is a reason that stands up to sober scrutiny.  That's on a level with someone's refusing to vote for Hillary because of her pant-suited thunder thighs.

Albright is the  gas bag who also darkly hints at Trump's being a fascist. But she lacks the estrogen to come out and say it. Does she know the meaning of that word or is she just using it as a verbal cudgel in the typical way of the leftist?

Tribalism is on the rise among the distaff contingent and it is not a pretty sight. The tribally female Dems are "un-freaking-hinged" to borrow a creative adjective from Rod Dreher whose Progressive Tribalism Beats the War Drums I invite you to read.

Kerouac Alley

A Northern California reader sends this photo of a street scene in the vicinity of City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco. I made a 'pilgrimage' to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's famous bookstore in the early '70s. That was before the Kerouac street sign was up.

Some of Ferlinghetti's poetry can be read here.  To my surprise, Ferlinghetti is still alive at 99. By contrast, old Kerouac quit the mortal coil and "the slaving meat wheel" at age 47.  He is, we hope, "safe in heaven, dead."  

 

The Corruption of Institutions

Without institutions, where would we be?

But they are all corrupt, potentially if not actually, in part if not in whole, and constantly in need of reform. The Roman Catholic Church is no exception despite its claim to divine sanction and guidance.

When an institution abandons its charter and strays from its founding purpose and substitutes the purpose of mere self-preservation for the secular benefit of its members, then it becomes an organizational hustle and ceases to deserve our respect. 

You should be skeptical of all institutions.  Like the houses here in the Sonoran desert, they either have termites or will get them.

But institutional corruption reflects personal corruption. Institutional corruption is the heart's corruption writ large. So you should be skeptical of all persons, including the one in the mirror.

Especially him, since he is the one you have direct control over.

Related: Frank Keating on the Catholic Bishops Today

Addendum (10/8). Alfred Centauri writes,

I just read your recent post on the corruption of institutions and this jumped right out at me:

When an institution abandons its charter and strays from its founding purpose and substitutes the purpose of mere self-preservation for the secular benefit of its members, then it becomes an organizational hustle and ceases to deserve our respect. 

For quite some time now, I've been thinking that this corruption is essentially an inevitable outcome.  It's a slow process that few seem to notice but, over time, the original goals of the institution become goals in name only and the end becomes the furthering of the institution itself.

That is, there's an inevitable inversion of the means and ends that take place over time.  Initially, the institution is a means to the end of the stated goals but, eventually, the institution becomes the end itself with the stated goals only a means to feeding and growing the institution.

It's reassuring to read that there are others that 'see the termites'.  

The corruption does seem inevitable, but the inversion of means and ends is usually only partial and not total. Consider a charity set up to feed the poor. It may start out by fulfilling its founding purpose, but gradually it becomes corrupt as more and more of the contributions are used to feather the nests of the charity's officers and to perpetuate the operation in a building in a fine location with lavish furnishings, etc.  Suppose 90% of the contributions go to so-called 'operating expenses' and only 10% go to the needy. Such an outfit is well on its way to becoming a pure 'hustle' although it is not there yet. Anyone who contributes to it is a chump.

I contribute $800 per year to St. Mary's Food Bank. According to Charity Navigator, it passes on over 95% of monies received to the needy.  So I'm not a chump. It is a nice question, though, whether when one does good, one should let others know about it. There are plausible arguments on both sides of the question. I set a good example by advertising my alms giving. On the other hand  there is Matthew 6:3: "But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth." (KJV)

Can bloated, inefficient Federal agencies justify their existence in terms of the good they do, if any?  The Department of Education is mainly just a hustle for the benefit of the people who work for it. What about the Social Security Administration? Clearly not as bad, but . . .  .

Examples are easily multiplied.  It is a very large topic indeed.

Susan Collins (R-Maine), Profile in Courage

Here is the full text of Senator Collins' speech before the U. S. Senate. (HT: Bill Keezer)

The analog of military valor in civilian life is called civil courage. Senator Collins has it. My impression is that some Republicans are finally learning from President Trump how to fight, as witness Senator Lindsey Graham's finest moment.

Commentary on the Kavanaugh Contretemps

Malcolm Pollack, A Roundup of Reaction from the Right.

Most interesting to me is the following quotation from Pollack which embeds a quotation from Michael Anton on the "Gillibrand Standard" which well exposes the twisted  viciousness of the contemporary Democrat Party (the bolding is mine, read it if you don't have the attention span for the whole thing):

Next, here’s Michael Anton, who as “Publius Decius Mus” wrote the critically important Flight 93 Election essay back in 2016. In this essay he writes about what he calls The Gillibrand Standard. Here are some longish excerpts, but you should read the whole thing.

The Left has created a new “standard” for American politics—indeed, new in the entire history of Anglo-American jurisprudence. Let us call it the Gillibrand Standard, after its most insistent advocate, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.).

According to the Gillibrand Standard, accusation suffices to destroy. Not only is no corroborating evidence necessary, to ask for such evidence makes one just as guilty as the accused. Especially monstrous is to ask questions of the accuser; that is to repeat or compound the alleged crime. The accusation, once stated, immediately takes on metaphysical certainty. To doubt is to blaspheme.

Actually, “accusation” is too generous. Machiavelli distinguishes between “accusation” and “calumny” in order to demonstrate that “as much as accusations are useful to republics, so much are calumnies pernicious.” The difference is that accusations are public, subject to critique and refutation, and a mendacious or even inaccurate accuser pays a price. Calumnies, by contrast, “have need neither of witnesses nor any other specific corroboration to prove them, so that everyone can be calumniated by everyone; but everyone cannot be accused, since accusations have need of true corroboration and of circumstances that show the truth of the accusation.” A more incisive summary of the Gillibrand Standard cannot be found.

… There is but one limiting principle to the Gillibrand Standard: It shalt be used only against the Right and Republicans. Credible accusations—with evidence, witnesses, contemporaneous police reports—against Democrats and liberals are not merely to be ignored but also stonewalled and attacked, alleged victims and witnesses alike smeared. That is, until this or that liberal is no longer useful in the moment and safely can be discarded. Throwing an expired liberal to the wolves now and then is useful to maintain the fiction of evenhandedness.

This is obviously outrageous, unjust, unfair, and offensive to any conceivable standard of decency. Just as obvious, the Democrats and Left not only do not care, they welcome the weaponization of accusation. Their only conceivable regret is that it might not work this time. But even if it doesn’t “work” in the sense that Kavanaugh is not confirmed, they know that it “works” in other ways. It rallies their base. It drives fundraising. It degrades public standards of decency and credibility, making its effective use more likely in the future. It delegitimizes institutions—in this case, the Supreme Court, which, with the addition of Justice Kavanaugh, may later rule constitutionally and correctly in ways the Left does not like. And, most important for the nihilistic Left, it delegitimizes and dehumanizes—makes a villain out of—Kavanaugh himself.

It is hard to say what is the most shamelessly disgusting aspect of this affair. I offer as a candidate the following tactic. First, smear your target with uncorroborated, unprovable and almost certainly false allegations. After you have—inevitably—failed to substantiate those charges, insist that your target withdraw since his reputation will now forever be under a cloud and his rulings will lack popular legitimacy. This is akin to breaking an opponent’s arm before a sporting event and then insisting that he forfeit.

Rod Dreher on the Purveyors of 'Progressive' Poison

Here:

These people. They have to be stopped. They’re ruining life. Who wants to work for a company where you can become an internal pariah for standing by your old friend? Who wants to work in a neurosis-ridden hamster cage where you have to be afraid that the internal mob will turn on you for having the “wrong” opinion? Who wants to get involved in helping out at your local school when ideologically-charged activists rush in to politicize everything?

[. . .]

UPDATE: A reader who grew up in communist Czechoslovakia writes:

It may look like Communism but it isn’t.  It’s worse. Nobody, and I mean nobody (perhaps with one notable exception of a very decent guy, actually), believed the communist propaganda drivel. I don’t recall anybody fainting at the thought of imperialist ‘diversants’ sneaking across the border, revanchists hiding in their closets. It was a mechanism to control, brutalize and destroy and both the brutes and the brutalized understood it as such. Our current situation is somewhat unique. We actually have a large class of people who take this garbage at face value. That’s scary.

Can One Reasonably Hold that Abortion is Murder but Ought to be Legal?

Victor Reppert poses the following important question on his Facebook page:

What, if anything, is wrong with holding, at the same time that a) Abortion is murder, and b) abortion should be legal?

It's not a logical contradiction, is it? Is it merely counterintuitive? Is it un-Christian?

One way of reaching this position might be to hold that, given a metaphysical or religious perspective, you view abortion as murder, but, living in a society where large segments of the population don't share that perspective, you don't think it reasonable to pass laws imposing that view on the general public.

The propositions in question are not logically contradictory. But one can generate a logical inconsistency by adding an eminently plausible  proposition.  Consider the following antilogism:

a) Abortion is murder
b) Abortion should be legal
c) Murder should be illegal.

The triad is logically inconsistent: the constituent propositions cannot all be true.  

Now (c) is the least rejectable (the least rejection-worthy) of the three propositions. For if the law does not proscribe murder, what would it proscribe? The purpose of the State, at a bare minimum, is to protect life, liberty, and property. (Call it the Lockean triad.) If the State is morally justified, then its passing and enforcing of laws is morally justified. Among these laws are laws pertaining to the killing of human beings. Without going any deeper into it, I will just assert what most of us will accept, namely, that the intentional killing of innocent human being is morally wrong and therefore ought to be made illegal by a morally justified State.

In short, we ought not reject (c). Therefore, one who accepts (a) ought to reject (b). Transforming the antilogism into a syllogism, we get:

Murder should be illegal
Abortion is murder
Ergo
Abortion should be illegal.

Reppert ought to be persuaded by this argument since he accepts the minor and I have given a powerful argument for the major.

Reppert asks whether it is reasonable to pass laws against abortion in a society in which large segments of the population do not oppose abortion.  Well, was it reasonable to pass laws against slavery in a society in which large segments of the population did not oppose slavery?

Suppose we become even more morally depraved than we are now. We get to the point where the majority considers infanticide  morally acceptable. Would it be reasonable to do away with the laws proscribing it?  Or the laws proscribing child pornography? Or rape laws? Should the law merely reflect the going moral sentiment no matter how decadent it becomes?

I'll leave you with these questions.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ramblin' Elliot Charles Adnopoz

David Dalton, Who is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion, 2012, p. 65:

As Dave van Ronk pointed out in his autobiography, many of the people involved in the first folk revival of the 1930s and '40s were Jewish -- as were the folkies of the '60s. Van Ronk reasoned that for Jews, belonging to a movement centered on American traditional music was a form of belonging and assimilation.

[. . .]

"The revelation that Jack [Elliot] was Jewish was vouchsafed unto Bobby one afternoon at the Figaro," Van Ronk recalled.  "We were sitting around shooting the bull with Barry Kornfeld and maybe a couple of other people and somehow it came out that Jack had grown up in Ocean Parkway and was named Elliot Adnopoz.  Bobby literally fell off his chair; he was rolling around on the floor, and it took him a couple of minutes to pull himself together and get up again.  Then Barry, who can be diabolical in things like this, leaned over to him and just whispered the word 'Adnopoz' and back he went under the table."

Lacking as it does the proper American cowboy resonance, 'Elliot Charles Adnopoz' was ditched by its bearer who came to call himself 'Ramblin' Jack Elliot.'  Born in 1931 in Brooklyn to Jewish parents who wanted him to become a doctor, young Adnopoz rebelled, ran away, and became a protege of Woody Guthrie.  If it weren't for Ramblin' Jack, Guthrie would be nowhere near as well-known as he is today. 

Pretty Boy Floyd.  "As through this life you ramble, as through this life you roam/You'll never see an outlaw drive a family from their home."  No?  An example of the  tendency of lefties invariably to  take the side of the underdog regardless of whether right or wrong.  

Ramblin' Jack does a haunting version of Dylan's Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues.  It grows on you. Give it a chance.  Cigarettes and Whisky and Wild Woman.  Soul of a Man. Dylan's unforgettable,  Don't Think Twice.  Here he is with Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Buffy Sainte Marie singing the beautiful, Passing Through.

Lyrics below the fold.

Friday Cat Blogging One Day Deferred: Palindrome Pussy

Not a Job Interview, but a Neo-Bolshevik Show Trial

Pat Buchanan:

Yet, in tossing out the “Catechism of Political Correctness” and treating the character assassination of Kavanaugh as what it was, a rotten conspiracy to destroy and defeat his nominee, Trump’s instincts were correct, even if they were politically incorrect.

This was not a “job interview” for Kavanaugh.

In a job interview, half the members of the hiring committee are not so instantly hostile to an applicant that they will conspire to criminalize and crush him to the point of wounding his family and ruining his reputation.

When Sen. Lindsey Graham charged the Democratic minority with such collusion, he was dead on. This was a neo-Bolshevik show trial where the defendant was presumed guilty and due process meant digging up dirt from his school days to smear and break him.

Our cultural elites have declared Trump a poltroon for daring to mock Ford’s story of what happened 36 years ago. Yet, these same elites reacted with delight at Matt Damon’s “SNL” depiction of Kavanaugh’s angry and agonized appearance, just 48 hours before.

Is it not hypocritical to laugh uproariously at a comedic depiction of Kavanaugh’s anguish, while demanding quiet respect for the highly suspect and uncorroborated story of Ford?

It is time to wake up and realize that Democrats are not fellow citizens but domestic enemies and ought to be treated as such.  

Their Cocks Make Them Sure

There are those who are cocksure that there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem judgment, no ultimate meaning to human existence, and that we are all just material bits of a material world. Now it may be so for all we  know. This is not an area in which proofs or disproofs are possible. 

But for those who are cocksure about it, I suspect that it is their cocks that make them sure.

Crudity aside, their natural concupiscence blinds them to the spiritual reality of God and the soul, dulls their consciences, and ties them to a passing world that their lust convinces them is ultimately real.

This is why I do not trust the atheisms of Russell and Sartre. They were sensualists and worldlings who failed to satisfy the prerequisites of spiritual insight. Pride and lust dimmed their eyes.