Maverick Philosopher

The 'Liberal'

She knows how to signal her virtue, but not her turns or lane changes. 

A Comparison of the Roles of Doubt in Philosophy and in Religion

This Sunday morning I preach on James 1:5-8. Of all the epistles, this, the most philosophical, is my favorite. There we read that he who is wanting in wisdom should ask it of God. But one must ask in faith without doubt or hesitation. "For he who hesitates/doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and carried about by the wind."  While I do not deny that doubt  can close us off from the help we need, I wonder whether doubt has a positive role to play in religion.

Doubt is the engine of inquiry, as I have said many times, but I think it also plays a salutary role in religion.  

The religious doubt the world and its values. What I mean by 'world' here is the fifth entry in my catalog of the twelve senses of 'world':

5) In the Christian-existential (existenziell) sense, 'world' refers to a certain attitude or mentality. My reader well describes it as follows:

But there is another sense of the term 'world' — Christians  talk of dying to the world and being in the world but not of it. This world they  speak  of could not be reduced to the world of black holes  and dark matter, of collapsing stars and expanding nebulae. This is the social and moral world that they want to die to. It is the world of spiritual distraction and moral fog, the world of status-seeking and reputation.

To which wonderful formulation I add that worldlings or the worldly live for the here and now alone with its fleeting pleasures and precarious perquisites. They worship idolatrously at the shrine of the Mighty Tetrad: money, power, sex, and recognition. They are blind to the Unseen Order and speak of it only to deny it.  They are the Cave dwellers of Plato who take shadow for substance, and the dimly descried for the optimally illuminated. They do not seek, nor do they find. They are not questers. They live as if they will live forever in a world they regard as the ne plus ultra of reality, repeating the same paltry pleasures and believing them to be the summum bonum.

Crucial to being religious is doubting the ultimacy and value of the world in this acceptation of the term.  The religious person is skeptical of secular teachings, secular 'authorities,' and secular suggestions. He is keenly aware of the infernal and ovine suggestibility of  humanity. That's my first point.

Second, the religious man doubts his own goodness and his ability to improve himself. He cultivates a deep skepticism about his own probity and moral worth, not out of a perverse need for self-denigration, but out of honest insight into self.  He follows the Socratic injunction to know oneself and he is not afraid to take a hard and unsparing look into his own (foul) heart, (disordered) soul, and (dark) mind.  He does not avert his eyes from the dreck and dross he inevitably discovers but catalogs it  clinically and objectively as best he can. Reason is weak, but not so weak that it cannot come to know and bemoan its own weakness and its susceptibility to subornation by the lusts of the flesh.

And of course the religious  train their moral skepticism upon their dear fellow mortals as well.  

Fourth, the religionist doubts the philosophers. Well aware that philosophy is magnificent in aspiration, one of the finest flowers in man's quest for the Absolute, the savvy religionist knows that it is miserable in execution. The philosophers contradict one another on all points, always have, and presumably always will.  Their guidance must not be ignored, but cannot be blindly trusted.

Fifth, he doubts the teachings of other religions and the probity of their teachers.

Sixth, he doubts the probity of the teachers of his own religion.  Surely this  is an obvious point, even if it does not extend to the founder of the religion. Doubt here can lead to denial and denunciation, and rightly so.  (Does not Bergoglio the Benighted deserve denunciation?)

Finally, a point about reason in relation to doubt. There is is no critical  reasoning without doubt which is not only the engine of inquiry but also the blade of critique which severs the true from the false, the meaningful from the meaningless, the justified from the unjustified, the plausible from the implausible, the probable from the improbable.  Critical reasoning and thus doubt have a legitimate role to play not only in theology  but also in scriptural exegesis.

Philosophy and religion are opposed  and in fruitful tension as are reason and faith, but each is involved with the other and needs the other for correction and balance, as Athens needs Jerusalem, and Jerusalem Athens.

On the Eternal in Man

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (tr. Alexander Dru, Pantheon Books, 1950, p. 67, #263, written 1940):

The man who explicitly does not believe and does not will to believe (for the will to believe belongs to believing) in an eternal life, that is to say in a personal life after death, will become an animal, an animal being which among other things, man is. Man is 'planned as spirit,' as Kierkegaard puts it, but that includes the immortality of the soul. Whoever relinquishes that also gives up the spirit of man.

Man alone among the animals raises the question whether he is more than an animal.  His raising of this question does not prove  that he is more than an animal; perhaps it proves only that he is the most pretentious of all animals, a crazy animal, an evolutionary fluke who merely fancies himself more than  an animal. Such a fanciful conceit might even be accorded survival value within a naturalist scheme. Thinking himself the crown of creation, a child of God, with divine sanction to lord it over, but also cherish and protect the critters beneath him, this lofty self-conception, even if false, might enhance his chances of survival. It could be like that, or at least I cannot see a way definitively to exclude this epistemic possibility.

Or it could be like this:  Man's having a world (Welt) and not merely an environment (Umwelt) like the animals points to a higher origin, a spiritual origin,  and a higher destiny.  Elsewhere I catalog twelve meanings of 'world'; here I am using the term in my twelfth sense, the transcendental-phenomenological sense.  It remains an open question whether the world in this sense has an ontic anchor in God, whether the light of the transcendental-phenomenological Lichtung (clearing) has an onto-theological Source. We cannot know it to be the case, but we can reasonably believe it to be the case. That is as good as it gets here below.  And so I am brought around, once again, to the fact that, in the end, one must decide what to believe and how to live.

Haecker is right to point out that "the will to believe belongs to believing." Not all belief is voluntary, but religious and anti-religious belief is.  The will comes into it, as it does not in the case of some such mundane belief as that the Sun has risen. You are free to believe that you are a complex physical system slated for utter annihilation in a few years, months, days, minutes, and you are free to believe that you are "planned as spirit."  Either way reasons can be adduced, reasons that are not obviously bad reasons.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia and Americana

I post what I like and I like what I post.

Elmore James, Dust My Broom

Doors, Crystal Ship

Clancy Bros., When the Ship Comes In.

Elvis Presley, Marie's the Name of His Latest Flame

Elvis Presley, Spanish Eyes

Bob Dylan, It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Take a Train to Cry, Cutting Edge take. 

Albert King, Crosscut Saw

Mississippi Sheiks, Sitting on Top of the World

YouTuber comment: "There is enough great music to listen to for a thousand years without ever having to listen to mindless shite if only people would explore the past." That's no shite, son.

Byrds, Chimes of Freedom.  One of Dylan's greatest anthems.

Buffy Sainte-Marie, Cod'ine

An equally powerful version by Janis Joplin

Mike Bloomfield, Carmelita Skiffle

A bar or two is all it takes recognize the signature sound of Michael Bloomfield, Jew, who exemplifies cultural appropriation at its best. My second guitar hero. My first was Dick Dale who, though not a Jew, gave us a version of Misirlou.

Warren Zevon, Carmelita

Billy Joel, Piano Man

Don MacLean, American Pie

 

Vermittlung Über Alles?

Nothing finite is self-contained: it refers beyond itself for its determinations, for its being what it is, and for its existence.  Nothing finite.  This is true. A thing is what it is by not being what it is not.  Omnis determinatio est negatio. (Spinoza)

Theodor Adorno (Negative Dialektik, Suhrkamp Verlag, S. 109), however,  removes the qualifier: he thinks this reference beyond itself is true of everything and that Vermittlung is dafür lediglich ein anderes Wort, that "Mediation is just another word for it."

Nothing is immediate.  All is mediated.  But what about the system of mediating items?  What mediates it?  Or is it absolute?

Hegel begat Marx, Marx begat the Frankfurt School which begat cultural (as opposed to 'classical' economic ) Marxism which begat or perhaps is the mess we are now in.

Metaphysically, our mess results from the denial of the Absolute.

Why Am I So Happy?

From my Facebook page, three years ago, pre-COVID-19, pre-Biden, before things really got bad. But I am still happy. For some of us happiness is a basal state, bred-in-the-bone, affected somewhat by external circumstances, but not by much.

 

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

 

My beloved country looks to be going the way of the Roman empire: overextended abroad and collapsing within under the weight of its own decadence. We can't agree about much of anything anymore and are arguing bitterly about things we ought not be arguing about. The future looks grim. Civil war may be in the offing. Idiots and overgrown children now occupy positions of power in our government. The Speaker of the House regularly spouts nonsense. Deep State operatives deploy fascist techniques against harmless citizens to intimidate and spread fear. People who should know better apologize for speaking the truth. Journalism is pretty much dead and lies are rampant. Delusional race-baiters who retail incoherence are celebrated by white 'liberals' in the pages of once respectable publications. Bootless neocons with no skin in the game advocate spreading 'democracy' among benighted tribalists regardless of the expenditure of American blood and treasure. The rights that are every American's birthright are under assault. Roughly half of our fellow citizens are reasonably viewed as domestic enemies. And the litany continues.

 

So why am I so happy?

 

When I was 20 I wrote into my journal, "Philosophy, the joy of my youth and the consolation of my old age." I was prescient, but not prescient enough. Philosophy has proven to be not only the consolation but also the joy of my old age, and a greater joy than ever.

 

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk, and this owl is reaping a rich harvest as the shadows grow long and the end of the trail comes into view.

 

It helps if you can look beyond this life and see it as a passing scene, real enough as far as it goes, and certainly no dream, but a scene of no final reality or importance.

 

And so I pity the poor secularist who has nothing beyond this hopeless world.

Can a Sentence be Named?

One thing we do with words is make assertions, as when I assert that snow is white. I use those words, but I can also talk about them, refer to them, mention them. You are all familiar with the use-mention distinction. 'Boston' is disyllabic, but no city is. 

One way to mention an expression is by enclosing the words in single quotation marks, thus: 'Snow is white.' One can then go on to say things about that sentence, for example, that it is true, that it is in the indicative mood, that it consists of three words, that it is in the present tense, and so on.  But a puzzle is soon upon us. Try this aporetic triad on for size:

1) No name is either true or false.

2) 'Snow is white' is the name of a sentence.

3) 'Snow is white' is true.

The propositions are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. Which will you reject? 

Best Friend, Worst Enemy

In your practical life, be your own best friend; in your spiritual and intellectual life, your own worst enemy.

Three Lockean Reasons to Oppose the Democrats

The main purposes of government are to protect life, liberty, and property. Subsidiary purposes are subordinate to the Lockean triad. This is lost on the present-day  Democrat party which has been hijacked by the hard Left.  Despite what they say, they are anti-life, anti-liberty, and anti-property. So if you value life, liberty, and property, then you must not vote for any Democrat.  Why 'any'? Because Democrat politicians are under party discipline and toe the party line. The one or two exceptions prove the rule. Because these exceptions are few and not reliably exceptional, my rule stands.

 

The Republicans in their timid way do stand for life, liberty, and property. Or at least some of them do. And they have become less timid under Trump's tutelage. Lindsey Graham, for one,  located his manly virtue and put it to work during the Kavanaugh confirmation. His recent behavior is less inspiring. In any case, the choice is clear. Vote Republican, never vote for any Democrat, and don't throw away your vote on unelectable third-party candidates.  As for the third point, you must never forget that politics is praxis, not theoria. What matters is not to have the best theory, but the best implementable theory.  No implementation of policy without power. No power without winning. Win, gain power, implement ameliorative policies.  If you don't have your hands on the levers of power, you are just another talker like me.  Two other related maxims.

 

First, it is folly to let the best become the enemy of the good. Second, politics is never about perfect versus imperfect, but about better versus worse. You find Trump deficient in gravitas? Well, so do I and defective in other ways to boot. But he was better than the alternative in 2016 and he will be better than the alternative in 2024. (And thank you, Sleepy Joe, for making Trump's virtues and accomplishments stand out so clearly.)

 

I will now briefly list some, but not all, of the reasons why the Democrats are anti-life, anti-liberty, and anti-property despite any mendacious protests to the contrary.

 

ANTI-LIFE. The Dems are the abortion party. They support abortion on demand at every stage of fetal development. They are blind to the moral issues that abortion raises. They absurdly think that abortion is merely about women's health and reproductive rights. They are not ashamed to embrace such Orwellian absurdities as that abortion is health care. To make matters worse, they violate the sincerely held and cogently argued beliefs of fellow taxpayers by their support of taxpayer funding for abortion.  You will recall that the 'devout Catholic' Joe Biden reversed himself on the Hyde Amendment. He showed once again who and what he is, a political opportunist grounded in no discernible principles, not to mention a brazen liar whose mendacity is now compounded by being  non compos mentis, not of sound mind.  

 

ANTI-LIBERTY. The Dems are opposed to free speech, religious liberty, and self-defense rights. They regularly conflate free speech with 'hate speech' and religious liberty with 'theocracy.' And this while going soft on genuine theocratic regimes such as Iran's. All of this puts them at odds with the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution. And in general we can say that contemporary Democrats are anti-Constitutional inasmuch as an open or living constitution, which they advocate, is no constitution at all, but a mere tabula rasa they hope to deface with their anti-American leftist ideology.

 

ANTI-PROPERTY. Today's Democrats, as hard leftists, are ever on the slouch toward socialism, which, in full flower (to put it euphemistically) requires central planning and government ownership of the means of production. That is where they want to go even though, as stealth ideologues, they won't admit it.

 

But let's assume that the statement I just made is exaggerated and that Dems really don't want socialism as it is classically defined. Still, they are anti-property in various ways. They think that we the people have to justify our keeping whereas government doesn't have to justify its taking. That is precisely backwards. They don't appreciate that the government exists for us; we don't exist for the government. They confuse taxation with wealth redistribution. And by the way, the government is not us, as Barack Obama has said. 'The government is us' is as perversely knuckle-headed as 'Diversity is our strength.' The latter stupidity is plainly Orwellian. What about the former? Pre-Orwellian? 

 

Finally, you need to understand that private property is the foundation of individual liberty.

Moral Progress in the West and its Benchmarks

A London correspondent writes,

A question for you: is there a set of verifiable practices that would act as a benchmark for the Western Enlightenment? I can think of (i) widespread (but not universal) respect for science (ii) separation of church and state (iii) end of judicial torture (iv) abolition of slavery, etc.

1) I will assume that moral progress, both individually and collectively, is possible, both in moral theory and in moral practice. This is not obvious inasmuch as one might insist that while there has been moral change, there has been  no moral progress. Progress, by definition, is change for the better, and a moral/cultural relativist will claim that there is no better or worse with respect moral beliefs and practices.  

2) If moral progress is possible, is it also actual? I would say so.  Holding as I do that slavery is a grave moral evil, I also hold that we in the West have made progress in this regard.  The same goes for penal practices. We in the West no longer punish in the barbaric ways still employed in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran.  Example are easily multiplied.

3) Is overall moral progress consistent with a certain amount of moral regress? I would like to say so. Mass murder and mass enslavement in Germany 1933-1945 are recognized in the West for the moral abominations they were. The Germans have come to their moral senses.   But what about the situation in the East under communism, in particular the communism practiced in China as we speak? I am thinking of the forced labor in China's Xinjiang region.

4) We cannot overlook the moral degeneration of the West, which suggests that while we made progress in the West, it is now being undone.  The Biden administration, for example, is the most lawless in American history; as a matter of policy it aids and abets criminality and then lies about what it is doing.

5) As for the benchmarks of progress, the ones listed by my correspondent are essential.  I would also add the following: religious liberty, limited government, the rule of law, equality of all citizens before the law, due process, universal suffrage, open inquiry and academic freedom, free markets, and the right to free speech  and freedom of assembly without fear of reprisal.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: More Americana

Tim Hardin, Lady Came from Baltimore

Arlo Guthrie, Percy's Song. Dylan's 1963 original

Byrds, Pretty Boy Floyd

Marty Robbins, El Paso

Bob Dylan, Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache

Bob Luman, Let's Think About Livin'

Charley Ryan, Hot Rod Lincoln, the original.  Before Johnny Bond, before Commander Cody. 

Dave Dudley, Six Days on the Road

Red Sovine, Phantom 309. Tom Waits' cover. YouTuber comment:

I don't know what it is about this particular Tom Waits song. Out of all the music I've heard, this is the only one that tears me up from the first chord. I'm a big boy, all grown-up. But I'm helpless to stop those tears. I've seen my fair share, and more, of pain and suffering and death, and so should be fairly immune to such sentimentality. Many songs are supposedly more tear-jerking, . . .  but NOT ONE moves me like this. Maybe because I used to hitchhike a lot? Maybe because I've seen, and been involved in, several car accidents? Maybe because a trucker friend was drowned when the ferry he was travelling on sunk? I don't know. I've always appreciated, and liked a lot, Tom Waits' compositions and performances, and yet this one song captures me completely, emotionally. Perhaps I'm turning into a softy. More likely, I'm just getting too old for this life. Answers on a postcard, please... (Tom Foyle)

Yes, one can get too old for this life.

Quietism versus Activism

Substack latest.

A Question about Donald Trump

This from a reader:

It would be very interesting to hear your take on Trump -- why do you think that his leadership of the country, despite obvious personality flaws, is less risky for the US and the world than a reasonable alternative? Yes, the ideological, thoughtless, and totalitarian far-left is dangerous, but isn't unprincipled, pugilistic and me-and-my-family first leadership any better? Is your thinking driven by "the lesser of two (or three) evils"?

1) I avoid talk of the lesser or least of evils. I prefer to speak of the better or the worse. 

 

2) Politics is not theoretical; it is practical. There is political theory, of course, and it divides into political science (empirical and non-normative) and political philosophy (normative). But politics is neither of the two, despite the fact that politics is informed by political theory. Politics is a practical game! It is not about having the right views. That does no good unless one can implement them. And only a fool lets the best become the enemy of the good. Politics is a matter of better or worse, not perfect or imperfect.  Politics is about accomplishing something in the extant suboptimal circumstances with the best implementable ideas.

 

3) And which ideas are those? The ideas, values, and principles of the Founders. They arrived as close as anyone ever has to a sound and viable political theory. 

 

4) Now if you accept (2) and (3), then the choice is clear: you support Trump over Hillary, and Trump over Biden. For Trump, unlike Hillary and Biden,  supports those values and not just with words. He proved his support for them in the teeth of vicious opposition by pseudo-cons and leftists alike  in his four years as POTUS.  A long list of his accomplishments could be inserted here. To mention just one, and a very important one: the SCOTUS appointments.

 

5) If you complain about Trump's character, I will agree that he is flawed but go on to point out that the same is true of Hillary and Biden.  Character-wise, the three are on a par. The difference is that Hillary and Biden are professional politicians deeply practiced in the arts of deception: mendacious to the core, they know how to hide their flaws, faults, and foibles.   Anyone can see that Biden is a fraud and a phony rooted in no principle except that of  the promotion of himself and his family's interests. The same goes for Hillary to a lesser extent. Trump, on the other hand, crudely lets it all hang out. He tells you what he thinks. He is blunt, brusque, boorish, and sometimes pointlessly brutal. (I am thinking of that nasty slur he hurled against Carly Fiorina.)

 

6) What decides the question for me is that Trump alone supports the American system of government whereas this is plainly not the case with Hillary or with Biden who is the puppet of puppet masters out to undermine the American system.  That should be blindingly evident to anyone who has been paying attention.

 

7) There comes a time when a corrective is needed, an outsider self-powered, un-owned, and unafraid to kick the asses of the Demo Rats to his Left and expose the fecklessness of the cuckservatives to his Right.  A corrective and a clarifier. No more of the usual Left versus Right. The battle for the soul of America is now a contest between the borderless globalism of the greedy elites and an enlightened nationalism, populist and patriotic.  Hillary/Biden versus The Donald, to personify it.

The Virtuous are Too Scrupulous to Rouse the People against their Tyrants

Here:

Describing Wilkes and two of his allies, Walpole wrote, “This triumvirate has made me often reflect that nations are most commonly saved by the worst men in [them].” Why? Because, he concluded, “The virtuous are too scrupulous to go the lengths that are necessary to rouse the people against their tyrants.”

Until the coming of The Donald, that had certainly become the case in recent American politics. Until the Orange Menace loosed the fearful lightning of his terrible swift tweets, the “virtuous,” rather battle-fatigued traditional conservative movement—even when controlling both houses of the Congress—had been out-shouted and outmaneuvered by the unholy alliance of a Left-dominated, morally nihilist pop culture and educational establishment, and what is laughably referred to as the “mainstream” media, all nudging an increasingly radicalized Democratic Party further and further to the left.

Here:

Describing Wilkes and two of his allies, Walpole wrote, “This triumvirate has made me often reflect that nations are most commonly saved by the worst men in [them].” Why? Because, he concluded, “The virtuous are too scrupulous to go the lengths that are necessary to rouse the people against their tyrants.”

Until the coming of The Donald, that had certainly become the case in recent American politics. Until the Orange Menace loosed the fearful lightning of his terrible swift tweets, the “virtuous,” rather battle-fatigued traditional conservative movement—even when controlling both houses of the Congress—had been out-shouted and outmaneuvered by the unholy alliance of a Left-dominated, morally nihilist pop culture and educational establishment, and what is laughably referred to as the “mainstream” media, all nudging an increasingly radicalized Democratic Party further and further to the left.

Boethius and the Second Death of Oblivion: Ubi nunc fidelis ossa Fabricii manent?

We die twice. We pass out of life, and then we pass out of memory, the encairnment in oblivion more final than the encairnment in rocks. Boethius puts the following words into the mouth of Philosophia near the end of Book Two of the Consolations of Philosophy.

Where are Fabricius's bones, that honourable man? What now is Brutus or unbending Cato? Their fame survives in this: it has no more than a few slight letters shewing forth an empty name. We see their noble names engraved, and only know thereby that they are brought to naught. Ye lie then all unknown, and fame can give no knowledge of you. But if you think that life can be prolonged by the breath of mortal fame, yet when the slow time robs you of this too, then there awaits you but a second death.

And why are these engraved names empty? Not just because their referents have ceased to exist, and not just because a time will come when no one remembers them, but because no so-called proper name is proper. All are common in that no name can capture the haecceity of its referent. So not only will we pass out of life and out of memory; even in life and in memory our much vaunted individuality is ineffable, and, some will conclude, nothing at all.

"We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep." (Shakespeare, The Tempest.) 

Is America Heading for a Systems Collapse?

It would appear so. An historian marshals the evidence.

The Problem of Consciousness and Galen Strawson's Non-Solution

Hi Dr. Vallicella,

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts, if it interests you to write about it on your blog, on Strawson's intriguing 2021 paper "Oh you materialist!", in which he argues for a materialistic monism and a deflation of the hard problem. 

 

Here is a link to the paper: https://philarchive.org/archive/STROYM

 

Best,

Chandler

 

What follows is a warm-up for a discussion of the paper to which Chandler directs us. Galen Strawson is a brilliant philosopher with very interesting ideas.   I am not sure I quite understand him. The entry below is a slightly emended version of a post from 2018. It is based on a much earlier paper by Strawson.

 

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

The problem can be set forth in a nice neat way as an aporetic triad:

1) Consciousness is real; it is not an illusion.

2) Consciousness is wholly natural, a material process in the brain.

3) It is impossible that conscious states, whether object-directed or merely qualitative, be material in nature.

It is easy to see that the members of this triad are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.  Any two of the propositions, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining proposition.  

And yet each limb of the triad has brilliant defenders and brilliant opponents. So not only is consciousness itself a mighty goad to inquiry; the wild diversity of opinions about it is as well.  (The second goad is an instance of what I call the Moorean motive for doing philosophy: G. E. Moore did not get his problems from the world, but from the strange and mutually contradictory things philosophers said about the world, e.g., that time is unreal (McTaggart) or that nothing is really related (Bradley).)

The above problem is soluble if a compelling case can be made for the rejection of one of the limbs.  But which one? Eliminativists and illusionists reject (1); dualists of all types, and not just substance dualists, reject (2); materialists reject (3).  Three prominent rejectors, respectively: Dennett, Swinburne. Strawson.

I agree with Strawson that eliminativism has zero credibility.  (1) is self-evident and the attempts to deny it are easily convicted of incoherence.  So no solution is to be had by rejecting (1).

As for (2), it is overwhelmingly credible to most at the present time.  We live in a secular age.  'Surely' -- the secularist will assure us -- there is nothing concrete that is supernatural.  God and the soul are just comforting fictions from a bygone era. The natural exhausts the real.  Materialism about the mind is just logical fallout from naturalism.  If all that (concretely) exists is space-time and its contents, then the same goes for minds and their states.

Strawson, accepting both (1) and (2) must reject (3).  But the arguments against (3), one of which I will sketch below, are formidable. The upshot of these arguments is that it is unintelligible how either qualia or intentional states of consciousness could be wholly material in nature.  Suppose I told you that there is a man who is both fully human and fully divine. You would say that that makes no sense, is unintelligible, and is impossible for that very reason. Well, it is no less unintelligible that a felt sensation such as my present blogger's euphoria be identical to a state of my brain.  

What could a materialist such as Strawson say in response? He has to make a mysterian move. 

He could say that our understanding of matter at present does not allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature, but that it is nevertheless wholly material in nature! Some matter is sentient and some matter thinks. My euphoria is literally inside my skull and so are my thoughts about Boston. These 'mental' items are made of the same stuff as what we are wont to call 'material' items. 

(Compare the orthodox Chalcedonian Incarnationalist who says that the man Jesus of Nazareth is identical to the Second Person of the Trinity despite the violation of the Indiscernibility of Identicals. Put the Incarnationalist under dialectical pressure and he might say, "Look it is true! We know it by divine revelation. And what is true is true whether or not we can understand how it is possible that it be true. It must remain a mystery to us here below.)

Or a materialist mysterian  can say that our understanding of matter will never allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature.  Either way, conscious experience, whether intentional or non-intentional, is wholly material in nature, and falls entirely within the subject-matter of physics, whether a future physics achievable by us, or a physics which, though not achievable by us, is perhaps achievable by organisms of a different constitution who study us.

If I understand Galen Strawson's mysterianism, it is of the first type.  Conscious experience is fully real but wholly material in nature despite the fact that on current physics we cannot account for its reality: we cannot understand how it is possible for qualia and thoughts to be wholly material.   Here is a characteristic passage from Strawson: 

Serious materialists have to be outright realists about the experiential. So they are obliged to hold that experiential phenomena just are physical phenomena, although current physics cannot account for them.  As an acting materialist, I accept this, and assume that experiential phenomena are "based in" or "realized in" the brain (to stick to the human case).  But this assumption does not solve any problems for materialists.  Instead it obliges them to admit ignorance of the nature of the physical, to admit that they don't have a fully adequate idea of what the physical is, and hence of what the brain is.  ("The Experiential and the Non-Experiential" in Warner and Szubka, eds. The Mind-Body Problem, Blackwell, 1994, p. 77)

Strawson and I agree on two important points.  One is that what he calls experiential phenomena are as real as anything and cannot be eliminated or reduced to anything non-experiential. Dennett denied! The other is that there is no accounting for experiential items in terms of current physics.

I disagree on whether his mysterian solution is a genuine solution to the problem. What he is saying is that, given the obvious reality of conscious states, and given the truth of naturalism, experiential phenomena must be material in nature, and that this is so whether or not we are able to understand how it could be so.  At present we cannot understand how it could be so. It is at present a mystery. But the mystery will dissipate when we have a better understanding of matter.

This strikes me as (metaphysical) bluster.

An experiential item such as a twinge of pain or a rush of elation is essentially subjective; it is something whose appearing just is its reality.  For qualia, esse = percipi.  If I am told that someday items like this will be exhaustively understood from a third-person point of view as objects of physics, I have no idea what this means.  The very notion strikes me as absurd.  We are being told in effect that what is essentially subjective will one day be exhaustively understood as both essentially subjective and wholly objective.  And that makes no sense. If you tell me that understanding in physics need not be objectifying understanding, I don't know what that means either.

As Strawson clearly appreciates, one cannot reduce a twinge of pain to a pattern of neuron firings, for such a reduction eliminates the what-it-is-like-ness  of the experience.  And so he inflates the concept of the physical to cover both the physical and the mental.  But by doing this he drains the physical of definite meaning.  His materialism is a vacuous materialism. We no longer have any idea of what 'physical' means if it no longer contrasts with 'mental.'

If we are told that sensations and thoughts are wholly material, we have a definite proposition only if 'material' contrasts with 'mental.' But if we are told that sensations and thoughts are material, but that matter in reality has mental properties and powers, then I say we are being fed  nonsense.  We are being served grammatically correct sentences that do not express a coherent thought.

Besides, if some matter in reality senses and thinks, surely some matter doesn't; hence we are back to dualism.

Why is Strawson's  mysterianism any better than Dennett's eliminativism?  Both are materialists. And both are keenly aware of the problem that qualia pose.  This is known in the trade as the 'hard problem.' (What? The other problems in the vicinity are easy?) The eliminativist simply denies the troublesome data. Qualia don't exist! They are illusory!  The mysterian materialist cannot bring himself to say something so manifestly silly. But, unwilling to question his materialism, he says something that is not much better. He tells us that qualia are real, and wholly material, but we don't understand how because we don't know enough about matter.  But this 'theological' solution is also worthless because no definite proposition is being advanced.

Strawson frankly confesses, "I am by faith a materialist." (p. 69)  Given this faith, experiential items, precisely as experiential, must be wholly material in nature.  This faith engenders the hope that future science will unlock the secret.  Strawson must pin his hopes on future science because of his clear recognition that experiential items are incomprehensible in terms of current physics.

But what do the theological virtues of faith and hope have to do with sober inquiry?  It doesn't strike me as particularly  intellectually honest to insist that materialism just has to be true and to uphold it by widening the concept of the physical to embrace what is mental.  It would be more honest just to admit that the problem of consciousness is insoluble.

And that is my 'solution.' The problem is real, but insoluble.  

Strawson's latest banging on his mysterian materialist drum is to be found in The Consciousness Deniers in The New York Review of Books.

Omnia Sana Sanis

"All is reasonable to the reasonable." Herein lies a reason to limit one's reasonableness.

For it is not reasonable to be reasonable in all things or in relation to all persons. We live among enemies. The enemy needs sometimes to experience the hard fist of unreason, the brute rejection, the blind refusal, the lethal blow. Or at least he must be made to fear this response, and you must be capable of making it.  The good are not the weak, but those capable of  violence while remaining the masters of its exercise.

Otherwise, are you fit for this world? On the other hand, it might be better not to be fit for this world. What sort of world is it in which the good must be brutal to preserve the reign of the Good?

Religion Under Assault

Religions are under assault from without, but they also undermine themselves from within. To put it sarcastically, the Roman Catholic Church has worked hard and successfully at destroying its own credibility by refusing (not just failing) to rein in priestly misconduct. Not all, but too many leaders of the RCC from the Pope on down have placed the survival of the temporal institution. the protection of its clerics,  and the preservation of its wealth and privileges above its divine mandate. For too many, the  hustle is the thing, and the noble aims a sham. The ancient edifice is in dire need of fumigation.  To the extent that the RCC has become just another hunk of leftist junk, it should be defunded. 

But he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea. (Matthew 18:6, Douay Rheims)

Too Many Memories?

Are you bothered by too many memories? Live more actively and thoughtlessly! Enter the diaspora of mundane dis-traction. Lose yourself in the quotidian. Take the drug of busy-ness.

Not my way, but it could be yours.

"Trust, but Verify!"

I said:

Perhaps the greatest diplomatic line of all time was uncorked by Ronald Reagan in his confrontation with Mikhail Gorbachev, he of the Evil Empire: "Trust, but verify!"

The Reagan riposte makes sense diplomatically but not semantically. If I trust you, I do not verify what you say or do. If you think otherwise, then you do not know  what 'trust' means.

Dmitri  replies:

This expression "Trust, but verify" is, among other things, a literal translation of a very popular saying in Russian. I am sure this is part of the reason Reagan used it.

 

And you can trust and still verify, because the person or institution you trust could be worth your overall trust, but err on occasion. In short, you can understand the meaning of trust and, at times, verify a trusted party at the same time.

I counter-respond:

I didn't know that the expression translates a popular Russian saying. Thank you for informing me of that.

On the point of disagreement, I persist in my contention.  Set aside institutions and other objects of  potential trust/distrust. Consider an interpersonal situation with exactly two persons. Suppose that person A says to person B: "I trust you with respect to your assertion that p, but I must verify that p." This was the situation between Reagan and Gorbachev. Gorbachev had made a specific assertion and Reagan said in effect that he trusted Gorbachev's veracity but but still had to make sure that what Gorbachev had asserted was true.

That is what I am claiming makes no semantic or conceptual sense. If I trust that what you are saying is true, then I cannot consistent with that trust verify what you are saying. I am making a simple point about the concept trust.  If you were to deny that there is a unitary concept trust expressible in different languages, then I would say that I am making a simple point about the meaning of  the word 'trust' in English. 

But if I deem a person overall trustworthy with respect to what he asserts, I may, consistent with that overall trust, tell the person that I need to verify a specific assertion that the person makes. So in the end I don't think Dmitri and I are in disagreement.

Various philosophical questions wait in the wings. What is the difference between the meaning or sense of a word and the concept the word expresses, assuming the word, on an occasion of use,  expresses a concept? What is a concept? Are concepts mind-dependent? Are they all general, or are some irreducibly singular?  Should we distinguish between the concept trust and the essence of trust where essences are mind-independent ideal or abstract objects that exist or subsist in splendid independence of minds and language? Is a linguistic prescriptivist committed to the existence of essences?   

More Malcolm on Mass Formation

Here at Motus Mentis, the weblog of Malcolm Pollack.  Pollack is an uncommonly good writer as you will see from the quotation below.  More importantly, he speaks truth against the current madness. In my earlier post on his American Greatness essay, after acknowledging his even-handedness, I suggested that 

. . . he may be giving aid and comfort to a false moral equivalentism.  Left and Right are not moral equivalents. The Left is far worse.

I assumed that he would accept my mild criticism and he has (emphasis added):

Alas, in such times as these – in the growing heat of a simmering civil war – for an observer to comment on social tectonics from such a remote altitude makes him seem almost blithely unconcerned with the great battle shaping up on the plain far below. As a result, commenters and correspondents have taken me to task for being too even-handed in my description of the phenomenon; for making it seem as if the craziness here in 2022 is symmetrically distributed between both factions in our current social and political conflict. Our old friend Bill Vallicella was among them; you can read his post, and my response (from which some of this post is adapted), here.

I think that’s a fair critique, and in my article I should have made it clear that right now, when it comes to the psychological manipulation of public narratives in order to focus an anxious and atomized public’s attention on objects of fear and loathing, there is no equivalence at all between the two great factions. “Mass formation” in today’s America is overwhelmingly a “Blue”, not a “Red”, phenomenon.

Readers of American Greatness, and of this blog, will need little convincing on this score, but a few points are worth mentioning:

First of all, it is a tremendous advantage in the manipulation of mass opinion to control the flow of information, and for many years now the American Left have controlled mass media, social media, internet-search technology, and education to the point of near-total information dominance.

Second, the artificiality of the public narrative blaring from the towering minarets of our institutions is shown by its transience: as soon as one story collapses (remember “Russian collusion”, and “hands up, don’t shoot”?) another takes its place (think of Jussie Smollett, or “two weeks to flatten the curve”). Likewise, the extent to which these narratives are in fact calculated propaganda offensives is given away by the aggressive censorship of dissenting views. (Magna est veritas, et praevalebit, the old saying goes – “Truth is great, and will prevail” – but to make falsehood prevail requires some assistance.)

Third, that the dominance of the Left’s message in America today relies upon a widespread psychological vulnerability is further demonstrated by the extent to which it has managed to override both tradition and common sense in getting large numbers of people to deny what, until now, have been understood by everyone everywhere to be objectively existing features and categories of the natural world.  To participate in polite society today – or, to put that more accurately, to be able to keep your job, get a college degree, or avoid being deplatformed from most media – we are expected to go along with things that most people know in their hearts are simply not so: that sex and race are purely social constructs; that men can become pregnant and bear children; that biology and heritability have nothing to do with human traits, and with their statistical distribution in populations; that cultures and peoples can be mixed and jumbled together at random without affecting the cohesion and stability of formerly homogeneous societies; that “equality” means that people cannot vary in talents, abilities, and aptitudes; that the greatest threat to American society is “white supremacy”; that everything in the modern Western world, from mathematics to nuclear families to pumpkin-spice lattes, is racist; that intelligence is a meaningless and unquantifiable concept; that when different identity groups perform differently on qualifying tests for education and employment, those tests should simply be discarded; that for nations to control their borders is inherently immoral; that the interests of criminals trump those of law-abiding citizens; that parents should have no say in how their children are educated; that members of various, designated groups are not to be considered responsible agents; that the way to deal with rising crime is to stop arresting people; that the 2020 election was squeaky-clean; that the January 6th protest was an assault on a par with Pearl Harbor and 9/11 (while the three-day siege of the White House by BLM and Antifa, in which hunrdeds of officers were injured, and the First Family had to be evacuated, was not); that the protests of that summer were “mostly peaceful”; and no end of other obvious falsehoods and absurdities.

Above all, what marks the current mental state of the American Left as psychologically abnormal is its suicidal self-abnegation. I can think of no other example in all of history of a coherent, prosperous and homogeneous society, with a robust civic culture and a proud historical mythos, suddenly deciding en masse to reject and denounce its heritage, declare its cherished cultural traditions shameful and immoral, fling open its borders to engage in deliberate ethnic, religious, and cultural dilution, and cheer on the accelerating displacement of its majority population and the gradual decomposition of cohesion and civil order. This all seems, when compared to the normal behavior of human societies, completely insane.

Considering all this, then, I hope it is clear that, although the phenomenon now being called “mass formation” has been observed in all ages and cultures, and must be considered in some sense a “universal” feature of our nature, its current manifestation in the United States is anything but symmetrical, and is overwhelmingly an affliction of the Left —  and that those of us who wish to have any chance of preserving the great American experiment must, in this hour of crisis, fight it with everything we’ve got.

Establishment Conservatives

ESTABLISHMENT CONSERVATIVES are singularly ill-equipped for fighting. Hobbled by their virtues, they cannot bring themselves to give as good as they get. Politics is war, but establishment conservatives don't want to believe it. Donald Trump tried to teach them, but they proved unteachable. Instead of getting with the program, they wasted time and energy undermining the one person capable of halting the leftist juggernaut.

These 'conservatives' are good at one thing only: conserving their own perquisites, privileges, pelf, and position. Everything they are supposed to conserve they allow to be destroyed, among them,  the rule of law, our rights and liberties as enumerated in the Constitution, our national heritage, the very distinctions, principles, and values that underpin our republican form of government.  They will soon be gone forever,  and the Left will have won, if we don't push back pronto. But it may be too late for effective resistance, sunk as we are in the warm bath of our own decadence.  We shall see.

Disingenuousness

One politician accuses another of being disingenuous. But isn't such an accusation itself disingenuous inasmuch as disingenuousness is itself necessary for polite, politic, civil, political behavior? Could one have diplomacy and  civility without fakery and phoniness?  Perhaps the greatest diplomatic line of all time was uncorked by Ronald Reagan in his confrontation with Mikhail Gorbachev, he of the Evil Empire: "Trust, but verify!"

The Reagan riposte makes sense diplomatically but not semantically. If I trust you, I do not verify what you say or do. If you think otherwise, then you do not know  what 'trust' means.

One root of Trump hatred is his refusal or inability to play the political game in the conventional way. In a world that runs on appearances, social success demands more than a modicum of fakery, dissembling, white lies, and such.  If Trump could learn to play the game in a more conventional way, but without any reduction in the size and efficacy of his political cojones, he would be unstoppable.

But this world in which there is more seeming than being is also a world of severe limitations.  You cannot expect a man of action with a popular appeal to be also sensitive, articulate, refined, and literary. And vice versa. Those who are the latter tend to be of the milquetoast sort.  Someone as précieux, as 'precious,' as Bill Kristol is not cut out to lead.  

Preciosity does not suit the populist.

 

A Nice Thing about Philosophy

One nice thing about philosophy is that one can often argue in a pleasant and gentlemanly way because little is at stake. It is unlikely that anyone will get up in arms, literally or figuratively, over the East coast versus the West coast interpretation of the noema in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.  I don't expect any blood to be spilt over this.

We Must Work with Atheists to Defeat the Left

America is is where the West will make its last stand, or else begin to turn the tide. The rest of the Anglosphere appears lost. It is falling asleep under the soporific of 'wokeism,' the latest and most virulent form of the leftist virus. To assure victory we theists need to work with atheist conservatives. I agree with the following characterization of conservatism, apparently written by Jillian Becker, at The Atheist Conservative:

B.   On Conservatism

1. Individual freedom is the necessary condition for prosperity, innovation, and adaptation, which together ensure survival.

2.  A culture constituted for individual freedom is superior to all others.

3. Only the Conservative policies of the post-Enlightenment Western world are formulated to protect individual freedom.

4. Individual freedom under the rule of non-discriminatory law, a free market economy, the limiting of government power by democratic controls and constitutional checks and balances, and strong national defense are core Conservative policies.

A conservatism along these lines navigates a sane middle path between leftism and reactionary, throne-and-altar conservatism.  

I am a theist. But as I have repeatedly maintained over the years, atheism is a reasonable position. The reasonable is not the same as the  true. The reasonable is sometimes false, and the true is sometimes unreasonable. To ascertain the truth is not easy. Reason is a weak reed indeed. And despite my use of 'ascertain,' if we attain the truth we are rarely if ever certain that we have when the truths pertain to substantive matters. Humility is not just a moral virtue; it is an epistemic one as well. 

Nowadays there is talk of a 'postliberal' conservatism. We shall have to take a look at that. I suspect that it is a form of reaction insusceptible of resurrection, as a matter of fact, and even if patient of resuscitation, not worthy of it. It is a Lazarus that won't be raised and ought not be.

I have heard it said that a conservatism infused with classical liberalism is 'unstable' and will inevitably transmogrify into the madness of 'wokeism.' But that is a slippery slope argument, and they are all of them invalid.

The Erasure of History at the University of Leicester

Another incident in the suicide of the West. And in England of all places. The battle appears to be lost in the mother country and in the rest of the Anglosphere with the exception of the United States of America. Here is where the West will make its last stand, or else begin to turn the tide. 

Is the meaning of 'last stand' such that the defenders, fighting against overwhelming odds, always lose? That is what 'last' implies. Custer's last stand was the end of Custer. He stood no more. Or does the meaning of the phrase allow for the defenders to sometimes prevail? Onkel Ludwig taught us that meaning is use. I take it to be an empirically verifiable lexical point that the phrase is used in both ways.  Sometimes linguistic prescriptivists such as your humble correspondent have to acquiesce in the ways of a wayward world. Kicking against the pricks is somethimges pointless. I am tempted to dilate upon 'kicking against the pricks,' but I will resist temptation. 

Jillian Becker: A Terrorism Archive Lost:

If one of the primary purposes of a university is to protect and hand on intellectual heritage, commitment to archive preservation is fundamental to that purpose. Perhaps the reason why the University of Leicester did not protect the IST archive was because it is now committed to erasing the past. An indication of this is in reports that the administration wants to “decolonize” the teaching of English literature by eliminating medieval studies (so Chaucer, inter alia, is to be removed from the curriculum), and “focus on ethnicity, sexuality and diversity,”

Ceasing to teach something does not necessarily entail the destruction of materials used for teaching it. Is it likely that a university entrusted with documents of national and international importance would deliberately discard them because they are no longer useful to its teaching? Would it choose to waste the fruits of long, hard, even dangerous effort exerted against a malign force threatening the Western world? Sadly, I suspect it would if it came to believe that the Western world was systemically at fault and needed to be transformed. But if therefore it would no longer protect documents of public importance, should it still be funded with public money?

The loss of an archive, whether by negligence or decision, is a calamity. To lose it by negligence is barbarously callous. To discard it deliberately is an act of intellectual vandalism, the equivalent of book-burning. If, in either case, a university is responsible, the disgrace must leave a permanent stain on its reputation.

Jillian Becker self portrait (early 1970s)

Other photographs of Jillian Becker

Malcolm Pollack on 'Mass Formation'

Our old friend Malcolm Pollack has an article in American Greatness entitled "'Mass Formation' is a Two-Headed Coin." Pollack offers the following characterization of mass formation:

“Mass formation” . . . is a newish term for an age-old and long-studied phenomenon: the occasional, and usually quite sudden, arising of passionate and sometimes completely irrational fixations of attention, desire, hatred, or other affinities and aversions in crowds of various sizes, from local mobs to entire societies.

What I will call the COVID Craze is an example of a mass formation. Not everyone who takes precautions is a victim of mass delusion, but surely many are. We see them everyday: people alone on windy beaches wearing face masks, for example. Such behavior is completely irrational and oftentimes issues in hateful displays against people who do not subscribe to the ovine lunacy of the hysterical whose fear has so addled them that they cannot distinguish between efficacious prophylaxis, misplaced moral enthusiasm, and virtue-signaling.

Under what conditions is a social phenomenon such as the COVID Craze usefully referred to as a mass formation? Pollack, citing Dr. Matthias Desmet of the University of Guelph, cites four: free-floating anxiety, social isolation, lack of meaning and purpose in one's life, and anger and frustration.

When all these conditions are met, the collective psyche becomes like a supercooled liquid: given the right nucleus around which to coalesce, a “phase transition” can propagate throughout the system in a very short time. That nucleus is some object that can be plausibly identified as a cause of everyone’s anxiety and frustration, and the allure of attacking and eliminating it through collective action becomes, for many people, irresistible. The reason for [cause of] this is sensible [understandable] enough, because it [the attack and attempted elimination]  addresses [alleviates] , in a single stroke, all of the stress-conditions listed above: it offers, at last, a concrete object to which free-floating anxiety can attach, about which something can be done; it provides a much-needed basis for the reconstruction of social bonds; it puts before the group a great purpose toward which everyone can direct their energy; and, perhaps most attractive of all, it creates a common enemy toward which the people can channel their anger. (I added the words in brackets to aid my understanding.)

Those who stand in the way of this collective purpose, as well as those who merely lack enthusiasm for the cause, have consciously excluded themselves from this new social bond, and so they are easily, and usually eagerly, seen as enemies who must be isolated or eliminated. This polarization in turn encourages increasingly conspicuous signaling of one’s fidelity to the group and its cause. The more costly those signals are at a personal level, the more they signify commitment to the new social bond, and the more respect they purchase from the in-group—even if (or, perhaps, especially if) they do nothing that is actually effective in solving the underlying problem.

Malcolm mentions COVID, but I would have liked to have seen other examples. I will suggest one of my own. The President of the United States has recently made a delusional statement to the effect that white supremacy is the greatest threat the nation faces.  Because Joseph Biden is non compos mentis,  there is a certain risk in attributing this thought to him as something he himself believes. It is however safe to say that he is serving as the mouthpiece of a large group of  people who either believe it, in which case they are delusional, or merely pretend to believe it for their own personal gain, in which case they are not delusional but immoral both in their mendacity and in their willingness to put personal profit over the good of the country that has made their success possible. The latter bunch include the 'woke' capitalists and all manner of 'woke' careerists in government, academia, the churches, and elsewhere who seek to promote themselves by spreading lies and slanders.

Malcolm tries to be even-handed in his piece, as witness:

It is also a dangerous conceit to imagine, as many on the Right seem to be doing with this viral idea, that it currently manifests itself only with regard to the COVID panic, and only on the Left. 

It’s important to keep in mind that the four conditions enumerated by Desmet are amply met throughout modern society, across political and ideological lines, and that as long as our various factions struggle to live together, any mass-formation on one side is likely to increase anger and stress on the other, in a destructive feedback loop.

Pollack is right on the first count: the COVID Craze (as I call it) is not the only manifestation of mass formation 'psychosis.' On the second, however, he may be giving aid and comfort to a false moral equivalentism.  Left and Right are not moral equivalents. The Left is far worse. I grant that there are some extremists among those on the Alternative Right. But they are few and far between, and of little consequence, in comparison to the extremists who dominate the Left. The Left is morally and indeed intellectually inferior to the Right by orders of magnitude. The contemporary 'woke' Left in the USA, which controls the Democrat Party, is mindlessly extremist and destructive in respect of almost all issues of importance. To name just a few mindlessly extreme and destructive ideas and policy proposals: the ethno-masochistic notion that mathematics is racist, which of course implies that hard science (physics, e.g.) is racist as well; the Pelosian idea that "borders are immoral" and the corresponding Democrat policy of allowing anyone from anywhere into the country without any control or vetting; the absurd notion that defunding the police and eliminating cash bail are 'reforms' that will reduce crime; the incessant Orwellian subversion of language as for example the misuse of 'insurrection' to refer to trespassing; the erection of monuments and memorials to the worthless while tearing down those that commemorate great and worthy Americans. I could cite another dozen examples with ease. 

I'll leave it here. The combox is open for Malcolm's response and for any comments of anyone.

 

Diversity Worth Having

Diversity worth having presupposes a principle of unity that controls the diversity. Diversity must be checked and balanced by the competing value of unity, a value with an equal, if not greater, claim on our respect.

 

Example. ONE language only in the public sphere makes possible MANY voices to be heard and understood by all. To communicate our differences we need a common language.

 

Talking with one another is preferable to shooting at each other. Polyglot 'cultures' are more conducive to shooting than to talking.

 

I predict more shooting and less talking as the nation declines 'thanks' to the destructive leftists who have infiltrated the once-respectable Democrat Party.

 

Gun and ammo are flying off the shelves, even in the toniest enclaves of the bien-pensant:

 

In Beverly Hills, even the purchase of a firearm comes with certain…expectations. The city’s only gun store, Beverly Hills Guns, is a “concierge service” by appointment only, for a largely affluent clientele. And business is booming.

Since opening in July 2020, the store has seen upscale residents from Santa Monica to the Hollywood Hills increasingly in a panic following several high-profile smash-and-grab and violent home invasion robberies. The apparent siege has brought in a daily stream of anxious business owners and prominent actors, real estate moguls and film execs, says owner Russell Stuart. Most are arming themselves for the first time.

“This morning I sold six shotguns in about an hour to people that say, ‘I want a home defense shotgun,’” says Stuart, whose store is discreetly located in a Beverly Hills office building, with no sign on the doors, down the hall from a diamond dealer. “Everyone has a general sense of constant fear,  which is very sad. We’re used to this being like Mayberry.”

You know things are getting bad when the super-rich who can easily afford the best in private security are buying firearms. 

Moral Failure and Moral Capacity

Not being capable of truly horrendous crimes and sins, we moral mediocrities sin in a manner commensurate with our limitations. It follows that  we are all equally sinful in that we all sin to the limit of our capacity. It is not that we always sin, but that when we do, we sin only as much as we are capable of.  So James 'Whitey' Bulger and I are equal in that we both sin, when we do, only to the limit of our capacity. It is just that his capacity is vastly greater than mine. I am a slacker when it comes to sin.  I have never murdered anyone because he knew too much, dismembered and disposed of the body, enjoyed a fine dinner, and then slept like a baby. Bulger did this to a beautiful young woman, the girlfriend of one of his pals when girl and pal broke up. "You're going to a better place," said the pal to the girl right before Bulger did the deed.

A while back I re-viewed* portions of the 1967 cinematic adaptation of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Can I take credit for not being a thief and a murderer when I simply don't have it in me to do such things? Instead I do things so paltry it seems absurd to confess them, the confessing of which is possibly indicative of an ego-enhancing moral scrupulosity, a peccadillo if a sin at all.

On the other hand, the harder you strive for a high standard, the more of a moral wretch you perceive yourself to be.

The moral life is no easy life either morally or intellectually.  That is to say: it is hard to live it and hard to think clearly and truly about it and what it entails.

________________

*The pedant in me would have you note the difference between review and re-view.

Pleasures of the Flesh, Mind, Spirit

Those who pursue the pleasures of the flesh alone do not know any better: they do not know the pleasures of the mind. Those who pursue the sensuous and intellectual pleasures alone know no better: they do not know the pleasures of the spirit resting in contemplative silence. All seek pleasure; your measure, however, is the type of pleasure you seek.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Americana

Buffy Sainte-Marie, I'm Gonna be a Country Girl Again

Hoyt Axton, Greenback Dollar

Nanci Griffith, Boots of Spanish Leather

16 Horsepower, Wayfaring Stranger

Stanley Bros., Rank Strangers

Bob Dylan, I am a Lonesome Hobo. Have you heard this version?

Bob Dylan, As I Went Out One Morning

Highwaymen, The City of New Orleans

Kenny Rogers, The Gambler

Buffy Sainte-Marie, Cod'ine

Bob Dylan, Only a Hobo, 1963

The Worst Thing about Poverty

Substack latest. A quotation from Theodor Haecker with a bit of commentary.

A Socialist Argument for Border Control

Three years ago on this date on my Facebook page.  Redacted and improved.

 

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

 

Suppose you want a massive expansion of the welfare state. You want, among other things, a college education to be free to anyone who wants one. In addition, you want free health care for all, and perhaps a guaranteed minimum income. Suppose further that you want your socialist government to work and not go bankrupt. To will the end is to will the means. Among the means:  A stemming of the tide of illegal immigration. So here you have the makings of a socialist argument for border control, an essential component of which is a physical barrier at the southern border. An essential component, not the only one. Mirabile dictu: A socialist argument for a conservative conclusion.

 

You can't have both open borders and socialism. I say to the libertarians: You want open borders? Go for it, but ONLY AFTER you have stripped the government down to its Lockean functions and instituted something like a Nozickian 'night watchman' state. (See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.) But of course that strip-down is not in the offing: the libertarian dream is u-topian. It's like Nowheresville, man, as Maynard G. Krebs might have said.

 

The welfare state in the USA is here to stay.  The only question concerns its size and scope. Will it metastasize unto the collapse of the nation?

 

An equal but opposite utopianism to that of the libertarians is the utopianism of the Green New Dealers.  To them and their democratic socialist fellow travellers, I say: you are going to have to become what you call 'xenophobes' and 'racists' if you want to implement a workable socialist scheme. You are going to have to become like us conservatives: 'nativists' and 'white supremacists' who hate the Other simply in virtue of his being Other.

 

Of course, none of these epithets apply to us. You only think they do in your perversity, ill-will, and deliberate self-enstupidation.

Krauthammer's Fundamental Law Repealed

"To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil." (Charles Krauthammer)

 

Cute and clever, the oft-quoted saying is a nice piece of journalese, but not quite right, although it gets at part of the truth. Krauthammer's 'law' conversationally implies that conservatives do not think that contemporary liberals or leftists are evil. But surely many of us do. Leftists routinely slander us with such epithets as: sexist, racist, white supremacist, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, and others. This is morally vicious behavior and to that extent evil.

 

It is important to face the fact  that many if not most so-called liberals are not good people. You are not a good person, for example, if you routinely dismiss legitimate concerns for the rule of law in the matter of immigration by accusing conservatives of having an irrational fear of foreigners. That is a bare-faced lie and a vicious refusal to take conservatives seriously as rational beings and address their numerous and powerful arguments.

 

A second problem with Krauthammer's 'law' is that intelligent conservatives do not think of most liberals as stupid but as having the wrong values, or, when they have some of the right values, not prioritizing them correctly. Generally speaking, political differences reflect differences in values and principles and presuppositions, not differences in intelligence or 'information.'

 

And that is why the phrase 'low information voter' is asinine. Beloved by 'liberals' it suggests that if the deplorables had more 'information' they would vote Left. That is a conceit risible in excelsis. 

Of Russell's Teapot and Abbey's Angry Lunicorn

Does the angry unicorn on the dark side of the Moon manage his anger by sipping herbal tea from Russell's teapot?

Substack latest.

Above the Urinal at the Chess Tournament

Urine check!

I didn't make that up. It was at some cheesy Knight's Inn or similar venue in Phoenix in the early-to-mid 'nineties, when Myron Lieberman presided in his inimitable manner over well-attended tournaments and Ed Yetman, bandanna around his neck and sidearm strapped to his hip, manned the book concession. Say what you want about the chess scene, it is chock full of colorful characters.

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

I posted the above on 21 October 2009. I received an e-mail message from Yetman today informing me of Lieberman's passing on Christmas Eve. Hats off to Myron and to Ed too for their services in promoting chess and organizing tournaments in Arizona.  

Myron Lieberman (left) with former US Chess Presidents Harold Winston (center) and Don Schultz in an undated photo. US Chess archival photo

Anent the Yetman reference supra, the record will show that I am against open carry. Are You a Gray Man? explains.

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

The passage of years has made of a man on the make a man of wisdom. He stands on a street corner, a spectator of the passing scene. An old flame from his cocky youth passes by.  Gloria Mundi sees him but without acknowledgement. The old man thinks to himself, "What did I ever see in her?"

Can it Happen Here?

It is happening here. We are no longer the land of the free and the home of the brave, and we haven't been for a long time. Most Americans are now willing to give up their birthright, liberty, for a mess of pottage. Safety and security are their main concerns. The orchestration of fear by the powers that be is a primary tool for forcing us into political dhimmitude. The masked masses, complicit in their own cancellation, are proving easy to control.

Dreher explains in under six minutes.

While Dreher is an eminently decent man, he is pre-eminently stupid in his opposition to Trump. He doesn't understand that we are involved in a war and that in a war you have to take sides, and that attempting to float above the fray and be 'objective' -- while appropriate for a political philosopher as opposed to a political activist -- plays right into the hands of the enemy.

 

Vito Caiati responds with a little help from Winston Churchill:

Your comment on Rod Dreher in this morning’s post (“While Dreher is an eminently decent man, he is pre-eminently stupid in his opposition to Trump. He doesn't understand that we are involved in a war and that in a war you have to take sides, and that attempting to float above the fray and be 'objective' -- while appropriate for a political philosopher as opposed to a political activist -- plays right into the hands of the enemy”) brought to mind Winston Churchill’s broadcast of June 22, 1941, following the Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia. His words, those of one of the most stalwart opponents of communion of the inter-war years, are worth remembering when dealing with “conservatives” such as Dreher and his kind, who confront nothing comparable to the hard and unpleasant political choice of the British Prime Minister:

No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no words that I've spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding. . . .

We have but one aim and one single irrevocable purpose. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. From this nothing will turn us. Nothing. We will never parley; we will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his gang. We shall fight him by land; we shall fight him by sea; we shall fight him in the air, until, with God's help, we have rid the earth of his shadow and liberated its people from his yoke.

Any man or State who fights against Nazism will have our aid. Any man or State who marches with Hitler is our foe. . . .

It follows, therefore, that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and to the Russian people. We shall appeal to all our friends and Allies in every part of the world to take the same course and pursue it as we shall, faithfully and steadfastly to the end.

We have offered to the Government of Soviet Russia any technical or economic assistance which is in our power and which is likely to be of service to them.”

We are indeed in a “war” with an implacable domestic enemy in which the tide of battle has dramatically and rapidly turned against us. What is most frustrating about Dreher is that he spends every day reporting on the assault by the Left on our culture, traditions, institutions, and freedoms, and yet he believes that we have the luxury of waiting for the coming of some pristine conservative leader, someone  più raffinato e puro than Trump. While he waits, the Republic is further undone by its enemies.

Exactly right, Vito. Dreher shares the characteristic referred to in your penultimate sentence with many so-called conservatives. They are waiting for someone "more refined and pure" to come along, a 'true conservative,' in a bow tie perhaps, who speaks and writes elegant English and displays all of the social graces, a clubbable man, a man cut from the same cloth as a George F. Will, or a Bill Kristol, not a boorish, mean-tweeting alpha male from the mean streets of NYC willing and able to slice into such effete  opponents as Jeb! Bush with mockery and derision.  These pseudo-cons are flummoxed and distracted by Trump's style so much so that they cannot pay attention to the deeply American substance of his words and his (not merely promised, but implemented) policies, policies they themselves pay lip service to but lack the cojones to implement. 

What are we to make of people like David Brooks and David French? Human behavior is multi-motivated and these two are undoubtedly complex and many-sided men with much good in them; I can't shake the idea, however, that a not inconsiderable driver of their behavior  is a desire for social acceptance by the elites and invitations to the most exclusive of Beltway soirees.  

French, for example, opposes abortion. A man comes along, a man much lied about and maligned, a patriotic American, who, though something of a sybarite in his personal behavior, yet accomplished much to stop the slaughter.  So what does French do? He throws in with Biden and the pro-abortion gang.  

If the distinction between style and substance were a stick, I would hit these pussy-cons over the head with it in a vain attempt at knocking some sense into them. 

Life's Fugacity

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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Out with the Old, In with the New

Happy New Year, dear readers. I wish you all the best for the coming year. 

Neil Young, Old Man 

Bob Seger, Old Time Rock and Roll. Does it really soothe the soul? Or does it stimulate something 'south' of the soul? If the soul has a bodily locus or point of attachment, where would it be? But I am done thinking for the day. Time to feel. Balance in all things, including balance.

The Band, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

Tom T. Hall, Old Five and Dimers Like Me

John Fogerty, The Old Man Down the Road

Ray Charles, Ol' Man River

Bob Dylan, New Morning

Eagles, New Kid in Town

And many more . . . .