Maverick Philosopher

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Road Tunes

This life is a via dolorosa through a vale of ambiguity. We trudge along veiled in ignorance of the ultimate whence, whither, and wherefore. But the way is not wholly dolorous and unmarked. There are some stunning vistas, exalted moments, intimations of Elsewhere, glimpses and vouchsafings, cloud-partings, fog-liftings, pointers and prospects.  We live by faith and hope in this life and beyond it. In any case, we are taking it to the end of the line.

Merle Haggard, Lonesome Fugitive

Eddy Rabbit, Driving My Life Away

Doors, Roadhouse Blues

Dave Dudley, Six Days on the Road

Tom Waits, Phantom 309

Charley Ryan, The ORIGINAL Hot Rod Lincoln

Jackson Browne, Running on Empty

Eagles, Take it Easy

Dr Feelgood, Route 66

Johnny Cash, I've Been Everywhere

Leon Russell, Truck Drivin' Man

Hank Williams, Lost Highway

Take a lesson, muchachos.  

Dave Alvin, Highway 61 Revisited.  Wow!

UPDATE (5/2). Duane Eddy died three days ago on 29 April at age 86.   Here he is interviewed by Ray Stevens. Trivia question: which politically incorrect song is Stevens most famous for? I'm sure Catacomb Joe knows the answer. 

UPDATE (5/8). Canned Heat, On the Road Again, alternate take, with lyrics. This one didn't make it 'into the can,' but it is better than the one that did.  

Is Mariology a Part of the Presuppositionalist 'Package Deal'? A Question for Flood

Full disclosure: I am not a theologian. I am a philosopher of religion who, as part of his task, thinks about theologoumena which, on a broad interpretation of the term, are simply things said about God, a term which therefore includes not only official, dogmatic pronunciamenti of, say, the RCC's magisterium, but also includes conjectures, speculations, and opinions about God that are not officially promulgated.

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

Anthony Flood writes,

The Christian worldview, expressed on the pages of the Bible, is a revelatory “package deal,” if you will, not a buffet of optional metaphysical theses. The organic connectedness (within the divine decree) of creation, trinity, and incarnation—even the so-called “contingencies of history,” e.g., Joshua’s impaling the King of Ai on a pole after slaughtering all of his subjects (Joshua 8)—await clarification in God’s good time, if He sees fit to provide it, but are put before us for our assent today.

Flood is a presuppositionalist who believes that "intelligible predication" presupposes the truth of the Christian worldview.  Thus, "The Christian does not avail himself of his birthright (Christian theistic) worldview because it confers omniscience on him, but rather because (a) it saves intelligible predication and (b) no competing worldview does."

We are being told that the Christian worldview, as Flood understands it, offers the best and indeed the only explanation of the fact of intelligible predication.  That intelligible predication is indeed a fact I do not question. But I do have some questions about Flood's explanation of the fact. One of them concerns what he includes in his explanation.  It is clear that he includes more than the existence of God where 'God' refers to a purely spiritual being, of a personal nature, endowed with the standard omni-attributes, who exists of metaphysical necessity, and who created out of nothing everything distinct from himself, or at least everything concrete distinct from himself. One reason for this 'more' is because Flood's God is not just personal, but tri-personal: one God in three divine persons. This is not intended as tri-theism, of course, but as monotheism: one God in three divine persons. 

Furthermore, in the Christian worldview as Flood understands it, the second person of the Trinity, variously known as the Logos, the Word, God the Son, became man in a particular man, Jesus of Nazareth, at a particular time in a particular place. One and the same person, the Son, without ceasing to be fully divine, became fully human, with a human body and a human soul, by being born of a virgin named 'Mary' in a stable in Bethlehem.  So it seems that the 'package deal' must include, in addition to Trinity and Incarnation, some version of Mariology.  Why must it? Because Jesus Christ, the God-Man, had to have gotten his human nature from somewhere. He inherited his human nature from his human mother.

Let's think about this.  God the Son is not a creature. Is Jesus a creature? His earthly mother is a creature. Jesus had no heavenly mother, at least not until the Assumption of Mary, body and soul, into heaven.  But that was long after the Incarnation event; I won't say anything more about the Assumption here. And Jesus had no earthly father. Joseph was his step-father, and a step-father is not a father in the earthly or biological sense of the term. The father of Jesus is a purely spiritual being.  So Jesus Christ, the God-Man, at the moment of Incarnation, has a heavenly father but no earthly father, and an earthly mother but no heavenly mother.

Mary became pregnant.  What was the nature of the inseminating seed? It had to be purely spiritual. Why? Because it came from God who is purely spiritual. What about the inseminated egg? It had to be physical. Why? Because it was the ovum of an earthly woman. It was a miraculous pregnancy by supernatural agency.

Now the God-Man had to be free of original sin to be able to do his redemptive work and restore right relations between man and God. So he could not have 'contracted' original sin from his earthly mother. Hence the logic of the soteriological narrative required that Mary be conceived without original sin. Hence the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.

It therefore seems that Mariology must be part of Flood's 'package deal,' and indeed a Mariology that includes Immaculate Conception.  So my first question to Flood is this:

Do you hold that the only possible explanation of  intelligible predication must be in terms of a Christian worldview that includes not only Trinity and Incarnation but also Immaculate Conception?

This is not a rhetorical question. It is a genuine question raised so that I might understand what exactly Flood's position is.  Tony is making a mistake if he thinks I am being polemical here. I am not. I honestly find presuppositionalism puzzling and I am trying to understand it.

My second question to Flood which I cannot develop and defend in this installment is this:

Given the well-known logical conundra that arise when we try to render intelligible to ourselves such doctrines as Trinity and Incarnation, conundra that seem to threaten the intelligibility of these doctrines, and therefore seem to threaten the intelligibility of any explanation of intelligible predication in terms of a worldview committed to them, how do you respond?  Do you maintain that the supposed logical puzzles are easily solved and that Trinity and Incarnation in their orthodox formulations are logically and epistemically unobjectionable? If that is not the tack you take, what tack do you take?

The Difference between Posing and Begging a Question

I found the nifty graphic below over at Flood's place.  It is a pithy and pictorial presentation of a point I have been hammering away at online for the last twenty years. Here is a Substack hammer-job. Some say we should give up the fight and let the forces of linguistic decadence obliterate the distinction between posing and begging a question. I am inclined to say that we should fight on against the anti-civilizational forces while well aware that fighting-on may be nothing more than a pointless rear-guard action.

What say you?

 

Health Equity?

Well, why not? 

Students in their first year of medical school typically learn what a healthy body looks like and how to keep it that way. At the University of California, Los Angeles, they learn that "fatphobia is medicine’s status quo" and that weight loss is a "hopeless endeavor."

Those are two of the more moderate claims made by Marquisele Mercedes, a self-described "fat liberationist," in an essay assigned to all first-year students in UCLA medical school’s mandatory "Structural Racism and Health Equity" class. Launched in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the course is required for all first-year medical students.

The Left destroys everything it touches, and it touches everything. Problem is, few physicians, comfortable and lazy as they are in their tony suburbs, have the civil courage to speak out against this nonsense.

Christianity and Intelligibility: A Response to Flood

Anthony Flood writes,

Beneath a post on his blog, Bill Vallicella commented on a matter of common interest. I stress that Bill wrote a comment, not a paper for a peer-reviewed journal, and that’s all I’m doing here. I offer the following only as a further, not a last word.

Last Sunday, in responding to one Joe Odegaard, Bill wrote:

While I agree that Christianity makes sense of the world and in particular of the scientific enterprise, and while I myself have argued against materialism/physicalism/naturalism and in favor of Divine Mind as source of the world’s intelligibility, it must be borne in mind that Xianity [Christianity] is a very specific religion with very specific tenets such as Incarnation and Trinity. Why should anyone think that such apparently unintelligible doctrines are necessary for the intelligibility of the natural world? (Emphasis added.—A. G. F.)

The short answer is that appearances can be untrustworthy. Unless it can be shown that those tenets are really, not just apparently, unintelligible, the implicit objection (in the form of a rhetorical question) has no force.

BV: Not so, and for two reasons.  Trinity and Incarnation may or may not be intelligible doctrines.  Either way, the question remains why an account of the intrinsic intelligibility of nature in terms of Divine Mind requires them.  That is the question I am posing to Joe, and indirectly to C. S. Lewis, and it is not rhetorical. I am genuinely asking it. But I have found that some people do not understand what a rhetorical question is. In fact, one night I caught the astute Mark Levin of Life, Liberty, and Levin (Fox News) misusing the phrase. So permit me a brief digression. 

A rhetorical question is a grammatically interrogative form of words that is not logically interrogative but either logically indicative or logically imperative.  Such a form of words is used to issue a command or to make a statement, not to ask a question.   For example, Daddy says to teenage girl, "Do you have to talk on the phone while driving?"  Clearly, the old man is not asking a question despite the grammatically interrogative formulation.  He is issuing a command, or perhaps a recommendation, in a polite way. A second example is from Hillary Clinton. "Do you really think Donald Trump has the temperament to be commander-in-chief?" When she said that in a speech, she was not asking whether Trump has the requisite temperament, but stating or asserting that he does not. And this despite her use of the grammatical interrogative.

Here is an interesting case. Someone sincerely asks, "Does God exist?" and receives the reply, "Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the Moon?" (Ed Abbey).  The first question is genuine; the second is rhetorical.  Another curious case: an uniformed person sincerely asks a genuine question, "Is Mayorkas lying about border security?" and receives in response a rhetorical question that expresses either a tautology, "Is a cat a cat?" or an analytic truth, "Is the Pope Catholic?" End of digression.

And so my question is not rhetorical. I am not asserting anything, I am genuinely asking why Joe or C. S. Lewis, to whom Joe links, or anyone thinks that an account of the intelligibility of nature (including its uniformity, regularity, and predictability) in terms of Divine Mind must also include such specifically Christian doctrines as Trinity and Incarnation.  By the intelligibility of nature I mean its intrinsic understandability by minds such as ours.  The natural world is intrinsically such as to be understandable by us. As opposed to what? As opposed to deriving its intelligibility from us via our conceptual schemes. If the latter derivation were the case, then the intelligibility would not be intrinsic but relational: relative to us and our conceptual frameworks.  (I note en passant that there are other ways of accounting for intelligibility without God. The late Daniel Dennett would probably say that it 'evolves.' I'll come back to Dennett later.)

After all, a Jew who rejects Trinity and Incarnation could  hold that nature is intrinsically intelligible only if it is a divine creation. And a Muslim could as well.  And our friend Dale Tuggy too! He is a  unitarian Christian.

So again: Why does an account of the intrinsic intelligibility of the natural world in terms of Divine Creative Mind require the specific doctrines of normative Christianity?  That and that alone is the question I am raising in my response to Joe and C. S. Lewis. 

Tony may have a defensible answer to my question. Or he may not. We can discuss it if he likes. But all of this is irrelevant to the initial post and the comment thread it generated.  The question I raised in the initial post was whether the knowledge involved when a person knows that the Sun has risen is exactly the same sort of knowledge involved  when a person knows -- if he does know --- that Christianity is true.

Intentionality in Locks and Keys?

Daniel Dennett on the 'evolution' of intentionality.  

Substack latest.

When we have gold we are in fear . . .

. . . when we have none we are in danger.  (English proverb)

A proverb whose pertinence is proven  by  recent  developments. Gold hit 2400 USD/oz. a day or two ago, but has backed off some.   Joe Biden and his shills lie their heads off about everything including the health of the economy, but, with respect to the latter,  the surging price of gold suggests otherwise.

Skeptical and Credulous

Remember Bernie Madoff?

A Substack retrospect.

God as Uniquely Unique

Top o' the Stack

Correctly used, 'unique' is three-way polyvalent. It  can mean that which is one of a kind, that which is necessarily one of a kind, and that which is uniquely unique in that it transcends the kind-instance distinction. 

 

Earth Day 2024

Substack latest.

The Intifada Comes to America

Well, what did you expect?

Intifada refers specifically to two separate uprisings of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank over the past four decades, but more broadly, it pertains to the continued resistance of the Palestinians to the existence of Israel. When they shout “Death to Israel,” they mean it. It should be a top priority of Congress now to determine whether they mean it when they shout “Death to America.”

The rise of pro-Palestinian hatred in the United States should not be a surprising development to anyone. Even before President Biden opened the southern border to millions of unvetted “newcomers,” as the global elites like to call the invaders, there has been a reckless U.S. policy going back two decades to resettle Muslim refugees from Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Afghanistan in the U.S. heartland. And because immigration policy no longer treats assimilation as a worthwhile goal, many of those refugees are loyal to their homeland and their religion much more than to the nation that offered them safety and security.

I suppose that is an inevitable result of the globalist agenda of border dissolution and the merging of disparate populations for the purpose of sharing wealth and assuaging billionaires’ guilt.

But it is only inevitable if the rest of us tolerate it.

The Sun Also Rises: On Solar and Christian Belief

A reader sends us to an article that begins like this:

The need for a return to God is clearly evident in today’s deranged and dysfunctional world. It is a need, exceeding all others, that must be fulfilled in order to keep enemies of God from interfering with human life. 

And then a little later we get an unsourced quotation from C. S. Lewis replete with a non-functioning hyperlink:

C.S. Lewis: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” This points directly to the essence of the faith in Christianity and to its need in life. A short explanation, found here, includes the observation: “At first glance, this quote may appear simple, but upon closer examination, its deep meaning and profound importance become evident. Essentially, Lewis suggests that his faith in Christianity is not solely based on tangible evidence but also on the transformative impact it has on his perception of the world.” [My emphasis.]

Since the quotation is unsourced, I cannot check whether Lewis said what he is quoted as saying. If he did, it is a silly thing to say. Let me explain.

This morning I observed a beautiful sunrise. And so I believe that the Sun rose this morning. I also believe that the Sun is the source of the natural light we enjoy on Earth.  But it is false, and indeed silly, to say that one who believes in Christianity believes in the very same way.  The difference is obvious. I cannot help but believe that the Sun rose this morning: I saw it with my own two eyes!  Seeing is believing in a case like this.* That the Sun rose is given, if not indubitably, then for all practical purposes.** There is no need for a leap of faith beyond the given.  The will does not come into it. In no way do I decide to believe that the Sun has risen. Examples like this one refute a universal doxastic voluntarism.

But if you believe that God became man in Jesus of Nazareth, if you believe that the God-Man is fully divine and fully human, that he is one person in two natures, then you believe beyond the sensorily given.  (You also arguably believe beyond what is intelligible to the discursive intellect.) You cannot see God the way you see the Sun. To 'see' God in Jesus you need the 'eye' of faith which is quite obviously not a physical eye but a spiritual 'eye.'  The last sentence in the quotation reads:

Essentially, Lewis suggests that his faith in Christianity is not solely based on tangible evidence but also on the transformative impact it has on his perception of the world.

Better, but still bad. Someone who comes to embrace Christianity comes to view the world in a way very different from the way he viewed it prior to his becoming a Christian. True! So, yes, his worldview has been transformed. But that transformation is no part of the evidence of the truth of Christianity; if it were, then the transformation that occurs in someone who goes from being a Christian to an atheist or a Christian to a Communist  or a Christian to a Buddhist, etc. is a transformation that is evidence of the truth of atheism, Communism, Buddhism respectively, etc.

Article here.

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*There may be other cases in which seeing does not suffice for belief. I am thinking of G. E. Moore's putative counterexample: "I see it, but I don't believe it!"

** The hyperbolic skepticism of Descartes is not to the point here.

Social Utility and the Value of Free Inquiry

Top o' the Stack.

Daniel Dennett died yesterday at age 82. A philosophical provocateur of influence, his brilliance far outstripped his insight. But a day after his demise, de mortuis nil nisi bonum remains in force. So I will say something good about him. I agree entirely with what he says in the following passage:

Daniel Dennett (1942-2024)

Daniel Dennett died today.  I heard the news from Malcolm Pollack whose obituary refers us to a very recent discussion between him and Jordan Peterson. I have been very critical of Dennett's work over the years, but I won't rehearse any of my critique so near the hour of his death. Let the watchword be: De mortuis nil nisi bonum.

Faith: Life-Enhancing Only if True?

In July of 2022 I published a post entitled Faith's Immanent Value.  Here are the opening paragraphs slightly redacted:

Suppose you sincerely believe in God and the soul but that your faith is in vain. You die and become nothing. Your faith was that the curtain would lift, but it falls, irrevocably.  My question is whether that possible upshot would matter. If it should turn out there is nothing on the other side of the Great Divide, would that retroactively remove your faith's immanent value?

My answer is that it won't matter because you won't know it. You will not learn that your faith was in vain. There will be no disappointment. You will not discover that your faith was a life-enhancing illusion. You will have had the benefit of a faith which will have sustained you until the moment of your annihilation as an individual person. You will not die alone for you will die with the Lord-believed-in, a Lord never to be known, but also never to be known not to be.   If the Lord-believed-in is enough for this life, and this life turns out to be the only life, then the Lord-believed-in is enough, period.

Your faith will have had immanent value. If this life is the only life, then this immanent value is the only value your faith could have had. 

The post received a strong response positive and negative. I return to the topic now, as I re-read for the third time Dietrich von Hildebrand's Jaws of Death: Gate of Heaven (Sophia Institute Press, 1991, tr. Alice von Hildebrand. The German original appeared in 1980 under the title Über den Tod (On Death)).

On pp. 109-110, von Hildebrand says things that seem to contradict what I am saying. My purpose in this entry is to re-think the question so as to test my view against his. Here is the paragraph that gives me pause and prompts me to re-examine my position:

Nothing would be more absurd than for us to regard the subjective happiness that results from the supernatural view of death as an end, and to see faith as a means for obtaining this end. To do so would mean detaching from truth both faith and the supernatural view of death. Such a pragmatic interpretation of faith comes close to a total misunderstanding of it. We must, therefore, condemn as blind nonsense the idea that, because it cheers and comforts us, supernatural view of death is worth nourishing even if it is an illusion. Faith gives comfort only if it is true. (110, emphasis added)

The pragmatic interpretation of faith as described by von Hildebrand is not mine.  My first  task, then, is to explain why. I turn then to an evaluation of von Hildebrand's positive view.

I

My claim is that religious faith has an immanent value, a value for this life in the here and now, whether or not the objects of this faith, God and the soul,* really exist. This is equivalent to saying that faith has immanent value whether or not the faith is objectively true. I am not saying that that faith has immanent value whether or not the believer really believes in God and the soul. I assume that he really does believe, and shows that he really does believe by living his faith, by 'walking the walk' and and not merely by 'taking the talk.'   My claim is that a believer who really believes derives an important life-enhancing benefit from his sincere belief whether or not the objects of his belief  really exist.

It is important to understand that one who really believes in God and the soul believes that they really exist whether or not he or anyone else believes that they do. His believing purports to target transcendent entities that exist independently of his believing. But note that this purport to target the transcendent is what is whether or not the targets exist.  In other words, from the fact that one really believes that a transcendent God exists, it does not follow that a transcendent God really exists.

Am I saying that faith is a means to the end of subjective happiness? No. The sincere believer does not make himself believe in order to make himself feel good or to comfort himself.  He is not fooling himself so as to comfort himself.  To fool himself, he would have to know or strongly believe that God does not exist and then hide that fact from himself.

The believer believes because of various experiences he has had: he feels (what he describes as) the presence of the Lord on certain occasions; he senses the absoluteness of moral demands and the gap between what he is and what he ought to be; he feels the bite of conscience and cannot bring himself to believe any naturalistic explanation of conscience and its deliverances; he has religious and mystical experiences that seem to tell of an Unseen Order; he takes the beauty, order, and intelligibility of the world to point beyond it to a transcendent Source of this beauty, order, and intelligibility; he feels that life would be meaningless if there were no God, that there would be no ultimate justice; he senses the presence of purely spiritual demonic agents interfering with his attempts to pray and meditate and conform to the demands of morality. 

Or it may be that a sincere religious believer never has any experiences that purport to reveal the reality of God and the soul, and has never considered any of the arguments for God and the soul; he believes because he was brought up to believe by people he admires and respects and trusts.  Even in this case the believer is not making himself believe as a means to the end of feeling good or comfortable or subjectively happy; he believes simply because he has taken on board the beliefs of others he trusts and respects.  I seem to recall Kierkegaard somewhere saying that he believes because his father told him so.  Some imbibe belief with their mother's milk. 

II

Despite these clarifications of my position, it still seems that if von Hildebrand is right, then I am wrong, and vice versa.  He holds that "Faith gives comfort only if it is true." I will take that to mean that faith confers an important life-enhancing benefit only it is objectively true and not merely believed to be truth by a sincere believer.  What I am saying, however, is that faith confers an important life-enhancing benefit to the sincere believer  whether or not  it is objectively true.

Who is right? In all intellectual honesty, it seems to me that I am right. Why should it be necessary that the faith be true for it be life-enhancing, for it to be good for me to believe it? An analogy may help me get my point across.

At age 60 I attempted a marathon. At the starting line I did not know whether I could cover the 26.2 miles within the allotted time (under seven hours). I did not know whether I could pull it off, but I strongly believed that I could, and surely this strong belief, whether true or false, was good for me to believe: it had race-immanent value in that with this belief I performed better than I would have performed without it.  As things turned out, I completed the marathon in six hours.  But suppose I hadn't.  Suppose that my belief in my ability to complete the marathon in the allotted time was false. It would still have been the case that my belief  in completion had race-immanent value.  I would still have been better off with that belief than without it.

Now in the Great Race of Life we compete against our own hebetude, decrepitude, and sinfulness  for the crown of Eternal Life, the Beatific Vision. But here below we cannot know whether we will attain the crown, or even whether it exists, so here below we need faith.  Living by faith we live better than we would have lived without it. We run the Race better, with more enthusiasm, commitment, and resoluteness.  Clearly, or so it seems to me, we reap the benefits of this faith in the here and now whether or not there is anything on the other side of the Great Divide.

So I say that von Hildebrand does not understand the pragmatics of faith. One problem is that he caricatures the pragmatic approach as I showed in the first section.  The other problem is that he is a dogmatist: his doxastic security needs are so strong that he cannot psychologically tolerate the idea that he might be wrong.  He wants objective certainty about ultimates, as all serious philosophers do, but he confuses his subjective certainty, which falls far short of knowledge,  with objective certainty, which knowledge logically requires.

He claims to know things that he cannot possibly know. He writes,

We ought to have faith because by our belief in God we give the response to which He is entitled. We ought to believe in divine Revelation because it is absolute truth. (110)

What von Hildebrand is doing here is simply presupposing the existence of God and the absolute truth of  divine revelation.  If God exists, then of course we ought to have faith in him. And if divine revelation is absolute truth, then we ought to believe in it. But how does von Hildebrand  know that God exists and that revelation is true? He doesn't t know these things, he merely believes them.  He is claiming to know what he cannot know, but can only believe.  

___________________________

*'Soul' in the Platonic sense, not the Aristotelian one according to which the soul is the mere life-principle of the body.

An Exchange Relevant to the Problem of Dirty Hands

From Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons."

• William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
• Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
• William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
• Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

But what if giving evildoers the benefit of law leads to the permanent ascendancy of evil and the destruction of all civilization? You say that can't happen? How do you know that? Because God wouldn't allow it? How do you know that God exists? You don't know that; you believe it.  Belief is not knowledge even if supported by reasons.  Can you prove that the Good must triumph in the end?  No you can't. I myself believe that the Good must triumph is the end.  But this is  matter of faith, not knowledge.

Of course, you might just say: Fiat iustitia, pereat mundus! "Let there be justice though the world perish!" But what would be the good of abstract justice if we were all to perish? The administration of justice via the rule of law in general and laws in particular is for the sake of human flourishing, and not the other way around.  The law exists for us; we don't exist for the law. The same goes for government without which there could be no equitable administration of justice.  Government exists for the benefit of the people; the people don't exist for the benefit of government and those who control it.

Welcome to political aporetics! 

To put the aporia as sharply as possible, the following are individually plausible but mutually inconsistent:

A. Moral reasons for action ought to be dominant: they trump every other reason for action such as 'reasons of state.'

B. Some actions are absolutely morally wrong, intrinsically wrong, morally impermissible always and everywhere, regardless of situation, context, circumstances, consequences.

C. Among absolutely morally wrong actions, there are some that are (non-morally) permissible, and indeed  (non-morally) necessary: they must be done in a situation in which refusing to act would lead to worse consequences such as the destruction of one's nation or culture.

It is easy to see that this triad is inconsistent.  The limbs cannot all be true.  (B) and (C) could both be true if one allowed moral reasons to be trumped by non-moral reasons.  But that is precisely what (A), quite plausibly, rules out.  

The threesome, then, is logically inconsistent. And yet each limb makes a strong claim on our acceptance. To solve the problem one of the limbs must be rejected.  Which one? 

Quotations from Chairman Maher

Christopher Rufo has her number.

The new CEO of NPR, then, is a left-wing ideologue who supports wide-scale censorship and considers the First Amendment an impediment to her campaign to sanitize the world of wrong opinions.

Maher is no aberration. She is part of a rising cohort of affluent, left-wing, female managers who dominate the departments of university administration, human resources, and DEI. They are the matriarchs of the American Longhouse: they value safety over liberty, censorship over debate, and relativism over truth.

Here, Rufo interviews Larry Sanger about NPR CEO Maher. Excerpt:

Sanger: The fact that she is not immediately hounded out of her job—and she won’t be, I’m sure—shows you how profoundly and how quickly the culture of not just the Internet, but of the United States and the West in general, has changed.

The fact that you had to do some research and surface these videos, that they weren’t immediately caught as smoking-gun evidence of how bad things have gotten, shows you that the attitudes that she expresses are what we expect these days.

Poor Maher! She suffers from both TDS and Truth Decay.

Trump in the 'Hood

Amazing video. Historically significant.

On Relevance in Philosophy Education

Substack latest.

Signposts on the Way to the Insane Asylum

• Looting is shopping without money.
• The 2022 riots were peaceful.
• The border is secure.
• Trespassing is insurrection.
• Dissent is hate.
• Free speech is hate speech.
• Barring candidates from the ballot is democratic.
• Abortion is health care.
• 'Migrants' are newcomers.
• The only purpose of guns is to kill people.
• Math is racist.
• There is no 'migrant' crisis.
• Diversity is our strength.
• 'DEI' is the new 'N' word.
• Coercive confiscation of firearms is gun buy-back. 
• Sex of a baby is not biologically inherent but a matter of 'assignment.'
• Race and sex are social constructs.
• To oppose the sexual mutilation of children is 'transphobic.'
• '2A'  is a terrorist marker.
• White supremacy is the greatest threat we face.
• 'Blind review' denigrates the sightless.
• The disabled are 'differently abled.'
• To argue against the moral acceptability of homosexual practices is 'homophobic.'

I am just getting warmed up. But I'm sure you've caught the drift by now. Each of these bullet points can be nailed down with numerous references which I have supplied elsewhere in many a post.

It is now your turn to do something in defense of civilization. 

What is Fascism?

Are MAGA Republicans fascists?

Answer at the top o' the Stack.

The Civil War Movie

Rather than submitting to sensory assault, your time would be better spent quietly preparing in three separate senses I will explain later. I won't be seeing the movie, for reasons given by my Alypius and the Gladiators.

Addendum: Why bother watching a fictional civil war scenario when the first phases of hot civil war are unfolding right before our eyes on the nightly news? We have an advantage over St Augustine: we are able to watch the collapse of civilization on television. The big disadvantage for us is that the collapse may take a nuclear turn.

So what do our pollyannish friends and neighbors do? They piss their lives away gaming, golfing, drinking and dancing, willfully oblivious of danger, feeling no responsibility to preserve the civilization that made it possible for them to live good lives up to this point, and irresponsibly ignoring the obligation to preserve it for future generations.

The worst of this bunch are those who brazenly deny the impending disaster.

Victor Davis Hanson, historian and classicist, can help you understand the gravity of the situation.  Can you pay attention for eight and a half minutes?

The Lucky Pollyanna

The pollyanna runs a risk of early death. One thinks of October 7th and the Israelis willfully oblivious of the Gazans sworn to their extermination. But the lucky pollyanna who happens to live long and well lives a life enhanced by the bliss of ignorance. A lucky outlier.

Related: The Psychology of the Pollyanna and the Political Ponerology of Leftism

Doing Well by Doing Good

A successful urologist I know told me that he and his colleagues want to do well by doing good.  An excellent formulation, but inapplicable to Joe Biden.  He wants to do well whether or not he does good. He wants such  trappings and results of worldly success as power and position, money and property,  even if he must destroy the country to get them. Good old Traitor Joe, violator of sacred vows, brazen liar, serial plagiarist, slanderer of decent people, threat to the peace and stability of the nation and the world.  If you support him, you are as despicable as he is. You might also consider that a vote for him is a vote for Kamala Harris. 

You say you don't like Donald Trump? I don't like him that much either. But politics is a practical pursuit. It is not about perfect versus imperfect but about better versus worse. I invite you to give some thought to the question whether you and your family and the nation and the world will be better off with another term of Trump or another of Biden. I invite you, for your own good, to inform yourself and exercise whatever critical faculties you possess.

On Travel

Travel introduces a salutary perturbation into one's quotidian orbit. It reduces self-satisfied complacency, putting in its place a useful unease.  Useful for what? For a renewed seriousness in pursuit of what finally matters. This is why it is good for the soul.

'Woke' Home Defense

Helpful tips. About three minutes long.

But wait, there's more: a case for pre-natal squatters' rights.

Journalism is Dead!

When Bill O'Reilly said as much years ago I thought he was exaggerating. It is certainly no exaggeration now, if it is lamestream, 'woke'-captured,  Democrat shill outlets such as National Public Radio (NPR) and the Washington Post (WaPo) we are talking about.  Here:

But we can thank Uri Berliner, a senior business editor at NPR, for revealing the main reason for journalism’s dire situation: Americans these days just don’t trust the news.

Berliner’s first-person account of the past near-decade at NPR – from Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign through the present – reveals a litany of reasons for this loss of faith. Berliner argues that NPR’s increasingly leftward tilt, lack of transparency, ideological groupthink and prioritization of diversity of identity and physical appearance above other values have led the organization astray.

If you like NPR programming, as I like some of  it, write them a check!  Just don't demand that they receive taxpayer support.  We are in fiscal crisis, and budgetary cuts must be made.  If such inessentials as NPR, PBS, NEH and NEA cannot be defunded, where will the cuts be made?  

So one good reason to defund NPR is that we cannot afford it.

But even if we could afford it, NPR in its present configuration should not receive Federal support.  And this for the simple reason that it is plainly a propaganda arm of the Left.* If you deny the increasingly leftward tilt of NPR, even unto 'wokery,' then you are delusional and not worth talking to.  So I'll charitably assume that you are sane and admit the bias.  The next question I will put to you is whether you think it is morally right that tax dollars be used to push points of view that half if not most of us in this land find objectionable.  I say that it it is not morally right that you take my money by force and then use it for a purpose that is not only inessential and unconnected to the necessary functions of government, but also violates my beliefs.

So that is my second reason for defunding NPR. 

Perhaps, if NPR were balanced like C-SPAN, it could be tolerated in times of plenty.  But we are not in times of plenty and it is not balanced.

Note that a reasonable liberal could accept my two reasons.  I am not arguing that government must not engage in any projects other than those that are strictly essential such as those connected to the protection of life, liberty, and property (the Lockean triad).  I am arguing that present facts dictate that defunding NPR is something that ought to be done.

As for WAPO, see here for their egregious mis-reporting of the Dexter Reed shooting.  Had Dexter read my Substack entry, What to do if a cop stops you, he might be alive today.

But he is dead, having foolishly, illegally, and immorally brought about his own death, as is journalism!

_________________

*I stand not only for the separation of church and state, but also for the separation of leftism and state.

Oppenheimer and Putin's Suitcases

Anthony G. Flood:

I recently cited evidence that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Father of the Atomic Bomb, was a security risk if ever there was one, yet he got what Albert Einstein could not: security clearance to work on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which the legendary physicist (and leftwing activist and Zionist) had urged on President Roosevelt. As Oppenheimer was a pro-Soviet Communist, I thought it ironic that in 1946 Ayn Rand, who fled the Communist system that had impoverished her family, interviewed him for a stillborn movie project. Neither of them (or anyone else to my knowledge) ever noted that irony.

Oppie’s Red politics was not a youthful, romantic fling from which he was detached only by the imperative of stopping Hitler. Two days ago Diana West, having read my post, wrote to suggest that while Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, the scholarly witnesses that informed my post, established the color of Oppie’s politics, there is evidence that he crossed the line demarcating political activity from disloyalty. I am grateful to her for pointing me toward that evidence, part of which I now pass along to you.

Read it all.

The Trial of the Century?

With O. J. back in the news you know what my latest Substack upload is about.

It's going on 30 years since that circus began with a delightful cast of characters including America's most famous houseguest, Kato Kaelin, Johnny "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit" Cochran, and others I am too lazy to list.  Whatever happened to Marcia Clark?

Jokes about white Broncos persist to this day.  Where were you that fateful day when a white Bronco ruled a freeway of L.A.?  

Know-Nothings and Librarians

Idiocracy is upon us.

Reading Now: Karl Barth, Henri Bouillard, Erich Przywara

'Now' above refers to March 2003. Tempus fugit! This unfinished post has been languishing in storage and now wants to see the light of day. Fiat lux!

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

I'm on a bit of theological jag at present. The updating of my SEP divine simplicity entry has occasioned my review of recent literature on modal collapse arguments against DDS, some of it by theologians. See the final section for the modal collapse arguments.

Henri Bouillard's The Knowledge of God (Herder and Herder, 1968) introduced me to Karl Barth.  Bouillard is a philosopher, Barth a theologian.  Both are in quest of the Absolute but in different ways. But completeness demands a tripartite distinction between philosopher, theologian, and mystic.

Thomas Aquinas, the Great Synthesizer, is all three at different times and in different texts. The natural theology of the praeambula fidei is philosophy, not theology strictly speaking. To argue from the mundus sensibilis to an extra-mundane causa prima is to do natural theology, which is a branch of philosophy.  No use is made by the philosopher qua philosopher of divine revelation. There is no appeal to the supernatural. Recourse is only to (discursive/dianoetic) reason and the deliverances of the senses.  Properly theological topics, on the other hand, among them  Trinity and Incarnation, are knowable only via revelation, which presupposes faith. They are not knowable by philosophical methods. Whether cognitio fidei (knowledge by faith) should be called knowledge is an important but vexing question, especially for those of us who toil in the shadow of the great Descartes. I have something to say about it here in connection with Edith Stein and her first and second 'masters,' the neo-Cartesian Edmund Husserl and Thomas Aquinas, respectively.

A third source of insight into the Absolute is via mysticism which promises direct access to God as opposed to access via discursive operations from the side of the finite subject and/or access via divine communication from God to man via Scripture. As I understand Barth so far in my study of him, he denies that God reveals himself in the created world or via the teaching authority of any church, let alone the church of Rome. On his account we know God only from God. Revelation is confined to Scripture and to God Incarnate, Jesus Christ. So there is no access to God via natural theology nor through direct mystical insight. 

Erich Przywara (1889-1972) somewhere in his stupendous Analogia  Entis (orig. publ. in German in 1962, English tr. by Betz and Hart, Eerdmans 2014) adds a fourth category, that of the theological philosopher. But I have forgotten what exactly he means by 'theological philosopher.'

He who quests for the Absolute may therefore wear one or more of four hats: philosopher, theologian (narrow or proper sense), mystic, or theological philosopher. Might there be other 'hats'? That of the moral reformer? That of the the beauty-seeker?

Question for 'Woke' Punks

Did it occur to you that when you mock nuns, you willy-nilly mock a fair number of lesbians?

The Left's Orwellianism Pictorially Represented

W

My First Substack Humor Upload

Check it out.

I'm as serious as cancer, but not 24/7/365.

Lee's Lunar Lunacy

Another example of a dumb-as-dirt Dem.

No Sheila dear, the Moon is not a planet, but a natural satellite of the Earth, the only one in fact. Its singularity is why, in correct orthography, we write 'the Moon' and not 'the moon.'  Jupiter has a number of moons, whereas the Earth has exactly one. Our moon is therefore properly referred to as 'the Moon.' And as you may have just now noticed, our home planet is properly referred to as 'the Earth,' not 'the earth.'  And our sun, which the distinguished Congresswoman informs us is "a mighty powerful heat," is properly referred to as 'the Sun.' So-called 'journalists' take note. 

Contrary to what Sheila thinks, the Moon is not made up mostly of gases. Nor is it a "complete-rounded circle" only when it is full.  Does she perhaps think that the phases of the Moon are changes intrinsic to the Moon as opposed to changes in the way it appears to us? Does she think that the Moon is a two-dimensional object? Her talk of a circle suggests as much. May I suggest 'sphere' or even better 'spheroid'? Does she perhaps also think that the Moon is the source of its light? Is she aware that moonlight is reflected sunlight?

Please realize that when you vote for Democrats you are voting for people who, as a group, are not only morally inferior to Republicans, but also intellectually inferior as well. I am speaking of the contemporary Democrat party. 

Story here.

Finally, what was the name of that black male pol who, if memory serves,  opined that islands float and can sink?

Political Perceptions

Only a leftard could come up with this  knee-slappingly risible explanation why 'No Labels' didn't stick:

The other problem with the No Labels operation is that there already is a moderate, bipartisanship-minded political faction in the United States. It is called the Democratic Party. For better or for worse, that party continues to be the home of nearly all of the remaining “institutionalists” in U.S. politics, and party leadership has repeatedly, over the past decade, passed up opportunities to engage in retaliatory procedural maneuvering in response to GOP constitutional hardball, preferring instead to stand up for a long-vanished consensus politics that has virtually no support on the other side of the aisle.

President Joe Biden not only leads that institutionalist party, but he is also its most vocal and successful backer of bipartisanship as a governing and political philosophy.

Herbert Aptheker

To understand the Left and its depredations, you must study communism. Herbert Aptheker was a major player in the CPUSA. Our friend Tony Flood, once a card-carrying member of the CPUSA, and an assistant to Aptheker, points us to a Wikipedia piece on the man which will provide some background to Aptheker and his work. 

Tony would have us note that he, or rather his name, leads off the Further References:

• Anthony Flood, "The History of Herbert Aptheker", Opera Historica, 22(1), 2021, 127–144 | doi:10.32725/oph.2021.007
• Anthony Flood, Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness (Independently published on Amazon, 2019).
• Anthony Flood, "C. L. R. James: Herbert Aptheker's Invisible Man", The C. L. R. James Journal, vol. 19, nos. 1 & 2 (Fall 2013), pp. 276–297.

Trump's Dobbs Strategy

I'd say it's the right one.  You are free to differ.

Related:

Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained

and

Slavery, Abortion, and 'Skin in the Game'

 

Sabotage Anyone?

Should a state university add "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" to its curriculum?

This is an undoubtedly interesting time to be alive. How could anyone be bored?

Should I rename my Academia category, Academentia?

Demented POTUS, demented polity. Madness spreads and the fish stinks from the head.

Update (3:39 pm): More academentia at UCLA medical school. Unbelievable, but you'd better believe it.

Heliophysics and Common Ground

The solar eclipse brought us all together for one day. Well, we do share common ground when, like Thales, our heads are craned upwards in wonder. That common ground is the home planet, spaceship Earth, upon which we stand, bitterly disagree, and slaughter one another when not distracted by an unusual celestial phenomenon.  Clearly, common ground of the terrestrial sort is not enough: we also need ideological common ground to make the world less of an abattoir.

This is something the open-borders types don't want to understand. One of their fundamental errors is to imagine that all-inclusive diversity is compatible with social harmony.   

It is not that diversity is not a value; it plainly is.  Many types of diversity are good. One thinks of culinary diversity, musical diversity, artistic diversity generally. Biodiversity is good, and so is a diversity of opinions, especially insofar as such diversity makes possible a robustly competitive marketplace of ideas wherein the best rise to the top. A diversity of testable hypotheses is conducive to scientific progress. And so on.

But no reasonable person values diversity as such. A maximally diverse neighborhood would include pimps, whores, nuns, drug addicts, Montessori schools cheek-by-jowl with tattoo parlors and liquor stores, Hamas terrorists, outlaw bikers, priests both pedophile and pure, Sufi mystics, bank clerks, insurance salesmen, people who care for their property, people who are big on deferred maintenance . . . .

You get the point. Only some sorts of diversity are valuable. 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 claim on our respect.

For example, one may value a district which is home to a diversity of restaurants (Turkish, Thai, French. . .), but only if they are all good restaurants. A diversity which includes ptomaine joints, greasy spoons, and high-end establishments is not the sort of diversity one values. Diversity of quality is not a value.  The same goes for diversity of moral decency, diversity of criminality, and so on. Or one may value a philosophy department in which a diversity of courses is on offer, but not one in which the diversity extends to the competence levels of the instructors or the preparedness levels of the students. One wants excellent instruction on a diversity of topics – but that is just to say that the value of diversity must be kept in check by the competing value of unity: the instructors ought not be diverse in respect of their excellence.

Diversity unchecked by the competing value of unity leads to divisiveness. For this reason, one ought not ‘celebrate diversity’ unless on is also willing to ‘celebrate unity.’ And this is precisely what too many leftists and 'woke' folk cannot, or will not, comprehend. They unreasonably emphasize diversity at the expense of unity. 

Liberty and security form another pair of competing values. The only liberty worth wanting is one that can be exercised in a secure environment. The liberty to quit my domicile at any time night or day is worth little or nothing if I am assaulted the minute I step into the street.  On the other hand, the only security worth wanting is one that allows the exercise of liberty. The security of totalitarian lock-down is not a value.

So what is to be done? Job One for all of you is to do your bit to make sure that Joe Biden is sent packing. 

It is not that diversity is not a value; it plainly is.  Many types of diversity are good. One thinks of culinary diversity, musical diversity, artistic diversity generally. Biodiversity is good, and so is a diversity of opinions, especially insofar as such diversity makes possible a robustly competitive marketplace of ideas wherein the best rise to the top. A diversity of testable hypotheses is conducive to scientific progress. And so on.

But no reasonable person values diversity as such. A maximally diverse neighborhood would include pimps, whores, nuns, drug addicts, Montessori schools cheek-by-jowl with tattoo parlors and liquor stores, Hamas terrorists, outlaw bikers, priests both pedophile and pure, Sufi mystics, bank clerks, insurance salesmen, people who care for their property, people who are big on deferred maintenance . . . .

You get the point. Only some sorts of diversity are valuable. 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 claim on our respect.

For example, one may value a district which is home to a diversity of restaurants (Turkish, Thai, French. . .), but only if they are all good restaurants. A diversity which includes ptomaine joints, greasy spoons, and high-end establishments is not the sort of diversity one values. Diversity of quality is not a value.  The same goes for diversity of moral decency, diversity of criminality, and so on. Or one may value a philosophy department in which a diversity of courses is on offer, but not one in which the diversity extends to the competence levels of the instructors or the preparedness levels of the students. One wants excellent instruction on a diversity of topics – but that is just to say that the value of diversity must be kept in check by the competing value of unity: the instructors ought not be diverse in respect of their excellence.

Diversity unchecked by the competing value of unity leads to divisiveness. For this reason, one ought not ‘celebrate diversity’ unless on is also willing to ‘celebrate unity.’ And this is precisely what too many leftists and 'woke' folk cannot, or will not, comprehend. They unreasonably emphasize diversity at the expense of unity. 

Liberty and security form another pair of competing values. The only liberty worth wanting is one that can be exercised in a secure environment. The liberty to quit my domicile at any time night or day is worth little or nothing if I am assaulted the minute I step into the street.  On the other hand, the only security worth wanting is one that allows the exercise of liberty. The security of totalitarian lock-down is not a value.

So what is to be done? Job One for all of you is to do your bit to make sure that Joe Biden is sent packing. 

Biden Chases 'Death to America' Vote

David Harsanyi:

Biden, it should be noted, is a vacuous political zombie who has never met a position he hasn’t dropped for a vote. Today, he is surrounded by Obama-era advisers and Hamas sympathizers . . . who have long wanted the U.S. to be aligned with mullahs of Iran, as a counterbalance to colonialist Western capitalists of Israel. And now that Democrats like Chuck Schumer have sold out the Jews to the vultures for a few votes in Dearborn, nothing holds back progressive Democrats from normalizing the antisemitism that already infects the hard left.  

That's the truth. Just so you know who you are supporting if you support Biden. You may not like Trump, but if it comes down to Trump versus Biden, you must support the former out of self-interest if for no other reason.

Edmund Husserl

A Substack birthday tribute.

'Progressive' and 'Conservative'

In their contemporary usages these terms are mainly misnomers.

If progress is change for the good, there is little progressive about contemporary 'progressives.' They are more accurately referred to as regressives. Or do you think that allowing biological males to compete in women's sporting events is a change for the good? It is obviously not, for reasons you will be able to discern without my help.  That is just one example among many.

As for so-called 'conservatives,' what do they ever succeed in conserving? These 'conservatives' are good at conserving only one thing: their own perquisites, privileges, pelf, and position. The things 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 as embodied in monuments and statues to great men, 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 the people don't push back pronto. 

But it may be too late for effective resistance, sunk as we Americans are in the warm bath of our own decadence.  We shall see.

Meanwhile, don't get too excited about all this. This world's a vanishing quantity and we with it.  The wise live for something that transcends it, but without dogmatism and doctrinal narrowness.

Richard Dawkins on Christianity and Islam

Here (HT: Catacomb Joe):

Famed atheist and self-styled intellectual Richard Dawkins shared in a recent interview that he was “horrified” to find that Oxford Street in London had lit up its public signs and displays to celebrate the Muslim fasting period called Ramadan, just days before Easter Sunday. “I have to choose my words carefully: If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I’d choose Christianity every single time,” Dawkins declared, expressing concern over the thousands of Muslim mosques being constructed across the U.K. He added, “It seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion, in a way that I think Islam is not.”

I hope to say more about this later. Now I have to prepare for a meeting with Brian the Calvinist.  First lunch and casual conversation about the events of the day and the latest outrages of the depredatory Left, then intense philosophical conversation about Jesus and the Powers, a stimulating albeit flawed book, and finally  two or so hours of battling over the 64 squares. 

That's the kind of socializing I like. Otherwise, solitude rules. 

'Insurrection' as 'Fedsurrection' and the 'Vibe Shift'

The Jan 6 narrative crumbles as Roger Kimball reports in his Navigating the Vibe Shift of a Cultural Reckoning.

But the 'vibe shift' in the direction of optimism faces stiff resistance. And so our man ends on a less-than-optimistic note:

I, too, discern cracks in the Narrative. I seem to see the Overton Window being forced open here and there.  But I also sense an aroma of panic among the dispensers and enforcers of the Narrative. You can feel it in the arrogant incredulousness of Nicolle Wallace attempting to digest the novel idea that maybe, just possibly, her snotty but ill-informed idea of what happened on January 6, 2021, is completely wrong.

You also see it in the minatory actions of the Deep State and its increasingly blatant resort to intimidation and coercion.  We might ask former Trump adviser Peter Navarro about that, but he is now moldering in jail, yet another political prisoner of the regime.  His tort? Ignoring a Congressional subpoena—the same thing that Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric “wingman” Holder did, but of course he belongs to a protected class, so nothing was done to him.

My point is this: as evidence of a “vibe shift” grows more numerous and more substantive, so too will the vibe-stiffening reaction among the guardians of the status quo.

The melancholy datum to bear in mind is that those guardians control virtually all of the levers of power in our society, beginning with the regime’s police power and wending its way down to the soft but ingratiating power of the media, the ditto-head cultural establishment, and practically the entire educational apparat.

What this means is that for any serious “vibe shift” to happen, something like cultural warfare, if not the other kind, is going to have to unfold.  I do not expect the coming months to be tranquil or pleasant. I do think they will tell us whether we get to resuscitate our constitutional republic or whether we will continue the long and rebarbative slide into woke socialist conformity.

Theme music: Good Vibrations

A Cure for Infatuation

One of the best is marriage.  

Substack latest.

Democracy and Toleration

Jesus and the Powers (N. T. Wright & Michael F. Bird, Zondervan, 2024):

Democracies are compelled to tolerate and enfranchise [give the vote to] people who stand in resolute opposition to the very idea of democracy itself. (164)

This sentence implies that a democracy is a system of government in which the will of the majority decides every question.  If so, then in such a system the majority may democratically decide that their system of government cease being a democracy and become, say, a theocracy.  If so, a democracy may democratically decide to commit political suicide. Democracy taken full strength cancels itself, or al least allows the possibility of self-cancellation. One reasonable inference is that it must not be taken full-strength: it needs support from an extra-democratic source.

Now the authors aim to make a case of "liberal democracy." (p. xvi)  But no democracy worth wanting could have the self-destructive feature I have exposed in the preceding paragraph. A democracy worth wanting must rest on principles that are not up for democratic grabs. I mean such principles as are enshrined in our founding documents: that all men are created equal, that they have unalienable rights, and so on.  For example, the rights  to life, liberty, property, and free speech. These rights do not derive from any collective human decision: they are not up for democratic grabs.  The same goes for what I will call political meta-principles such as the rule of law. The rule of law is not itself a law, but a principle that governs the application of laws.  It the normative principle that no man is above the law, that all are subject to the same laws, and that everyone is to be treated equally under the law.  ABA definition: " no one is above the law, everyone is treated equally under the law, everyone is held accountable to the same laws, there are clear and fair processes for enforcing laws, there is an independent judiciary, and human rights are guaranteed for all."  If I understand due process, it is part and parcel of the rule of law: the latter subsumes the former. It should bother you that prominent leftists have questioned due process.

And so I say: no democracy worth wanting can tolerate those who would work to undermine the principles upon which a democracy worth wanting must rest. This is why I wrote two days ago:

Any sane person who does not intend the destruction of our [democratic, constitutionally-based] republic should be able to see that the values of Sharia [Islamic law] are incompatible with American values, and that no Muslims should be allowed to immigrate who are unwilling to accept and honor our values [and Anglo-American system of law, and renounce Islamic law].

The authors, apparently, disagree: 

We need a political framework that exhibits . . . a willingness to endure strange and even offensive ways of life. [. . .] Victory in liberal democracy is not vanquishing our opponents, but winning their respect, living in peace with them, and affirming their right to their opinion. That means LGBTQ+ people have the right to be themselves, Muslims can be Muslims, Christians can be Christians, Socialists can be Socialists, Greenies can be Greenies. (172)

If so, then Communists can be Communists and must be tolerated. But surely toleration, the touchstone of classical liberalism, has limits. Communism, which aims at the overthrow of the American system of government, cannot be tolerated. Is that not obvious? But then neither can Sharia-based Islam. For both Communism and Islam are antithetical to our founding principles.

At the very end of Article VI of the Constitution, we read:

. . . no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

But of course Communism is not a religion in any reasonable sense of the term as I have argued elsewhere. What about Islam? Isn't it a religion?   Some say it is a Christian heresy (Chesterton). Others say it is a political ideology masquerading as a religion. I say it is a hybrid ideology: both a religion and a political ideology.  I would argue that, since its political commitments are antithetical to American principles, values, and presuppositions, Islam does not count as a religion for the purposes of the application of Article VI, paragraph 3. 

But it will take another 9/11-type event to convince most people of this. Most people are impervious to reasoning such as I am engaging in here; it strikes these sense-enslaved denizens of Plato's Cave as 'abstract' and 'unreal.' But when they are smashed in the face, they will begin to get the point, as they expire in the rubble.

That event is coming. 

Amendments or Addenda?

The Bill of Rights. Amendments or additions? A reasonable question and a good distinction.  Addenda. I owe the point and the distinction to James Soriano. It's obvious when you think about it, but the question hadn't occurred to me.

And always give credit where credit us due, else you'll end up like the Big Guy, a terminally unrepentant serial plagiarist and an 'inspiration' to such other 'presidents' as Claudine Gay.

Distinctions are the lifeblood of thought. 

Race and Reportage

A trenchant addendum to a 14 March post.

False Abstraction

Surely one of the idiocies of the age is the oft-repeated, "Diversity is our strength." Anyone who repeats this bit of thoughtless group-speak wears his folly like a scarlet letter.  I'll leave it to the reader to work out why the falsehood is false and how it  illustrates the fallacy of false abstraction. Why do I have to do all the work?

But a soupçon of  sanity is beginning to glimmer in the heads of  some of the original progenitors of  DEI nonsense.  See here.