Maverick Philosopher

Does Classical Liberalism Destroy Itself?

Joe Odegaard sends us to The Orthosphere where we find Classical Liberalism Destroys Itself. The opening paragraph is stylistically brilliant, especially the concluding sentence, and I agree with the paragraph content-wise, though not with the quotation from Dreher:

“Classical liberalism detached from the Christian faith is what got us here.” 

Rod Dreher, “David French: Not Woke Enough For The Times?”  The American Conservative (Feb. 16, 2023)

The above is from a long thumb-sucker in which Dreher sadly ponders the performative conservatism of David French.  Performative conservatism means striking conservative poses rather than striking blows that actually conserve.  Performative conservatives have plenty of principles but precious few wins.  Dreher is himself what Sam Francis called a “beautiful loser,” which is to say a conservative pundit who is admired for his prose, his erudition, his broadmindedness, and his many, many friends on the left, but who is not and cannot be admired for success.  French and Dreher are the spiritual sons of George Will, a belletristic bimbo and court clown who went down fighting by the Queensbury Rules.

As I said, brilliant writing and a delightful skewering of that yap-and-scribble lap dog of the Left, George Will, of the Beltway bow-tie brigade. There is only one mistake: the rules are Queensberry, not Queensbury. My pedantry having now been satisfied, I proceed to the substantive issues.  My disagreement begins with the second paragraph:

Classical liberalism is detached from Christian faith because classical liberalism detached Christian faith from public life. It did this intentionally and by design. Does Dreher really not understand that the first task of classical liberalism was to liberate men and women from classical Christianity. Some emancipated Christians went straight to atheism while others chose a couple of generations of decompression in the halfway house of liberal Christianity. Many worked as thoughtful Christian conservative columnists who believe that the United States was not really a Christian country until passage of the Fourteenth, perhaps Nineteenth, amendment.

The bias of the author surfaces with "the first task of classical liberalism was to liberate men and women from classical Christianity." Not so. The task was to separate church and state, not to "liberate" men and women from "classical" Christianity. What does "liberate" mean here? And what is "classical" Christianity? Roman Catholicism? Some form of Protestantism? The author is attributing nefarious motives to the Founders who were classical liberals and men of the Enlightenment.  A government that is neutral on such theological questions as the divinity of Jesus Christ and the tri-unity of God and that allows for freedom of religion and the freedom to practice no religion is not inimical to Christianity but tolerant of different forms of Christianity as well as tolerant of other religions and of those who practice no religion. 

There may be some truth in Dreher’s proposition that classical liberalism only works so long as the United States contains a great many Christians. But that is just additional evidence that classical liberalism destroys itself. It is a simple and obvious historical fact that Christians fare no better under classical liberalism than they fared under the Roman Emperor Nero. The disappearance of Christians under the former is not so swift and sanguinary as under the latter, but it is equally certain.

The "obvious fact" is neither obvious nor a fact. Would the author prefer to be a practicing Christian under Nero or under Biden? Christians obviously fare better now under Biden and those who pull the puppet's strings than they did under Nero.  And the talk of "equal certainty" is a wild exaggeration. Undoubtedly, Christianity is presently under assault. That is an obvious fact.  But there is no necessity that Christianity succumb. There is no inevitability at work here.

More importantly, there is nothing in the nature of classical liberalism that necessitates that Christians be forced into latter-day catacombs.  After all, the touchstone of classical liberalism is toleration. Toleration is part of the very essence of classical liberalism. That toleration extends to Jews, Christians, and even Muslims if the latter renounce Sharia (Islamic law), which is incompatible with the principles and values of classical liberalism. Toleration has limits.  Perhaps the thought of people like the author is that if you tolerate many different views, then you must tolerate all, including the view that Christianity must be destroyed. But the inference from Many to All is a non sequitur. Logically viewed, all slippery slope arguments are invalid.   If we tolerate the consumption of alcoholic beverages, must we also tolerate drunk driving? Obviously not.  To tolerate drinking is not to tolerate drunkenness, let alone drunk driving. To tolerate drinking by adults is not to tolerate drinking by children. To tolerate private inebriation is not to tolerate public inebriation. And so on.  A government that tolerates sodomy in private between consenting adults can also tolerate the existence of private schools in which it is taught that sodomy is a mortal sin.  Why not?

Besides the Many to All fallacy, there is also the fallacy called post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this.) From the fact that classically liberal government has been followed temporally by the decadence and insanity all around us (wide open national borders, celebration of worthless individuals, destruction of monuments to great men, the institutionally-mandated DEI agenda, et cetera ad nauseam) it does not follow logically that the first is the cause of the second.

Dreher admits as much when he writes

“I cannot imagine a form of government and a social compact that most of us can consent to, that upholds classical liberal standards without a broadly shared religion..”

Nor can I.  I cannot imagine that form of government and social compact because classical liberal standards necessarily destroy a broadly shared religion.  Classical liberalism destroys a broadly shared religion because it removes all civil disabilities from apostates and infidels.  The natural result is that there are more of both and the broadly shared religion disappears.

I disagree with Dreher. We don't need a broadly shared religion; what we need is a minimal conception of the common good to which most of us can consent, whether we are Christians, Jews, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, etc.  Of course, the commonality of a broadly shared religion freely subscribed to by its adherents would greatly enhance comity.  Imagine the social harmony and social cohesion we would all enjoy if each of us, sincerely, and without coercion, subscribed to and lived by the Baltimore Catechism!  But that is hopelessly utopian. Our Protestant brethren would surely raise a stink to high heaven.

I even more strongly disagree with the author. We are being told that classical liberalism "necessarily destroys a broadly shared religion because it removes all civil disabilities [liabilities?] from apostates and infidels." First of all, where does this necessity come from? There is no necessity or inevitability at work here.  That's the slippery-slope trope once more. And again, to tolerate broadly shared religions is not to destroy them.  And what exactly is the author proposing? A politically totalitarian theocracy? What  then  would he do with the "apostates" and "infidels"?   What penalties would he exact? Would he support a throne-and-altar form of 'woke cancellation'? 

To mask the disappearance of the broadly shared religion, our court clowns and progressive propagandists have invented preposterous pseudo-religions like Judeo-Christianity, or now “People of Faith.”  What this shows is that our broadly shared religion is that there shall be no broadly shared religion—classical liberalism, in short.

I agree that there is no such specific religion as Judeo-Christianity, but by that reasoning there is no such specific religion as Christianity either given the manifold sects and doctrinal divergences. My friend Dale Tuggy, noted philosopher of religion, is a unitarian, a denier of the divinity of Christ, and someone who thinks (gasp!) that Platonism has nothing to contribute to Christianity. And he has said bad things about Trump in my presence. But he is probably a better Christian than me in some ways.

And surely it is a slovenly misuse of 'religion' to refer to classical liberalism as a religion. Call it an ersatz religion if you like, but note that an ersatz X is precisely not an X. A salt substitute such as potassium chloride is not table salt (sodium chloride).

The irony is that Dreher knows this and says as much when he writes about Christianity and not politics.  Christianity cannot survive as a broadly shared religion if it does not possess a political community in which apostasy comes at a price, and from which infidels are rigorously excluded.  Classical liberalism forbids both of these necessary measures, and this is why Christianity and classical liberalism both are doomed.

This is doubly mistaken. Christianity can easily survive as a broadly shared religion under a limited, constitutionally-based government whose provisions secure, inter alia, religious liberty. No politically totalitarian theocracy is need to assure Christianity's survival.  Toleration and limited government suffice. Of course, we have neither now. So what we have to do is get back to American conservatism which includes a sizable admixture of classical liberalism. I understand what animates those on the Reactionary Right, just as I understand what inspires those on the Alternative Right who, unlike the Orthospherians, think that Christianity is the problem, it having weakened us and made us unfit for living in this world, the only one (they think) there is. But both of these right turns lead to dead ends. There will be no return to throne-and-altar conservatism.  

Finally, neither Christianity nor classical liberalism are doomed. Again the inevitability 'argument' which is akin to the slippery-slope trope, and the fallacies of Many to All, and post hoc ergo propter hoc.   That being said, things in the near-term look bad indeed, and I am none too sanguine about turning things around and returning to America as she was founded to be.

Down with Tobacco, Up with Marijuana

Why down with the first (I allude to the menthol cigarette ban) and up with the second?  Why the differential treatment and the misplaced moral enthusiasm? The locoweed I smoked with band members in the late '60s was tame stuff, poor in tetrahydrocannabinol as compared to the potent THC-rich product on the market today.  Since then, cigarettes have been wussified what with the addition of filters and lower nicotine levels.   

So why the differential treatment? The short answer is that it is not in the interest of a police state to promote alertness and attention, which is what nicotine does, while it is in such a state's interest to promote dopiness and lethargy and escapism and every manner of vice.  

It is the tried-and-true panem et circenses principle. Keep the masses fat and stupid, doped up on hooch and weed, distracted by mass sporting events such as the Stupor Bowl and pornography, expectant of regular initiative-inimical handouts and 'freebies,' and they will be easy to control. 

Sate the peoples' blood-lust with HollyWeird brutality and gun violence while at the same time stripping law-abiding citizens of their Second Amendment rights.   Alec Baldwin easily serves as poster-clown for this sort of thing: he make big bucks in movies that celebrate violence while knowing nothing himself about firearms and their safe handling. The nimrod is on record as opposing the National Rifle Association, an outfit that promotes gun safety and defends constitutionally-protected (not constitutionally-conferred) natural rights.  Baldwin is a contemptible fool whose willful self-enstupidation resulted in a young woman's death. He has been brought up on charges of involuntary manslaughter, which sounds just right to me. (It's a stronger charge than negligent homicide.) 

We saw the same panem-et-circenses pattern with the COVID-19 lockdown. The churches were targeted for closure while the liquor stores stayed open. Police states brook no critique or competition from organized religion, but a liquored-up citizenry is kept distracted and manipulable.

Similarly with Biden's wide-open border policy. It is not just to flood the nation with 'undocumented Democrats' so as to insure in perpetuity the hegemony of what is now a hard-Left party, but also to allow in as much fentanyl as possible to poison and kill off the native population, and in particular the poor white trash of Appalachia and elsewhere in fly-over country, the people Hillary spoke of as deplorables and Obama as clingers to guns and Bibles.

A government worth having promotes virtue in the people and in particular the virtues of self-reliance and self-control. A totalitarian state, however, works best by promoting vice. A reader sent me to this perceptive article portions of which I will now share:

Remember that the “government,” as I describe it, is much more than just the state. It includes schools, banks, and corporations, collaborating with the state to govern a population. This need not be a conspiracy — although it often is — it can simply occur because of a shared set of objectives and priorities. For the government to cooperate correctly with itself, it needs maximal data and predictability in the population.

That’s why modern governments exert an inverted form of pastoral power to promote vice. Greed, lust, and vainglory are very predictable: if you know that every merchant will do anything to maximize profit, then you can predict their trading patterns with precision. The “rational actor,” the utilitarian automaton, and the pleasure-maximizer are the ideal constituents of the modern population. This means we can expand Dr. E. Michael Jones’ well-known dictum that “sexual liberation is political control”⁴ by saying: manipulation of any vice is political control.

This is why the government is promoting Impossible burgers, even though the company loses money: they want to centralize all protein production. Impossible is a tool to nudge the population’s behavior through a desire for “meatiness” in food. The government seeks to steer the rudder of our vices until all protein comes from patented software and gene edits. They won’t even have to pass a law.

To summarize and expand upon three of the main points made in the above quotation:

1) The government is not just the State but the latter together with all its adjuncts and extensions including Big Tech and Big Pharma. But 'adjunct' might not be the best word given the regulatory capture of the former by the latter.

2) If the interests of different groups align and they move in the same direction, this need not be due to any  conspiracy among the groups. It follows that anyone who alleges a commonality of direction, towards increasing wokeness, say, is not automatically a conspiracy theorist.

3) ". . . modern governments exert an inverted form of pastoral power to promote vice." A genuine insight beautifully expressed.  I hope you won't take it amiss if I nominate that good Catholic, Joe Biden, for the annual Pastor of Vice award.

You may recall that in 2016, Joey B. received the University of  Notre Dame's Laetare Medal. Read this for a good laugh:

“We live in a toxic political environment where poisonous invective and partisan gamesmanship pass for political leadership,” said Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., Notre Dame’s president. “Public confidence in government is at historic lows, and cynicism is high. It is a good time to remind ourselves what lives dedicated to genuine public service in politics look like. We find it in the lives of Vice President Biden and Speaker Boehner.

Might we call this the 'regulatory capture' of a once-great university by the WokeState and its puppets and pimps? (Or is that going too far?)  The (so-called) Catholic universities are the most corrupt of all, for they have fallen the farthest. They are in dire need of defunding by sane and reasonable alumni. Not a dime for those who support DEI.

The churches, the RCC in particular, the universities, the once-great ones especially, and the Fourth Estate should serve as checks on the State and its omnivorous appetite for power and control.  They should function as bulwarks against and critics of the government and its metastasizing octopus of grasping and sucking agencies and agents.

The God Question and the Christian Proposition

A conversation between Alain Fikielkraut and Pierre Manent.  Very French and very flabby, but here is an excerpt that I approve of (emphasis added):

P.M. What is the nature of Islam’s challenge for us? And who is this “we” being challenged? The challenge lies in the fact that what is happening is that Islam is exerting considerable pressure on Europe, which should not have happened according to the grand progressive narrative elaborated since the eighteenth century—this philosophy of history, according to which humanity, under the leadership of the European avant-garde, was supposed to emancipate itself irresistibly from religious claims, dogma, and doctrine. The vitality that Islam as a whole has maintained, or rather reinforced, goes against a historical perspective that the weakening or “secularization” of Christianity seemed, to many, to validate. Islam is, in any case, the religion that refuses to come to an end and that affirms itself in ways that are manifestly public and triumphalist, casting doubt at least on the grand narrative of secularization. This challenges the consciousness upon which the self-confidence of modern Europe once rested.

Progressivism will not reconsider its approach to the religious question. What, then, does it do? On the one hand, it radically modifies its definition of progress in order to make Islam a part of the grand narrative. Europe no longer represents progress as the framework for the coming forth of a new association of humanity, of an industrial or socialist society, as August Comte or Karl Marx thought; on the contrary, it now represents progress because it has totally renounced self-affirmation and has reinvented itself as unlimited openness to the other—even when this other goes as directly as possible against our principles, particularly those concerning the equality of men and women. Since we now measure the quality of our progressivism by our disposition to welcome Islam unconditionally, Islam obliges us by confirming our grand narrative rather than refuting it. But since it is necessary all the same to take account of the fact that Muslim customs conflict with some of our essential principles, we decree with confidence (in a complementary strategic move) that secularism will take care of the problem by requiring Muslims to remove at least the visible signs of the subordination of women. While the first move boasts of its acceptance of Muslims as they are, the second promises that secularism will make them what they ought to be. Thus is removed all limitation on the welcoming of Islam, whether in the name of its present difference or in the name of its future similarity. Of course, this similarity will be slow in coming; progressivism lives by waiting.

MavPhil 'intervention': European progressivism is so progressive that it transmogrifies into ethno-masochism and cultural suicide. The progressivity of this progressivism is that of  a progressive disease. With the exception of Hungary, Europe is decadent-unto-death, and there is no decadent like a French decadent. (Am I being fair, Vito?) Of course, we over here are decadent as hell as well, but not as decadent, since about half of our population is willing to punch back against ethno-masochistic wokery, 'critical' race-delusionality, reality-denying social constructivism, the celebration of grotesquerie, the canonization of worthless individuals, the destruction of monuments to the great and noble, the destruction of the family, the moral corruption of children, the excusing of brazen mendacity at the highest levels of government, and all the rest of the depredations of cultural Marxism.

As for the "complementary strategic move," good luck with that! Do you Frenchies have the WILL to defend your superior culture against that of the Muslim invaders? Will European secularism "take care of" Muslim barbarism? Maybe. But addiction to la dolce vita is vitiating, weakening in plain English, and you Europeans may end up in dhimmitude. (My use of the Italian phrase may be inappropriate given the current 'stiffening' in my ancestral country, powered by a fiery Italian female.)

The rest of the discussion is pretty good too.

Le Figaro: The Catholic and Republican frameworks that hold together French society have become dislocated, as Jerome Fourquet explains at the beginning of his work L’Archipel francais. And so, we seek alternative religions. The philosopher Jean-Francois Braunstein recently published La religion woke. Alain Finkielkraut, what do you make of the idea of looking at wokeism as a religion?

A.F. I am not comfortable with this metaphorical use of the term religion. I am not convinced by the concept of secular religions. The promise of a radiant future is not religious. In his book, Pierre Manent sets up a very illuminating debate between Pascal and Rousseau. Original sin occupies a central place in Pascal’s thought. Manent writes: “The claim to overcome human injustice by ourselves, the injustice in which we are born and in which we will live as long as God has not delivered us, is the beginning and indeed the height of our injustice.” Rousseau says the opposite; he excludes the hypothesis of original sin: “I have shown that all the vices imputed to the human heart are not natural to it; I have stated the manner in which they are born. I have followed their genealogy, so to speak, and I have shown how through the continuous deterioration of their original goodness, men finally become what they are.”

Rousseau replaces original sin by the original crime: property, inequality. Those we call the oppressors are the successors of this crime. For Rousseau, politics must take responsibility for the whole of reality, and its final purpose becomes the elimination of evil. This project can take no other form than the elimination of the wicked; this is what the totalitarian experience teaches us. This is why we see the unexpected return of a meditation on original sin in late nineteenth-century thought. We human beings do not have the strength to deliver ourselves from sin.

Now, with wokeism, we return to the original crime, as if totalitarianism had never happened. With wokeism, evil has an address: evil is the male, white heterosexual over 50. Evil must be eliminated at all costs. Thus, cancel culture arises and spreads.

P.M. The new ideology no longer sees in human bonds the expression and fulfillment of human nature, but what threatens freedom and injures the rights of the individual. The new progressive finds his way in society as in a suspect country. The sole common cause is the protection of nature—but protection against whom? Against human beings, who stain or destroy nature, in one way or another. Political ecology introduces a principle of distrust or of limitless enmity between human beings and with respect to humanity as such. The desire for an earth without people turns humanity against itself and thus feeds the project of effacing what is special about humanity, of making human beings animals like the others, and so, in the end, inoffensive. Thus, at the moment when we claim to base all collective order on the sole principle of human rights, we wish to remove from humanity all that is distinctive by promulgating the rights of animals, plants, and rocks against humanity. Those who speak on behalf of species incapable of speaking need fear no refutation. All of nature provides them with an inexhaustible supply of motives in their accusations against other human beings.

As I have said, contemporary progressivism would have us admit that our species has no real or legitimate privilege over other species, which ultimately have as many rights as we do. And yet there is one point concerning which progressivism absolutely refuses to consider us as animals like the others: it rejects the idea that our lives should be organized according to the difference between the sexes, the natural polarity between males and females. How can we be animals like the others if the human order must construct itself on the basis of the negation of this natural difference that we have in common with animals? In this way, contemporary ideology succeeds in combining a radical contestation of the human difference with a radical contestation of the animal part of our natures. We have only to open the Bible to the book of Genesis to recover a bit of common sense.

 

Does the Demonic Play a Role in the Politics of the Day?

This just in from Vito Caiati:

Your thought provoking post An Oligarchic Pathocracy and in particular the twenty characteristics of this collective psychological derangement, each of which is an absolute inversion of the natural, the good, and the rational, leads me to consider whether potent demonic (Satanic) forces are at work here and now, either directly or through possessed human agents, forces whose presence is unnoticed, since it falls beyond the scope of the established explanatory frameworks of the social sciences. Although such an account may seem farfetched, I find that I must at least entertain the possibility of its validity, given evilness of the political and social destruction and the moral and cultural darkness propagated by the pathocratic Left:  Evil is instantiated in everything it touches.  Does this seem too farfetched to you?

Too farfetched? Not so farfetched as to be beneath consideration. Of course, proper method requires that we search first for naturalistic explanations.  This methodological principle is accepted not only by naturalists, who will omit the word 'first' in my formulation, but also by those who hold that certain phenomena are explainable only by supernatural agency.  (See for example the criteriology set forth by the great Spanish mystic Theresa of Avila in her Interior Castle for the assessment of the veridicality of certain mystical states, and also the procedures of the Church of Rome for the evaluation of putative miracles of different kinds, the Marian apparitions, stigmata, Therese Neumann, Padre Pio, et al. , and so on.) 

A committed naturalist will of course never accept any supernatural explanation of any occurrence however unusual and apparently inexplicable. He will either proffer a naturalistic explanation or, in the absence of a convincing one, state that there must be one whether or not we ever find it.  The italicized phrase signals the naturalist's a priori and presuppositional commitment to naturalism, to the metaphysical scheme according to which reality is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents. The naturalist 'knows' a priori and thus in advance of any particular investigation into any putative apparition, etc., that nothing could possibly be evidence of supernatural agency.  Nothing will be allowed by the naturalist to count as evidence against his naturalism.  To misuse, as in common parlance, the word 'theological,' there s something 'theological' about the naturalist's naturalism and his scientism. (Scientism is the epistemology of naturalism.)

Consider the case of the Russian monk, Rasputin. He was a hard man to kill, so hard to kill that some will surmise that he was under demonic protection. But there are naturalistic explanations of his toughness that are implausible, perhaps, but not impossible.  Adolf Hitler was another man who proved hard to kill until he decided to do the job himself.  I myself am open to the possibility that he 'enjoyed' demonic protection, but the evidence of its actuality is far from compelling.

Can we definitively rule out demonic interference in human affairs and thus in our politics? No. There is no proof of naturalism.  

While I cannot prove that there is demonic involvement in our affairs, it is reasonable to believe that there is. Here I argue that there is no plausible naturalistic explanation of  the ubiquity, magnitude, and horrific depth of moral evil. Fidel Castro, for example, that hero of the Left, did not merely imprison his political opponents for their dissent; he had them tortured in unspeakable ways.

Integralism in Three Sentences

Substack latest.

Here are the three sentences:

Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that rejects the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holding that political rule must order man to his final goal. Since, however, man has both a temporal and an eternal end, integralism holds that there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And since man’s temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power.

'Post-liberalism' is gaining ground. Integralism is one form of it. I am against both the species and the genus.

Politics and Meaning: More on the Conservative Disadvantage

Here again is my Substack entry "The Conservative Disadvantage."  In it I wrote, "We don't look to politics for meaning. Or rather, we do not seek any transcendent meaning in the political sphere." Thomas Beale charitably comments (edited):

Just a short note on that post: your observation about meaning is  one of the most penetrating I have read for a long while -- it's one of those truths hiding in such plain sight that no one sees it. This phenomenon of the true conservative "not looking to politics for meaning" is deeper than the usual formulations according to which Marxist and other utopian ideologies are replacements for the old religions. This is because the whole question of where 'meaning' (and therefore worth) in life is found is the most fundamental question of the human condition. It's a Scruton-esque observation as well -- perhaps he even said something like this, although I don't remember it as pithily expressed as your version - - but he certainly thought that meaning for real people was in their daily lives well lived within clubs, theatres, the garden, nature.

In fact, re-reading your text, it's almost a shortest-possible definition of what it means to be (small-c) conservative by describing its negation. I particularly like the line 'A conservative could never write a book with the title, The Politics of Meaning.' 

Your characterisation of the conservative atheist I think is very nice as well.

My thanks to Thomas Beale for these kind comments.  Here are some additional remarks about meaning and the political to clarify and fill out what I wrote and perhaps ignite some discussion.

1) There is a distinction between 'existential' and  semantic meaning. Our concern here is solely with the first. There is also a distinction within existential or life meaning between ultimate and proximate meaning. When we ask philosophically about the meaning of  life we are asking about the ultimate and objective point, purpose, end, or goal of human willing and striving, if there is one.  We are asking whether there is an ultimate and objective purpose, and what it is.  Both of these questions admit of reasonable controversy. Some say that human life has no objective purpose. Any purpose it has must be subjective. Others say that it does have an objective purpose, but then disagree bitterly as to what it is. But that there are proximate and relative meanings in human lives is uncontroversial.  For one person, writing poetry is highly meaningful, for another a silly and meaningless waste of time.  

2) When I say that the conservative does not look to politics for meaning, I am referring to ultimate meaning: he does not look to politics for ultimate meaning.  One could be a conservative in my sense and find political activity proximately meaningful.  One could not be a conservative in my sense and find political activity ultimately meaningful.  For the conservative understands something that the leftist does not. He understands that  political activity cannot be our ultimate purpose because the political is not of ultimate value. This raises the question of the relation of the teleological to the axiological. The meaning-of-life question has both a teleological and an axiological side.

3) Teleological and Axiological Aspects of Existential Meaning

Teleology. Meaning bears a teleological aspect in that a meaningful life is a purpose-driven life.  It is difficult to see how a human life devoid of purposes could be meaningful, either proximately or ultimately, and indeed purposes organized by a central purpose such as advancing knowledge or alleviating suffering.  The central purpose must be one the agent freely and self-transparently chooses for himself. It cannot be one that is assigned ab extra. The central purpose must be both nontrivial and achievable.  A life devoted to the collecting of beer cans is purpose-driven but meaningless on the score of triviality while a life in quest of a perpetuum mobile is purpose-driven but meaningless on the score of futility.  But even if a life has a focal purpose that is freely and consciously chosen by the agent of the life, nontrivial, and achievable, this still does not suffice for ultimate meaningfulness.

Axiology. A meaningful life also bears an axiological aspect in that a meaningful life is one that embodies some if not a preponderance of positive non-instrumental value at least for the agent of the life.  A life wholly devoid of personal satisfaction cannot be called meaningful.  But even this is not enough.  The lives of some terrorists and mass murderers are driven by non-trivial and non-futile purposes and are satisfying to their agents.  We ought, however, to resist the notion that such lives are ultimately meaningful. A necessary condition of a life’s being ultimately meaningful is that it realize some if not a preponderance of positive non-instrumental objective value.  If so, a radically immoral life cannot be a meaningful life. Or so say I.

This might be reasonably questioned. According to David Benatar, "A meaningful life is one that transcends one's own limits and significantly impacts others or serves purposes beyond oneself." (The Human Predicament, Oxford UP, 2017, p. 18) By this definition, the lives of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot were meaningful, as Benatar grants. (19) Well, can a radically immoral life be a meaningful life? I say No; Benatar leaves the question open:

One response is to acknowledge that wicked lives can be meaningful, but then say that we should seek only positive meaning. Another option is to say that a life is not meaningful unless its purposes or ways of transcending limits are positive, worthy, or valuable. (19)

I pack quite a lot into the concept of an ultimately meaningful human life.  Such a life is one that is purpose-driven by a central purpose that organizes and unifies various peripheral purposes; a purpose that is freely  chosen by the liver of the life as opposed to imposed from without by the State, for example; a purpose that is neither trivial nor futile, and thus achievable; a purpose that is objectively morally permissible, and beyond that, objectively the best and highest life that a human is capable of; finally, a purpose that is redemptive.  But there is no space now to expand upon this last clause.  

4) But must a conservative seek an ultimate objective meaning or purpose? No, because he might not believe that one exists.  He would not be irrational in so thinking.  David Benatar serves as a a good, perhaps the best, example.

5) I have just set the bar very high, impossibly high some will say.  As I see it, one can count oneself a conservative while rejecting the conception of an ultimately meaningful life as I have defined it. 

What one cannot do as a conservative is seek ultimate meaning in the quotidian round, in "daily lives well lived within clubs, theatres, the garden, nature" to quote Beale glossing Scruton.  There is no ultimate meaning to be found there, but then again there might not be an ultimate meaning. One would then have to take whatever meaning one could get from mundane pursuits and makes friends with finitude.

Another thing a conservative qua conservative cannot do is look for meaning where the leftist looks for it.

6) A  fundamental error of the leftist is to seek ultimate meaning where it cannot be found, namely, in the political sphere, in sociopolitical activism, in the wrong-headed and dangerously quixotic attempt to straighten "the crooked timber of humanity" (Kant) by collective human action, to bring forth the "worker's paradise," to eliminate class distinctions, to end 'racism,' and 'sexism' and 'homophobia,'  'transphobia,' and other invented bogeypersons, to end alienation and the natural hierarchy of life and spirit in all its forms, and to transform the world in such a way that all meta-physical and religious yearnings for Transcendence are finally squelched and eradicated,  and to do so no matter how many 'eggs' have to be broken to achieve  the unachievable 'omelet.'

The leftist rightly sneers at mere bourgeois self-indulgence, material acquisition for its own sake, status-seeking, pleasure-seeking however refined, the 'lifestyles of the rich and famous,' etc. We conservatives who seek the true Transcendence can agree with leftists about that. But we reject their destructively cockamamie schemes and say to them: better the bourgeois life, or even the life of Nietzsche's Last Man, than your mad pursuit of the unattainable.

7) As for The Politics of Meaning, that is an actual title of a book by a pal of Hillary Clinton, Michael Lerner. It came out in 1996.  I wasn't referring to it specifically but mocking the notion that existential meaning worth attaining could be attained by political means.

The Fix We Are In: How Should We Respond to the 'Woke' Revolutionaries?

The difference between paleo-liberal and post-liberal responses to the 'woke' Left is well described in a recent Substack entry White tribalism is a third response. I have been entertaining (with some hospitality) the notion that whites may need to go tribal pro tempore, for the time being, in order to defend themselves and their interests (which are not just their interests but the interests of civilization and high culture) against the various tribalisms promoted by the Left. Call it Tribalism Pro Tem.

 

But so far my 'official' position on this weblog and elsewhere  would fall under the paleo-liberal or classically liberal rubric. As I see it, a sound conservatism, American conservatism I call it, takes on board what is good in classical liberalism.  Against Deneen, whose position is limned in the above-linked Substack piece by N. S. Lyons, I would object that there is no inevitability to the slide from the classical liberalism of the Founders, which was respectful of traditions, to a society of atomized, deracinated individuals. I suspect that Deneen succumbs to the classic slippery slope fallacy.

 

This just over the transom from a reader:

A question for you:  It seems like I'm one of the alt-right "tribalists" you take yourself to disagree with.  (Correct me if I'm wrong.)  But do we really disagree?  Let me try to clarify my position a little.

 

I'd be very happy to live in a society where race and other tribal markers don't matter much.  They could be a purely personal or social kind of thing with no political meaning.

 

On the other hand, when I look around and see how non-white (etc.) tribalism is being weaponized against white people, and specifically white-Euro-Christian men, it seems to me that we have no practical​ option other than consciously identifying as the tribe under attack.  It's largely a defensive thing.  We are being attacked as​ white people, or white men, so it's not enough to just call ourselves "Americans" or "Canadians" or whatever.  Those civic identities have already been deconstructed or rejected by the people who hate us and seek power over us.  They just don't care.  And others like us are not going to be motivated by appeals to these more abstract categories when their enemies are attacking them for being white, and male.

 

So it's in this (weird) context that I think white men should be conscious and proud of their "tribal" identity, as a healthy and empowering response to the hateful tribalism of others.  In a different context I wouldn't advocate this kind of tribalism.  Against a society that says it's shameful and immoral to be a white man--which, let's be frank, is what they're really saying--we should affirm that there's nothing wrong with us, that we like ourselves and won't apologize for being who we are.

 

Do you disagree?

I agree with qualifications, caveats, and codicils.

 

I can't see that a white-tribal or white-male-tribal response to the pernicious tribalisms promoted by the Left is a good solution in the long run.  But in the short run I see no acceptable alternative to a pro tempore white tribalism.  So I don't disagree with my reader on the practical plane. But as a theist and a personalist, I consider a self-identification as a member of a tribe to be a false self-identification.  I am not just an animal of a particular sex and race, and because I am not just that, any self-identification as just that is a false self-identification.  I am more than that.  And I would add that my life-project is to realize that 'more' and to achieve individuation as a person. This individuation is not a given but a task. It is a spiritual task.  This is an existentialist motif expressed in a neo-Kantian way. But this is not the place to expatiate further on this theme.

 

Who am I ultimately? Just a token of a type? Just an interchangeable member of a particular tribe of animals? You wouldn't have to be a theist to reject this sort of crude self-identification. One could take oneself to be zoon logikon in Aristotle's sense, a rational animal.  One could reject God and the soul and still achieve a loftier self-apperception than that of a bit of the Earth's fauna determined by the biological categories of race and sex.  Now I accept the biological reality of race and sex: they are not social constructs. 'Society' -- whatever that is -- did not 'assign' me my male sex upon birth. The very notion is absurd. Nor did any group. Nor can I interpret myself as black or female and thereby bring about a change of race or sex.  Race and sex are neither social constructs nor personal constructs. My reality is logically and ontologically antecedent to my self-understanding. Indeed, I am essentially (as opposed to accidentally) Caucasian and male. An essential (accidental) property of a thing is a property that thing cannot (can) exist without.

 

My interlocutor will probably feel that I am sidestepping the pressing, practical issue by raising the questions that most deeply interest me, namely, those about the metaphysics of the self.  He will remind me that I am no Boethius and would have a very hard time investigating the metaphysics of the self in the gulag or under torture. And he would be right to so remind me.

 

Suppose a black guy gets in my face and attacks my whiteness and all of its values and virtues (objectivity, punctuality, self-control, ability to defer gratification, love of learning, etc.) I will point out that his smart phone would not exist if it were not for the cultural goods  produced in the West and the values and virtues just listed.   I will point out that no high culture at the level of the West came out of sub-Saharan Africa.  I will point out his ingratitude at the thousands that died in the U.S. Civil War to free the slaves. I will remind him that slavery existed on the continent of North America long before the Unites States of America came into existence, and that the moral and philosophical foundations of this polity made possible the elimination of slavery.

 

And so I would do something I would prefer not to do, namely stick up for the white tribe.  And I would do it as long as I had to do it. I would play the role part-time of the pro tem white tribalist. But at the same time that I was playing this role out of a necessity imposed on me ab extra, I would not forget who I am really am.  And who is that? Well, there are several options the exploration of which does not belong here.  But let me just note that if you are a classical theist you will not take yourself to be identical to an animal slated for utter destruction in a few years determined by your biology.

 

One more point which I think is very important. I wrote above of whiteness and its values and virtues. But we whites do not own these virtues and values any more than we own the truths of mathematics and natural science. They are universal and belong to all. It is just that whites have proven to be so much better at their discovery, articulation, dissemination, and so much better at living in accordance with them and reaping the benefits from such living.  If blacks want to improve their lives, they will have to engage in some serious cultural appropriation, which is not really cultural appropriation given the universality of the virtues and values.  They will have to order their lives along the lines of the 'white' virtues and values that they foolishly denigrate. 

David French, Christianity, and Politics

Substack latest.

Kierkegaard on the Power and the Powerlessness of Earthly Power

The following passage from Concluding Unscientific Postscript embodies a penetrating insight:

. . . the legal authority shows its impotence precisely when it shows its power: its power by giving permission, its impotence by not being able to make it permissible. (p. 460, tr. Swenson & Lowrie)

My permitting you to do X does not make X permissible.  My forbidding you to do X does not make X impermissible.  My permitting (forbidding) is justified only if what I permit (forbid) is in itself permissible (impermissible).  And the same goes for any finite agent or collection of finite agents. A finite agent may have the power to permit and forbid, but it cannot have the power to make permissible or impermissible.  Finite agency, then, betrays its impotence in exercising its power.

 

For example, the moral permissibility of killing in self-defense is what it is independently of the State's power to permit or forbid via its laws and their enforcement.  The State cannot make morally permissible what is morally permissible by passing and enforcing laws that permit it.  Nor can the State make morally impermissible what is morally permissible by passing and enforcing laws that proscribe it.

Here below Might and Right fall asunder: the powerful are not always just, and the just are not always powerful.  But it would be a mistake to think that the mighty cannot be right, or that the right cannot be mighty.  The falling asunder is consistent with a certain amount of overlap.  But the overlap will always only be partial.

Power does not confer moral justification, but neither does impotence.  (For example, the relative weakness of the Palestinians relative to the Israelis does not confer justification on the Palestinian cause or its methods.)  See The Converse Callicles Principle: Weakness Does Not Justify.

The State is practically necessary and morally justifiable.  Or so I would argue against the anarchists.  But fear of the State is rational: its power is awesome and often misused.  Communist governments murdered some 100 million during the twentieth century alone. This is why the State's power must be hedged round with limits.  The Founders of the United States of America understood this. It is an understanding that is approaching its nadir as 2020 fades.

We don't know whether God exists.  But we do know that nothing is worthy of being called God unless it is the perfect harmonization and coalescence of Might and Right, of Power and Justice, of Will and Reason. 

This coalescence is a mystical unity that cannot be achieved by human effort. The Eschaton cannot be immanentized. If this divine mystical unity exists, it does not exist in the here and now, or in the future of the here and now.  If this unity does not exist, it cannot be for us an ideal.  Only what is realizable by us can serve as an ideal for us.

Kierkegaard the Corrective is an anti-Hegel and an anti-Marx. Hegel held that the unity existed already, here below. Marx, recognizing the professorial bluster for what it was, turned Hegel upon his head, urging that it be brought about. "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it." (The Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach.)  But the conception itself was fatally flawed, already in Hegel.

We saw the sequel. It was a road to slavery and the gulag.

Horribile dictu, having learned nothing, we are about to repeat the same mistakes.

There is no heaven on earth and there cannot be. Because there cannot be, heaven on earth cannot without disaster be pursued as an ideal. If there is heaven, it is Elsewhere, beyond the human horizon. 

Believers and unbelievers can live in peace, or at least in the absence of war, if the unbelievers on the Left eschew their totalitarianism, which is a perversion of the dogmatic certainties of the Age of Belief.  But they cannot be reasonably expected to do so. It is  not 'who they are' in their silly way of speaking.

We who love liberty are in for the burden of a long twilight struggle against forces of darkness in the gloaming.

David French, Donald Trump, Christianity, and Politics

David French maintains that Christians cannot, if they are to remain true to Christian teachings, support Donald Trump:

The proper way for Christians to engage in politics is a rich subject . . . but there are some rather simple foundational principles that apply before the questions get complex. For example, all but a tiny few believers would agree that a Christian should not violate the Ten Commandments or any other clear, biblical command while pursuing or exercising political power.

But of course we see such behavior all the time from hardcore Christian Trump supporters. They’ll echo Trump’s lies. They’ll defend Trump’s lies. They’ll adopt many of his same rhetorical tactics, including engaging in mocking and insulting behavior as a matter of course.

Farther down:

I fully recognize what I’m saying. I fully recognize that refusing to hire a hater and refusing to hire a liar carries costs. If we see politics through worldly eyes, it makes no sense at all. Why would you adopt moral standards that put you at a disadvantage in an existential political struggle? If we don’t stand by Trump we will lose, and losing is unacceptable. (Emphasis added.)

French has just touched upon the deepest issue in this debate.  He is right that it makes no sense for conservative Christians not to support Trump if politics is seen through worldly eyes. The question, however, is whether one can avoid doing so. Can one see politics and pursue it through unworldly eyes?  Can one participate in politics at any level, and especially at the higher levels, while adhering strictly and unwaveringly to Christian principles and precepts and while practicing Christian virtues?  Can one combine contemptus mundi with political action?

I don't believe that this is possible.

Christian precepts such as "Turn the other cheek" and "Welcome the stranger" make sense and are salutary only within communities of the like-minded and morally decent; they make no sense and are positively harmful in the public sphere, and, a fortiori, in the international sphere.  The monastery is not the wide world.  What is conducive unto salvation in the former will get you killed in the latter.  And we know what totalitarians, whether Communists or Islamists, do when they get power: they destroy the churches, synagogues, monasteries, ashrams, and zendos. And with them are destroyed the means of transmitting the dharma, the kerygma, the law and the prophets.  

An important but troubling thought is conveyed in a recent NYT op-ed (emphasis added):

Machiavelli teaches that in a world where so many are not good, you must learn to be able to not be good. The virtues taught in our secular and religious schools are incompatible with the virtues one must practice to safeguard those same institutions. The power of the lion and the cleverness of the fox: These are the qualities a leader must harness to preserve the republic.

The problem referenced in the bolded sentence is very serious but may have no solution.  That's the aporetician in me speaking. 

The problem as I see it is that (i) the pacific virtues the practice of which makes life worth living within families, between friends, and in such institutions of civil society as churches and fraternal organizations  are essentially private and cannot be extended outward as if we are all brothers and sisters belonging to a global community.  Talk of  global community is blather.  The institutions of civil society can survive and flourish only if protected by warriors and statesmen whose virtues are of the manly and martial, not of the womanish and pacific, sort. And yet (ii) if no  extension beyond the private of the pacific virtues is possible. then humanity would seem to be doomed  in an age of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.  Besides, it is unsatisfactory that there be two moralities, one private, the other public.

I say that we need to face the problem honestly.

Consider the Christian virtues preached by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.  They include humility, meekness, love of righteousness, mercy, purity of heart, love of peace and of reconciliation.  Everyone who must live uncloistered in the world understands that these pacific and essentially womanish virtues have but limited application there.  Indeed, their practice can get you killed. (I am not using 'womanish' as a derogatory qualifier.)

You may love peace, but unless you are prepared to make war upon your enemies and show them no mercy, you may not be long for this world.  Turning the other cheek makes sense within a loving family, but no sense in the wider world.  (Would the Pope turn the other cheek if the Vatican came under attack by Muslim terrorists or would he call upon the armed might of the Italian state?)  My point is perfectly obvious in the case of states: they are in the state (condition) of nature with respect to each other. Each state secures by blood and iron a civilized space within which art and music and science and scholarship can flourish and wherein, ideally, blood does not flow; but these states and their civilizations battle each other in the state (condition) of nature red in tooth and claw.  Talk of world government or United Nations is globalist blather that hides the will to power of those who would seize control of the world government. United under which umbrella of values and principles and presuppositions?

What values do we share with the Muslim world? Do they accept the Enlightenment values enshrined in our founding documents? Obviously not.  Christianity has civilized us to some extent. Has Islam civilized them? Their penology is barbaric as is their attitude toward other cultures and religions. 

The Allies would not have been long for this world had they not been merciless in their treatment of the Axis Powers.  

Israel would have ceased to exist long ago had Israelis not been ruthless in their dealing with Muslim terrorists bent on her destruction.

This is also true of individuals once they move beyond their families and friends and genuine communities and sally forth into the wider world. 

The problem is well understood by Hannah Arendt ("Truth and Politics" in Between Past and Future, Penguin 1968, p. 245):

     The disastrous consequences for any community that began in all
     earnest to follow ethical precepts derived from man in the singular
     -- be they Socratic or Platonic or Christian -- have been
     frequently pointed out. Long before Machiavelli recommended
     protecting the political realm against the undiluted principles of
     the Christian faith (those who refuse to resist evil permit the
     wicked "to do as much evil as they please"), Aristotle warned
     against giving philosophers any say in political matters. (Men who
     for professional reasons must be so unconcerned with "what is good
     for themselves" cannot very well be trusted with what is good for
     others, and least of all with the "common good," the down-to-earth
     interests of the community.) [Arendt cites the Nicomachean Ethics,
     Book VI, and in particular 1140b9 and 1141b4.]

There is a tension  between man qua philosopher/Christian and man qua citizen.  As a philosopher raised in Christianity, I am concerned with my soul, with its integrity, purity, salvation. I take very seriously indeed the Socratic "Better to suffer wrong than to do it" and the Christian  "Resist not the evildoer." But as a citizen I must be concerned not only with my own well-being but also with the public welfare.

This is true a fortiori of public officials and people in a position to  influence public opinion, people like Catholic bishops many of whom are woefully ignorant of the simple points Arendt makes in the passage quoted. So, as Arendt points out, the Socratic and Christian admonitions are not applicable in the public sphere.

What is applicable to me in the singular, as this existing individual concerned with the welfare of his immortal soul over that of his  perishable body, is not applicable to me as citizen. As a citizen, I   cannot "welcome the stranger" who violates the laws of my country, a stranger who may be a terrorist or a drug smuggler or a human trafficker or a carrier of a deadly disease or a person who has no respect for the traditions of the country he invades; I cannot aid and abet his law breaking. I must be concerned with public order.  This order is among  the very conditions that make the philosophical and Christian life possible in the first place. If I were to aid and abet the stranger's law breaking, I would not be "rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" as the New Testament enjoins us to do.

Indeed, the Caesar verse provides a scriptural basis for Church-State separation and indirectly exposes the fallacy of the Catholic bishops  and others who confuse private and public morality. 

David French is such a one.

Anthony Flood Reviews David Horowitz, Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America

Excerpts:

Cultural Marxism is but the latest form of the cultural cancer now metastasizing throughout the body politic. (Marxism-Leninism was only the deadliest form, not the first, but even today old-fashioned Communism does not lack adherents.) That the Democratic Party is now this malignancy’s host is the grim, but well-documented, conclusion of Horowitz’s long literary career.

In Dark Agenda’s last chapter, Horowitz puts forward the metaphor of civil war to define what might be in front of us. It’s a possible outcome of the divisions that beset us and which we’re all supposed to want to “heal.” One prosecutes a war, however, not to heal one’s enemies, but rather to incapacitate them.

For Americans only the Age of Lincoln offers the closest comparison to our parlous state. But shall Christians and their Jewish allies (agnostic and observant alike) prepare for military conflict and await—or initiate—our Fort Sumter? Is it not quixotic to put all our eggs in the electoral consensus-building basket? Are we restricted to chronicling our enemies’ crimes, as Horowitz has masterfully done in dozens of popular and scholarly tomes? Urgency calls forth a response, but if Horowitz has an idea of how Americans might defeat the Left’s dark agenda, he doesn’t share it here. No suggested plan of action follows the note of urgency he sounds.

In the third paragraph, Flood touches upon a point that troubles me as well. We have reams of incisive conservative commentary on what the Left has wrought but precious little by way of concrete proposals for ameliorative action by individuals. In  fairness to Horowitz, however, it needs noting that in the concluding chapters of Big Agenda (Humanix 2017), he lists various things the Republican party and President Trump can do. So he does outline a plan of action, and he is appropriately combative:

The movement galvanized by Trump can stop the progressive juggernaut and change the American future, but only if it emulates the strategy of the campaign: Be on the offense; take no prisoners; stay on the attack. To stop the Democrats and their societal transformation, Republicans must adhere to a strategy that begins with a punch in the mouth. That punch must pack an emotional wallop large enough to throw them off balance and neutralize their assaults. It must be framed as a moral indictment that stigmatizes them in the way their attacks stigmatize Republicans. It must expose them for their hypocrisy. It must hold them accountable for the divisions they sow and the suffering they cause. (Big Agenda, Humanix, 2017, p. 142)

Still and all, I would like to see a list of what individuals can do beyond voting and writing letters and blog posts.  Does Tony Flood have any suggestions?  I suppose I myself should put up or shut up while well aware of the dangers of saying anything that might incite violence among the unhinged. (But violence is being done every day by leftists to the unborn and to our Constitutional rights and sacred American values). So here are three suggestions, just to keep this post short. I invite Tony to e-mail me with any thoughts he may have.

• Buy guns and learn how to use them. The idea here is deterrence and not aggression. A well-armed populace is a mighty check against both the criminal element that leftists work to empower, and against leftists themselves and their agents. We can demoralize them without firing a shot. Call it winning through intimidation. They will never respect us, but they can be brought to fear us. (An analysis of respect might show that fear is is a large part of it.) Grandmaster Nimzowitsch's remark is apropos: "The threat is stronger than the execution."  2A is concrete back-up for 1A and all the rest of our rights. Leftists know this. This explains the mindlessness and mendacity of their confiscatory assault on our Second Amendment rights.  
• Vote with your feet and your wallet.  Leave blue localities and let them languish in the feculence their policies have birthed, and bring your money and tax dollars to healthy places. 
• Defund the Left. For example, refuse to support your leftist alma mater, to use a border-line pleonastic expression.      

Flood's review concludes:

Of course, Dark Agenda is no more an essay on spirituality than on political philosophy. The case it makes, however, cries out for at least a hint of the response that its author believes will meet this greatest of all challenges. If there’s no political way to overcome the darkness, only the spiritual route is left.

Yet David Horowitz leaves this tension unresolved. For him, the Christian Scriptures are not (as far as I know) a source of divinely revealed truth; Christianity is but the historically contingent arrangement that works for people who happen to love instead of hate Western civilization; things don’t go any deeper than that. Am I wrong about him?

Like all human arrangements, however, Western Civ will eventually pass away into the void out of which all things, including humans, allegedly emerged . . . unless the Christian worldview is overarchingly true. Maybe Horowitz has one more book in him in which he can address this question. But I’d prefer to be shown that something in his vast literary oeuvre already has.

Having read more Horowitz than Tony has, I believe he is right in the second paragraph lately quoted.

And I am sympathetic with the third paragraph, though not with Flood's enthusiasm for Van Til. See the entries in my Van Til and Presuppositionalism category. 

Finally, I have a deep-going analytic post on Horowitz' agnosticism as he presents it in Dark Agenda. See Five Grades of Agnosticism.  

Equality is a Norm, not a Fact. Does it Have a Ground or is it Groundless?

As a matter of empirical fact, we are not equal, not physically, mentally, morally, spiritually, socially, politically, or economically.  By no empirical measure are people equal.  We are naturally unequal.  And yet we are supposedly equal as persons.  This equality of persons as persons we take as requiring equality of treatment.  Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), for example, insists that every human being, and indeed very rational being human or not, exists as an end in himself and therefore must never be treated as a means to an end.  A person is not a thing in nature to be used as we see fit.  For this reason, slavery is a grave moral evil.  A person is a rational being and must be accorded respect just in virtue of being a person.  And this regardless of inevitable empirical differences among persons.   Thus in his third formulation of the Categorical Imperative in his 1785 Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant writes:

Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.  (Grundlegung 429)

In connection with this supreme practical injunction, Kant distinguishes between price and dignity. (435)  "Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has dignity."  Dignity is intrinsic moral worth.  Each rational being, each person, is thus irreplaceably and intrinsically valuable with a value that is both infinite -- in that no price can be placed upon it -- and the same for all. The irreplaceability of persons is a very rich theme, one I explore, with the help of the great Pascal, in Do I Love the Person or Only Her Qualities?

These are beautiful and lofty thoughts, no doubt, and most of us in the West (and not just in the West) accept them in some more or less confused form.  But what do these pieties have to do with reality?  Especially if reality is exhausted by space-time-matter?

Again, we are not equal by any empirical measure.  We are not equal as animals or even as rational animals.  We are supposedly equal as persons, as subjects of experience, as free agents.  But what could a person be if not just a living human animal (or a living 'Martian' animal).  And given how many of these human animals there are, why should they be regarded as infinitely precious?  Are they not just highly complex physical systems?  Surely you won't say that complexity as such confers value, let alone infinite value.  Why should the more complex be more valuable than the less complex?  And surely you are not a species-chauvinist who believes that h. sapiens is the crown of 'creation' just because we happen to be these critters.

If we are unequal as animals and equal as persons, then a person is not an animal.  What then is a person?  And what makes them equal in dignity and equal in rights and infinite in worth?

Now theism can answer these questions.   We are persons and not mere animals because we are created in the image and likeness of the Supreme Person.  We are equal as persons because we are, to put it metaphorically, sons and daughters of one and the same Father.  Since the Source we depend on for our being, intelligibility, and value is one and the same, we are equal as derivatives of that Source.  We are infinite in worth because we have a higher destiny, a higher vocation, which extends beyond our animal existence: we are created to participate eternally in the Divine Life.

Most of the educated cannot credit the idea of a Supreme Person.

But if you reject theism, how will you uphold the Kantian values adumbrated above?  If there is no God and no soul and no eternal destiny, what reasons, other than merely prudential ones, could I have for not enslaving you should I desire to do so and have the power to do so?

Aristotle thought it natural that some men should be slaves.  We find this notion morally abhorrent.  But why should we if we reject the Judeo-Christian God?  "We just do find it abhorrent."  But that's only because we are running on the fumes of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  What happens when the fumes run out?

It is easy to see that it makes no sense, using terms strictly, to speak of anything or anybody as a creature if there is no creator. It is less easy to see, but equally true, that it makes no sense to try to hold on to notions such as that of the equality and dignity of persons after their metaphysical foundations in Christian theism have been undermined.

So here you have a Nietzschean challenge to the New Atheists.  No God, then no justification for your classically liberal values! Pay attention, Sam Harris.  Make a clean sweep! Just as religion is for the weak who won't face reality, so is liberalism.  The world belongs to the strong, to those who have the power to impose their will upon it.  The world belongs to those hard as diamonds, not to those soft as coal and weak and womanish. Nietzsche:

Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation - but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped?

Beyond Good and Evil, Chapter 9, What is Noble?, Friedrich Nietzsche    Go to Quote

More quotations on strength and weakness here.

Nancy Pelosi and the Divine Spark

Donald Trump famously referred to MS-13 gangsters as "animals." That's not the way I would put it inasmuch as it is an insult to animals who, unlike the gangbangers, are beneath good and evil. But Trump talks like a working stiff and we all know what he meant. Pelosi, however, took umbrage, protesting that the murderous bunch possesses "the divine spark" (her phrase) along with the rest of us. I don't disagree, but I do have a couple of questions for Madame Speaker.

First, Nancy dear, do you think the pre-natal also have the divine spark? If not, why not? Isn't that what your Catholic religion, bits of which you regularly inject into your speeches, teaches? And if the horrific rapes, murders, beheadings, etc. of the MS-13 do not cause them to forfeit the "divine spark," then how it it that a human fetus' lack of development prevents it from having said spark?

Second, as a leftist committed to driving every vestige of religion, or rather Christianity, from the public square, can't you see that it is inconsistent of you to use themes from your Catholic girlhood when it suits you and your obstructionist purposes?

You come across as a silly goose of a dingbat. Or is that just an act to mask your mendacity and subversiveness and Alinskyite disregard of double standards?

Integralism in Three Sentences

Here:

Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that rejects the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holding that political rule must order man to his final goal. Since, however, man has both a temporal and an eternal end, integralism holds that there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And since man’s temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power.

The crucial proposition is the first. By 'end of human life' is meant the ultimate or final goal or purpose of human life, not its cessation or stoppage.  It is presupposed that all human lives share the same final purpose. And what might that be? For a traditional Catholic, the Baltimore Catechism gives the answer:

LESSON FIRST
ON THE END OF MAN

1. Q. Who made the world?
A. God made the world.

2. Q. Who is God?
A. God is the Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things.

3. Q. What is man?
A. Man is a creature composed of body and soul, and made to the image
and likeness of God.

6. Q. Why did God make you?
A. God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world,
and to be happy with Him forever in the next.

The Catholic integralist is making the following claims. First, every human life has an ultimate purpose. Second, the  purpose is not different for different people: all, regardless of race, sex, or any other difference, share the same purpose. Third, the final common purpose is known and not open to doubt or debate: it is not a matter of conjecture or speculation or private opinion.  Fourth, the final common purpose is to know, love, and serve God in this world, and to be happy with him in the next. And of course the Catholic integralist is committed to the presuppositions of these claims, e.g., that there is a God, that he created everything distinct from himself, that man has a destiny that transcends this life, and so on.

Suppose all of the above is true. Then the political order here below must subserve the divinely ordained eternal order.   The temporal power, the State, must be subordinated to, and therefore cannot be separated from, the true church, the Roman Catholic Church.  If so, classical liberalism is an erroneous and pernicious political philosophy.

One consequence of this view seems to be that state power can be justifiably used to coerce dissidents.  Some of them hold that human life has no purpose at all. Others hold that it has a purpose but one that is determined by the individual. Still others think that there is a common ultimate purpose but that it is secular and humanistic and therefore atheistic.

And then there are the classically liberal theists who hold that when it comes to the final purpose of human life and how to attain it, there is reasonable belief, but no knowledge. If there is no knowledge in this area then coercion of atheists, agnostics, and non-Catholics could not be justified.  Finally, there are those who, while holding that there is knowledge in this area, knowledge that justifies the coercion of dissidents, reject the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Some Protestants for example, or Islamists.

My view is that we ought not stray too far from the classically liberal view of the Founders. We do not KNOW that the Catechism worldview is true. ONLY IF it were known to be true could it be justifiably imposed via the awesome power of the State. In a well-ordered Republic, the dissent of secular humanists, atheists, and non-Catholic theists ought to be tolerated. At the same time, State power must never be used to violate the consciences of Catholics by, say, forcing them to support the grave moral evil of abortion on demand with their tax dollars.

Government by ts very nature is coercive. I stand for limited government and limited coercion.

So that's my initial take on Catholic integralism. It is a non-starter.

David Horowitz on the War Against Christianity

David Horowitz argues in his new book "Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America," that secularists and leftists want to turn the nation into a godless, heathen society where religion has absolutely no role.

Horowitz, who heads the David Horowitz Freedom Center in Los Angeles, is used to taking controversial positions. He is the New York Times best-selling author of "Radical Son and Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America."

“The war on Christianity is real, and it’s right on our doorstep,” Horowitz says.

In an exclusive interview with Newsmax magazine, Horowitz details the perils facing our nation’s religious freedoms and the efforts by conservatives of all faiths to save them.

Newsmax: Many people think of the persecution of Christians as being limited to the Mideast, Far East, and Africa, far away from the United States. But that’s not true?

David Horowitz: No, it’s very bad in the U.S. This war against Christianity is a war of the left, which is the Democratic Party, because Christian values are incompatible with the social justice delusions of the left. Everything about Christianity — the sanctity of the individual, the individual soul, individual accountability and equality — all these things are anathema to the left. Efforts to keep religion out of daily life continue to grow, such as school prayers and public displays of faith.

But you argue that’s not what our founding fathers intended.

Horowitz: That’s right. The First Amendment prevents the government from prohibiting the free exercise of religion, but the left has attacked that clause. Jefferson acknowledged a wall of church-state separation, but all that meant was the state won’t make one religion like Anglicanism the official religion and persecute the other religions. The American Civil Liberties Union stood that reassurance on its head with “wall of separation between church and state” becoming a bumper-sticker slogan for leftists and secularists who want to silence religious people and marginalize their beliefs. You describe yourself as an atheist Jew.

Why would a Jewish skeptic write a book coming to the defense of Christians in America?

Horowitz: It was prompted by the murder in 1974 of a friend of mine, Betty Van Patter, a dedicated leftist and mother of three who was a bookkeeper at the New Left magazine Ramparts, which I edited. I had raised money to buy a Baptist church and turn it into a school for the Black Panthers; after Betty discovered the Panthers had doctored their books, she was raped, tortured, and beaten to death. I investigated and found the Panther Party was a criminal gang engaging in extortion, arson, drug trafficking, and murder. Still, their leaders received the support of the American left which defended the killers because they were the voices of the oppressed and champions of the progressive clause.

How does President Donald Trump fit into the fabric of American Christianity today?

Horowitz: He’s terrific for America. He’s a great patriot, and I think that’s what inspired the Evangelicals to support him. He wouldn’t have been elected without them.

What is your view of the Democratic Party?

Horowitz: It no longer respects equality. It’s a racist party. White people, males, and straight males are guilty before the fact, and people of color, women, and gays are innocent, even if the facts show they’re guilty.

Will the persecution of Christians be a big issue in the upcoming 2020 presidential election?

Horowitz: Oh, totally! It’s going to be a huge issue. Once either [Supreme Court Justices] Ruth Bader Ginsberg or Clarence Thomas retire, and Trump nominates this Catholic woman [believed to be U.S. Circuit Judge Amy Coney Barrett] there’s going to be a battle.

Do you believe Roe v. Wade will be overturned?
Horowitz: I hope so. This is a war. The left wants to kill babies outside the womb; they’re baby killers. Their slogan “pro-choice” is completely fraudulent, because they make choices. You have to choose to have sex, you have to choose who to have sex with, you have to choose whether to use contraception or not . . . or if something goes awry you have to choose not to use the morning-after pill, or to give birth to the baby and find it an adoptive mother, or kill it. It’s not about choice or reproductive freedom B.S.

You say the catalyst for writing the book was the intolerance of the left. Can you explain?

Horowitz: Before I began writing the book and was becoming acquainted with all of the issues, I thought the persecution of Christians was a somewhat parochial issue. I [began having] sympathy for this community because the left is being so intolerant . . . Now I see it as a central battle. The country is at stake. The left wants a one-party state, you can see that. How can you have a resistance to a dually elected president? It’s sedition. It’s treason, in the normal sense of the word, to obstruct a president. Everything that’s running the Democratic Party today is obstructionism. You can’t have a democracy if you don’t accept the legitimacy of an election. I mean, that is fundamental.

What Explains the Left's Toleration of Militant Islam?

From 1789 on, a defining characteristic of the Left has been hostility to religion, especially in its institutionalized forms. This goes together with a commitment to such Enlightenment values as individual liberty, belief in reason, and equality, including equality among the races and between the sexes. Thus the last thing one would expect from the Left is an alignment with militant Islam given the latter’s philosophically unsophisticated religiosity bordering on rank superstition, its totalitarian moralism, its voluntaristic suppression of reason, and its opposition to gender equality.

So why is the radical Left soft on militant Islam?  The values of the progressive creed are antithetic to those of the Islamists, and it is quite clear that if the Islamists got everything they wanted, namely, the imposition of Islamic law on the entire world, our dear progressives would soon find themselves headless. I don’t imagine that they long to live under Sharia, where ‘getting stoned’ would have more than metaphorical meaning. So what explains this bizarre alignment?

1. One point of similarity between radical leftists and Islamists is that both are totalitarians. As David Horowitz writes in Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (Regnery, 2004) , "Both movements are totalitarian in their desire to extend the revolutionary law into the sphere of private life, and both are exacting in the justice they administer and the loyalty they demand." (p. 124)

2. Horowitz points to another similarity when he writes, "The radical Islamist believes that by conquering nations and instituting sharia, he can redeem the world for Allah. The socialist’s faith is in using state power and violent means to eliminate private property and thereby usher in the millenium." (129)

Perhaps we could say that the utopianism of the Left is a quasi-religion with a sort of secular eschatology. The leftist dreams of an eschaton ushered in by human effort alone, a millenial state that could be described as pie-in-the-future as opposed to pie-in-the-sky. When this millenial state is achieved, religion in its traditional form will disappear. Its narcotic satisfactions will no longer be in demand. Religion is the "sigh of the oppressed creature," (Marx) a sigh that arises within a contingent socioeconomic arrangement that can be overturned. When it is overturned, religion will disappear.

3. This allows us to explain why the secular radical does not take seriously the religious pathology of radical Islam. "The secular radical believes that religion itself is merely an expression of real-world misery, for which capitalist property is ultimately responsible." (129) The overthrow of capitalist America will eliminate the need for religion. This "will liberate Islamic fanatics from the need to be Islamic and fanatic." (130)

Building on Horowitz’s point, I would say the leftist in his naïveté  fails to grasp that religion, however we finally resolve the question of its validity or lack thereof, is deeply rooted in human nature. As Schopenhauer points out, man is a metaphysical animal, and religion is one expression of the metaphysical urge.  Every temple, church, and mosque is evidence of man's being an animal metaphysicum.   As such, religion is not a merely contingent expression of a contingent misery produced by a contingent state of society. On the contrary, as grounded in human nature, religion answers to a misery, sense of abandonment, and need for meaning essential to the human predicament as such, a predicament the amelioration of which cannot be brought about by any merely human effort, whether individual or collective. Whether or not religion can deliver what it promises, it answers to real and ineradicable human needs for meaning and purpose, needs that only a utopian could imagine being satisfied in a state of society brought about by human effort alone.

In their dangerous naïveté, leftists thinks that they can use radical Islam to help destroy the capitalist USA, and, once that is accomplished, radical Islam will ‘wither away.’ But they will ‘wither away’ before Islamo-fanaticism does. They think they can use genuine fascist theocracy to defeat the ‘fascist theocracy’ of the USA. They are deluding themselves.

Residing in their utopian Wolkenskukuheim -- a wonderful word I found in Schopenhauer translatable as 'Cloud Cuckoo Land' -- radical leftists are wrong about religion, wrong about human nature, wrong about the terrorist threat, wrong about the ‘fascist theocracy’ of conservatives, wrong about economics; in short, they are wrong about reality.

Leftists  are delusional reality-deniers.  Now that they are in our government, we are in grave danger.  I sincerely hope that people do not need a 'nuclear event' to wake them up.  Political Correctness can get you killed.

From 1789 on, a defining characteristic of the Left has been hostility to religion, especially in its institutionalized forms. This goes together with a commitment to such Enlightenment values as individual liberty, belief in reason, and equality, including equality among the races and between the sexes. Thus the last thing one would expect from the Left is an alignment with militant Islam given the latter’s philosophically unsophisticated religiosity bordering on rank superstition, its totalitarian moralism, its voluntaristic suppression of reason, and its opposition to gender equality.

So why is the radical Left soft on militant Islam?  The values of the progressive creed are antithetic to those of the Islamists, and it is quite clear that if the Islamists got everything they wanted, namely, the imposition of Islamic law on the entire world, our dear progressives would soon find themselves headless. I don’t imagine that they long to live under Sharia, where ‘getting stoned’ would have more than metaphorical meaning. So what explains this bizarre alignment?

1. One point of similarity between radical leftists and Islamists is that both are totalitarians. As David Horowitz writes in Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (Regnery, 2004) , "Both movements are totalitarian in their desire to extend the revolutionary law into the sphere of private life, and both are exacting in the justice they administer and the loyalty they demand." (p. 124)

2. Horowitz points to another similarity when he writes, "The radical Islamist believes that by conquering nations and instituting sharia, he can redeem the world for Allah. The socialist’s faith is in using state power and violent means to eliminate private property and thereby usher in the millenium." (129)

Perhaps we could say that the utopianism of the Left is a quasi-religion with a sort of secular eschatology. The leftist dreams of an eschaton ushered in by human effort alone, a millenial state that could be described as pie-in-the-future as opposed to pie-in-the-sky. When this millenial state is achieved, religion in its traditional form will disappear. Its narcotic satisfactions will no longer be in demand. Religion is the "sigh of the oppressed creature," (Marx) a sigh that arises within a contingent socioeconomic arrangement that can be overturned. When it is overturned, religion will disappear.

3. This allows us to explain why the secular radical does not take seriously the religious pathology of radical Islam. "The secular radical believes that religion itself is merely an expression of real-world misery, for which capitalist property is ultimately responsible." (129) The overthrow of capitalist America will eliminate the need for religion. This "will liberate Islamic fanatics from the need to be Islamic and fanatic." (130)

Building on Horowitz’s point, I would say the leftist in his naïveté  fails to grasp that religion, however we finally resolve the question of its validity or lack thereof, is deeply rooted in human nature. As Schopenhauer points out, man is a metaphysical animal, and religion is one expression of the metaphysical urge.  Every temple, church, and mosque is evidence of man's being an animal metaphysicum.   As such, religion is not a merely contingent expression of a contingent misery produced by a contingent state of society. On the contrary, as grounded in human nature, religion answers to a misery, sense of abandonment, and need for meaning essential to the human predicament as such, a predicament the amelioration of which cannot be brought about by any merely human effort, whether individual or collective. Whether or not religion can deliver what it promises, it answers to real and ineradicable human needs for meaning and purpose, needs that only a utopian could imagine being satisfied in a state of society brought about by human effort alone.

In their dangerous naïveté, leftists thinks that they can use radical Islam to help destroy the capitalist USA, and, once that is accomplished, radical Islam will ‘wither away.’ But they will ‘wither away’ before Islamo-fanaticism does. They think they can use genuine fascist theocracy to defeat the ‘fascist theocracy’ of the USA. They are deluding themselves.

Residing in their utopian Wolkenskukuheim -- a wonderful word I found in Schopenhauer translatable as 'Cloud Cuckoo Land' -- radical leftists are wrong about religion, wrong about human nature, wrong about the terrorist threat, wrong about the ‘fascist theocracy’ of conservatives, wrong about economics; in short, they are wrong about reality.

Leftists  are delusional reality-deniers.  Now that they are in our government, we are in grave danger.  I sincerely hope that people do not need a 'nuclear event' to wake them up.  Political Correctness can get you killed.

A Good Summary of the Political Thinking of Carl Schmitt

Carl Schmitt on Political Power by Jürgen Braungardt.  Excerpt:

Political existentialism?

Schmitt is a political existentialist in the following sense: ‘The political’, that mode of human experience that expresses itself in interpersonal relations of power and struggle, is logically and temporally prior to all political institutions. It is expressed in the distinction between friend and enemy, which is from Schmitt’s point of view a fact of human psychology. We are naturally hostile not only to strangers, but to others. In this regard, his position is close to Thomas Hobbes. [Walter] Benjamin subverts this idea by adding a perspective of compassion: We may be hostile to strangers, but most of us are also strangers, aliens, immigrants, or refugees. We live in times of global migration, and nation states have lost their importance for the definition of political identity. But Schmitt would counter that any call for an inclusion of the “tradition of the oppressed” never brought us closer to a humanitarian turn in history. Instead, Marxist, anarchist, or liberal progress thinkers have several traits in common: they  dream of a better future, but by doing so they instrumentalize the present.  In reality, they attempt to overcome the political dimension, because for them the struggle for political power is dirty, and fundamentally, they want to abolish political power altogether. But politics with utopian aims often culminates in the creation of a Leviathan – an uncontrollable and powerful sovereign entity that forces us to abandon our humanity in exchange for the membership in a system that tends to become totalitarian.

That's a good insight on the part of Schmitt.  Anarchists and 'progressives' try to "instrumentalize the present," that is, to make of it a means to achieve a utopian state (condition) that will justify the violent and by bourgeois standards immoral means necessary in the present to reach the political eschaton in which the political as such will be aufgehoben. But the quest for 'pie in the future' reliably results in the creation of a totalizing monster state complete with gulag and Vernichtungslager in which our humanity is extinguished.

Carl Schmitt is eerily relevant at the present moment in American politics. And the unlikely Donald J. Trump has unwittingly made political philosophy come alive like never before. Read this:

The sovereign and the state of emergency

In his book “Political Theology” (1922), Schmitt famously declares that the sovereign is he who determines the state of emergency, and thus has the political power to act outside the boundaries of the law in times of crisis. With this definition of the sovereign, Schmitt distinguishes between the rule of the law, and the rule of people. Should we allow society to be ruled only by a system of by laws, which means that the actions of rulers also have to be law-abiding? Or should we accept that we need people to be in control of the system, who can at times override or disable the law in order to deal with an emergency, or with a situation for which the law has no provision? According to Schmitt, the essence of political power is the ability to suspend normal law and assume special powers, just like the ancient dictators did. In his definition, the exception defines the limit, and this boundary constitutes what politics is. The answer to “Who decides the exception?” is the precondition of the law being obligatory and being, in fact, obeyed. Even proto-liberals such as John Locke, admitted that the executive must be permitted the power to suspend the laws if necessary for the good of society. The conflict between executive and legislative branches of the government plays itself out in US constitutional law in the different interpretations of the power of the President, or in cases where the President overrides or evades congressional authority.

I am not suggesting that President Trump, in declaring a national emergency anent the southern border, is operating outside the law. But some whom I respect are claiming just that.  I am simply drawing attention to Schmitt's relevance to the question.

We are living in exciting times, philosophical times!  If I were a young man I would be worried, but I am not, and "the owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk."

Related: The Secularization of the Judeo-Christian Equality Axiom

Addendum. Heather MacDonald needs to read Schmitt. Here is how her A Threat to the Constitutional Order ends:

For centuries, Western political theory has struggled with the problem of how to free individuals from the yoke of capricious power. Humanity’s greatest minds conceived of a government constrained by neutral principles. The ground rules in a constitutional polity are set in advance; they cannot be gamed to give one side of a political struggle an unfair and possibly insuperable advantage. The United States does need a wall on its southern border, accompanied by a radical revision of the legal-immigration system to prioritize skills, language, and assimilability. But if we remove the constitutional boundaries around each branch of government, as Trump’s emergency funding appropriation threatens to do, we will have lost the very thing that makes Western democracies so attractive to the rest of the world. The Supreme Court, when the inevitable legal challenges reach it, should strike Trump’s declaration down.

Heather Mac is telling us that the ground rules cannot be gamed to give one side an advantage.  Well, if she means that they ought not be gamed, then she is right. But they are gamed, and so they can be. If SCOTUS is dominated by leftists who think of the Constitution as a 'living document,' then their rulings will constitute serious 'gaming' in the form of legislating from the bench. How is that for a removal of constitutional boundaries between branches of government? Besides, the law has to be enforced to count as law in any serious sense.   If the Congress does not provide the funding necessary for proper enforcement of the immigration laws, then that too is a serious 'gaming' of the system.  If the Left does not respect the rule of law, then why is the chief executive not justified in declaring a national emergency?

It is all very well to speak of "the rule of law not of men," but when Congress refuses to uphold the rule of law then we may have a Schmittian state of exception wherein the chief executive may and perhaps must override the Congress.  I say "may have" because it is not clear to me that Trump's  declaration of a state of emergency is illegal or extralegal.

A Note on Beccaria and Kant on Capital Punishment

Here:

According to [Cesare] Beccaria, punishment has two fundamental objectives: to restrain the criminal from committing additional crimes and to deter other members of society from committing the same crime. The first purpose is served by imprisonment, so we are left with the issue of deterrence.

Not so fast! Imprisonment obviously does not prevent criminals from committing additional crimes since criminals continue to commit all sorts of crimes in prison, including murder. Execution of murderers, however, is a most effective means of restraining them from committing additional crimes. It works every time.

Just as dead men tell no tales, dead men commit no crimes.  Does it follow that we ought to exterminate humanity to prevent crime? I don't think so!  

The topic of deterrence raises the following question.  Suppose the execution of a murderer has no deterrent effect whatsoever. Would the execution be nonetheless morally justified?  I should think so, on retributivist grounds. Retribution, impartially administered by the state apparatus, is not revenge, but a form of justice.  Immanuel Kant takes this line in perhaps its most rigoristic form. 

Justice demands capital punishment in certain cases, and it doesn't matter what it costs, or whether there is any benefit to society, or even whether there is any society to benefit. Recall Kant's last man scenario from Metaphysics of Morals, Part II (emphasis added):

[6] But whoever has committed murder, must die. There is, in this case, no juridical substitute or surrogate, that can be given or taken for the satisfaction of justice. There is no likeness or proportion between life, however painful, and death; and therefore there is no equality between the crime of murder and the retaliation of it but what is judicially accomplished by the execution of the criminal. His death, however, must be kept free from all maltreatment that would make the humanity suffering in his person loathsome or abominable. Even if a civil society resolved to dissolve itself with the consent of all its members--as might be supposed in the case of a people inhabiting an island resolving to separate and scatter themselves throughout the whole world--the last murderer lying in prison ought to be executed before the resolution was carried out. This ought to be done in order that every one may realize the desert of his deeds, and that blood-guiltiness may not remain upon the people; for otherwise they might all be regarded as participators in the murder as a public violation of justice.

Kant's view in this passage is that capital punishment of murderers is not just morally permissible, but morally obligatory. (Note that whatever is morally obligatory is morally permissible, though not conversely, and that 'morally justified' just means 'morally permissible.')

Here is another interesting question. The U. S Constitution grants a near-plenary power of pardon to the president. (Here I go again, alliterating.) Does this extend to convicted mass murderers such as Timothy McVeigh? If yes, then Kant would not be pleased. The president would be violating the demands of retributive justice! This of course is a secular analog of the old theological problem of justice and mercy.

Memo to self: bone up on this!  See what Carl Schmitt has to say about it specifically. Cf. his Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 56:

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. 

Meditation on the Third Commandment

A 1941 article by C. S. Lewis. (HT: Victor Reppert)

The Third Commandment in the ordering preferred by Protestants of Lewis' stripe is the one about taking the Lord's name in vain: 

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

Lewis meditates on the difficulties that must beset attempts to form a political party animated by Christian principles.

Christians may be expected to agree on the general ends of good government, but that agreement does not suffice for a political party. What one needs for a political party, which by its very nature is oriented toward concrete actions in the here and now, is the championship  of very specific means. But then bitter contention over these means is unavoidable and our incipient Christian party breaks apart into competing factions.

The cynosure of Lewis' disapprobation, I take it, is the invocation of God to justify one's very specific political means. One who does that takes the name of the Lord in vain.

One is put in mind of Dylan's With God On Its Side.

The Secularization of the Judeo-Christian Equality Axiom

It is a plain fact that humans are not empirically equal either as individuals or as groups. Why then is there so much politically correct resistance to this truth? It is because it flies in the face of a central dogma of the Left, namely, that deep down we are all the same, want the same things, have the same abilities, share the same values, and so on.  So if women are 'under-represented' among the engineers, for example, then the only way to explain this, given the leftist equality dogma, is in terms of something nefarious such as sexism. For if we are all equal empirically, then the 'under-representation' -- a word I enclose in sneer quotes because of its conflation of the factual and the normative -- cannot be explained in terms of a difference in interests and values or a difference in mathematical aptitude. (Remember what happened to Lawrence Summers of Harvard?)

The dogma is false, yet widely and fervently believed. Anyone who dares offend against it faces severe consequences.  Amy Wax, for example:

A University of Pennsylvania law school professor will no longer teach required courses following outcry over a video in which she suggested — falsely, according to the school — that black students seldom graduated high in their class.

Amy Wax, a tenured professor, will continue to teach electives in her areas of expertise but will be removed from teaching first-year curriculum courses, Penn Law Dean Theodore Ruger said in a statement Wednesday.

Ruger said Wax spoke “disparagingly and inaccurately” when she claimed last year that she had “rarely, rarely” seen a black student finish in the top half of their class.

Professor Wax spoke the truth, but the truth is no defense in the court of the politically correct. In present-day academe, all must toe the party line and woe to him who doesn't. The universities have become leftist seminaries.

What explains the fervor and fanaticism with which the Left's equality dogma is upheld? Could we explain it as a secularization of the Judeo-Christian belief that all men are created equal? Long before I read Carl Schmitt, I had this thought. But then I found this  provocative assertion by Schmitt:

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development . . . but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. (Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, tr. G. Schwab, University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 36.)

The idea that all humans are equal in virtue of having been created by God in the image and likeness of God is a purely theological notion consistent with deep and wide empirical differences among humans.  Its secularization, I suggest, involves several steps. (These are my ideas, not Schmitt's.)

The first step is to transform the metaphysical concept of equality of persons into an empirical concept of equality of measurable attributes.

The second step is to explain away the manifest empirical inequality of human groups and individuals in terms of sexism or racism or ageism or some other 'ism.'  This involves a turn toward social constructivism and a reality-denying turn away from the mind-independent reality  of biological differences between the sexes and the races.  Sex becomes 'gender' and the latter a social construct.  Similarly with race. The absurdities that result are foolishly embraced rather than taken as so many reductiones ad absurdum of the original mistake of making sex and race social constructs. Thus one foolishly embraces the notion that one can change one's race. For a calm and thorough critique of this notion as represented by a contemporary academic, see my Can One Change One's Race?

The third step is to jettison the theological underpinning of the original equality conception.  

In this way a true, non-empirical claim of Christian metaphysics about persons as rights-bearers is transformed into a false empirical claim about human animals.  At the same time the ground of the non-empirical claim is denied.  

It is easy to see how unstable this all is. Reject God, and you no longer have a basis for belief in equality of persons.  Man reverts to being an animal among animals with all the empirical inequality that that brings with it.

So the Left has a problem. It is virulently anti-theistic and anti-religious and yet it wants to uphold a notion of equality that makes sense only within a theistic framework. The Left, blind to this inconsistency, is running on the fumes of an evaporating Christian worldview. Equality of persons and rights secularizes itself right out of existence once the theological support is kicked away.

Nietzsche understood this long ago. The death of God has consequences. One is that the brotherhood of man becomes  a joke.  If my tribe can enslave yours, then it has all the justification it needs and can have for doing so.  Why should I treat you as my brother if I have the power to make you my servant and I have freed my mind of Christian fictions?

For those of us who oppose both the Left and the Alt-Right faction that is anti-Christian and Nietzschean, the only option seems to be a return to our Judeo-Christian heritage.

Here is an example of an argument from the Alt Right faction I am referring to:

There is a strong anti-Christian tendency in contemporary White Nationalism.

The argument goes something like this: Christianity is one of the primary causes of the decline of the white race for two reasons. First, it gives the Jews a privileged place in the sacred history of mankind, a role that they have used to gain their enormous power over us today. Second, Christian moral teachings—inborn collective guilt, magical redemption, universalism, altruism, humility, meekness, turning the other cheek, etc.—are the primary cause of the white race’s ongoing suicide and the main impediment to turning the tide. These values are no less Christian in origin just because secular liberals and socialists discard their supernatural trappings. The usual conclusion is that the white race will not be able to save itself unless it rejects Christianity.

I agree entirely with the sentence I have bolded. Leftist secularization is essentially a suppression of the supernatural with a concomitant maintenance of virtues and precepts that make sense only within a supernatural framework. But 'trappings' is not the right word; 'supports' is better.  The Left is engaged in the absurd project of kicking away the support of universal rights, the dignity and equality of persons, and all the rest while trying to hold on to these commitments.

The deeper question, though, is whether Christianity weakens us and makes us unfit to live and flourish as the animals we are in the only world there is, this world of space, time, matter and change, or whether Alles Vergaengliche ist nur ein Gleichnis (Goethe), time is a moving image of eternity (Plato), and this world is a fleeting vale of tears that veils an Unseen Order.