Maverick Philosopher

The Worst Thing about Poverty

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

Be Skeptical of Activists' Claims

Here's a tip for you. 

When some activist or advocate makes a claim, be skeptical and run the numbers, especially when the advocate has a vested interest in promoting his cause.  

Do you remember Mitch Snyder the advocate for the homeless who hanged himself in 1990?  I heard him make a wild claim sometime in the '80s to the effect that the number of homeless in the U. S. was three million.  At the time the population of the U.S. was around 220 million.  So I rounded that up to 300 million and divided by three million.  And then I knew that Snyder's claim was bogus, and probably fabricated by Snyder, as was later shown to be the case.  It is simply not credible that one in 100 in the U. S. is a homeless person.

When Snyder admitted to Ted Koppel that he made up his number, advocates for the homeless defended his tactic as "lying for justice."  See here. A nice illustration of the leftist principle that the end justifies the means.  Obama implemented the principle when he  lied some 30 times about the Affordable Care Act .  But let's not go over that again.

Philosophy needs no social justification. But one of the salutary social byproducts of its study and practice is the honing of one's critical thinking skills.  I am assuming that the philosophy in question is broadly analytic and not the crapulous crapola  of such later Continentals as Derrida.

Monastic Poverty: Too Easy?

The monk takes a vow of poverty, but he lives well, comfortably, securely, often amidst great natural beauty. The typical monk in the West is not poor materially but poor in a spiritual sense. Or at least he aspires to be such. The monastery's wealth is his usufruct -- he has the usus et fructus, the use and enjoyment, of it. The poverty vow is a vow of non-attachment. The monk strives to live without attachment to the wealth necessary for his health and well-being. But couldn't one both own things and be non-attached? It is possible, but out of reach for most of us. Ownership breeds attachment.

Might the life of the monk be too easy to count as genuinely Christian?

Protestants, in the main, have not been friendly to monasticism, although I believe there are some Protestant monasteries. Anti-monastic hostility is perhaps given its most extreme expression in the writings of S. Kierkegaard. Here is a an excerpt from an entry in which I quote the Danish Socrates as sending the Pope to hell:

No, it is certainly not the highest to seek a solitary hiding place in order if possible to seek God alone there.  It is not the highest -- this we indeed see in the prototype [Christ].  But although it is not the highest it is nevertheless possible . . . that not a single one of us is this coddled and secularized generation would be able to do it.  But it is not the highest.  The highest is: unconditionally heterogeneous with the world by serving God alone, to remain in the world and in the middle of actuality before the eyes of all, to direct all attention to oneself -- for then persecution is unavoidable.  This is Christian piety: renouncing everything to serve God alone, to deny oneself in order to serve God alone -- and then to have to suffer for it -- to do good and then to have to suffer for it.  It is this that the prototype expresses; it is also this, to mention a mere man, that Luther, the superb teacher of our Church, continually points out as belonging to true Christianity: to suffer for the doctrine, to do good and suffer for it, and that suffering in this world is inseparable from being a Christian in this world. (Judge for Yourself!,169)

S. K. here sounds his recurrent theme of Christianity as heterogeneity to the world.  The heterogeneity to the world of the monastic life, however, does not go far enough.  A more radical heterogeneity is lived by one who remains in the world, not only living the doctrine, but suffering for it. No doubt that is how the Prototype lived, but he was and is God.  How is such a thing possible for any mere  mortal?

If true Christianity requires suffering for the doctrine, if it requires persecution and martyrdom, then true Christianity is out of reach except for those who, like present-day Christians in the Middle East, are even as we speak having their throats cut for the doctrine by radical Muslim savages as the rest of the world, and the Pope, look on and do nothing.  In the Denmark of Kierkegaard's day (1813-1855), when Christianity was the state religion and the object of universal lip-service, true Christianity was out of reach for S. K. himself by his own teaching.  The true Christian must be prepared for persecution and martyrdom, but it is difficult to see how they can be "inseparable from being a Christian in this world."

So add this persecution extremism to the off-putting factors already listed: the anti-mysticism, the anti-rationalism, and the extreme fideism.

But what a prodigiously prolific writer he was!  What a genius, and what a fascinating specimen of humanity.