Maverick Philosopher

Why Colin McGinn is the Best Philosopher Ever

It takes one to know one.  (Via Dmitri Dain)

Beware of Projecting . . .

. . . your values and attitudes into others. We are not all the same 'deep down,' and we don't all want the same things. You say you value peace and social harmony? So do I. But some are bellicose right out of the box. They love war and thrive on conflict, and not just verbally.  

It is dangerous to assume that others are like we are.  (I am thinking right now of a very loving and lovable female neighbor  who makes the dangerous assumption: she has a 'Coexist' sticker affixed to her bumper.)

Liberal 'projectionism' -- to give it a name -- can get your irenic self killed.

As desirable a desideratum as peaceful coexistence is, it is inconsistent with totalitarian systems. This is why communism and Christianity cannot coexist assuming that they remain true to their defining principles.  (Or at least they cannot coexist in one geographical area over the long term.) They are mutually exclusive worldviews. And of course they are not just comprehensive views of the world and the people in it, but practical systems of prescriptions and proscriptions oriented toward the guidance of human action.  The actional side is paramount in both systems. Old Karl said that the philosophers had variously interpreted the world when the point was to change it. (Karl Marx, Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach).  A serious Christian could say that the philosophers had variously theorized and speculated when the unum necessarium was the salvation of one's immortal soul.  "For what doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul?" (Matthew 16-26)  A library of learned disquisitions on the nature of the soul is of no avail if one in the end suffers its loss.

Christianity and Islam are also quite obviously mutually exclusive on both  doctrinal and  practical planes. Note that both in their ideological purity are totalitarian. (Christianity in the West has of course been liberalized to a great extent and is thus no longer ideologically pure.) The two in their pure forms make a total claim on the lives of their adherents. They cannot peacefully coexist in the same geographical area over the long term. The Muslim says to the infidel: either convert to the truth faith, or accept dhimmitude, or be put to the sword. That, for a Christian, is indeed a trilemma: you will be impaled on one of three horns, but you are free to choose which one. 

Can classical liberalism, the touchstone of which is toleration, coexist with any totalitarian ideology, religious or secular? No again. The classical liberal can and will tolerate any ideology as long as it respects the principle of toleration; it cannot, however, tolerate the rejection of this very principle, the principle that defines it. The rub, for the totalitarian, is that if he accepts the principle of toleration, he can no longer remain totalitarian: he will have to adjust his tenets in various ways. Classical liberalism and totalitarian systems are mutually exclusive. 

So where does this leave us? There can be no peaceful coexistence in one and the same geographical area over the long term except under classical liberalism.  For classical liberalism alone is tolerant of deep differences and is alone respectful of our equally deep ignorance of the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters.  Why must we be tolerant? Because we do not know. The classical liberal  is keenly aware of the evil in the human heart and of the necessity of limited government and dispersed power. So he is justified in making war against fanaticism, onesidedness, and totalitarian systems of government whether theocratic or 'leftocratic.'  It would not be a war of extermination but one of limitation. It would also be limited to one's geographical area and not promoted abroad to impose the values of classical liberalism on the benighted tribalists of the Middle East and elsewhere.

Finally, can American conservatism and the ideology of the Democrat Party in its contemporary incarnation peacefully coexist? Obviously not, which is why there is a battle for the soul of America. Either we defeat the totalitarian Left or we face a nasty trilemmatic trident: acquiesce and convert; or accept dhimmitude; or ne cancelled in one livelihood and then eventually in one's life.

More Malcolm on Mass Formation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Malcolm Pollack on 'Mass Formation'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Mighty Tetrad: Money, Power, Sex, and Recognition

Money, power, sex, and recognition form the Mighty Tetrad of human motivators, the chief goads to action here below. But none of the four is evil or the root of all evil. People thoughtlessly and falsely repeat, time and again, that money is the root of all evil. Why not say that about power, sex, and recognition? The sober truth is that no member of the Mighty Tetrad is evil or the root of all evil. Each is ambiguous: a good liable to perversion.

Read the rest at Substack.

Linked at my Facebook page. You may leave a comment there if you wish, or send me an e-mail message.  I have come to refer to Facebook as Furzbuch because its suppression of free speech surely stinks to high heaven. 

There I must walk the line. But I won't back down.  It's going to be a long twilight struggle* against the forces of darkness, my friends. (Wo)Man up, gear up, but be of good cheer. Long live the Republic!

____________

*"Now the trumpet summons us again--not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need--not as a call to battle, though embattled we are-- but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, 'rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation'--a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself." JFK Inaugural Speech, 1961.

Of the four, tyranny is greatest threat at the present time, the tyranny of the deep state wokesters who control the Democrat Party and pull the strings of the puppet-in-chief, Joe Biden.

Study history to know yourself and what you are capable of

In this important video, Jordan Peterson explains how history describes you.

Part of what he is doing is railing against the pernicious leftist displacement of evil onto external conditions, social and economic, and its removal from its original and true locus, the foul and diseased heart of the human animal. For your own good, please pay close attention to the whole talk.

Most assuredly, you would have been a Nazi had you been a German in Germany 1933-1945.

And you will be a 'woke' totalitarian commie if we don't get this country back on track. You will go along to get long. You will fall in line out of fear and the instinct of self-preservation. You will snitch on your neighbors. You will practice self-censorship. You will acquiesce in the pronoun nonsense oblivious as you are to the power of language to guide and mis-guide thought.  You will submit to absurd health mandates. You will sell your birthright for a mess of pottage. And you will have no trouble rationalizing and justifying your compliance. "I have a family to support." And in other more creative ways.  The capacity for rationalization in humans is near-infinite.

READINGS FOR DARK TIMES

When the light of liberty was extinguished in Germany 1933-1945, many escaped to America.  But when the light of liberty is extinguished here, there will be no place left to go.  The rest of the Anglosphere appears lost, liberty-wise. Consider what is happening in Australia of all places.

What was it like to live in the Third Reich?  What can we learn that may be of use in the present darkness? I come back again and again to the following four.

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night, tr. A Dru, Pantheon, 1950.

Paul Roubiczek, Across the Abyss: Diary Entries for the Year 1939-1940, tr. George Bird, Cambridge UP, 1982.

Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir, tr. O. Pretzel, Picador, 2000.

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, The University of Chicago Press, 1955, 2017

All of these are easy reading, especially the second two.

Related: Theodor Haecker entries.

Recognition, Attention, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Alexander

As social animals we have a legitimate need for recognition by others. This need is not a mere desire for attention. Parents and teachers harm a child when they dismiss the legitimate need for recognition and respect as a bid for attention. A child so maligned may father a man who is more monster than man. 

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

"The child is father of the man" is from William Wordsworth's 1802 poem, "My Heart Leaps Up."

My Heart Leaps Up

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

My allusion to Wordsworth above extends, and some will say, 'distorts,'  the meaning of his "The Child is Father of the Man." 

I learned the phrase "natural piety" from Samuel Alexander, but now I see where Alexander found it.

Samuel Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity, vol. II, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1979, (originally published in 1920), p. 46:

The higher quality emerges from the lower level of existence and has its roots therein, but it emerges therefrom, and it does not belong to that lower level, but constitutes its possessor a new order of existent with its special laws of behaviour.  The existence of emergent qualities thus described is something to be noted, as some would say, under the compulsion of brute empirical fact, or, as I would prefer to say in less harsh terms, to be accepted with the "natural piety" of the investigator.  It admits no explanation.

If, however, the emergent entities admit of no explanation, if their emergence is a brute fact, then claims of emergence are open to the 'poof' objection.  It would appear to be rather unbecoming of a hard-assed physicalist to simply announce that such-and-such has emerged when he can offer no explanation of how it has emerged.  If interactionist dualists are supposed to be embarrassed by questions as to how mind and body interact, then emergentists are in a similar boat.

That being said, "natural piety" is a beautiful phrase.

Memory: Content and Affect

The trick is to retain the content so that one can rehearse it if one wishes, but without re-enacting the affect, unless one wishes.  Let me explain.

Suppose one recalls a long-past insult to oneself, and feels anger in the present as a result. The anger is followed by regret at not having responded in kind. (L'esprit de l'escalier.) And then perhaps there is disgust at oneself for having remained passive, for not having stood up to the aggressor and asserted oneself. This may be followed by annoyance with oneself for allowing these memorial affects  to arise one more time despite one's assiduous and protracted inner work. Finally, pessimism supervenes concerning the efficacy of attempts at self-improvement and mind control.  

Well, welcome to the human predicament.  Buck up, never give up. We are not here to slack off and have a good time. This world is preparatory and propadeutic if not penal. That is the right way to think of it. Live and strive. Leben und streben! Streben bis zum Sterben!  There is no guarantee that the "long, twilight struggle" will open out into  light.   For there are two twilights, one that leads to dawn, the other to dusk. But we live better if we believe in the advent of the first.

Judge your success not by how far you have to go, but how far you've come.

Inquire and aspire.  What Plato has Socrates say about inquiry (intellectual self-improvement) in response to Meno's Paradox is adaptable to aspiration (moral self-improvement).

And therefore we ought not to listen to this sophistical argument about the impossibility of inquiry: for it will make us idle; and is sweet only to the sluggard; but the other saying will make us active and inquisitive. (Plato, Meno, 81a-81e)

The Old Soul

The old soul sees, while his body is yet young, that this world has nothing to offer us that is finally satisfactory.

The Introvert Advantage

Social distancing?  I've been doing it all my life. O beata solitudo, sola beatitudo!  Happy solitude, the sole beatitude. How sweet it is, and made sweeter still by a little socializing.

Full lockdown?  I could easily take it, and put it to good use.  It provides an excellent excuse to avoid meaningless holiday socializing with its empty and idle talk. 

Franz Kafka: The Diaries 1910-1923, ed. Max Brod, Schocken 1948, p. 199:

In the next room my mother is entertaining the L. couple. They are talking about vermin and corns. (Mrs. L. has six corns on each toe.) It is easy to see that there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort. It is information that will be forgotten again by both and that even now proceeds along in self-forgetfulness without any sense of responsibility.

I have read this passage many times, and what delights me each time is the droll understatement of it: "there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort." No indeed. There is no progress because the conversations are not seriously about anything worth talking about. There is no Verantwortlichkeit (responsibility): the talk does not answer (antworten) to anything real in the world or anything real in the interlocutors. It is jaw-flapping for its own sake, mere linguistic behavior which, if it conveys anything, conveys: ‘I like you, you like me, and everything’s fine.’

The interlocutors float along in the inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit) of what Martin Heidegger calls das Man, the ‘they self.’ Compare Heidegger’s analysis of idle talk (Gerede) in Sein und Zeit (1927), sec. 35.

Am I suggesting that one should absolutely avoid idle talk?  That would be to take things to an unnecessary and perhaps imprudent extreme.  It is prudent to get yourself perceived as a regular guy -- especially if you are an 'irregular guy.'

I am not under full lockdown like the Canadians in Ontario province. But the weight room now allows only six at a time and for one hour only, and you have to book each session in advance. This Christmas Eve should be very nice. I booked a 3-4 pm slot. I expect no one else to be there; I can overstay into the 4-5 pm slot. I can sing,  talk to myself, grunt, groan, and use any machine. The TVs will be on; I can crank the fans way up. I shall commandeer the stationary bike upon which I will pedal while reading J. J. Valberg's superb The Puzzle of Experience. Ditto tomorrow.

Ganz man selbst sein, kann man nur wenn man allein ist. (Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena) "Only when one is alone can one be entirely oneself." (tr. BV)

I wouldn't  make a very good socialist.

Oh happy solitude, sole beatitude! The introvert comes most fully into his own and most deeply savors his psychological good fortune, in old age, as Einstein attests. 

Albert Einstein, "Self-Portrait" in Out of My Later Years (Citadel Press, 1956), p. 5:

. . . For the most part I do the thing which my own nature drives me to do. It is embarrassing to earn so much respect and love for it. Arrows of hate have been shot at me too; but they never hit me, because somehow they belonged to another world, with which I have no connection whatsoever.

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

Franz Kafka: The Diaries 1910-1923, ed. Max Brod, Schocken 1948, p. 199:

In the next room my mother is entertaining the L. couple. They are talking about vermin and corns. (Mrs. L. has six corns on each toe.) It is easy to see that there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort. It is information that will be forgotten again by both and that even now proceeds along in self-forgetfulness without any sense of responsibility.

I have read this passage many times, and what delights me each time is the droll understatement of it: "there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort." No indeed. There is no progress because the conversations are not seriously about anything worth talking about. There is no Verantwortlichkeit (responsibility): the talk does not answer (antworten) to anything real in the world or anything real in the interlocutors. It is jaw-flapping for its own sake, mere linguistic behavior which, if it conveys anything, conveys: ‘I like you, you like me, and everything’s fine.’

The interlocutors float along in the inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit) of what Martin Heidegger calls das Man, the ‘they self.’ Compare Heidegger’s analysis of idle talk (Gerede) in Sein und Zeit (1927), sec. 35.

Am I suggesting that one should absolutely avoid idle talk?  That would be to take things to an unnecessary and perhaps imprudent extreme.  It is prudent to get yourself perceived as a regular guy -- especially if you are an 'irregular guy.'

I am not under full lockdown like the Canadians in Ontario province. But the weight room now allows only six at a time and for one hour only, and you have to book each session in advance. This Christmas Eve should be very nice. I booked a 3-4 pm slot. I expect no one else to be there; I can overstay into the 4-5 pm slot. I can sing,  talk to myself, grunt, groan, and use any machine. The TVs will be on; I can crank the fans way up. I shall commandeer the stationary bike upon which I will pedal while reading J. J. Valberg's superb The Puzzle of Experience. Ditto tomorrow.

Ganz man selbst sein, kann man nur wenn man allein ist. (Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena) "Only when one is alone can one be entirely oneself." (tr. BV)

I wouldn't  make a very good socialist.

Oh happy solitude, sole beatitude! The introvert comes most fully into his own and most deeply savors his psychological good fortune, in old age, as Einstein attests. 

Albert Einstein, "Self-Portrait" in Out of My Later Years (Citadel Press, 1956), p. 5:

. . . For the most part I do the thing which my own nature drives me to do. It is embarrassing to earn so much respect and love for it. Arrows of hate have been shot at me too; but they never hit me, because somehow they belonged to another world, with which I have no connection whatsoever.

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

Why are Lawyers so Unhappy?

Martin P. Seligman explains. 'Seligman'! Now there's an aptronym for you. Selig is German for happy, blessed, blissful, although it can also mean late (verstorben) and tipsy (betrunken). So Seligman is the happy man or happy one. Nomen est omen?

Give some careful thought to what you name your kid. 'Chastity' may have an anti-aptronymic effect.  As for anti-aptronyms, I was introduced a while back to a hulking biker who rejoiced under the name of 'Tiny.'  A student of mine's name for me was 'Smiley' to underscore my serious-as-cancer demeanor.

Martin P. Seligman explains. 'Seligman'! Now there's an aptronym for you. Selig is German for happy, blessed, blissful, although it can also mean late (verstorben) and tipsy (betrunken). So Seligman is the happy man or happy one. Nomen est omen?

Give some careful thought to what you name your kid. 'Chastity' may have an anti-aptronymic effect.  As for anti-aptronyms, I was introduced a while back to a hulking biker who rejoiced under the name of 'Tiny.'  A student of mine's name for me was 'Smiley' to underscore my serious-as-cancer demeanor.

People and Their Works

This from a reader:

Your comment about Husserl's picture on your wall reminded me of a line from my notes: "I try to admire works but never people, as people invariably let you down." It's, I think, a line from Peter Hitchens.

People regularly, though not invariably, let one down. True. But being a person, I need persons to show me what is humanly possible and to serve as examples of how best to live. No book can render that service. While I cannot emulate (equal or excel) Husserl or Socrates in all respects, I can hope to do so in some, in respect of intellectual probity and devotion to the truth. 

Sometimes we are at fault when others disappoint us. We pegged them too high.  To be just in our assessments of others is extremely difficult. No man is worthy of worship and no man of utter contempt. No one is an angel and no one a demon. We regularly go to extremes. 

One way to avoid disappointment in one's heroes is by not meeting them in the flesh.  Distance permits idealization. Propinquity militates against it.

And if you want to avoid inspiring disappointment in those who haven't met you but will, request of your advocates and admirers that they not sing your praises!  Let the former  think that you are just an ordinary schmuck schlepping down the pike. And then surprise them.

Moving from Religion to Philosophy: A Typology of Motives

People come to philosophy from various 'places.'  Some come from religion, others from mathematics and the natural sciences, still others from literature and the arts.  There are other termini a quis as well.  In this post I am concerned only with the move from religion to philosophy.  What are the main types of reasons for those who are concerned with religion to take up the serious study of philosophy?  I count five main types of motive.

1. The Apologetic Motive.  Some look to philosophy for apologetic tools.  Their concern is to clarify and defend the tenets of their religious faith, tenets they do not question, or do not question in the main, against those who do question them, or even attack them.  For someone whose central motive is apologetic, the aim is not to seek a truth they do not possess, but to articulate and defend a truth, the "deposit of faith," that they already possess, if not in fullness, at least in outline.

2. The Critical Motive.  Someone who is animated by the Critical Motive seeks to understand religion and evaluate its claim to truth, while taking it seriously.  To criticize is not to oppose, but to sift, evaluate, assay, separate the true from the false, the reasonable from the unreasonable.  The critic is not out to defend or attack but to understand and evaluate.  Open to the claims of religion, his question is: But is it true?

3. The Debunking Motive.  If the apologist presupposes the truth of his religion, or some religion, the debunker presupposes the falsehood of a particular religion or of every religion.  He takes the doctrines and institutions of religion seriously as things worth attacking, exposing, debunking, unmasking, refuting.

The apologist, the critic, and the debunker all take religion seriously as something worth defending, worth evaluating, or worth attacking using the tools of philosophy.  For all three, philosophy is a tool, not an end in itself. 

The apologist moves to philosophy without leaving religion. If he succeeds in defending his faith with the weapons of philosophy, well and good; if he fails, it doesn't really matter.  He has all the essential truth he needs from his religion.  His inability to mount an intellectually respectable defense of it is a secondary matter.  He might take the following view. "My religion is true. So there must be an intellectually respectable defense of it, whether or not I or anyone can mount that defense."

The critic moves to philosophy with the live option of leaving religion behind.  Whether or not he leaves it behind depends on the outcome of his critique.  Neither staying nor leaving is a foregone conclusion.

The debunker either never had a living faith, or else he had one but lost it.  As a debunker, his decision has been made and his Rubicon crossed: religion is buncombe from start to finish, dangerous buncombe that needs to be unmasked and opposed. Strictly speaking, only the debunker who once had a living faith moves from it to philosophy.  You cannot move away from a place where you never were.

4. The Transcensive Motive.  The transcender aims to find in philosophy something that completes and transcends religion while preserving its truth.  One way to flesh this out would be in Hegelian terms: religion and philosophy both aim to express the Absolute, but only philosophy does so adequately.  Religion is an inadequate 'pictorial' (vortstellende) representation of the Absolute.  On this sort of approach all that is good in religion is aufgehoben in philosophy, simultaneously cancelled and preserved, roughly in the way the bud is both cancelled and preserved in the flower.

5. The Substitutional Motive.  The substitutionalist aims to find in philosophy a substitute for religion.  Religion, when taken seriously, makes a total claim on its adherents' higher energies.  A person who, for any reason, becomes disenchanted with religion, but is not prepared to allow himself to degenerate to the level of the worldling, may look to invest his energies elsewhere in some other lofty pursuit.  Some will turn to social or political activism.  And of course there are other termini ad quos on the road from religion. The substitutionalist abandons religion for philosophy.  In  a sense, philosophy becomes his religion.  It is in her precincts that he seeks his highest meaning and an outlet for his noblest impulses.

Some Questions

A. What is my motive?  (2).  Certainly not (1):  I seem to be constitutionally incapable of taking the religion of my upbringing, or any religion, as simply true without examination.  I can't suppress the questions that naturally arise.  We have it on high authority that "The unexamined life is not worth living."  That examination, of course, extends to everything, including religion, and indeed also to this very examining.  Note  that I am not appealing to the authority of Socrates/Plato since their authority can be validated rationally and autonomously.

Certainly not (3): I am not a debunker.  Not (4) or (5) either.  Hegel is right: both religion and philosophy treat of the Absolute.  Hegel is wrong, however, in thinking that religion is somehow completed by or culminates in philosophy.  I incline to the view that Athens and Jersualem are at odds with each other, that there is a tension between them, indeed a fruitful, productive tension, one that accounts in part for the vitality of the West as over against the inanition of the Islamic world.  To put it starkly, it it is the tension between the autonomy of reason and the heteronomy of obedient faith (cf. Leo Strauss).  Jerusalem is not a suburb of Athens.

Nor do I aim to substitute philosophy for religion.  Philosophy, with its "bloodless ballet of categories," is not my religion.  Man does not live by the discursive intellect alone.

My view is that there are four main paths to the Absolute, philosophy, religion, mysticism, and morality.  They are separate and somehow all must be trod.  No one of them has proprietary rights in the Absolute.  How integrate them?  Integration may not be possible here below.  The best we can do is tack back and forth among them.  So we think, we pray, we meditate and we live under the aegis of moral demands taken as absolute.

This theme is developed in Philosophy, Religion, Mysticism, and Wisdom. 

B. Have I left any types of motive out?   

Are You an Introvert? Take this Test!

This is a re-post from April 2012 with minor edits and additions.

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The bolded material below is taken verbatim from Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking (Crown 2012), p. 13.  I then give my responses.  The more affirmative responses, the more of an introvert you are.

1. I prefer one-on-one conversations to group activities. Absolutely!  Especially in philosophical discussions.  As Roderick Chisholm once said, "In philosophy, three's a crowd."

2. I often prefer to express myself in writing.  Yes. 

3. I enjoy solitude.  Is the Pope Catholic?  Beata solitudo, sola beatitudo.  Happy solitude, the sole beatitude.

4. I seem to care less than my peers about wealth, fame, and status.  Seem?  Do!

Money is a mere means.  To pursue it as an end in itself is perverse.  And once you have enough, you stop acquiring more and turn to higher pursuits.  

As for fame, it is a fool's cynosure. Obscurity is delicious.  To be able to walk down the street and pass as an ordinary schmuck is wonderful.  The value of fame and celebrity is directly proportional to the value of the fools and know-nothings who confer it.  And doesn't Aristotle say that to  be famous you need other people, which fact renders you dependent on them? He does indeed, in his Nicomachean Ethics.

Similarly with social status.  Who confers it? And what is their judgment worth?

5. I dislike small talk, but I enjoy talking in depth about topics that matter to me.  More than once in these pages have I ranted about the endless yap, yap, yap, about noth, noth, nothing.

6. People tell me I'm a good listener.  Yes.  My mind drifts back to a girl I knew when I was fifteen.  She called me her 'analyst' when she wasn't calling me 'Dr. Freud.'

7. I'm not a big risk-taker.  That's right.  I recently took a three-day motorcycle course, passed it, and got my license.  I  had been eyeing  the Harley-Davidson 883 Iron.  But then I asked myself how riding a motorcycle would further my life tasks and whether it makes sense, having come this far, to risk my life and physical integrity in pursuit of cheap thrills.

8. I enjoy work that allows me to "dive in" with few interruptions.  Right.  No instant messaging.  Only recently acquired a cell phone.  I keep it turned off.  Call me the uncalled caller.  Still don't have a smart phone.  My wife is presently in a faraway land on a Fulbright.  That allows me to unplug the land-line.  I love e-mail; fast but unintrusive.  I'll answer when I feel like it and get around to it.  I don't allow myself to be rushed or interrupted.

9. I like to celebrate birthdays on a small scale, with only one or two close friends or family members.  I don't see the point of celebrating birthdays at all. What's to celebrate?  First, birth is not unequivocally good.  Second, it is not something you brought about.  It befell you.  Better to celebrate some good thing that you made happen.

10. People describe me as "soft-spoken" or "mellow."  I'm too intense to be called 'mellow,' but sotto voce applies.

11. I prefer not to show or discuss my work with others until it is finished.  Pretty much, with the exception of these blog scribblings. 

12. I dislike conflict.  Can't stand it.  I hate onesidedness.  I look at a problem from all angles and try to mediate oppositions  when possible.  I thoroughly hate, reject, and abjure the blood sport approach to philosophy.  Polemic has no place in philosophy.  This is not to say that it does not have a place elsewhere, in politics for example.  Don't confuse politics with political philosophy. 

13. I do my best work on my own.  Yes.  A former colleague, a superficial extrovert, once described me as 'lone wolf.'  'Superficial extrovert' smacks of pleonasm. An extrovert is like a mirror: nothing in himself, he is only what reflects.  Is that fair? Fair enough for a blog post. Or an extrovert is like an onion: peel away the last skin and arrive at -- precisely nothing.  The extrovert manages to be surface all the way down.  Or you could say that he is merely a node in a social network. He is constituted by his social relations, and nothing apart from them; hence no substance that enters into social relations.

14. I tend to think before I speak.  Yes.

15. I feel drained after being out and about, even if I've enjoyed myself.  Yes.  This is a common complaint of introverts.  They can take only so much social interaction.  It depletes their energy and they need to go off by themselves to 'recharge their batteries.'  In my case, it is not just an energy depletion but a draining away of my  'spiritual substance.'  It is as if one's interiority has been compromised and one has entered into inauthenticity, Heidegger's Uneigentlichkeit.  The best expression of this sense of spiritual depletion is probably Kierkegaard's remark in one of his early journal entries about a party he attended:

I have just returned from a party of which I was the life and soul; witty banter flowed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me -- but I came away, indeed that dash should be as along as the radii of the earth's orbit ---------------------------------------------------------- wanting to shoot myself. (1836)

16. I often let calls go through to e-mail.  Yes. See comment to #8 above.

17. If I had to choose, I'd prefer a weekend with absolutely nothing to do to one with too many things scheduled.  I love huge blocks of time, days at a stretch, with no commitments whatsoever. Dolce far niente.  Sweet to do nothing.

18. I don't enjoy multitasking.  Right. One thing at a time.

19. I can concentrate easily.  Obviously, and for long stretches of time.

20. In classroom situations, I prefer lecture to seminars.  Especially if I'm doing the lecturing.

Here is a description of the Myers-Briggs INTP.  And here is another.

The Introvert Advantage

We introverts make up about a quarter of the population. No surprise, then, that we are poorly understood.  We are not shy or anti-social. Extroverts abuse us, but there is no need to reply in kind since the present turn of events will do the job for us. They will suffer. We will have no trouble maintaining our social distance. We have rich inner lives and welcome the opportunity to have an excuse to withdraw from the idle talkers, the unserious, the spiritless, and the superficial.  Call it the Introvert Advantage.  

Clinical Depression and the Moral Permissibility of Suicide

I detect a cri du coeur in the following  question to me from a reader:

Do you believe it is morally permissible for an unmarried person who is now middle-aged (late 40's) and who has no children to care for and who has battled clinical depression and anxiety for many years to commit suicide?

Since this is an 'existential' and not merely a theoretical question, and because I want to treat it with the proper respect, I should say that while I have read about clinical depression, I would not call any of my bouts with anxiety and depression 'clinical.' I  have successfully dealt with all of them on my own through prayer, meditation, Stoic and other spiritual disciplines, journal writing, vigorous physical exercise (running), and just toughing it out.  The classically American virtue of self-reliance, too little practiced these days, can sometimes see you through much better than drugs and hand-holding.  But I have been spared the hell I have read about in William Styron's Darkness Visible, and more recently in the philosopher J. P. Moreland's Finding Quiet: My Story of Overcoming Anxiety and the Practices that Brought Me Peace.  

I recommend Moreland's book to the reader and this interview as an introduction thereto.

To come directly at the question: any philosopher who proffers a confident answer to the question is either a fool or a blowhard. Being neither, I will say that I don't know.  I further believe that no one knows despite their asseverations to the contrary. I will say that I have never seen a rationally compelling argument against the moral permissibility of suicide when the going gets unbearably tough.  That life is hell for some people is better known than any doctrine that forbids escape.

I now refer the reader to some entries of mine that I hope are of some use to him.

On Suicide

Kant on Suicide

Benatar on Suicide: Is Suicide Murder?

Is it Always Wrong to Take One's Own Life?

Suicide, Drafts, and Street Corners 

Addendum (1/28). It seems to me that each of us who has the time and soundness of mind to pursue the question should should decide now what he will do if calamity strikes.  

"I Will Pray for You"

In many but not all contexts, to say "I will pray for you" to a person manifests the following passive-aggressive attitude on the part of the speaker: (a) I have strongly negative feelings toward you but I will not directly express them, either because I fear a confrontation, or fancy myself above such negative feelings, or because it would not be expedient for me to express them; (b) I consider myself morally superior to you, and you so inferior to me as to need divine assistance; (c) in truth, I have no real concern for the state of your soul, but by saying that I will pray for you, I posture as if I really do care.

What inspired this observation was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's repeated  talk of praying for Donald Trump. I call this passive-aggression via the misuse in the political sphere of religious language. The sanctimonious insincerity of the dingbat is galling. 

What Trump should tweet to Nancy: Let's make a deal, Nancy. You pray for the state of my soul, and I'll pray for the state of your intellect!

Related: Nancy Pelosi and the Divine Spark

UPDATE (1/2/2020)  Dave Gudeman comments:

At first I thought you were being overly critical, but on further thought it's hard to imagine saying "I will pray for you" as a rebuke to a casual acquaintance. The only time I can think of where it would be appropriate is when said by a fellow church member, a close friend, or a family member to someone engaging in behavior or expressing opinions that they themselves would have considered immoral very recently. In this context, it can be a heartfelt and genuine expression of concern over their move away from a morality that you both shared, but if you don't have a relationship where the other person can reasonably be expected to listen to your rebuke or if what you are rebuking the person for is a long-standing difference, then it becomes what you described, nothing but a passive-aggressive criticism.

I'll add that claiming you love someone after you have attacked them as viciously as Nancy Pelosi has attacked Trump is shockingly hypocritical.

BV: When Pelosi says  "I will pray for you," or "I pray for him all the time," she is not rebuking Trump in so many words.  Her overt speech acts do not express her inner attitude, but mask it, or attempt to mask it. To any astute observer, however, she fails to hide her inner attitude which is as I have described it above.  This passive-aggressive mendacity is what I am objecting to.  

There is also the misuse of religious language in a political context, a Pelosian trademark.  I'll write more about that later.

As Gudeman suggests above, there are uses of 'I will pray for you' that are unobjectionable.  A thorough discussion would sort out different cases.   There were people we genuinely loved the 'evangelical' atheist Christopher Hitchens and who told him that they would pray for him.  That is an entirely different type of case, and it needs a different analysis.  This sort of case, even if mildly objectionable, does not come close to the Pelosian level of self-deceptive hostility that cannot discharge itself in an overt way.  

Tom and Van: A Tale of Two Idealists and their Disillusionment

Thomas Merton and Jean van Heijenoort were both studies in youthful idealism. Both made drastic life decisions early on, and both sacrificed much for their respective ideals. Van joined Leon Trotsky to save the world rather than attend the prestigious Ecole Normale in pursuit of a bourgeois career. While Van was motivated by a desire to save the world, Tom was driven by contemptus mundi to flee the world and retreat to a monastery, which is what he did in 1941 at the age of 26 when he joined the Trappists. A convert to Catholicism, with the zeal of the convert, he took it to the limit the old-time doctrine implied: if the temporal order is but a vanishing quantity, then one should live with eternity ever before one's mind.

Both became disillusioned,* but in different ways. Van lost his secular faith, broke with Marxism, and went back to the serene but lifeless precincts of mathematics to become a distinguished bourgeois professor of the subject.  Tom remained a monk but dropped the contemptus mundi. Van abandoned activism for mathematical logic and romantic affairs. Tom dropped his quietism -- not entirely, however -- and became active in human affairs, the peace movement in particular, during that heady period of ferment inside and outside of the Church, the 1960s.

Both met their ends in foreign venues by unusual means. Unable to stay put like a good monk in Gethsemani, Tom flew to Bangkok for a theological conference where he died of accidental electrocution in December of 1968 at the relatively young age of 53. Van's addiction to sexual love and 'romance' led to his destruction, and in the same Mexico City where the long arm of Stalin, extended by Ramon Mercader's ice axe,  finally slew his erstwhile mentor, Trotsky. Van couldn't stay away from Anne-Marie Zamora even though he believed she would kill him. Drawn like a moth to the flame he flew from Boston to Mexico City.  And kill him she did. While he was asleep, Zamora pumped a couple of rounds from her .38 Special into his head.  Trotsky was done in by the madness of politics; Van by the madness of love. 

What is the moral of this comparison?

Superior individuals feel the lure of the Higher. They seek something more from human existence than a jejune bourgeois life in pursuit of property, pelf, and social status.  They seek transcendence, and sometimes, like Marxist activists, in the wrong places.  No secular eschaton is "right around the corner" to borrow from the prevalent lingo of the 1950s CPUSA.  Man cannot save himself by social praxis. The question as to how we should live remains live. Tom chose a better and nobler path than Van. But can any church be the final repository of all truth? 

For sources, see articles below.

Related:

Like a Moth to the Flame

Trotsky's Faith in Man

A Monk and his Political Silence

___________________________

*Is 'disillusioned' a  predicate adjective of success? If a person becomes disillusioned about X, does it follow that X really is an illusion? Or can one be wrongly disillusioned about X, i.e. come to believe falsely that X is an illusion?  I would say that 'disillusioned' is not a predicate adjective of success.  

ADDENDUM (11/13): WAS THOMAS MERTON ASSASSINATED? 

This just over the transom from Hugh Turley:

Dear Mr. Vallicella,

In your article “Tom and Van: A Tale of Two Idealists and their Disillusionment” you repeated a popular error when you wrote that Thomas Merton "died of accidental electrocution.”

 

It is understandable that you could repeat this mistake because there was deliberate deception to conceal the truth about Merton’s death and the falsehoods have been repeated for over 50 years.  In 2018 I co-authored The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation with David Martin.

 

There is absolutely no evidence to support the accidental electrocution story.

 

I invite you to visit our website and look at the official documents from Thailand concerning Merton’s death and find more information.  http://www.themartyrdomofthomasmerton.com

 

There is also a video of a presentation that I gave in New York City in September.

https://153news.net/watch_video.php?v=9O1A7KHOUY2X

 

Yours for the truth,

 

Hugh Turley

I confess to not having considered, until now, the possibility that Merton was assassinated. So this is news to me and I take no position on the matter. The reviews of Turley's book I have so far located are all positive. If there has been an attempt to rebut his (and his co-author's) claims, I would like someone to let me know.  

 

Here is one of the favorable reviews. And here is a June 2019 article by the authors on the ongoing cover-up of what they take to be the truth.

The Philosopher as Luftmensch

Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Penguin, 2002), p. 11:

Philosophy today gets no respect. Many scientists use the term as a synonym for effete speculation. When my colleague Ned Block told his father that he would major in the subject, his father's reply was "Luft!" — Yiddish for "air." And then there's the joke in which a young man told his mother that he would become a Doctor of Philosophy and she said, "Wonderful! But what kind of disease is philosophy?"

Well, to adapt a chess player's expression, better to make Luft than to make war! (One 'makes Luft' in chess by moving a pawn in front of the castled king's position as prophylaxis against back rank mate. The allusion is to the Vietnam era's 'Make love not war.')

As for 'Doctor of Philosophy,' 'doctor,' etymologically, means teacher (from L. docere, to teach) and 'philosophy' stands in for knowledge or science broadly construed. Thus as late as the 19th century, physicists were still referred to as natural philosophers. 'Ph.D.,' of course, abbreviates Doctor of Philosophy, which is why it is an abomination to see it written as 'PHD.' And when a Ph.D does it it is doubly abominable. But then I'm a linguistic conservative, as well as every other kind of conservative.

In fairness to Pinker, I should point out that after citing the above anecdotes he goes on to say some words in defense of philosophy.

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Addendum: Kevin Spraggett on the importance of making Luft.  White to move.

The Wild Diversity of Human Types

The wild diversity of human types never ceases to fascinate me. There are people like Hugh Hefner who live for their own pleasure. And then there are those who live to sacrifice themselves for causes that transcend themselves even unto literal self-immolation.

Man on Fire will hold your interest.

Defense Mechanisms as Psychic Calluses

Some defense mechanisms are in aid of mental health and adaptation to life. They are distortions of personality, but beneficial, like calluses. To modify the metaphor, in a warped world, the warpage of which is Original, the timber of humanity is correspondingly crooked and knotty, but more resilient in consequence.

A Modest View of Oneself

A modest view of oneself may reflect self-knowledge or lack of self-confidence. But to know which requires self-knowledge.

Don't Pathologize Political Differences

This is the excellent advice of Alan Dershowitz (emphasis added):

But psychiatrists and other mental health professionals have no more right to pathologize a president or a candidate because they disagree with his or her political views than do prosecutors or politicians have a right to criminalize political opponents.

I have been writing in opposition to the criminalization of political differences for decades, because it is dangerous to democracy. It is even more dangerous to pathologize or psychiatrize one’s political opponents based on opposition to their politics.

Getting mental health professionals to declare political opponents mentally ill was a common tactic used against political dissidents by the Soviet Union, China, and apartheid South Africa. Perfectly sane people were locked up in psychiatric wards or prisons for years because of phony diagnoses of mental illness.

The American Psychiatric Association took a strong stand against the use of this weapon by tyrants. I was deeply involved in that condemnation, because I understood how dangerous it is to diagnose political opponents instead of responding to the merits of their political views.

It is even more dangerous when a democracy like the U.S. begins to go down the road of pathologizing political differences. It’s one thing to say your opponents are wrong. It’s quite another to say they are crazy.

Questions about President Trump’s mental health arose even before he was elected. Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, some of his most extreme critics were not content to say they disagreed with his policies – or thought he was unqualified because of his temperament, background, or skill set. Instead, they questioned his mental health.

I am old enough to remember the last time this happened. The 1964 presidential election was the second in which I voted. President Lyndon Johnson, who had succeeded the assassinated President John F. Kennedy, was running against Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz.

I didn’t like either candidate. Johnson’s personal characteristics were obnoxious, though he had achieved much, especially in the area of civil rights. Goldwater’s personal characteristics seemed fine, but I disapproved of his conservative political views.

I was shocked to read an article in Fact magazine – based on interviews with more than 1,100 psychiatrists – that concluded Goldwater was mentally unstable and psychologically unfit to be president. It was Lyndon Johnson whose personal fitness to hold the highest office I had questioned.

Goldwater seemed to me to be emotionally stable, with excellent personal characteristics, but highly questionable politics. The article was utterly unpersuasive, but in the end, I reluctantly voted for Johnson because Goldwater was too conservative for my political tastes.

Goldwater went back to the Senate, where he served with great distinction and high personal morality. Johnson got us deeply into an unwinnable war in Vietnam that hurt our nation and claimed more than 58,000 American lives. The more than 1,100 psychiatrists, it turned out, were wrong in their diagnosis and predictions.

The misdiagnosis of Goldwater should surprise no one, since none of the psychiatrists had ever examined, or even met, the Arizona senator. They just didn’t like his politics. Indeed, some feared that he would destroy the world if he had access to the nuclear button.

The most powerful TV ad against Goldwater showed an adorable young girl playing with a flower. Then, the viewer hears an ominous voice counting down from 10, the camera zooms into a tight close-up of the little girl’s eye, and you see the horrific mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion, implying that electing Goldwater would bring about a nuclear holocaust. It was an effective ad. It influenced me far more than the psychobabble in the Fact article.

Read it all.

I would add that those who suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome are in no position to call Trump crazy or mentally unstable.  That would be a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

But haven't I just done what Dershowitz says one ought not do? Have I not just pathologized the views of those who oppose Trump by calling these people deranged?

No. I am not pathologizing their views, I am pathologizing them in respect of their boundless hatred of the man. Robert de Niro is a prime example. In his latest outburst, he calls Trump in public a "fucking idiot" and a "fucking fool" and on and on.  And there is this even worse earlier stream of invective from De Niro.  

I call this phenomenon topical insanity. There are certain topics that will 'trigger' ordinarily sane people and cause them to lose their mental stability.  Guns have quite the triggering effect on many liberals.  They simply cannot maintain their mental balance when the topic comes up. Pointing out well-known truths about race will do it as well.

So we need to distinguish between pathologizing views and pathologizing people.

There are a number of interesting questions here.  One question is whether there are any political or other views which are such that their holding by anybody would be good evidence of mental instability on the part of the one holding the view. 

A related but different question is whether there are any political or other views which are such that their holding by anybody would be good evidence of moral corruption or an evil nature.

Finally, there is the phenomenon of calling one's political opponents stupid. This is obviously different from calling them either insane or evil.  For example, I have heard Ann Coulter called stupid. But stupid is one thing she is obviously not.  Every political view has adherents that are less and more intelligent.  For example, Nancy Pelosi is not very bright as should be obvious. Obama on the other hand, is quite bright and indeed brighter, I would judge, than Joe Biden or  G. W. Bush.  But having a high degree of verbal intelligence is no guarantee that one possesses wisdom or has the right values.

Trump's Alleged Insanity

Liberals playing the 'mental' card is nothing new. You may recall the Johnson campaign's smearing of Barry Goldwater with "In your guts you know he's nuts." That was in 1964. So forgive me for not being impressed when sufferers from Trump Derangement Syndrome pronounce Donald Trump unfit for office on the ground of insanity.

Just how sane are anti-Trumpers? John Pepple:

. . . I believe all these people (and not just Americans, but also their counterparts throughout the Western world) are themselves insane, and what’s more, they are suicidally insane, while as far as I know, Trump is not suicidally insane. I’ve been saying this for ages, but I will say it again. These people all seem to believe that it is the height of progressiveness these days to welcome into the West people who are not a bit progressive and who already have a track record of deliberately murdering lots of progressives and even of destroying the progressive movement in at least one country (Iran back in 1979). This is like Jews inviting Nazis into Israel, or blacks supporting the KKK. It's sheer insanity.

 

How to Know You are in a Mass Hysteria Bubble

Scott Adams:

The most visible Mass Hysteria of the moment involves the idea that the United States intentionally elected a racist President. If that statement just triggered you, it might mean you are in the Mass Hysteria bubble. The cool part is that you can’t fact-check my claim you are hallucinating if you are actually hallucinating. But you can read my description of the signs of mass hysteria and see if you check off the boxes.

Trump Derangement Syndrome

A case study.

Old Mountaineers and Bold Mountaineers

I'm no climber, but I love walking in the mountains. On a solo backpacking adventure in the magnificent Sierra Nevada some years back I overheard a snatch of conversation:

There are old mountaineers, and there are bold mountaineers, but there are no old bold mountaineers.

Ueli Steck, the great Swiss climber, is dead at 40, having fallen near Everest.

I have repeatedly asked myself, why I do this. The answer is pretty simple: because I want to do it and because I like it. I don’t like being restricted. When I climb, I feel free and unrestricted; away from any social commitments. This is what I am looking for.

I have a better answer. Steck climbed because he was very, very good at it, and we humans love doing what we are good at. Freedom from social commitments can be had in far less perilous ways.  

I am reminded of something the great marathoner Bill Rodgers once said when asked why he ran and won 26.2 mile races at a blistering sub-five-minute-per-mile pace. "I like to be be fit." (I quote from memory) But of course one can be very fit indeed without running such a punishing distance at such a punishing pace.

Nicholas Kristof on the Origin of Trump Derangement Syndrome

In the piss-poor pages of the Rag of Record's op-ed section, for today's date, I found this: ". . .Trump's craziness is proving infectious, making Democrats crazy with rage that actually impedes a progressive agenda."

It is true that the Dems are crazy with rage and that this impedes their agenda. But of course such impedance is a good thing, not to mention the pleasures of Schadenfreude as we watch our opponents melt down.

But Kristof is wrong about the origin of TDS. It does not derive from the Orange Man's alleged craziness, but oozes up from the mephitic recesses of leftists' psyche.

Their bien-pensant bigotry, smug assurance of  moral superiority, and Hillarian sense of entitlement received a stinging rebuke on November 8th, and they still haven't gotten over it.

If you are wondering why I didn't link to Kristoff's piece, it is because the NYT webpages are now set up to disallow copying and pasting. No copy and paste? Then no hyperlink. Yes, I know there is a copy-and-paste work-around, but I'm not about to jump through those hoops.

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Why Are Lawyers So Unhappy?

Martin P. Seligman explains. Seligman! Now there's an aptronym for you. Selig is German for happy, blessed, blissful, although it can also mean late (verstorben) and tipsy (betrunken). So Seligman is the happy man or happy one. Nomen est omen?

Give some careful thought to what you name your kid. 'Chastity' may have an anti-aptronymic effect.  As for anti-aptronyms, I was introduced a while back to a hulking biker who rejoiced under the name of 'Tiny.'  A student of mine's name for me was 'Smiley' to underscore my serious-as-cancer demeanor.

Trump Against the Pussycons

'Pussycon' is a crude moniker for those I have variously described as milquetoast conservatives, yap-and-scribble do-nothings, and bow-tie boys. Esther Goldberg:

The hanky-clutching, cluck-clucking, tsk-tsking faction of the Conservative movement is in for a rough and bumpy ride over the next four to eight years.

They’re the ones who wanted a Republican president who looked like the male manikin on top of the wedding cake. You know, like Mitt Romney. And who were shocked when they got one who wore a baseball cap and spoke with a Queens accent. Like Al Capp’s S.W.I.N.E. (Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything), they are perpetually offended by everything Donald Trump says and does. By the fact that he simply exists.

I call them the Pussycons. They’re demanding a prissiness from Republican politicians, a refined politesse that distinguishes them from the swinish multitude. For George Will, you had to be able to imagine him “in an Iowa living room, with a macaroon in one hand and cup of hot chocolate balanced on a knee.” A George H.W. Bush, dangling a tea cup. Or a Mitt Romney, so much more elevated than his 47 percent of “takers.”

Political Oikophobia and Trump Derangement Syndrome

Oikophobia is an irrational fear of household items, surroundings, and the like.  Political oikophobia is an irrational aversion to one's own country, culture, traditions, and countrymen.  I suggest we call the opposite political oikophilia, an irrational love of one's own country, culture, traditions, and countrymen.  This distinction 'cuts perpendicular' to the xenophobia-xenophilia distinction. Thus,

Political oikophobia: irrational aversion to one's own country, etc.
Political oikophilia: irrational love of one's own country, etc.
Xenophobia: an irrational fear of foreigners and the foreign.
Xenophilia: an irrational love of foeigners and the foreign.

Clearly, one can be an oikophobe without being a xenophile, and an oikophile without being a xenophobe.

Trump Derangment Syndrome takes the form of political oikophobia in many.  Glenn Reynolds supplies examples. Here is one:

Ned Resnikoff, a “senior editor” at the  liberal website ThinkProgress, wrote on Facebook that he’d called a plumber to fix a clogged drain. The plumber showed up, did the job and left, but Resnikoff was left shaken, though with a functioning drain. Wrote Resnikoff, “He was a perfectly nice guy and a consummate professional. But he was also a middle-aged white man with a Southern accent who seemed unperturbed by this week’s news.”

This created fear: “While I had him in the apartment, I couldn’t stop thinking about whether he had voted for Trump, whether he knew my last name is Jewish, and how that knowledge might change the interaction we were having inside my own home.”

When it was all over, Resnikoff reported that he was “rattled” at the thought that a Trump supporter might have been in his home. “I couldn’t shake the sense of potential danger.”

Here is a second example:

In fact, another piece on reacting to the election, by Tim Kreider in The Week, is titled "I love America. It's Americans I hate." Writes Kreider, “The public is a swarm of hostile morons, I told her. You don't need to make them understand you; you just need to defeat them, or wait for them die. . . .  A few of us are talking, after a couple drinks, about buying guns; if it comes to a fascist state or civil war, we figure, we don't want the red states to be the only ones armed.”

“A vote for Trump,” Kreider continues, “is kind of like a murder.”  Though his piece concludes on a (slightly) more hopeful note, the point is clear:  Americans, at least Trump-voting Americans, are “pathetically dumb and gullible, uncritical consumers of any disinformation that confirms their biases.”

And a third:

And in a notorious Yale Law Journal article, feminist law professor Wendy Brown wrote about an experience in which, after a wilderness hike, she returned to her car to find it wouldn’t start. A man in an NRA hat spent a couple of hours helping her get it going, but rather than display appreciation for this act of unselfishness, Brown wrote that she was lucky she had friends along, as a guy like that was probably a rapist.

Clearly, these three people are topically deranged: they lose their mental balance and the boat of brain capsizes into irrationality when the topic of Trump obtrudes.  This is not to say that they cannot negotiate the world sensibly in other ways: they are not globally deranged.  Nor is it to say that everyone with objections to Trump the man or Trump's policies and appointments is deranged topically or globally.

The phrase 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' refers to a real phenomenon and is justified by this fact.

What Explains Trump Derangement Syndrome?

Glenn Reynolds points to status anxiety:

Our privileged, college-educated left — what Joel Kotkin calls the gentry liberals — feels that its preeminent position in American society is under threat. And people care a lot about status.

What’s more, the people who seem to be lashing out the most are, in fact, just those gentry liberals: academics, entertainers, pundits, low-level tech types, and so on. As journalism professor Mark Grabowski reported, another academic texted him on election night: "Oh my God! We will be the ones ostracized if he wins."

Maybe we shouldn’t “ostracize” people based on whether their candidate wins, but in a way this professor was right:  A Trump victory is a blow to the status of the people who thought Hillary Clinton was their candidate — one that they feel even more deeply because gentry liberals, having been raised on the principle that the personal is political, seem to take politics pretty personally.

Another example that’s been circulating on the Internet comes from YouTube sex-talker Laci Green. When the election was still uncertain, she tweeted: “Regardless of the outcome, we are clearly a *deeply* divided and broken country. So much work ahead to mend, heal, and restore the U in USA.” Just a few hours later, when it became clear that Hillary had lost, she changed her tune: “We are now under total Republican rule. Textbook fascism. F____ you, white America. F___ you, you racist, misogynist pieces of s___. G'night.”

Reynolds' is part of the explanation.  Another part is that Hillarians and lefties generally are, most of them, secularists.  Religion and its promises are for them purest buncombe.  This is it, baby, and this is all she wrote.  This is as real as it gets.  And yet they are not content to be smiley-faced nihilists with their little pleasure for the day and their little pleasure for the night, to paraphrase Nietzsche's Last Man riff.  They want Deep Meaning that transcends the petty particulars of quotidian life. So they seek it in the Political. Not being able to worship something worship-worthy, they succumb to the Idolatry of the Political. They don't realize that the Meaning they seek cannot be found where they seek it.

It is their inordinate and idolatrous commitment to the Political that explains, in part, why lefties 'lose it' when their candidates lose.

TDS really is an amazing syndrome.  There is no counterpart of  it on the Right.   

Poor Barry Manilow

Here:

In an experiment published in 2000, the psychologist Thomas Gilovich and his colleagues asked undergraduates to wear a piece of clothing that they found embarrassing—a t-shirt with a picture of singer-songwriter Barry Manilow on it. After putting on the shirt, the undergraduates had to spend some time in a room with other students and were later asked to guess how many of the other students noticed what they were wearing. The undergraduates tended to overestimate the proportion by a large margin, and did the same when asked to wear a t-shirt with a positive image on it, like Bob Marley or Martin Luther King Jr. In study after study, experimental subjects thought that other people would notice them much more than they actually did.

Another study that confirms what we already knew.  Were any tax dollars used to fund it?  In a scientistic culture ignorant of its own rich traditions it is thought that only what is 'scientifically' validated can be taken seriously.  I am not denying that a study such as this one might have some slight value.

More interesting, I should think, would be a study of why Marley and King have a positive image and Manilow a negative one, not that I would be caught dead listening to Manilow's schmaltz, except for analytic and culture-critical purposes.  Or a study why there is a preponderance among the young of Che Guevara T-shirts over, say, Maggie Thatcher T-shirts.

David French on Hillary on 'Implicit Bias.' Hillary as Cultural Marxist. Psychology of the NeverTrumper

Here (emphasis added):

Indeed, in the debate Monday night, Clinton framed her discussion of “implicit bias” as a malady we all suffer from, telling Lester Holt:

“I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police. I think, unfortunately, too many of us in our great country jump to conclusions about each other.”

Well, yes, too many people do jump to conclusions. So, what’s the solution, Hillary? When it comes to policing, since it can have literally fatal consequences, I have said, in my first budget, we would put money into that budget to help us deal with implicit bias by retraining a lot of our police officers. Wait. What? If we’re all biased, who’s training whom? Let’s be very clear: When it moves from abstract to concrete, all this talk about “implicit bias” gets very sinister, very quickly. It allows radicals to indict entire communities as bigoted, it relieves them of the obligation of actually proving their case, and it allows them to use virtually any negative event as a pretext for enforcing their ideological agenda.

What bothers me about David French is that, while he writes outstanding columns in support of the conservative cause, he is, last time I checked, a NeverTrumper.

Would it be fair to label him a yap-and-scribble milquetoast 'conservative'?  He talks and talks, writes and writes, but refuses to support the one man who has any chance of impeding Hillary and the Left's destructive 'long march' (Mao) through the institutions of our society.  That is so strange and so absurd that one may be justified in a bit of psychologizing.  Perhaps the explanation of his behavior and that of others in his elite club is revealed in this column by F. H. Buckley:

I gave a talk to a conservative group not so long ago, when the NeverTrumper still lived in his fantasy wor[l]d. They believed that the voters and delegates would finally come to their senses and nominate the amiable Ted Cruz, or that somehow they’d jigger the Convention rules, or that the absurd Great White Hope, David French, would do the trick.

It was four months ago, and I gave my usual anti-Pollyanna talk of gloom and doom. When I finished people lined up to ask questions, and one of them was a senior executive at a prominent DC think tank. “It’s true we’re going to Hell in a hand-basket,” he said, “but this time we’ve got a lot of great think tanks on our side.” Right you are, I thought. Bad as it might be, you can say “I’ve got mine.”

I thought of that when I talked to a friend yesterday. He spoke of dinner parties ruined when NeverTrumpers start abusing Trump supporters. Then he told me of one dinner party at which two of the most prominent NeverTrumpers confessed why they want Hillary to win. They know they’ll have no access to the Trump White House if he wins. Nor would they have any access to a Hillary White House. The difference, however, is that their donor base would desert them in the event of a Trump victory, whereas they can raise money from donors in the event of a Hillary win.

We had figured this out. We’re just surprised to hear them admit it.

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Predicting What One Wants to Happen

Perhaps you have noticed this too.  People will often predict what they want to happen, even when what they want to happen is far from a foregone conclusion. At the moment I am reading an article by David P. Goldman who asserts that Hillary is "road kill":

The presidential election was over the moment the word “deplorable” made its run out of Hillary Clinton’s unguarded mouth. As the whole world now knows, Clinton told a Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender fundraiser Sept. 10, “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables.’ Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that, and he has lifted them up.”

What is the astute Goldman up to?  He must know the election is not in the bag.  A glance at the electoral college map should convince anyone of that.  At the moment, Clinton has 209 electoral votes, Trump 154, with 175 toss ups.

My theory is that when intelligent people predict what they want to happen, when what they want to happen is far from a foregone conclusion, they are trying to influence the outcome.  If more and more people think that Trump will win, then they will be inclined to support him.  People like to be on the winning side.  "You just want to be one the side that's winning," Dylan whined in Positively Fourth Street.

There are numerous examples of this phenomenon of predicting what one wants to happen.  

A related phenomenon is often exhibited by my angelic wife.  I'll ask her how likely it is that such-and-such a good thing will happen, and she will reply, "I hope so!"  I will then point out that what I requested was her assessment of the probability of a desired future event, not a report on what she hopes.  

'Do you think Socrates Jones will get tenure?"

"I hope so!"

Goldman's ending earns the coveted MavPhil nihil obstat:

He [Trump] built a new country club in Palm Beach two decades ago because the old ones excluded blacks and Jews. He’s no racist. He’s an obnoxious, vulgar salesman who plays politics like a reality show. I’ve made clear that I will vote for him, not because he was my choice in the Republican field (that was Sen. Cruz), but because I believe that rule of law is a precondition for a free society. If the Clintons get a free pass for influence-peddling on the multi-hundred-million-dollar scale and for covering up illegal use of private communications for government documents, the rule of law is a joke in the United States. Even if Trump were a worse president than Clinton–which is probably not the case–I would vote for him, on this ground alone.

My view exactly.

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You know the type.  The one whose lack of understanding of a subject is no barrier to his talking about it.

Moral Narcissism

As defined by Roger L. Simon¹:

Briefly stated, moral narcissism is this: What you say you believe or claim you believe — not how you actually behave — defines who you are and makes you “virtuous” in your own eyes and the eyes of others. Almost always, this is without regard to the consequences of those beliefs, because actual real-world results are immaterial and often ignored.

If you have the right opinions and say the right things, people will remember your pronouncements, not your actions or what happened because of them.

That is moral narcissism.

We see this in the campaign of Bernie Sanders, a moral narcissist par excellence who, rarely revising a half-century-old worldview, trumpets the virtues of socialism with scant reference to the cost of its programs or to its often-totalitarian outcome. 

I would add that moral narcissism fits nicely with the denial of objective truth, one of the features of contemporary liberalism.  If there is no objective way things are, then all that matters is how one postures and what one says.  If you say the 'right' things, the politically correct things, the 'sensitive,' 'nonjudgmental,' 'inclusive,' things, then you are good person whether or not any of it can be expected to work out in reality.

For example, it sounds really good and 'caring' to say that the state should provide free college educations at public institutions for all and to call for an expansion of social services generally.  And its sounds 'racist' and 'xenophobic' and 'mean-spirited' to insist on the stoppage of illegal immigration.  But put the two together, freebies and open borders,and you get an objective absurdity that cannot work out in reality.

Not to confront this contradiction shows a lack of concern for truth.

Obviously, a sustainable  welfare state requires strict immigration control.  Or, if you prefer open borders, then you need a libertarian clamp-down on entitilements and social services.  One or the other.  Reality places us before this exclusive 'or.'

Sanders the socialist thinks he can have it both ways: a massive welfare state with open borders.  That is objectively unworkable. Reality will not allow it.  But if there is no reality and no objective truth, then no problem!  One can say all the right things and posture as virtuous.

And when disaster occurs, you can always plead your good intentions.

That's moral narcissism.

_____________________

1

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Clinton Cash, The Movie

Official trailer.

Money, power, sex, and recognition form what I call the Mighty Tetrad of human motivators, the chief goads to action here below. Hillary specializes in the inordinate love of the first two, Bill in the inordinate love of the second.

The Parable of the Lion and the Turtle

The lion said to the turtle, "Come out of your shell, and join the party!"  The turtle said to the lion, "OK, Leo, after you have had yourself declawed and defanged."

Defense mechanisms, both physical and psychological, serve a good purpose even as they limit relations with others.  But too much armor, psychic and otherwise, will stunt your life.  Too little may end it.  

Among a body politic's defense mechanisms are secure borders and a wise immigration policy.  

The USA at present has neither.  You know what to do.

Image credit.

Other parables:

The Parable of the Tree and the House

The Parable of the Leaky Cup

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Christopher Hitchens, Religion, and Cognitive Dissonance

Hitchens says somewhere that he didn't suffer from cognitive dissonance of the sort that arises when a deeply internalized religious upbringing collides with the contrary values of the world, since he never took religion or theism seriously in the first place.  But then I say religion was never a Jamesian live option for him.  But if not a live existential option, one that engages the whole man and not just his intellect, then not an option explored with the openness and sympathy and humility requisite for understanding. 

So why should we take seriously what Hitchens says about religion?  He hasn't sympathetically entered into the subject.  He hasn't fulfilled the prerequisites for understanding.  One such prerequisite is openness to the pain of cognitive dissonance as suffered when the doctrines, precepts and practices of a religion taken seriously come into conflict with a world that mocks them when not ignoring them.  But in Hitchens by his own account there was not even the possibility of cognitive dissonance.

Consider two working class individuals.  The first is a sensitive poet with real poetic ability.  His family, however, considers poetry effete and epicene and nothing that a real man could or should take seriously.  The second is a lout with no appreciation of poetry whatsoever.  The first suffers cognitive dissonance as his ideal world of poetic imagination collides with the grubby work-a-day-world of his unlettered parents and relatives.  The second fellow obviously suffers from no comparable cognitive dissonance: he never took poetry seriously in the first place.

The  second fellow, however, is full of himself and his opinions and does not hesitate to hold forth in the manner of the bar room bullshitter on any and all topics, including poetry.  Should we credit his opinions about poetry?  Of course not: he has never engaged with it by practice or careful reading or the consultation of works of literary criticism.  He knows not whereof he speaks.  His nescience reflects his lack of the poetic 'organ.' 

Similarly,  a fellow like Hitchens, as clever as he is, lacks the religious 'organ.'  So religion is closed off from him and what he says about it , though interesting, need not be taken all that seriously, or is to be taken seriously only in a negative way in the manner of the pathologist in his study of pathogens.

Companion post:  David Lewis on Religion

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Is There Anything Good About Men?

Via Bill Keezer, via Malcolm Pollack, I came to the above-captioned address by Roy F. Baumeister.  Packed with insights.  (In my book, 'insight' is a noun of success: there are no false insights.)

A Battle of Titans: Plato Versus Aristotle

It is sometimes said that there are only two kinds of philosophers, Platonists and Aristotelians.  What follows is a quotation from Heinrich Heine which expresses one version of this useful simplification.  Carl Gustav Jung places it at the very beginning of his Psychological Types (Princeton UP, 1971, p. 2.)

Plato and Aristotle! These are not merely two systems: they are also types of two distinct human natures, which from time immemorial, under every sort of disguise, stand more or less inimically opposed. The whole medieval period in particular was riven by this conflict, which persists down to the present day, and which forms the most essential content of the history of the Christian Church. Although under other names, it is always of Plato and Aristotle that we speak. Visionary, mystical, Platonic natures disclose Christian ideas and their corresponding symbols from the fathomless depths of their souls. Practical, orderly, Aristotelian natures build out of these ideas and symbols a fixed system, a dogma and a cult. Finally, the Church eventually embraces both natures—one of them entrenched in the clergy, and the other in monasticism; but both keeping up a constant feud. ~ H. Heine, Deutschland

Plato, on the left carrying The Timaeus, points upwards while Aristotle, on the right carrying his Ethics, points either forward (thereby valorizing the 'horizontal' dimension of time and change as against Plato's 'vertical' gesture) or downwards (emphasizing the foundational status of sense particulars and sense knowledge.)  At least  five contrasts are suggested: vita contemplativa versus vita activa, mundus intelligibilis versus mundus sensibilis, transcendence versus immanence, eternity versus time, mystical unity versus rational-cum-empirical plurality.

Heine is right about the battle within Christianity between the Platonic and Aristotelian tendencies.  Trinity, Incarnation, Transubstantiation, Divine Simplicity -- these are at bottom mystical notions impervious to penetration by the discursive intellect as we have been lately observing.  Nevertheless,"Practical, orderly, Aristotelian natures build out of these ideas and symbols a fixed system, a dogma and a cult."  But the dogmatic constructions, no matter how clever and detailed, never succeed in rendering intelligible the  transintelligible, mystical contents.

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The Strange Tale of Chris Knight, the Central Maine Hermit-Thief

A hell of a story.  This one goes into the Questers and Other Oddballs file.

Anyone who reveals what he’s learned, Chris told me, is not by his definition a true hermit. Chris had come around on the idea of himself as a hermit, and eventually embraced it. When I mentioned Thoreau, who spent two years at Walden, Chris dismissed him with a single word: "dilettante."

Again I am astonished by the wild diversity of human types as between, say, Zelda Kaplan and Dolores Hart.  Who or what is man that he should admit of such wide diversity?

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Thoreau, the First Declutterer

The Several-Storied Thomas Merton: Contemplative, Writer, Bohemian, Activist

An outstanding essay by Robert Royal on the many Mertons and their uneasy unity in one fleshly vehicle. There is of course Merton the Contemplative, the convert to Catholicism who, with the typical zeal of the convert, took it all the way to the austerities of Trappist monasticism, and that at a time (1941) when it was a more demanding and rigorous affair than today.  In serious tension with the Contemplative, the Scribbler:

It did not help that Merton the Contemplative confronted Merton the Writer. Even for a man not vowed to silence, Merton's several dozen books would have been an extraordinary output. But adding the journals -- four volumes have now appeared and the whole will run to seven volumes totaling about 3,500 large pages -- we begin to glimpse a serious conflict. Can a man committed to the wordless apophatic way and a forgetting of self be preoccupied with recording-and publishing-every thought and act?

I live that tension myself very morning.  For me it takes the form of a conflict between Athens and Benares, as I like to call it. Denk, denk, denk, scribble scribble, scribble from 2 AM on.  But then at 4 AM, no later! I must tear myself away from the discursive desk and mount the black mat of meditation, going into reverse, as it were, moving from disciplined thinking to disciplined non-thinking.

Also in tension with the Contemplative, the Bohemian:

There were also other Mertons, among the more troublesome: the Bohemian. This Merton felt a constant need to be an outsider. When Merton lived in the world, it took the usual forms. He had aspirations to being an experimental writer and poet (his Collected Poems, which show real innovation but great unevenness, run to almost 1,000 pages). He listened to jazz, dabbled in leftist politics, hit the bottle pretty hard, smoked heavily, had his share of girlfriends, and did a bit of drawing. All relatively harmless, but some incongruous holdover bedeviled Merton the monk. Should a Trappist be interested in Henry Miller? Or follow Joan Baez? Or Bob Dylan? As late as 1959 (after eighteen years in the abbey), Merton was reading books like James Thurber's The Years with Ross, an account of life under Harold Ross, editor of the New Yorker. The New Yorker of the fifties was more staid than its current incarnation, and Merton often claimed the chic ads reminded him of everything in the world he had fled. But there was something odd in a monk even being interested in a magazine like the New Yorker.

Also battling with the Contemplative and Quietist (in a broad sense of this term), a fourth Merton, the Social Activist who aligned easily with the Writer and the Bohemian:

In the 1960s that world [the world outside the monastic enclosure, the 'real'  world in the parlance of the worldly] came to the fore in his work. The Contemplative who fled the world, however, was not always a good advisor for the Activist. The Contemplative had not fared well in European or American society, and had taken this as proof that those societies were not doing well either. This led him to a number of mistaken or exaggerated judgments. During the fifties he accepted a theory of the moral equivalence of the United States and the Soviet Union. The Vietnam War abroad and the civil rights struggle at home, he came to believe, revealed a totalitarian impulse in America and he wrote of the possible emergence of a Nazi-like racial regime in the United States. (Emphasis added)

Royal has it exactly right.

The frequent tendency of Merton the Activist to overstatement is telling. Merton was by background mostly a European. And lacking any experience of the moral realism and decency of most Americans, he tended to judge all of American society through the lens of heated political controversies and the usual intellectual complaints about the bourgeoisie. His essays on civil rights, for example, are heartfelt and penetrating, but are not even a very good description of the predicament of the American liberal. The kind of moderation Merton showed in spiritual and moral questions rarely appears in his social commentary. He was angry about political issues in the early 1960s. (Emphasis added)

Spot on, once again.  Merton was in many ways a typical leftist intellectual alienated from and unappreciative of the country that allowed him to live his kind of life in his kind of way, as opposed to, say, being forced into a concentration camp and then put to death.  The Commies were not all that kind to religion and religionists.  You may recall that Edith Stein, another Catholic convert, became a Carmelite nun, but  was murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz.  She was, by the way, a much better thinker than Merton. 

Merton the Man is the uneasy unity of these four personae.  His edifice is four-storied rather than seven, and I suppose 'story' could also be read as 'narrative' or 'script,' the Contemplative, the Writer, the Bohemian, and the Activist being as much multiply exemplifiable life-scripts  as  the competing personae of one particular man. 

Intimately interwoven with these four Mertons is someone we are forced to call Merton the Man. This Fifth Business never entirely settled down. The Contemplative, as may be seen in painful detail in the journals, is constantly vacillating, though in his public work Merton displays spiritual mastery. The Writer is gifted, but so much so that he has a tendency toward glibness. The Bohemian Merton got the others into any number of scrapes, and the Activist Merton often got carried away by currents in the sixties that-in retrospect-were not entirely fair to American society. Yet when all is said and done, Merton remains one of the great contemplative spirits of the century.

Merton died young in Bangkok in 1968, at the age of 53.  He was there for a conference.  Those of us who have attended and contributed to academic conferences know how dubious they are, and how destabilizing to a centered life.  I tend to think that it was the Writer, The Bohemian, and the Activist who, in the synergy of an unholy trinity, swamped the Contemplative and caused him to be lured away from his circumscribed but true monastic orbit. 

If he had lived on into the '70s would Merton have remained a monk?  Who knows?  So many men and women of the cloth abandoned their vocations and vows at that time.*  In his Asian journal he writes that he intended to return to Gethsemani.  It is nevertheless reasonable to speculate that he would not have lasted as a monk much longer.  The Zeitgeist would have got to him, and the synergy of the unholy trinity just mentioned.  Not to mention the transports of earthly love:

The mid-1960s brought him to the brink of disaster. Merton had a back problem requiring an operation at a Catholic hospital in Louisville. When he recovered from the anesthesia, he was anxious that he had missed daily communion. He began making notes on Meister Eckhart. His long- desired hermitage awaited him back at Gethsemani. To the eye, it was business as usual.

But a pretty young student nurse came in. A Catholic, she knew of Merton from a book her father had given her. Something erupted between them- even though she had a fiance in Chicago. On leaving the hospital, he wrote her about needing friendship. She wrote back, instructed by him to mark the envelope "conscience matter" (lest the superiors read the correspondence). Under "conscience matter," Merton sent a declaration of love. Thus began a series of deceptions, and Merton only narrowly avoided the shipwreck of his monastic vows because of the impossibility of the whole situation.

 ______________

*I think of the Jesuits and others who had jobs in philosophy because they were assigned to teach it at Catholic colleges back in the day when such colleges were more than nominally Catholic, and how they left their religious orders -- but kept their jobs!  Nice work if you can get it.

A Big Ego

One associates loud, domineering, and aggressive behavior with a 'big ego.'  But a long memory for wrongs done one, a fine sensitivity to slights and slurs real and imagined are also signs of a 'big ego.'

Doubting Psychology

Spencer Case reviews Theodore Dalrymple, Admirable Evasions.

President Snark

"Snarkery is a character flaw of thin-skinned insecurity and juvenile mean-spiritedness — and embarrassing in a president."

Extrovert versus Introvert: The Introvert Speaks

The extrovert is like a mirror: being nothing in himself, he is only what he reflects.  A caricature, no doubt, but useful in delineation of an ideal type.  This is why the extrovert needs others.  Without them, he lacks inner substance.  This is also why he is not drained by others, but drains them -- like a vampire.  By contrast, the introvert, who has inner substance, loses it by social intercourse.  He is drained not merely of physical energy, but of spiritual integrity, inner focus, his very self.  The problem with socializing is not so much energy loss as self loss.  But one cannot lose what one does not have. 

The introvert cannot be himself in society but must sacrifice himself on the altar of Heidegger's das Man, the 'they self,' or social self.  The extrovert can only be himself and come to himself in society.  Whereas the introvert loses himself in society, the extrovert finds himself there.

If you infer the superiority of the introvert, I won't disagree with you.

The above cartoon nails it. 

Are you an introvert?  Take this test.

Kierkegaard was an archetypical introvert. 

UPDATE (11:55 AM):  It occurred to me that 'superficial extrovert' might count as a pleonastic expression.  Other polemical jabs:  'Extroverts are surface all the way down.' 'Extroverts aren't even shallow.'

Islam and the Perils of Psychological Projection

I have found that it is dangerous to assume that others are essentially like oneself.

Psychologists speak of projection. As I understand it, it involves projecting (etymologically, throwing outward) into others one's own attitudes, beliefs, motivations, fears, emotions, desires, values, and the like.  It is classified as a defense mechanism.  To avoid confronting an unsavory attitude or trait in oneself, one projects it into another.  Suppose one is stingy, considers stinginess an undesirable trait, but doesn't want to own up to one's stinginess.  As a defense against the admission of one's own stinginess, one projects it into others.  "I'm not stingy; you're stingy!"

I once had a superficial colleague who published a lot.  He was motivated more by a neurotic need to advance himself socially and economically, a need based in low self-esteem, rather than by a drive to get at the truth or make a contribution to his subject.   He was at some level aware that his motives were less than noble.  Once, when he found out that I had published an article, he told me that my motive was to see my name in print. It was a classic case of projection: he could not understand me except as being driven by the same paltry motives that drove him.  By projecting his motives into me, he warded off the awareness of their presence in him, or else excused their presence in him on the spurious ground that everyone has the same paltry motivations.

Most of the definitions of projection I have read imply that it is only undesirable attitudes, beliefs, and the like that  are the contents of acts of projection.  But it seems to me that the notion of projection could and perhaps should be widened to include desirable ones as well. 

The desire for peace and social harmony, for example, is obviously good.  But it too can be the content of an act of psychological projection.  A pacifist, for example, may assume that others deep down are really like he is: peace-loving to such an extent as to avoid war at all costs. A pacifist might reason as follows: since everyone deep down wants peace, and abhors war, if I throw down my weapon, my adversary will do likewise. My adversay is histile out of fear; if I remove the reason for his fear, he will be pacified.  By unilaterally disarming, I show my good will, and he will reciprocate. But if you throw down your weapon before Hitler, he will take that precisely as justification for killing you: since might makes right on his neo-Thrasymachian scheme, you have shown by your pacific deed that you are unfit for the struggle for existence and therefore deserve to die, and indeed must die to keep from polluting the gene pool.

Projection in cases like these can be dangerous.  One oftens hears the sentiment expressed that we human beings are at bottom all the same and  all want the same things.  Not so!  You and I may want

Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind's true liberation

as expressed in that characteristic '60s song, Aquarius, but others have belligerence and bellicosity hard-wired into them.  They like fighting and dominating and they only come alive when they are bashing your skull in either literally or figuratively.  People are not the same and it is a big mistake to think otherwise and project your decency into them.

I'll say it again: people are not the same.  We are not 'equal.'  Or do you consider yourself the moral equal of Chechen Muslim ingrates who come to our shores, exploit our hospitality, go on welfare, rip us off, and then detonate explosives at the finish line of a great American event that celebrates life and self-reliance?  I am referring to the Boston Marathon.

I said that the psychologists classify projection as a defense mechanism.  But how could the projection of good traits count as a defense mechanism?  Well, suppose that by engaging in such projections one defends oneself against the painful realization that the people in the world are much worse than one would have liked to believe.  Many of us have a strong psychological need to see good in other people, and this can give rise to illusions.  There is good and evil in each person, and one must train oneself to accurately discern how much of each is present in each person one encounters.

This brings me to a penetrating passage from Sam Harris that illustrates my theme:

Our humanities and social science departments are filled with scholars and pseudo-scholars deemed to be experts in terrorism, religion, Islamic jurisprudence, anthropology, political science, and other diverse fields, who claim that where Muslim intolerance and violence are concerned, nothing is ever what it seems. Above all, these experts claim that one can’t take Islamists and jihadists at their word: Their incessant declarations about God, paradise, martyrdom, and the evils of apostasy are nothing more than a mask concealing their real motivations. What are their real motivations [according to these experts]?

Insert here the most abject hopes and projections of secular liberalism: How would you feel if Western imperialists and their mapmakers had divided your lands, stolen your oil, and humiliated your proud culture? Devout Muslims merely want what everyone wants—political and economic security, a piece of land to call home, good schools for their children, a little leisure to enjoy the company of friends. Unfortunately, most of my fellow liberals appear to believe this. In fact, to not accept this obscurantism as a deep insight into human nature and immediately avert one’s eyes from the teachings of Islam is considered a form of bigotry.

Harris has put his finger on a mistake that too many in the West, whether you call it psychological projection or not make, namely, the mistake of assuming that everyone, deep down, cherishes the same values and has the same motivations.  This mistake is one of the planks in the platform of political correctness.

And as we should have learned by now, political correctness can get you killed.

Related articles

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Does Anyone Really Believe in the Muslim Paradise?

Islamic Scholar: Barack Obama Is Dead Wrong About Islamic State, "They Are True Muslims"

If ISIS Is Not Islamic, Then the Inquisition Was Not Catholic

"How Isalm Creates Psychopaths," by Nicolai Sennels

Mass Race Delusion: Bruce Levenson's 'Racist' E-Mail

Recently I have been pinching myself a lot, figuratively speaking, to see if I am awake and not dreaming all the delusional race nonsense I keep hearing about.  Herewith, a very recent example.

Bruce Levenson, owner of the Atlanta Hawks, sold his controlling interest in the NBA franchise  because of this piece of 'racist' e-mail  that he very foolishly sent in naive ignorance of the climate of the country.  I excerpt the 'offensive' part, bad writing, bad punctuation and all.  Emphasis added.

Regarding game ops [operations?], i need to start with some background. for the first couple of years we owned the team, i didn't much focus on game ops.  then one day a light bulb went off [went on?].  when digging into why our season ticket base is so small, i was told it is because we can't get 35-55 white males and corporations to buy season tixs [tickets] and they are the primary demo [demographic] for season tickets around the league. when i pushed further, folks generally shrugged their shoulders.  then i start looking around our arena during games and notice the following:

-- it's 70 pct black
-- the cheerleaders are black
-- the music is hip hop
-- at the bars it's 90 pct black
-- there are few fathers and sons at the games
-- we are doing after game concerts to attract more fans and the concerts are either hip hop or gospel.

Then i start looking around at other arenas. It is completely different. Even DC with its affluent black community never has more than 15 pct black audience.

Before we bought the hawks and for those couple years immediately after in an effort to make the arena look full (at the nba's urging) thousands and thousands of tickets were being giving away, predominantly in the black community, adding to the overwhelming black audience.

My theory is that the black crowd scared away the whites and there are simply not enough affluent black fans to build a signficant season ticket base. Please dont get me wrong. There was nothing threatening going on in the arean [arena] back then. i never felt uncomfortable, but i think southern whites simply were not comfortable being in an arena or at a bar where they were in the minority. On fan sites i would read comments about how dangerous it is around philips yet in our 9 years, i don't know of a mugging or even a pick pocket incident. This was just racist garbage. When I hear some people saying the arena is in the wrong place I think it is code for there are too many blacks at the games.

Now could any reasonable person, as opposed to a person in the grip of a delusion, take offence at any of this?  Of course not.  Levenson is a business man who is offering an explanation of why ticket sales are low.  His explanation is two-fold. First, the black crowd scares away the southern whites who are uncomfortable with being in a minority and who do not enjoy black entertainment (hip hop, all black cheerleaders) and do not want to be in a family-unfriendly environment (few fathers with sons). Second, there is a lack of affluent black fans.

Now whether or not Levenson's explanation is correct, it is surely plausible.  But the main thing is that there is nothing racist about it. To report that certain whites are scared by certain blacks is to report a fact about the way those whites feel.  It is not to imply that the whites are justified in feeling the way they do.  Maybe they are and maybe they aren't. 

The mistake that liberals (whether white or black) make is to confuse a racial explanation with a racist explanation.

It is a special case of the confusion of a racial statement (a statement whose subject-matter is race) with a racist statement.  For example, the statement that blacks are 13-14% of the U. S. population is a racial statement, but not a racist statement.  Capiche?

Suppose I state that men, on average, are taller than women, on average.  Is that a hateful thing to say?  Is it sexist or 'tallist'?  Does it express a 'bias' that I need to overcome?  Of course not, it is true.

Now here is another distinction that is probably wasted on a liberal.  It is the distinction beween the content of an assertion and the asserting of that content.  I see a man with no legs.  His name is Joe Blow.  I assert within earshot of Joe Blow, Joe Blow has no legs!  The content of my assertion is true and unobjectionable.  But my asserting of it in this context is morally objectionable and for obvious reasons.  But in other contexts both the content and my asserting of it would be unobjectionable.

What is going on here?  How do we explain the mass race delusion of liberals?  Some possibilities:

• Liberals are in general very stupid people who cannot think but only emote and associate.
• Liberals are not, on average, any dumber than conservatives, but on certain topics they stupefy, or perhaps I should say enstupidate themselves consciously and willfully and in a way that makes them the just recipients of moral censure.
• Liberals are not, on average, any dumber than conservatives,  but on certain topics they stupefy, or perhaps I should say enstupidate themselves unconsciously -- they are infected with a PeeCee virus but are unaware of being infected.

UPDATE:  A reader comments:

I don’t know if you saw it, but after the remarks came out Levenson stated that he’s not worthy of owning an NBA franchise. Now, I assume you know about the recent kerfuffle about Donald Sterling, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers (another NBA team). He made some racial comments in a private conversation that were leaked to the broader world, and as a result was forced to sell his team.

 

That’s the background, and now a theory: Levenson did all of this as a trick to be forced to sell his team as profitably as possible. Because the league is forcing him to sell, they have to assure him of getting the price that an auditor deems it to be worth rather than what it would get in the real world. In other words, it may just a cynical trick to make more money/divest himself of what he perceives to be a bad investment.

The reader may have something here.  Levenson's grovelling is suspicious.  Businessmen in a position to buy a controlling interest in an NBA franchise tend to have big egos. One expects them to fight  and not act the part of a pussy, especially when the accusations made against him are so palpably absurd.

 

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It's Twilight Time

Why Do Jews Do So Well and Arabs So Poorly?

Preach What You Practice!

Jabbar: Hawks owner not racist, but in business

The Word 'Racism' and Some of its Definitions