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?
*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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
. . . 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.
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.
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 oldbold 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.
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.
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.
'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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 MavPhilnihil 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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.
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.'
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.
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.'
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.
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.
For many philosophers, their technical philosophical work bears little or no relation to the implicit or explicit set of action-guiding beliefs and values that constitutes their worldview. Saul Kripke, for example, is an observant Jew who keeps the Sabbath and rejects naturalism and materialism. But you would never know it from his technical work which has no direct relevance to the Big Questions. (Possible qualification: the business about the necessity of identity discussed in Naming and Necessity allows for a Cartesian-style argument for mind-body dualism. See here.)
So I would characterize Kripke as a compartmentalizer. (My use of this term does not have a pejorative connotation, at least not yet.) His work in philosophy occupies one of his mental compartments while his religious convictions and practices occupy another with little or no influence of the one on the other. It is not that his technical work is inconsistent with his religious worldview; my point is that the two are largely irrelevant to each other. No doubt some of Kripke's examples 'betray' his religious upbringing -- e.g., the fascinating bit about Moloch as a misvocalization of the Hebrew 'melech' in Reference and Existence, p. 70 ff. et passim -- but his technical work, or at least his published technical work, is not a means to either the articulation or the rational justification of his worldview.
You may appreciate my point if you compare Kripke with Alvin Plantinga. He too is a religious man and a theist, an anti-naturalist, and an anti-materialist. But all of Plantinga's books that I am aware of contribute directly to the articulation and defense of his theistic worldview. He is out to explain and justify theistic belief and turn aside such objections to it as the ever-popular arguments from evil. This is clear from the titles of God and Other Minds, God, Freedom, and Evil, Does God Have a Nature. But it is also clear from Nature of Necessity the penultimate chapter of which treats of God, evil, and freedom, and the ultimate chapter of which is about God and necessity. The same is true of his two volumes on warrant one of which includes a critique of naturalism, not to mention his last book, Where the Conflict Really Lies.
The late David M. Armstrong is an interesting case. While he respects religion and is not a militant naturalist or atheist, his technical work articulates and defends his thoroughly naturalist worldview, where naturalism is the thesis that all that exists is the space-time world and its contents. The naturalist worldview comes first for Armstrong, both temporally and logically, and sets the agenda for the technical investigations of particulars, universals, states of affairs, classes, numbers, causation, laws of nature, dispositions, modality, mind, and so on. Broadly characterized, the agenda is to show how everything, including what appear to be 'abstract objects,' can be accounted for naturalistically using only those resources supplied by the natural world, without recourse to anything nonnatural or supernatural.
For Plantinga, by contrast, it is his theistic worldview that comes first both temporally and logically and sets the agenda for his technical work.
And then there is an acquaintance of mine who attends Greek Orthodox services on Sunday but during working hours is something close to a logical positivist.
This suggests a three-fold classification. There are philosophers whose
A. Technical work is consistent with but does not support their worldview;
B. Technical work is consistent with and does support their worldview;
C. Technical work is inconsistent with and hence does not support their worldview.
I will assume that (C) is an unacceptable form of compartmentalization, but I won't try to explain why in this post. Brevity is the soul of blog. This leaves (B) and (C).
Now it has always seemed obvious to me that (B) is to be preferred over (A). But do I have an argument? But first I should try to make my thesis more precise. To that end, a few more distinctions and observations.
I distinguish philosophy-as-inquiry from philosophy-as-worldview. (And you should too.) Roughly, a worldview is a more or less comprehensive system of more or less precisely articulated action-guiding beliefs and values. (Transfinite cardinal arithmetic is not a worldview: you can't 'take it to the streets.') Obviously, there are many philosophies in this sense, and therefore no such thing as philosophy in this sense. There is the philosophy of your crazy uncle who has an opinion about everything, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, the philosophy of Kant, the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Observe also that a philosophy in the sense of a worldview need not be arrived at by rational inquiry. Philosophy-as-inquiry, by contrast is rational inquiry by definition. To put it paradoxically, there needn't be anything philosophical about a philosophy. I trust my meaning is clear.
Note too that philosophy-as-inquiry need not result in a worldview. It can end aporetically, at an impasse, the way a number of the Platonic dialogs do, in Socratic nescience, even if the intention was to arrive at a worldview. And sometimes even the intention is lacking: there are philosophers who are content to devote their professional hours to some such narrow topic as counterfactual conditionals or epistemic closure principles, or anaphora. They can be said to engage in hyperspecialization. There are also those less extreme specialists who are concerned with ethics or epistemology but give no thought to the metaphysical presuppositions of either.
We should also distinguish between engaging in philosophy-as-inquiry in order to arrive at a worldview versus engaging in philosophy-as-inquiry in order to shore up or defend a worldview that one antecedently accepts. This is the difference between one who seeks the truth by philosophical means, a truth he does not possess, and one who possesses or thinks he possesses the truth or most of the truth and employs philosophical means to the end of defending and securing and promoting the truth that he already has and has received from some extraphilosophical source such as revelation or religious/mystical experience. The latter could be called philosophy-as-inquiry in the service of apologetics, 'apologetics' broadly construed.
It should now be evident that (B) conflates two ideas that need to be split apart. There are philosophers whose
B1. Technical work is consistent with and supports an antecedently held worldview whose source is extraphilosophical and whose source is not philosophy-as-inquiry;
B2. Technical work is consistent with and supports a worldview the source of which is philosophy-as-inquiry.
My main thesis is that (B2) is superior to (A), but I also incline to the view that (B1) is superior to (A). But for now I set aside (B1).
But why is (B2) superior to (A)? I am not saying that there is anything wrong with satisfying a purely theoretical interest either by (i) hyperspecializing and concentrating on one or a few narrow topics, or (ii) specializing as in the case of Kripke by working on a fairly wide range of topics. What I want to say is that there is something better than either of (i) or (ii).
My thesis: Since philosophy is a search for the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, one is not true to the spirit of philosophy in the full and normative sense of the word if one is content to theorize about minutiae that in the end have no 'existential' relevance where 'existential' is to be taken in the sense of Kierkegaard, Jaspers, et. al, and their distinguished predecessors, Socrates, Augustine, Pascal, et al. One's own existence, fate, moral responsibility, and existential meaning are surely part of the ultimate matters; so to abstract from these matters by pursuing a purely theoretical interest is, if not logically absurd, then existentially absurd. In philosophy one cannot leave oneself out and be objective in the way the sciences must leave out the subject and be objective.
Of course I am not a narrow existentialist who rejects technical philosophy.
What I am maintaining is that one ought not compartmentalize: one's technical work ought to subserve a higher end, the articulation and defense of a comprehensive view of things. As Wilfrid Sellars says, "It is . . . the 'eye on the whole' which distinguishes the philosophical enterprise." (SPR 3) "The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term." (SPR 1) But I am saying more than this, and words like 'view' and 'worldview' don't quite convey it since philosophy as I 'view' it ought not be purely theoretical. Somehow, oner's theory and one's Existenz need to achieve unity.
I still haven't made my thesis all that clear, but it is perhaps clear enough.
One argument for my thesis is that specialization gets us nowhere. It is notorious that philosophers have not convinced one another and that progress in philosophy has not occurred. And the best and brightest have been at it for going on three thousand years. That progress will occur in future is therefore the shakiest of inductions. Given that shakiness, it is existentially if not logically absurd to lose oneself in, say, the technical labyrinth of the philosophy of language, as fascinating as it is. Who on his deathbed will care whether reference is routed through sense or is direct? The following may help clarify my meaning.
Fred Sommers, The Logic of Natural Language (Oxford, 1982), p. xii:
My interest in Ryle's 'category mistakes' turned me away from the study of Whitehead's metaphysical writings (on which I had written a doctoral thesis at Columbia University) to the study of problems that could be arranged for possible solution.
The suggestion is that the problems of logic, but not those of metaphysics, can be "arranged for possible solution." Although I sympathize with Sommers' sentiment, he must surely have noticed that his attempt to rehabilitate pre-Fregean logical theory issues in results that are controversial, and perhaps just as controversial as the claims of metaphysicians. Or do all his colleagues in logic agree with him?
If by 'pulling in our horns' and confining ourselves to problems of language and logic we were able to attain sure and incontrovertible results, then there might well be justification for setting metaphysics aside and working on problems amenable to solution. But if it turns out that logical, linguistic, phenomenological, epistemological and all other such preliminary inquiries arrive at results that are also widely and vigorously contested, then the advantage of 'pulling in our horns' is lost and we may as well concentrate on the questions that really matter, which are most assuredly not questions of logic and language — fascinating as these may be.
Sommers' is a rich and fascinating book. But, at the end of the day, how important is it to prove that the inference embedded in 'Some girl is loved by every boy so every boy loves a girl' really is capturable, pace the dogmatic partisans of modern predicate logic, by a refurbished traditional term logic? (See pp. 144-145)
As one draws one's last breath, which is more salutary: to be worried about a silly bagatelle such as the one just mentioned, or to be contemplating God and the soul?
I started to take the quiz but then quit in disgust after the first two questions.
Here is the first question:
Which of the following statements comes closest to your view?
.
.
I would say that both statements are true. That some government regulation is necessary is obviously true. But that many types of regulation makes things worse is also the case, though it is not as obvious. What does it even mean to ask which of these comes closest to my view? The rational thing to do is reject the question as poorly defined.
Here is the second question:
Which of the following statements comes closest to your view?
Hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most.
Again, both of these statements are true, at least in the USA at the present time. The second statement is obviously true. Success is not guaranteed for anyone. You could be doing everything right and be killed by a drunk driver. In every success there is some element of luck. The first statement is not as clearly true, but it too is true. Again, there is the problem of what 'comes closest' even means. I am a conservative and so you will expect me to plump for the first statement. But the second is one that every sane person must accept. So in one sense of 'closest' the second is closest to my view. In another sense, the first is closest, because it is more characteristic of my view. A near-certainty that everyone must accept on pain of being irrational is not characteristic of any political view. Capiche?
Not all of the question pairs display the faults of the first two. They display others such as false alternative. And a few, I grant, are well-formulated. #20 for example:
Which of the following statements comes closest to your view?
.
These statements cannot both be true, and there is no false alternative: it must be that one of them is true.
Cognitive Dissonance Theory, developed by Leon Festinger (1957), is concerned with the relationships among cognitions. A cognition, for the purpose of this theory, may be thought of as a ³piece of knowledge.² The knowledge may be about an attitude, an emotion, a behavior, a value, and so on. For example, the knowledge that you like the color red is a cognition; the knowledge that you caught a touchdown pass is a cognition; the knowledge that the Supreme Court outlawed school segregation is a cognition. People hold a multitude of cognitions simultaneously, and these cognitions form irrelevant, consonant or dissonant relationships with one another.
[. . .]
Two cognitions are said to be dissonant if one cognition follows from the opposite of another. What happens to people when they discover dissonant cognitions? The answer to this question forms the basic postulate of Festinger¹s theory. A person who has dissonant or discrepant cognitions is said to be in a state of psychological dissonance, which is experienced as unpleasant psychological tension. This tension state has drivelike properties that are much like those of hunger and thirst. When a person has been deprived of food for several hours, he/she experiences unpleasant tension and is driven to reduce the unpleasant tension state that results. Reducing the psychological sate of dissonance is not as simple as eating or drinking however.
The above, taken strictly and literally, is incoherent. We are first told that a cognition is a bit of knowledge, and then in the second quoted paragraph that (in effect) some cognitions are dissonant, and that if one cognition follows from the opposite of another, then the two are dissonant. But surely it is logically impossible that any two bits of knowledge, K1 and K2, be such that K1 entails the negation of K2, or vice versa. Why? Because every cognition is true -- there cannot be false knowledge -- and no two truths are such that one follows from the opposite of the other.
The author is embracing an inconsistent pentad:
1. Every cognition is a bit of knowledge.
2. Every bit of knowledge is true.
3. Some, at least two, cognitions are dissonant.
4. If one cognition follows from the opposite (the negation) of another, then the two are dissonant.
5. It is logically impossible that two truths be such that one follows from the negation of the other: if a cognition is true, then its negation is false, and no falsehood follows from a truth.
The point, obviously, is that while beliefs can be dissonant, cognitions cannot be. There simply is no such thing as cognitive dissonance. What there is is doxastic dissonance.
"What a pedant you are! Surely what the psychologists mean is what you call doxastic dissonance."
Then they should say what they mean. Language matters. Confusing belief and knowledge and truth and related notions can lead to serious and indeed pernicious errors. A good deal of contemporary relativism is sired by a failure to make such distinctions.
Brian Leiter would do well to consider and live by the following prudential analog of Ockham's Razor:
Do not multiply enemies beyond necessity.
Why not? Well, it is just foolish, especially for a vain and status-obsessed careerist who craves name and fame, to attack people who, it can be expected, will expose his petty and absurd behavior.
One of the puzzles of the Leiterian psychology is that he does things that are quite plainly not in his self-interest. When he attacks those who are above him on what he perceives to be the Great Ladder of Success, he reveals his envy. When he attacks those he perceives to be below him, he reveals his pusillanimity.
In Aristotelian terms, what Leiter lacks is magnanimity (megalopsychia, great-souledness). The sphere of magnanimity is the sphere of honor and dishonor. Magnanimity is the mean between the extremes of vanity and pusillanimity. The magnanimous person knows himself and is capable of honest self-evaluation. This self-knowledge keeps him from both vanity and pusillanimity.
The vain man pegs himself too high: lacking self-knowledge he fancies that he deserves honors and emoluments, perquisites and privileges far above what he actually deserves. So we could say that vanity involves an excess of self-love together with a lack of self-knowledge. Leiter is clearly vain in this Aristotelian sense. His vanity is at the root of his envy of those who are his betters, such as Thomas Nagel whose superiority is evident and unsurpassable by the likes of Leiter no matter how hard he climbs.
The pusillanimous person pegs himself too low: lacking self-knowledge, he fails to aim at goods he is worthy of. He occupies himself with matters that ought to be beneath him such as slandering and defaming opponents.
So it appears that Leiter, lacking self-knowledge and with it magnanimity, oscillates between vanity and pusillanimity. When his vanity is in the ascendancy, he attacks those above him on the Ladder. When his pusillanimity reigns over his psyche, he attacks those below him. This is yet another proof of the appositeness of the 'Ladder Man' label. It is not just that he obsessively likes to rank things. He himself is obsessed with his rank, and thus obsessed by those above him and below him in the Rangordnung. He cannot accept with gratitude the rung upon which he is perched, however precariously. He burns for more in the way of name and fame while denigrating those he considers unsuccessful.
Leiter is a fascinating study, not qua token, but qua type. The Ladder Man type is what elicits scientific interest. There is no science of the particular qua particular, said Aristotle. Individuum ineffabile est.
For Aristotle on magnanimity and pusillanimity, see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book IV.
My title is intentionally hyperbolic and provocative, but not without justification given the outrageously vile (e.g., Martin Bashir) and breathtakingly mindless (e.g., Melissa Harris Perry) commentary encountered at liberal media outlets such as MSNBC. Here is a measured formulation of my question: To what extent does liberal ideology militate against sanity and moral decency in those who imbibe it, people who otherwise are basically sane and decent?
A philosophy doctoral student at an Ivy League institution e-mails,
In a recent post, you wrote:
Can one be both a liberal and a decent and sane human being? Or is scumbaggery as it were inscribed into the very marrow of the contemporary liberal? Or perhaps it is more like this: once liberalism infects a person's mind, the decency that was there is flushed out.
Actually, I have struggled with relatives of these questions for some time, and honestly don't know what to think. Many of the people I rub shoulders with are liberal to the bone. But I know well enough to say they're genuinely nice people--and smart people (some, for instance, are brilliant philosophers). At the same time, I find most of the liberal claptrap so intellectually inane and morally repugnant that I have a genuinely hard time seeing how anyone--much less these seemingly smart and decent people--can believe it. I don't know how to reconcile the two observations. Surely you know at least one intelligent, morally decent liberal. How do you fit their existence into your ontology? Or do we have an argument from queerness motivating us to become liberal error theorists? Would such a creature--assuming they can exist--present a peer-disagreement scenario, or cause you to lower your credence in your own beliefs?
My correspondent poses the puzzle of reconciling
1. Some liberals are genuinely nice and highly intelligent people
with
2. These same liberals subscribe to intellectually inane and morally repugnant beliefs.
What makes this aporetic dyad truly puzzling is that the limbs are individually plausible but appear collectively inconsistent. Let's consider an example.
I don't know Robert Paul Wolff personally, but I was favorably impressed by a couple of his books and I read his blog, The Philosopher's Stone, despite the fact that he often comes across as a stoned philosopher. He is no doubt very intelligent, and he seems like a nice guy. But he says things so preternaturally moronic that I am left scratching my head. Here is just one of several examples:
Why Do Conservatives Oppose ObamaCare?
Robert Paul Wolff has an answer for us. Ready? The bolding is Wolff's own and is twice-repeated:
Because Obama is Black.
Is Professor Wolff serious? I'm afraid he is. But given that the man is neither stupid nor the usual sort of left-wing moral scumbag, how could he be serious? What explains a view so plainly delusional? How account for an emotion-driven mere dismissal of the conservative position the arguments for which he will not examine? How is it that a professional philosopher, indeed a very good one, can engage in such puerile ad hominem psychologizing? Wolff himself provides an answer in a later post:
My knowledge of the beliefs and sentiments of those on the right is based entirely on things I have read or have seen on television. I have never had a conversation with a committed right-wing opponent of the Affordable Care Act, nor have I even, to the best of my knowledge, met one. You would be quite correct in inferring that I live in a left-wing bubble [called Chapel Hill -- before that, I lived in a left-wing bubble called Amherst, MA, and before that I lived in the right wing bubbles called Morningside Heights, Hyde Park, and Cambridge.] If this strikes you as disqualifying me from having an opinion, you are free to ignore the rest of this post.
Need I say more?
............
This is a perfect illustration of my correspondent's puzzle. In Robert Paul Wolff we have a man who is intelligent and (I will give him the benefit of the doubt) morally decent, but who maintains a thesis that is both delusional and morally repugnant in that it constitutes a slander on conservatives. What explains this? Wolff himself provides what may be the best explanation: he lives in a bubble. He doesn't know conservative positions, nor interact with conservatives. But isn't it a moral failure in one who is supposedly a truth-seeker simply to ignore whole swaths of opinion that run counter to one's own? Is that not a mark of intellectual dishonesty?
But the best explanation, in terms of his 'bubbly' isolation, is still not very good. How could anyone of his maturity and experience with the world of ideas, even one unfamiliar with conservatism, imagine for even a second that the cheap psychologizing he engages in could be on target?
It is Christmas time, and so, to be charitable I won't accuse Wolff of a moral failing; I'll just say that he and so many of his ilk are topically insane: their leftism has rendered them incapable of rational thought with respect to certain issues, race being a chief one among them.
For further discussion of Robert Paul 'Howlin'' Wolff, see below.
I dedicate this post to Peter L. and Mike V. with whom some of the following ideas were hashed out over Sunday breakfast at a Mesa hash house.
Sam Harris reports on the curious views of one Scott Atran, anthropologist:
According to Atran, people who decapitate journalists, filmmakers, and aid workers to cries of “Alahu akbar!” or blow themselves up in crowds of innocents are led to misbehave this way not because of their deeply held beliefs about jihad and martyrdom but because of their experience of male bonding in soccer clubs and barbershops. (Really.) So I asked Atran directly:
“Are you saying that no Muslim suicide bomber has ever blown himself up with the expectation of getting into Paradise?”
“Yes,” he said, “that’s what I’m saying. No one believes in Paradise.”
This post assumes that Harris has fairly and accurately reported Atran's view. If you think he hasn't then substitute 'Atran*' for 'Atran' below. Atran* holds by definition the view I will be criticizing.
If we are to be as charitable to Atran as possible, we would have to say that he holds his strange view because he himself does not believe in the Muslim paradise and he cannot imagine anyone else really believing in it either. So Muslims who profess to believe in Paradise with its black-eyed virgins, etc. are merely mouthing phrases. What makes this preposterous is that Atran ignores the best evidence one could have as to what a person believes, namely, the person's overt behavior taken in the context of his verbal avowals. Belief is linked to action. If I believe I have a flat tire, I will pull over and investigate. If I say 'We have a flat tire" but keep on driving, then you know that I don't really believe that we have a flat tire.
Same with the Muslim terrorist. If he invokes the greatness of his god while decapitating someone, then that is the best possible evidence that he believes in the existence of his god and what that god guarantees to the faithful, namely, an endless supply of post-mortem carnal delights. This is particularly clear in the case of jihadis such as suicide bombers. The verbal avowals indicate the content of the belief while the action indicates that the content is believed.
Now compare this very strong evidence with the evidence Atran has for the proposition that "No one believes in Paradise." His only evidence is astonishingly flimsy: that he and his ilk cannot imagine anyone believing what Muslims believe. But that involves both a failure of imagination and a projection into the Other of one's own attitudes.
The problem here is a general one.
"I don't believe that, and you don't either!"
"But I do!"
"No you don't, you merely think you believe it or are feigning belief."
"Look at what I do, and how I live. The evidence of my actions, which costs me something, in the context of what I say, is solid evidence that I do believe what I claim to believe."
Example. Years ago I heard Mario Cuomo say at a Democratic National Convention that the life of the politician was the noblest and best life. I was incredulous and thought to myself: Cuomo cannot possibly believe what he just said! But then I realized that he most likely does believe it and that I was making the mistake of assuming that others share my values and assumptions and attitudes.
It is a bad mistake to project one's own values, beliefs, attitudes , assumptions and whatnot into others.
Most of the definitions of psychological 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 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. 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" but others have belligerence and bellicosity as it were 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 said that the psychologists classify projection as a defense mechanism. But how could the projection of good traits count as a defense mechanism? Well, I 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 that 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.
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.
The critic moves to philosophy with the 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 cnclusion.
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.
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 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. 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 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.
One mistake I have made, more than once, is to assume that since I value truth above many other things, others do as well. But there are plenty of people who do not value truth at all, or else assign it a rather low priority. There are many, for example, who value human feelings over truth. Truth is nothing to them; feelings everything. That makes no sense to me; to me it is self-evident that, although both are values (to be precise: things that ought to be valued), truth is a higher value, if not the highest value. But reality forces me to accept that others hold to the opposite value-prioritization. It is folly to project one's own values into others.
There are other people for whom truth counts for nothing, but power for everything. They interpret every type of interpersonal transaction as a power struggle. Thus if you calmly try to persuade such a person of the truth of some proposition by appealing to facts and reasoning correctly from them, he will interpret that as nothing but an attempt to dominate him psychologically. Such people are utterly blind to the value of truth and to the fact that truth can sometimes be attained by dialectical means. They project their own lust for power into everyone else interpreting everything that is manifestly not a power-move as latently a power-move.
There are plenty of leftists like this. Taking their cue from Nietzsche, they assume that everything is power at bottom. Die Welt ist der Wille zur Macht und nichts anders! "The world is the will to power and nothing besides!" Supported by this assumption, they set out to unmask (deconstruct) phenomena that manifestly are not power-driven, for example, attempts to state what is the case. Power-mad themselves, these leftists project lust for power into everyone and everything. It is a curious pars pro toto fallacy: one takes a phenomenon one finds in oneself, lust for power, and then interprets everything else in terms of it. The idea might be worth exploring that Nietzsche's doctrine of the Will to Power arose by projection. He saw the lust for power within himself and excused its presence there by projecting it outward thus transforming a psychological peculiarity into a fundamental trait of beings qua beings.
You say I'm psychologizing. True enough. But false views are legitimately psychologized. It would be the genetic fallacy to dismiss as false a proposition just because it arose from a need or serves a need or results from projection. But once a proposition has been shown to be false, it is legitimate to inquire into the genesis of the belief.
Whereas the extrovert finds himself in socializing, the introvert loses himself in it: he experiences the loss of his inwardness, which is precious to him, a pearl of great price, not willingly surrendered. The clearest expression of this dismay at self-loss that I am aware of finds expression is an early (1836) journal entry of Søren Kierkegaard:
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 the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ------------------------------------------- wanting to shoot myself. (The Diary of Søren Kierkegaard, ed. Peter P. Rohde, p. 13)
You are free to psychologize your opponent when his position is demonstrably false or incoherent. If his reasons are worthless, then you are justified in exposing the motives that drive his commitments.
Does someone want to do something for you? Buy you lunch? Give you a gift? Bring something to the dinner?
Be gracious. Don't say, "You don't have to buy me lunch," or "Let me buy you lunch," or "You didn't have to bring that." Humbly accept and grant the donor the pleasure of being a donor.
Lack of graciousness often bespeaks an excess of ego.
We were re-hydrating at a bar in Tortilla Flat, Arizona, after an ankle-busting hike up a stream bed. I offered to buy Alex a drink. Instead of graciously accepting my hospitality, he had the chutzpah to ask me to lend him money so that he could buy me a drink!
Another type of ungraciousness is replying 'Thank you' to 'Thank you.' If I thank you for something, say 'You're welcome,' not 'Thank You.' Graciously acquiesce in the fact that I have done you a favor. Don't try to get the upper hand by thanking me.
I grant that there are situations in which mutual thanking is appropriate.
Some people feel that they must 'reciprocate.' Why exactly? I gave you a little Christmas present because I felt like it. And now you feel you must give me one in return? Is this a tit for tat game?
Suppose I compliment you sincerely. Will you throw the compliment back in my face by denigrating that which I complimented you for, thereby impugning my judgment?
To what extent is it a sign of self-importance that one regularly draws attention to one's own insignificance? I am thinking of Simone Weil. In self-effacement the ego may find a way to assert itself. "Do you see how pure and penetrating is my love of truth that I am able to realize and admit my own personal nothingness face to face with Truth?"
The ego, wily 'structure' that it is, usually (always?) finds a way to affirm itself.
When a working-class person votes conservative, isn't he voting against his economic interests? That's what many lefties think and it puzzles them. Why would the workers do such a thing? This gives rise to the duping hypothesis: "the Republican party dupes people into voting against their economic interests by triggering outrage on cultural issues."
According to Haidt, conservatives have a broader "moral palate" than liberals. Liberals have only three concerns to the conservative's six (emphasis added):
. . . we have identified six moral concerns as the best candidates for being the innate "taste buds" of the moral sense: care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. Across many kinds of surveys, in the UK as well as in the USA, we find that people who self-identify as being on the left score higher on questions about care/harm. [. . .]
But on matters relating to group loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity (treating things as sacred and untouchable, not only in the context of religion), it sometimes seems that liberals lack the moral taste buds, or at least, their moral "cuisine" makes less use of them. [. . .]
In America, it is these three moral foundations that underlie most of the "cultural" issues that, according to duping theorists, are used to distract voters from their self-interest. But are voters really voting against their self-interest when they vote for candidates who share their values? Loyalty, respect for authority and some degree of sanctification create a more binding social order that places some limits on individualism and egoism. [. . .]
Despite being in the wake of a financial crisis that – if the duping theorists were correct – should have buried the cultural issues and pulled most voters to the left, we are finding in America and many European nations a stronger shift to the right. When people fear the collapse of their society, they want order and national greatness, not a more nurturing government.
Even on the two moral taste buds that both sides claim – fairness and liberty – the right can often outcook the left. The left typically thinks of equality as being central to fairness, and leftists are extremely sensitive about gross inequalities of outcome – particularly when they correspond along racial or ethnic lines. But the broader meaning of fairness is really proportionality – are people getting rewarded in proportion to the work they put into a common project? Equality of outcomes is only seen as fair by most people in the special case in which everyone has made equal contributions. [. . .]
Similarly for liberty. Americans and Britons all love liberty, yet when liberty and care conflict, the left is more likely to choose care. This is the crux of the US's monumental battle over Obama's healthcare plan. Can the federal government compel some people to buy a product (health insurance) in order to make a plan work that extends care to 30 million other people? The derogatory term "nanny state" is rarely used against the right (pastygate being perhaps an exception). Conservatives are more cautious about infringing on individual liberties (eg of gun owners in the US and small businessmen) in order to protect vulnerable populations (such as children, animals and immigrants).
In sum, the left has a tendency to place caring for the weak, sick and vulnerable above all other moral concerns. It is admirable and necessary that some political party stands up for victims of injustice, racism or bad luck. But in focusing so much on the needy, the left often fails to address – and sometimes violates – other moral needs, hopes and concerns. When working-class people vote conservative, as most do in the US, they are not voting against their self-interest; they are voting for their moral interest. They are voting for the party that serves to them a more satisfying moral cuisine. The left in the UK and USA should think hard about their recipe for success in the 21st century.
He has a lot of body surface. His 'exposure' is greater than that of the other body types. So he is more sensitive. His skin is also literally thinner, which is connected with his being psychologically 'thin-skinned.'
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. 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? 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. 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 mself 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. 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.
13. I do my best work on my own. Yes. A former colleague, a superficial extrovert, once described me as 'lone wolf.'
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 sitations, 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.
My opinion of Maureen Dodd went up a notch when I read this NYT column in which she quotes a Catholic priest. He proffers good advice about marriage one piece of which is:
Don't marry a problem character thinking you will change him. Excellent advice, Schopenhauerian advice. You will remember his riff on the unalterability of character. It is true as a general rule: people do not change. What you are characterologically at twenty you are for life. If you catch your inamorata lying to you or engaging in any sort of duplicity, know that you have been vouchsafed an insight into an underlying mendacity that will manifest itself time and time again. If one time she racks up a credit card bill that she cannot pay in full at the end of the month, she will do it a thousand times. And so on down the line. Enter into matrimony with such a person if you must, but do it with eyes open and thoughts clear.
My wife has a wide range of virtues and no vices to speak of. But in point of punctuality, she falls down. I am by contrast punctual to a fault. So 29 years ago I tried to change her, to make her punctual like me, but soon realized my folly and changed myself instead. I simply gave up making precise dates with her, rather than courting vexation at her nonshowing at appointed exact times. Instead of: Meet me at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth at the stroke of high noon, this: I'll be at the Sufficient Grounds coffee house from 2 PM on writing and playing chess; fall by when you get a chance.
I also realized that part of her being such a sweet and agreeable person is her not being hung up on precision. And I furthermore bore in mind Plato's point in the Symposium, namely, and to put it in my own way, that a partner should be a complement, not a copy.
As a rule of thumb: You can't change others, but you can change yourself. And you should. A bit more precisely: character is largely invariant but attitude admits of adjustment.
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