Maverick Philosopher

How to Tell the Impostor RCC from the Real Thing

The Roman Catholic Church with Bergoglio at its head is an impostor church. So William Kilpatrick asks:

. . . how can one tell the imposter Church from the Church established by Christ?

Although there are several indicators, the main giveaway, I believe, can be found in differing attitudes toward sin. The true Church takes sin very seriously and warns about it constantly. Indeed, the main mission of the Church is to save us from our sins. On the other hand, one of the main goals of the Church which Francis and his followers are building is to diminish the importance of sin.

On several occasions, Francis has belittled sexual sins, referring to them as the “lightest of sins” or jokingly as “sins below the waist.” He reportedly told a group of Spanish seminarians that they must absolve all sins in the confessional, even if there is no sign of repentance. On one occasion, when asked about the exploits of a homosexual priest, Francis replied, “Who am I to judge?” But—with the exception of sins against the environment and “sins” of rigidity—he seems to take a “Who-am-I-to-judge” attitude toward almost all sins.

In a Substack article from a couple of years ago, I  explore the real root of the rot in the Roman church. See The Role of Concupiscence in the Decline of the Catholic Church. 

Related

Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained: Why do the powerful arguments against abortion have such little effect?

Like a Moth to the Flame

Top o' the Stack: A Saturday sermon of sorts on romantic folly.

Pride?

What are you proud of? Your paraphilias? Is that what your 'pride flag' signifies? Does the plus sign at the end of LGBTQ+ signify the inclusion of every paraphilia? Might that be taking 'inclusion' too far? Is every focus of erotic interest legitimate?  Should every mode of (what has traditionally been considered to be) deviant behavior be normalized? Should every factual abnormality be viewed as normative?  

Are you really proud of your pedophilia, pedovestism, coprophilia, necrophilia and anthropophagy? 

Here: 

The parade that capped off June’s Pride events in New York City proclaimed the movement’s actual intentions quite clearly. The message was chanted all along the route, repeatedly and at high volume:

“We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children.”

Now, there’s a sentiment that should make your blood run cold. It gives the lie to all those innocent protestations you’ve heard for years: “Gee, all we want is to live our lives and love who we love.”

It’s well past time to wake up and recognize the truth. We are living in a very dangerous time filled with threats to our physical and mental health, and to our immortal souls.

The pedophilic words chanted by a corps of New York drag queens were as vivid a wake-up call as can be imagined. This was perversion on proud display. It was an assault on childhood innocence, on family life, on decency, on religion, on basic human reality. It was as vivid and unignorable as a declaration of war.

You might call it our “Gender Pearl Harbor.”

The time for kindness and tolerance has passed. These people must be opposed on every level in every way.

The problem, of course, is that the gender movement has secured alliances among the leadership of government, business, finance, media, the arts — virtually every institution of society. The country has been severely compromised by this pervasive and insidious gender ideology.

The Double Denial by the 'Woke'

It is not unreasonable to maintain that there is no God and that nature alone exists. But suppose you take it a step further and deny nature as well. Then you are in the precincts of 'woke' lunacy.  Call it the Double Denial.

One way to deny nature is by denying that the biotic underpins the social and that as a consequence the difference between men and women is a matter of social construction and not a matter of biology.  But any sane person will grasp instantly that one cannot change one's sex by merely thinking of oneself as belonging to the opposite sex. It is also obvious that sartorial and cosmetic modifications will not turn the trick.

Less obvious, but equally true, is that chemical and surgical alteration of one's body cannot change one's sex even if the surgical alteration is of a deeply structural sort:  reduction of muscle mass, heart and lung volume,  bone density, size of hands, and length of limbs even unto the removal of portions of bones to make the altered person shorter.

But of course the 'transgendered' biological men who compete in, and win, women's sporting events do not and would not submit to the modern-day equivalent of the Bed of Procrustes: they are not about to be modified in the drastic ways just mentioned.  And yet such men are allowed to pass themselves off as women.  To add insult to injury, some of these impostors are then awarded 'woman of the year' titles.

What is going on here? It is one thing to condemn the injustice to women and overall idiocy of this, quite another to understand how it could arise and be taken seriously by otherwise sane people.

One thing that needs explaining is how leftists, who are supposedly for women and against their oppression by men and 'the patriarchy,' could embrace something so antifeminist as the allowance of male interference with women's sports. I suggest that what we are witnessing here is a collision of motifs on the Left. One such is the oppressor-oppressed motif. Another is the hyper-constructivist denial-of-reality motif. These motifs are in tension with each other. If men oppress women, then women need their 'safe spaces' where they can feel secure against real or merely perceived micro- and macro-aggression. Accordingly, there is obvious need for  sexual segregation in certain areas such as sports competitions, locker rooms, restrooms, prisons, etc.  But if everything is a matter of social construction, as per the second motif, then so are sexual differences in which case they are not innate and immutable, but malleable. A man can 're-identify' as a woman with or without chemical and surgical alteration. Add in a third motif that of expressive individualism and for good measure throw in the 'my truth' meme.  If 'my truth' is that I am a woman, then I am a woman and can compete against women. (There is little or no chance that any woman will 're-identify' as a man so as to compete against them.)

The conflict of leftist motifs explains the utter absurdity of wokesters who tolerate the grotesquely unjust penetration of biological males into female spaces.

Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac

Substack latest. 

From Bad to Worse

His johnson became his dousing rod, but it led him not to the waters of life, but to the fleshpots. This after abandoning organized religion and its hypocrisies, but also its curbs and checks on destructive behavior. So he went from bad to worse. He started on down that Lost Highway.

Questions about Pronouns, Sex, and 'Wokism'

Elliot Crozat writes, 

During my visit, one of our conversation topics was pronoun usage. If I recall, on one of the hikes, you gave the example "He who hesitates is lost” and asked about the function of ‘He.’ You then said that this pronoun seems to function as a universal quantifier such that, for any x, if x hesitates, then x is lost. I agree. Our agreement suggests that pronouns can function logically in ways that differ from their merely grammatical appearance.

BV: Right. Although 'he' and 'she' are classified grammatically as pronouns, their logical function in examples like the one I gave is not pronominal, but quantificational. Pronouns typically have noun antecedents, but 'he' in 'He who hesitates is lost' has no antecedent. It functions like a bound variable. I can imagine a Yogi Berra type joke. I say to Berra, "He who hesitates is lost," and he replies, "You mean Joe Biden?" (Here is a real Yogi Berra joke. Someone asked Berra what time it is. He replied, "You mean now?")

I spoke today with a friend, a philosopher, who is under some pressure from his employer to use the ‘preferred pronouns’ of colleagues and others even if such 'pronouns' don't align with the biological sex of the 'preferrers.' For various reasons concerning clarity and accuracy of language, freedom of speech and thought, and ideological disagreement, my friend is concerned about how to navigate this progressivist current in a responsible manner. We discussed some ideas.

Here’s one. Suppose a biological male, Mark, desires and requests to be referred to as ‘she.’ Suppose also that, generally speaking, all pronouns that are indexicals (i.e., demonstratives) refer to their respective persons or objects as they objectively are. Smith, a colleague of Mark, attempts to refer to Mark as ‘she.’ It would seem, then, that ‘she’ fails to refer – or that Mark fails to refer via ‘she’ – and thus ‘she’ is a useless and confusing bit of language. Smith’s use of ‘she’ is unhelpful on this account.

BV: I will first make the minor point that an indexical is not the same as a demonstrative. Every demonstrative is an indexical, but not conversely. Suppose I am standing before the deli counter. Having temporarily forgotten that the name of what I want is 'prosciutto,' I say to the deli man, "I'd like some of that." My use of the demonstrative 'that' must be accompanied by a demonstration if I am to succeed in conveying my request. I have to point to the meat I want. But I don't have to point to myself when I utter the indexical 'I' in 'I'd like some of that." 'I' is not a demonstrative. 

A second minor point is that 'I' sometimes functions as a bound variable.  Suppose that in explaining intentionality to a student, I say, "I cannot think without thinking of something." I have not made an autobiographical remark. The proposition I am attempting to convey to the student is that, for any person x, if x thinks, then x thinks of something. 

Grammatical pronouns can function pronominally, indexically, and quantificationally.  Here is a sentence featuring a pronoun functioning pronominally and which therefore has  an antecedent:

Peter always calls before he visits.

In this sentence, 'Peter' is the antecedent of the third-person singular pronoun 'he.'  It is worth noting that an antecedent needn't come before the term for which it is the antecedent:

After he got home, Peter poured himself a drink.

In this sentence 'Peter' is the antecedent of 'he' despite occurring after 'he' in the order of reading.  The antecedency is therefore referential rather than temporal.  In both of these cases, the reference of 'he' is supplied by the antecedent.  The burden of reference is borne by the antecedent.  So there is a clear sense in which the reference of 'he' in both cases is not direct, but mediated by the antecedent. (And if the reference of the antecedent is mediated by a Frege-style sense or Sinn, then we have a double mediation.)  The antecedent is referentially prior to the pronoun for which it is the antecedent.  But suppose I point to Peter and say

He smokes cigarettes.

This is an indexical use of 'he.'  Part of what makes it an indexical use is that its reference depends on the non-linguistic context of utterance: I utter a token of 'he' while pointing at Peter, or nodding in his direction.  The sentence need not be situated in a linguistic context.  Another part of what makes 'he' in the example an indexical is that it refers directly, not just in the sense that the reference is not routed through a description or sense associated with the use of the pronoun that fixes the reference to Peter and nothing else, but also in that there is no need for an antecedent to secure the reference.  Now suppose I say

I smoke cigars.

This use of 'I' is clearly indexical, although it is  purely indexical (David Kaplan) inasmuch as there is no need for a demonstration:  I don't need to point to myself when I say 'I smoke cigars.'  And like the immediately preceding example, there is no need for an antecedent to nail down the reference of 'I.'  Not every pronoun needs an antecedent to do a referential job.

In fact, it seems that no expression, used indexically, has or could have an antecedent.  Hector-Neri Castaneda puts it like this:

Whether in oratio recta or in oratio obliqua, (genuine) indicators have no antecedents. ("Indicators and Quasi-Indicators" reprinted in The Phenomeno-Logic of the I, p. 67)

 For a quantificational use of a grammatical pronoun, consider

He who hesitates is lost.

Clearly, 'he' does not function here pronominally -- there is no antecedent -- nor does it function indexically.  It functions like the bound variable in

For any person x, if x hesitates, then x is lost.

But is this token ‘she’ a pronoun in appearance only? It seems to function in some ways like a proper name (perhaps a sobriquet or a tag of sorts) of one who has undergone a name change. On this view, the token ‘she’ wouldn’t function as a rigid designator, since there are possible worlds in which Mark doesn’t use ‘she.’ But the token seems to work as a name or tag for Mark in relevant circumstances.

BV: I would say that 'she' has a sense which requires that any human being  successfully referred to by its use is a biological female. I am inclined to say that if you try to refer to a biological male as 'she,' then the reference won't be successful. But this is none too clear.  

Consider the example of Cassius Clay, who underwent a change in the way he viewed himself and hence selected a new name to reflect his subjective change of ‘self-identification.’ As a matter of respect for Clay as a person, others began to call him by his new name ‘Ali.’

Is the Clay-Ali scenario relevantly similar to the situation of Mark, who in this world subjectively identifies as female despite being biologically male and having formerly identified as male? Suppose Smith speaks about Mark by saying “She went to the market.” Does Smith refer successfully to Mark in virtue of using “she” as something like a proper name rather than a pronoun?

BV: One can change one's religion but one cannot change one's sex. That's an important difference. I myself find it very easy to identify with women, but surely it is impossible for me to identify as a woman if that means:  apperceive or interpret myself or alter my physicality or raiment in such a way as to bring it about that I become a woman. I can no more identify as a woman than I can identify as a cat or a carrot. Of course, I can pretend to be a woman and even successfully pass myself off as one.  (Cf. the movies "Tootsie" and "Mrs. Doubtfire" which you no doubt have seen.) But a man in drag remains a man, even if he is in what I call  'super-drag' where this includes surgical mutilation and augmentation of the body, hormone replacement 'therapy,' etc.  And the sexual frisson/excitation that a man might feel when putting on panties and bra is male frisson is it not? And thus further proof that he remains a man even if he has had his genitalia lopped off and a vagina fashioned from his former penis? 

I am inclined to say that a literal sex change operation is an impossibility. No animal can change its sex or have its sex changed.

Here is a proof from the metaphysics of time. Tell me what you think of it. Every adult woman was a girl. Every adult male was a boy.  The past is unalterable. (Not even God  can restore a virgin.) Now it is possible for a man to become a woman only if it is possible for a man to have been a girl. But that is impossible because it is impossible to alter the past.  Therefore, it is impossible for a man to become a woman no matter how he is altered, even chromosomally. The nature of time rules it out.

Here is another thought. You can change your religion or your political affiliation, but not your race or your sex.  These non-negotiable facts are extra-linguistic. Now with the exception of mere Millian tags, the senses of words determines their reference and not the other way around. I suggested above that one cannot successfully refer to a biological male using 'she.' And this for the reason that 'she' has a sense that is sexually restrictive, assuming that it is being used to refer to sexually-polarized animals such as human beings as opposed to ships and flags as in "She's a grand old flag; she's a high-flying flag . . . ." So is the extra-linguistic fact I mentioned partially determining the sense of 'she'? That's what I am puzzling over at the moment. But I am just 'shootin' from the hip here and perhaps what I have written is not sufficiently clear to permit evaluation.  

If the proper name account doesn’t succeed, perhaps ‘she’ has a non-indexical use. Some pronouns have non-indexical applications. David Braun lists three types of pronoun use: indexical(demonstrative), bound variable, andunbound anaphoric. See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/indexicals/#IndNonIndUsePro

Perhaps ‘she’ has a bound variable use, such as: “Every male who subjectively identifies as a female believes she will be better off doing so.” Or maybe ‘she’ has an unbound anaphoric use, such as: “Mark was late to work today. She was caught in traffic.”

These non-indexical accounts seem strained to me, and hence I’m thinking the proper name account might be better. Or maybe there is still another account that best explains what is happening in these linguistically-odd situations. Maybe all efforts to refer to Mark as 'she' fail to refer.

I’d like to hear what you have to say on this issue, since you’ve thought deeply about pronouns and about the philosophy of language. I’d be glad to give you a call this weekend to chat, if you're free. Or we can discuss via email. 

BV: I have time for one more comment. 'Mark was late for work because she was caught in traffic.' If I heard that I would ask, "Who was the female in question and what did her getting caught in traffic have to do with Mark's being late for work?"

Your philosopher friend should politely tell his employer that his preferred pronouns are those of standard English and that, while he is willing to tolerate the linguistic innovations of others, he expects toleration in return. If his tolerance is met with intolerance, then he should politely remind the intolerant about who has the guns.

Left, Right, Gender, and Sex

There is nothing in the graphic below to disagree with, although more could be said. But one quibble: The correct word is not 'gender,' but 'sex.' Gender is a grammatical category first and foremost. But it is not unreasonable to allow a widening of the term to cover certain social roles that one's sex fits one to play.  So if you want to talk about gender roles, go right ahead. One such is the firefighter role.  This is a social role typically filled by biological males, and for good reason. Men make better firefighters than women due to their  greater physical strength, an attribute grounded in their sex, which is a biological category.  That men are physically stronger than women is a generic statement, and such a statement, since it is not a universal affirmative, cannot be refuted by adducing cases in which some woman is stronger than some man.

So it is entirely natural and unsurprising that men are 'over-represented' among firefighters. You would have to be in the grip of the 'equity' delusion to think that there is something wrong with this 'over-representation.' The term is here being used in its factual or non-normative sense. It is a mark of the muddled to confuse factual and normative uses of terms. There are proportionally more male firefighters than female. This is a 'feature' grounded in biological  reality not a 'bug' introduced by 'sexists.' It is a fact that does not need fixing.

Wokesters are social constructivists gone wild. No doubt there are social constructs. For example, textbooks of biology are social constructs. They would not exist if social animals such as ourselves did not exist and did not interact socially to produce them and to consume them. Biology itself is a cooperative social enterprise, and, as such, a social construct.  Just don't confuse biology with the biotic, or, in general, the study of some range of natural  phenomena with the natural phenomena studied.  Biology is a social construct, but the biologists we are familiar with are all of them human animals and therefore not social constructs.

It should be obvious that not everything could be a social construct. Life itself, as a necessary precondition of all social constructing, cannot itself be a social construct.  The same goes for the abiotic stratum that undergirds the biotic. Could the social constructors themselves be social constructs? Whose? Who constructs the constructors? Either a vicious infinite regress arises, or you must accept the nonsense of social constructivist bootstrapping: one socially constructs oneself. And note that such  self-construction could not be social if others did not help with the task. This adds a further layer of absurdity. If my self-construction requires your help, and yours mine, then we must first exist non-socially in order to socially construct each other. But then I am not, at bottom, a social construct.

And then there is the fact that, before human beings came along, there already was sexual polarity in plants and animals.  Will you seriously maintain that there was no such sexual polarity before humans made the scene and started doing botany and biology? 

If you think about all of this carefully, you should be able to see the absurdity of the idea of 're-imagining' (as a wokester might say) what is natural and both logically and temporally antecedent to the social as a social construct. The world cannot be social construction 'all the way down.'

I cannot explain it now in any detail, but this woke social constructivism, which issues in such lunacies as that babies on birth are 'assigned' their sex, is a particularly virulent and degenerate form of metaphysical idealism according to which reality is mind-made. This idealist motif has coherent articulations, but woke social constructivism is not one of them. 

Book Lust

The old man's libido may be on the wane, but this man's book lust  remains as stiff-standing as ever.  I'm reading along in Anthony Kenny's Aquinas on Being and I find a footnote in which he praises a certain Hermann Weidemann's article contained in a certain anthology. I think, "Oh boy, when I am in Tempe on Friday I'll snag that volume from the Arizona State University  library."

In the bookman's eros we descry the superiority of the spirit over the flesh. The pleasures of the mind can extend for decades, from earliest youth to advanced old age.  But not even the artifices of a Hugh Hefner can help those enmired  in the dotage and decrepitude of the flesh.

At the end, even stoked to the max with Viagra to the point of hearing loss, Hef couldn't get it up sufficiently to penetrate the young lovelies who cavorted around him. He was reduced to manual mode while the bunnies romped with each other exchanging intimacies I charitably imagine to be more innocently sororal than libidinously lesbian.

Can One Copulate One's Way to Chastity?

John B. writes,

I'm a regular reader of your blog and I've written very occasionally, but not for a few years.  Here's another comment. 

 

I enjoy your periodic return to the question of whether one can philosophize one's way to a release from philosophy.  But I think that, to split hairs, you're wrong to say that one can't copulate one's way to chastity.  After a manner of speaking, one can.  It's true that one can't copulate one's way to virginity . . . . But isn't "copulating one's way to chastity" at the heart of marriage as the remedium concupiscentiae?  When the Apostle Paul tells his readers that it is better to marry than to burn with lust, he seems to have in mind something like copulating one's way to chastity.

 

Think of a bachelor who has unruly sexual desires, some of which he may act on.  He then falls in love and gets married, agreeing to an exclusive sexual relationship with his wife.  Over the course of his marriage, his inclinations are tamed and re-structured so that, while he may still experience fleeting moments where, sure, he notices that another woman is very pretty, his sexual desire as such is exclusively, or nearly exclusively, for his wife, whom he loves more and more.  Actually having frequent sexual intercourse with his wife is part of this transformation, since having sex with the same partner, in the context of a loving relationship, has powerful psychological effects.  It might be an oversimplification to say that the man in question "copulated his way to chastity," but it would also be an oversimplification to say that he didn't.

 

Take that for whatever it's worth, and keep up the good work.

 

I see your point, John, but if the question is whether one can achieve chastity by sexual intercourse, I would say no.  One cannot copulate one's way to chastity either in marriage or outside of marriage. But if the question is whether being married helps one avoid unchastity, the answer is a resounding yes.  And that, I take it, is the point you succeeded in making.  Marriage channels and directs sexual energy in a licit and productive way even if no procreation results.  It is therefore indeed remedium concupiscentiae. We need the remedy and the mitigation. We are naturally concupiscent from the ground up, and the decadent, sex-saturated society we live in exacerbates the natural tendency,  pouring gasoline on the "fire down below." 

 

The logically prior question is: what is chastity?  "Chastity is the virtue which [either] excludes or moderates the indulgence of the sexual appetite." (Catholic Encyclopedia, here.) It is a form of temperance, one of the four cardinal virtues. Chastity is either absolute or relative depending on whether it excludes indulgence in the sexual appetite or merely moderates it.  Absolute chastity is called continence and is classed as a "counsel of perfection." As such, it is not morally obligatory but supererogatory. The supererogatory is that which is good but above and beyond what is morally required.  Absolute chastity is not required of those in the marital state; relative chastity is.  So the exercise of the virtue of chastity is compatible with at least some forms of the indulgence of sexual appetite in marriage.

 

Chastity in marriage is extremely difficult to achieve. Who would have the temerity to claim that he has achieved it on a regular basis? It is obviously not enough to refrain from sexual relations with partners other than one's spouse.  Suppose you are having sexual intercourse with your wife while thinking lustful thoughts about your neighbor's wife.  That would count as a violation of chastity in marriage. Am I right about that, John?

 

Moral collapse has proceeded so far that discussions such as the above will strike the majority as quaint and absurd and out of all relation to anything 'real.' When the Pope allows a 'devout Catholic' supporter of abortion on demand for any reason at any stage of fetal development to receive Holy Communion in Rome, then we are fast approaching the end.

 

Related: Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained

Augustine was Right

It is our love of the Unchanging Light, a love unconscious of itself and grotesquely diffracted into creatures, that animates our inordinate love of them. 

St. Valentine's Day at the Oldies: Love and Murder

We'll start with murder.  David Dalton (Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion 2012, pp. 28-29, hyperlinks added!):

Most folk songs had grim, murderous content (and subtext). In Pretty Polly a man lures a young girl from her home with the promise of marriage,and then leads the pregnant girl to an already-dug grave and murders her.  In Love Henry, a woman poisons her unfaithful lover, observed by an alarmed parrot that she also tries to kill. So it was a bit bizarre that these songs should become part of the sweetened, homogenized new pop music.

[. . .]

The original folk songs were potent, possessed stuff, but the folk trios had figured out how to make this grisly stuff palatable, which only proved that practically anything could be homogenized. Clean-cut guys and girls in crinolines, dressed as if for prom night, sang ancient curse-and-doom tales.  Their songs had sweet little melodies, but as in nursery rhymes, there was a dark gothic undercurrent to them -- like Ring Around the Rosies, which happens to be a charming little plague song.

The most famous of these folk songs was the 1958 hit Tom Dooley, a track off a Kingston Trio album which set off the second folk revival [the first was in the early '40s with groups like the Weavers] and was Dylan's initial inspiration for getting involved in folk music.  [I prefer Doc Watson's version.] And it was the very success of the syrupy folk trios that inspired Dylan's future manager to assemble one himself: Peter, Paul and Mary.  They would make Dylan, the prophet of the folk protest movement, a star and lead to consequences that even he did not foresee.  Their version of Blowin' in the Wind would become so successful that it would sound the death knell for the folk protest movement.  Ultimately there would be more than sixty versions of it, "all performing the same function," as Michael Gray says, of "anesthetizing Dylan's message."

Be that as it may, it is a great song, one of the anthems of the Civil Rights movement.  Its power in no small measure is due to the allusiveness of its lyrics which deliver the protest message without tying it to particular events.  It's topical without being topical and marks a difference between Dylan, and say, Phil Ochs.

And now for some love songs.

Gloria Lynne, I Wish You Love.  A great version from 1964.  Lynne died at 83 in 2013.  Here's what Marlene Dietrich does with it.

Ketty Lester, Love Letters.  Another great old tune in a 1962 version.  The best to my taste.

Three for my wife.  An old Sam Cooke number, a lovely Shirelles tune, and my favorite from the Seekers.

Addenda:

1. Keith Burgess-Jackson quotes Jamie Glazov on the hatred of Islamists and leftists for St. Valentine's Day.  Another very interesting similarity between these two totalitarian movements.  Recalling past inamorata while listening to sentimental songs  -- is this not the height of bourgeois self-indulgence when you should be plotting ways to blow up the infidel or bring down capitalism?  But we who defend the private life against totalitarian scum must be careful not to retreat too far into the private life.  A certain amount of activism and engagement is necessary to keep the totalitarians in check.

2. On Thomas Merton: “All the love and all the death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez’s ‘Silver Dagger,’” the man wrote to his lady love in 1966. “I can’t get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself — and yourself for me, in a way.”

Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother
She's sleeping here right by my side
And in her right hand a silver dagger,
She says that I can't be your bride.

All men are false, says my mother,
They'll tell you wicked, lovin' lies.
The very next evening, they'll court another,
Leave you alone to pine and sigh.

My daddy is a handsome devil
He's got a chain five miles long,
And on every link a heart does dangle
Of another maid he's loved and wronged.

Go court another tender maiden,
And hope that she will be your wife,
For I've been warned, and I've decided
To sleep alone all of my life.

Of Palate and Penis

The control of the one aids in the control of the other, and the control of the other in the control of the one. The Desert Fathers knew this, and enjoined the control of both.

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

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

Read the rest at Substack.

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

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

____________

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

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

Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac

If there is divine light, sexual indulgence prevents it from streaming in.  Herein lies the best argument for continence.  The sex monkey may not be as destructive of the body as the booze monkey, but he is more destructive of the spirit.  You may dismiss what I am saying here either by denying that there is any divine light, or by denying that sexual indulgence impedes its influx, or both.  But if you are in the grip of either monkey I will dismiss your dismissal.  Why should I listen to a man with a monkey on his back?  How do I know it is the man speaking and not the monkey?

Poor Kerouac got the holy hell beaten out of him by the simian tag  team.   The Ellis Amburn biography goes into the greatest detail regarding Kerouac's homo- and hetero-erotic sexual excesses.  His fatal fondness for the sauce, for the devil in liquid form, is documented in all the biographies.

It is not that the lovable dharma lush did not struggle mightily in his jihad against his lower self.  He did, in his Buddhist phase in the mid-fifties, before the 1957 success of On the Road and the blandishments of fame did him in.  (Worldly $ucce$$/Suckcess is an ambiguous good.) I've already pulled some quotations from Some of the Dharma which  offers the best documentation of Jack's attempt to tread the straight path to the narrow gate.

One lesson, perhaps, is that we cannot be lamps unto ourselves even if the Tathagata succeeded in pulling himself up into Nirvana by his samsaric sandal straps.  To the vast run of us ordinary "poor suffering fucks" a religion of self-help is no help at all.  The help we need, if help there be, must come from Elsewhere.

And so in the end Jack returned to the religion of his childhood.

The Last Interview, 12 October 1969.  "I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic."  "I just sneak into church now, at dusk, at vespers. But yeah, as you get older you get more . . . genealogical."

As much of a screw-up and sinner as he was, as irresponsible, self-indulgent, and self-destructive, Kerouac was a deeply religious man.  He went through a Buddhist phase, but at the end he came home to Catholicism.  

"Everybody goes home in October." (On the Road, Part I, Ch. 14, Para 1)

Kadın erkeğin şeytanıdır

"Woman is man's devil." (Turkish proverb)

Never underestimate the power of concupiscence to derange, disorient, and delude.

When Spanish bishop Xavier Novell resigned last month, the Roman Catholic Church cited strictly personal reasons without going into detail.

It has now emerged in Spanish media that he fell in love with a woman who writes Satanic-tinged erotic fiction.

In 2010 at the age of 41, he became Spain's youngest bishop, in Solsona in the north-eastern region of Catalonia.

[. . .]

It came as a shock when Religión Digital reported that he had fallen for divorcee Silvia Caballol, a psychologist and erotic novelist. The news site said that the former bishop was now looking for a job in the Barcelona area as an agronomist.

Caballol's books include titles such as The Hell of Gabriel's Lust and the trilogy Amnesia. In the blurb for one of her works, the reader is promised a journey into sadism, madness and lust and a struggle between good and evil, God and Satan with a plot to shake one's values and religious beliefs.

Story here.

Can Mere Thoughts be Morally Wrong?

A Substack meditation inspired by Matthew 5.27-28

Sounds Incoherent to Me

Here:

“I don’t want to have sex with anybody and I probably won’t ever have sex,” says Benoit over Zoom, although she does explain that the key point here is sexual relations with others: she does masturbate.

If she masturbates, then she has sex with herself in which case she does want to have sex with somebody. But then again perhaps 'masturbate' in her idiolect means 'wash one's private parts.'  

The Eclipse of Sex by the Rise of Gender

Ponder this

Dennis Prager on Liberalism, Leftism, and Race

Here at Substack.  

IS IT REASONABLE TO BE A SEX REALIST BUT A RACE IRREALIST LIKE PRAGER?

If not, should one affirm the biological reality of both, deny the biological reality of both, or affirm race realism and sex irrealism?

The Lust of the Eyes and the Pride of Life

This just over the transom from T. O. with my responses:

I am wondering if you'd like to tackle this question prompted by your latest post on the sensus divinitatis. 

 

Suppose a man indulges his sensual desires and passions (especially sexual passion) without restraint when he is young. Then, as he ages, he realizes the folly of his ways and retrains himself. He trains himself to avert his eyes from beautiful women or lusty images, instead of simply soaking up the sensory delight unimpeded. He becomes chaste. He takes every lustful thought captive and refrains from sexual behaviour or activity that is inordinate or otherwise immoral. My question is, can this man ever fully escape the pull and attraction of sexual passion having so fully indulged it in his youth?

Thank you for asking such an easy question. The answer is No, based on my own experience, my observation of the lives of others, and wide reading in the wisdom literature of the East and West.

Even though he is now chaste and is more or less self-restrained, he still feels the intense pull of sexual desire from time to time, even if he doesn't entertain it. Will he always feel this pull? Will he always feel that pang within when he sees a beautiful woman, no matter how many years he cultivates a disciplined and chaste soul? Or, is this simply an idiosyncratic matter that is unique to everyone, regardless of how they have lived in the past? 

Yes, he will always feel it, with the exception of a very few spiritually advanced souls, the existence of whom is hard to verify in a critical way that avoids hagiographic excess.  The intensity of the allurement will diminish with time along with the means of acting upon it.  As we work to abandon our vices, they do their part by abandoning us.

 

But of course there are those fools who fail to make good use of their decline in vitality (the "pride of life") for spiritual advancement and try to keep their enslavement to the flesh going until death swallows them. Hugh Hefner is one example I have commented on. Jeffrey Epstein is another.

 

My title above is from 1 John 2:16: "For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world." (KJV)

Omne quod est in mundo, concupiscentia carnis est, et concupiscentia oculorum, et superbia vitae . . . .

The New Testament verse condemns the Roman Catholic Church in its current corruption.

 

The following two are probably my best entries on the topic:

 

The Fall of John Searle

Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained

On Engagement with Females: The Anti-Biden Rule

With the exception of wives, sisters, and girlfriends, accept and return hugs, but don't initiate them. A gentleman is cognizant of the power differential between the sexes, and does not impose himself physically or psychologically.  And while the scent of a woman can can carry a powerful erotic charge, a gentleman does not creep up like Creepy Joe to sniff a woman's hair or any other part of her anatomy.

Being an old man does not confer carte blanche in this regard. Mild sexual aggression in the young man is perhaps tolerable, but few things are more digusting than a dirty old man.  You would have your doubts about a young man not on the make; but the old man, the made man, having attained a modicum of maturity, is more appropriately concerned with the impression he will soon be making on his Maker.

"You spent your life chasing women as your summum bonum? Well then, I shall grant you your heart's desire: for all eternity you shall chase women!"

Related: A Theory of Hell

Love and Money

Don't say that money is the root of all evil. That's just silly. Say something that is true:

The inordinate love of money is the root of SOME evils.

Point proven in Radix Omnium Malorum. 

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

Addendum (7/17). Claude Boisson sends the following:

As you already know, your interpretation is exactly that of some careful Greek scholars for the sentence in 1 Timothy 6:10 

Infatuation

What saves infatuation from being merely that? Its being a love of God that doesn't understand itself.

Cesare Pavese on Romantic Folly

Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), This Business of Living: Diaries 1935-1950, Transaction Publishers, 2009, p. 177, from the entry of 30 September 1940:

The best defense against a love affair is to tell yourself over and over again till you are dizzy: "this passion is simply stupid; the game is not worth the candle." But a lover always tends to imagine that this time it is the real thing; the beauty of it lies in the persistent  conviction that something extraordinary, something incredible, is going to happen to us.

Who among us has not been played for a fool by the illusions of romantic love? Our restless hearts seek from the finite what the finite cannot provide. This is quite the predicament for those for whom the Infinite has withdrawn behind the veils of nonentity or sunk beneath the waters of oblivion.

"Dark is the morning that passes without the light of your eyes."

Infatuation

It is fitting that infatuation is fleeting.

Love Untranslated

Love untranslated into action remains an emotion and in many case a mere self-indulgence.

Coitus Reservatus and Beyond

It is a decidedly unpopular thing to say these days, but I'll say it anyway, echoing a conviction of William James: Much profit comes from avoiding sensory indulgence.

A much more difficult practice is to enter into it with cool detachment. Coitus reservatus, for example. But it is no more difficult than playing blindfold chess, which is not that difficult. One experiences the sensations attendant upon sexual intercourse while remaining indifferent to them: one regards them as mere sensations. (In my lexicon, coitus reservatus requires non-ejaculation, whereas coitus interruptus allows it, but outside the partner.)

Could one take it one step further and ejaculate with detachment? This is hard to imagine, but conceivable. After all, Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita was enjoined by Lord Krishna to kill with detachment. Try to imagine looking a man in the eyes and then running him through with a sword, all the while preserving one's equanimity. If it is possible to kill with detachment, then it is possible to ejaculate with detachment.

What could it mean to ejaculate with detachment? One would experience the sensations attendant upon the outflow of seminal fluid while viewing them as mere sensations. One would not lose oneself in them as is normally the case, but hold them at mental arm's length, or, to change metaphor, peer at them from within the fastness of the inner citadel. One would remain unattached. Like the chess master who keeps the draw in hand, one would keep one's ataraxia in hand.

Am I talking nonsense?

Companion post:  William James on Self-Denial

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Love and Murder

We'll start with murder.  David Dalton (Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion 2012, pp. 28-29, hyperlinks added!):

Most folk songs had grim, murderous content (and subtext). In Pretty Polly a man lures a young girl from her home with the promise of marriage,and then leads the pregnant girl to an already-dug grave and murders her.  In Love Henry a woman poisons her unfaithful lover, observed by an alarmed parrot that she also tries to kill. So it was a bit bizarre that these songs should become part of the sweetened, homogenized new pop music.

[. . .]

The original folk songs were potent, possessed stuff, but the folk trios had figured out how to make this grisly stuff palatable, which only proved that practically anything could be homogenized. Clean-cut guys and girls in crinolines, dressed as if for prom night, sang ancient curse-and-doom tales.  Their songs had sweet little melodies, but as in nursery rhymes, there was a dark gothic undercurrent to them -- like Ring Around the Rosies, which happens to be a charming little plague song.

The most famous of these folk songs was the 1958 hit Tom Dooley, a track off a Kingston Trio album which set off the second folk revival [the first was in the early '40s with groups like the Weavers] and was Dylan's initial inspiration for getting involved in folk music.  [I prefer Doc Watson's version.] And it was the very success of the syrupy folk trios that inspired Dylan's future manager to assemble one himself: Peter, Paul and Mary.  They would make Dylan, the prophet of the folk protest movement, a star and lead to consequences that even he did not foresee.  Their version of Blowin' in the Wind would become so successful that it would sound the death knell for the folk protest movement.  Ultimately there would be more than sixty versions of it, "all performing the same function," as Michael Gray says, of "anesthetizing Dylan's message."

Be that as it may, it is a great song, one of the anthems of the Civil Rights movement.  Its power in no small measure is due to the allusiveness of its lyrics which deliver the protest message without tying it to particular events.  It's topical without being topical and marks a difference between Dylan, and say, Phil Ochs.

And now for some love songs.

Gloria Lynne, I Wish You Love.  A great version from 1964.  Lynne died at 83 in 2013.  Here's what Marlene Dietrich does with it.

Ketty Lester, Love Letters.  Another great old tune in a 1962 version.  The best to my taste.

Three for my wife.  An old Sam Cooke number, a lovely Shirelles tune, and my favorite from the Seekers.

Addenda:

1. Keith Burgess-Jackson quotes Jamie Glazov on the hatred of Islamists and leftists for St. Valentine's Day.  Another very interesting similarity between these two totalitarian movements.  Recalling past inamorata of a Saturday night while listening to sentimental songs  -- is this not the height of bourgeois self-indulgence when you should be plotting ways to blow up the infidel or bring down capitalism?  But we who defend the private life against totalitarian scum must be careful not to retreat too far into the private life.  A certain amount of activism and engagement is necessary to keep the totalitarians in check.

2. On Thomas Merton: “All the love and all the death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez’s ‘Silver Dagger,’” the man wrote to his lady love in 1966. “I can’t get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself — and yourself for me, in a way.”

Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother
She's sleeping here right by my side
And in her right hand a silver dagger,
She says that I can't be your bride.

All men are false, says my mother,
They'll tell you wicked, lovin' lies.
The very next evening, they'll court another,
Leave you alone to pine and sigh.

My daddy is a handsome devil
He's got a chain five miles long,
And on every link a heart does dangle
Of another maid he's loved and wronged.

Go court another tender maiden,
And hope that she will be your wife,
For I've been warned, and I've decided
To sleep alone all of my life.

A Cure for Infatuation?

One of the very best is marriage. 

Infatuation is a form of idolatry that cannot last long in a marriage. Marriage cures it. That's an argument for marriage. There was no cure for Don Quixote's romantic fantasies because their object, the fair Dulcinea del Toboso, existed only in his imagination.*

But while infatuation lasts, it is blissful. One is made silly, often harmlessly so. One walks on air and can think of nothing but the beloved. The moon hits your eye like a bigga pizza pie. The world starts to shine like you've had too much wine. So smitten was I in the early days of my relationship to the woman I married that I sat in my carrel at the university one day and just thought about her for eight hours straight when I was supposed to be finishing an article on Frege. Life is both love and logic. But sometimes hot love trumps cold logic.

The best marriages begin with the romantic transports of infatuation, but a marriage lasts only if the Rousseauian transports are undergirded by good solid reasons of the big head without interference from the heart or the little head. The love then matures. Real love replaces illusory idealization. The big head ought to be the ruling element in a man.

It takes an Italian to capture the aforementioned romantic transports, and Dean Martin (Dino Crocetti) does the job well in the schmaltzy That's Amore. 

Il Mio Mondo is a good expression of the idolatry of infatuation.  Cilla Black's 1964 rendition of the Italian song is You're My World.

But whence the idealization, the infatuation, the idolatry?  And why the perennial popularity of silly love songs? What we really want in the deepest depths of the heart no man or woman can provide.  That is known to all who know their own hearts and have seen through the idols.  What we want is an infinite and eternal love.  This infinite desire may have no object in reality. Arguments from desire are not rationally compelling.

But given the fact of the desire, a fact that does not entail the reality of its object, we have what we need to explain the idealization, the infatuation, and the idolatry of the sexual other. We substitute an immanent object for Transcendence inaccessible.

_____________________________

*The great novel of Miguel Cervantes is a work of fiction. And so both Don Quixote/Quijote and Dulcinea are fictional characters. But the first is posited as real within the fiction while the other is posited as imaginary, as Don Quixote's fiction, even if based upon the posited-in-the-fiction real Aldonza Lorenzo. Herewith a bit of grist for the mill of the philosophy of fiction. The real-imaginary distinction operates within an imaginary construct.

 

Word of the Day: Zaftig

Said of a woman. Having a full, shapely figure. Voluptuous. Plump and vigorous. Rubenesque. A Yiddish word. Supposedly from the German saftig, juicy. More here. Trigger Warning! Snowflakes of the distaff persuasion will be offended.

Time was when 'female persuasion' and the like were used figuratively as a kind of joke; after all, one cannot be persuaded to be female or male. Or recruited. One does not join the female club. Nor can one be assigned one's sex at birth. Being female is something biological, not political or social like a party affiliation. But the times they have a'changed. Nowadays everything is a social construction and a matter of arbitrary identification. So, being female is like being a Democrat!

Nowadays there is no sex, only gender. How then can anything be sexist? And if, in reality, there are no races -- race being a mere social construct -- how can there be racism? Inquiring minds want to know.

The Romantic Fool

It has been my experience that the folly of the romantic fool  has an expiration date -- at least with respect to any given object of his folly, if not with respect to his propensity to make a fool of himself in matters amorous.  The wayward heart is fickle. The older and wiser see the need for the custody of the heart, but to attain the insight is one thing, to play the custodian another.  Popular music testifies eloquently to the problem. 

Fools rush in, where wise men never go;
But wise men never fall in love;
So how are they to know?

Wise men say
Only fools rush in;
But I can't help
Falling in love with you.

Master Desire and Aversion

It is a curious fact that a man who has no time for his own wife easily finds time for the wife of another. Not valuing what he has, he desires what he does not have, even though at some level he understands that, were he to take possession of what he now merely desires, the pattern would repeat itself: he would again desire that which he does not possess over that which he does possess. He should learn to appreciate what he has.

The Buddhists have a saying, "Conquer desire and aversion." But this goes too far: desire and aversion are not to be conquered or extirpated so much as chastened and channeled. They are to be mastered. Without self-mastery, the highest mastery, there can be no true happiness.

Amy Wax Interviewed

Here is a taste:

Once again, you’d have to define racism. You’re basically saying any generalization about a group, whether true or false—and we know it doesn’t apply to everybody in the group, because that’s just a straw man—is racist. I mean, we could do “sexist,” right?

We could.

So, women, on average, are more agreeable than men. Women, on average, are less knowledgeable than men. They’re less intellectual than men. Now, I can actually back up all those statements with social-science research.

You can send me links for women are “less intellectual than men.” I’m happy to include that in the piece if you have a good link for that.

O.K., well, there’s a literature in Britain, a series of papers that were done, and I need to look them up, that show that women are less knowledgeable than men. They know less about every single subject, except fashion. There is a literature out of Vanderbilt University that looks at women of very high ability—so, controlling for ability—and, starting in adolescence, women are less interested in the single-minded pursuit of abstract intellectual goals than men. They want more balance in their life. They want more time with family, friends, and people. They’re less interested in working hard on abstract ideas. You can put together a database that shows that. The person who has the literature is a man named David Lubinski, and he shows that intelligence isn’t what’s driving it. It is interest, orientation, what people want to spend their time doing.

Now, is that sexist? We can argue all day about whether it is sexist. We can argue from morning till night. And it is sterile. It is pointless. Let’s talk about the actual findings and what implications they have for policy, for expectations.

[. . .]

The Fall of John Searle

By now you will have heard that the distinguished philosopher, John R. Searle, has been stripped of his emeritus status  at the University of California, Berkeley. He was found to have violated sexual harrassment policies.  A long-time reader of this blog astutely observes that things went worse for Peter Abelard, and then adds:

Also, behaviour which would not have shocked me if it had involved an investment banker (although investment bankers often get a bad press in that respect), shocks me in a philosopher. OK, philosophers are not priests. But there is a sort of commitment to, er, What Is Higher, and I don’t see any such commitment in what has been described of Searle. E.g. watching pornography in front of students, with the explicit intention of making them aware of the pornography, or of making a signal of some kind, not sure what. (E.g. did he imagine that the pornography would create some desire in a female student one third of his age? Then he is a silly old fool. But then no fool like an old fool).

I am slightly surprised that my correspondent, an old man, a conservative, a man of the world, and a philosopher reports being shocked. As I would put it, we are concupiscent from the ground up, and in a social climate in which the old-time restraints have been removed, is it any surprise that a man like Searle who sports a huge ego -- I've seen him in action -- and is an atheist and a naturalist to boot, should get in touch with his inner lecher, especially in a far-Left Left-coast venue such as Berkeley, California?

Of course, I am not condoning his bad behavior; I condemn it. I'm just not shocked by it. The man considers religion to be in bad taste. No curb on his behavior from that direction!  With a Luciferian (phosphorescent, light-bearing) intellect and an ego to match, widely-respected, he probably considered himself bullet-proof. Pride comes before the fall. And no fool like an old fool, as my correspondent notes.

Didn’t I tell you of Kingsley Amis’s remark that sexual desire was like ‘being handcuffed to a lunatic’? Right, but he also said the benefit of middle age was being released. So he acknowledged the absurdity of the desire. Searle apparently did not acknowledge such absurdity. I mean, it’s fairly absurd in a young man, but wholly and fantastically absurd in a man aged 86, or whatever it is.

Amis is right, except that middle age is too young for release. I say you are young until 30, middle-aged 30-60, and old thereafter.  If you feed your sex monkey, he can torment you throughout that middle-aged period and beyond depending on your level of vigor.  It is interesting, and indeed important, to note that according to St. Augustine, who had wide experience in these matters, no man achieves continence without divine assistance. So rather than say that insatiable lust is absurd, I prefer to say that it is  border-line demonic.

Lord Russell, if I rightly recall, refused to remain faithful to his wife even in his 80's.  Now that truly is absurd. You chase a woman. Suppose you catch her. What the hell do you do then? Sniff her hair like creepy Joe Biden?  It is natural for a young man to be on the prowl, and you would entertain certain doubts about a young man who wasn't; but an old man on the prowl cuts a ridiculous figure, and is failing to make use of his old age for what it is good for: finally breaking his bondage to the flesh.

Searle story here. Something about the philandering Freddy Ayer, here. And if, after all that salaciousness, you are by any chance  interested in Searles'  ideas, go here. 

 

Into the Late Sensate: Concupiscense Unconstrained

Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin has proven to be remarkably prescient. From Pitirim Sorokin Revisited:

Sorokin’s critique of private life begins with the disintegration of the family. “Divorces and separations will increase until any profound difference between socially sanctioned marriages and illicit sex-relationship disappears,” he predicted in the final volume of Social and Cultural Dynamics. [rev. ed. 1957] Children born out of wedlock and separated from parents would become unexceptional.

In the 1950s he foresaw the coming sexual anarchy of the West and its downside. Alfred Kinsey’s widely publicized research, the newly founded Playboy magazine’s explicit carnal appeal, the Elvis Presley delirium among adolescents, the runaway commercial success of Peyton Place, the critical success of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita—all were parts of a piece at mid-century. In 1957 Sorokin wrote crabbily, “Americans are victims of a sex mania as malign as cancer and as socially menacing as communism.” This overreach got him ridiculed in the movie Gidget, cartooned in The San Francisco Chronicle, and called a publicity hound and prude.

What Sorokin saw dawning is now at full noon. The edgy and sordid are box office. Hot porn is just a click away. Casual sex is the norm. Ten or twenty sexualities clamor for a spotlight. Real or not, it doesn’t matter. Hopes and dreams crowd out what is possible and what can be done. The pursuit of pleasure—Neil Postman called it amusing ourselves to death—looks as if it might be a terminal social disease. In the Western world marriage loses its appeal. The idea of family formation changes shape, resulting in social conditions in which 40 percent of U.S. children today are born to unmarried women. These sexualities bear legal rights and popular favor perhaps unique in human history.  

Late Sensate license—if it feels good, do it—has become its own faith. Facts, reason, and logic are losing their universal public authority, even in academic life. Despite astonishing affluence and material ease, some one-sixth of Americans over the age of fifteen are taking prescribed anti-depressants. Others are reaching for whiskey, marijuana, opioids, and other palliatives. The Late Sensate does not appear to be working too well psychologically, and governability is at issue. Sorokin’s advice to perplexed or anxious individuals facing social turmoil was to focus on the transcendent through the humanities. Plant a garden. Go walking. Respect the natural environment. Practice yoga. Live simply. Turn off the television set and talk to others.

More than fifty years later, this is not unwise advice. “Only the power of unbounded love…can prevent the pending extermination of man by man on this planet,” Sorokin expounded. “Without love, no armament, no war, no diplomatic machinations, no coercive police force, no school education, no economic or political measures, not even hydrogen bombs can prevent the pending catastrophe.” Sorokin’s prescriptions of altruism and universalism might seem painfully naïve and anodyne today. But this difficult, intuitive man’s clear-eyed premonitions, his studies of social dynamics, and his tough-minded benevolence remain remarkable guides to considering current events.

Gilbert T. Sewall is co-author of After Hiroshima: The United States Since 1945 and editor of The Eighties: A Reader.

Their Cocks Make Them Sure

There are those who are cocksure that there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem judgment, no ultimate meaning to human existence, and that we are all just material bits of a material world. Now it may be so for all we  know. This is not an area in which proofs or disproofs are possible. 

But for those who are cocksure about it, I suspect that it is their cocks that make them sure.

Crudity aside, their natural concupiscence blinds them to the spiritual reality of God and the soul, dulls their consciences, and ties them to a passing world that their lust convinces them is ultimately real.

This is why I do not trust the atheisms of Russell and Sartre. They were sensualists and worldlings who failed to satisfy the prerequisites of spiritual insight. Pride and lust dimmed their eyes.

'Nonconsensual Choking'

I was struck by a curious expression I found in a recent NYRB piece:

I faced criminal charges including hair-pulling, hitting during intimacy in one instance, and—the most serious allegation—nonconsensual choking while making out with a woman on a date in 2002.

As opposed to what? Consensual choking? So if you are on a date and the girl consents to being choked, then it is morally acceptable? And what sort of girl wants to be choked? Next stop: erotic asphyxiation. Why not, if it is consensual? You might even try mutual erotic asphyxiation. That might not end well, however. David Carradine's auto-erotic adventure in auto-asphyxiation in a Bangkok hotel room proved to be his last.

From another source, I gather that the hitting mentioned in the quotation is punching a girl in the head against her will. So if she wants to be punched in the head,  there is nothing wrong with it?

I'd say we are living in sick times if the consent of the done to is sufficient for the moral acceptability of the doer's deed. 

I'll leave it to you to work out why.

Related entry: Real Enough to Debase, but not to Satisfy

UPDATE (9/16)

A reader expands our vocabulary of depravity with a link to donkey punch. Not for the easily shocked. But I think it is important to look human wretchedness hard in the face and realize what becomes of morality when it is untethered from a transcendent anchor. This is what is happening in the RCC under Bergoglio the Termite. 

How to Make Your Penis Go Away in the Eyes of the Law: Identify as a Woman!

'Karen' White is a man sporting a healthy, nature-made penis. In 2003 and 2016 'she' put the organ in question to work in the rape of two different women. So of course 'she' ended up in a women's prison where -- you guessed it -- 'she' sexually assaulted women, not 'women,' women.

Rod Dreher reports and concludes, "The world has gone mad."

No, Rod, not the world, but 'liberals,' 'progressives,' 'leftists,' 'libtards,' whatever you want to call these willfully destructive shitheads who, here in the States, have come to dominate the Democrat Party.

The essence of the lunacy is the denial of reality, in this instance, biological reality.

Philosophy is often dismissed as utterly inconsequential. But the times they have a' changed. We now live in an age in which loony notions once only toyed with in ivory towers are now being implemented to the consequential detriment of real people.  

I develop the thought of the last paragraph in When Politics Becomes Like Philosophy.

Why There Probably Won't Be a Serious Inquiry into Priestly Pederasty

Steven Hayward:

Such an inquiry would require journalists to probe into matters that run afoul of liberal orthodoxy today. It is one thing to probe into bad behavior from unpopular and easily demonized cardinals. Blowing open a cover-up is standard Watergate Journalism 101. It’s another thing to open the door to uncomfortable questions about sexual morality in our anything-goes times. And that’s almost as great a moral failing as the bishops and cardinals who cover up the evil in the first place. The point is, while the media will gladly blast the most lurid and awful (but unproven) details of a grand jury report about what took place in Pennsylvania without question, they are unwilling to look deeper into the potential causes and enablers of this evil. That is nearly as contemptible as the cowardly behavior of the Church hierarchy.

Just as the Left cannot tolerate any serious questioning of the morality of abortion, it cannot tolerate any serious questioning of the morality of homosexual practices.  Any raising of those questions would raise questions about their entire worldview. The Left subscribes to the 'wisdom' of that celebrity chef, 'foodie,' and gastro-tourist, Anthony Bourdain, for whom:

Man has no higher origin or higher destiny. The body is not the temple of the Holy Spirit or any sort of temple; it is a pleasure factory.  

So what could possibly be wrong with consensual sodomy? But the Church condemns sodomy, consensual or not. Kierkegaard said that Christianity is "heterogeneity to the world." The same is true of the RCC. It is in the world but not of it. It is a rebuke to it and cannot be secularized without being destroyed.

To inquire seriously into the homosexual culture within the Church and to expose it as the root of the rot would involve touching on questions the Left would rather not touch on. 

Gender is a Social Construct -- Except When It's Not

Heather Mac!

When Did Sex Begin?

In 1963.  Or at least so we hear from Philip Larkin in his Annus Mirabilis.  It was indeed a remarkable year.  I was but a boy in grade school, but old enough so that I now remember all those wonderful songs and not so wonderful events such as the Profumo scandal in Britain.  What ever happened to sex kitten Christine Keeler, by the way?  Brace yourself.

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Would Don Juan Approve of Bill Cosby?

Drugging a woman to have sex with her takes all the sport out of the chase.

From Bad to Worse

His johnson became his dousing rod, but it led him not to the waters of life, but to the fleshpots. This after abandoning organized religion and its hypocrisies, but also its curbs and checks on destructive behavior. So he went from bad to worse. He started on down that Lost Highway.

When Physicists Get Physical: A Tale of Sex and Scientism

Allegedly, Lawrence Krauss is a sexual predator. I'll leave it to you to decide which is worse, his philosophical incompetence or his sexual predation. Both are forms of seduction, one cerebral, the other carnal.

Shakespeare on the Fire Down Below

My favorite Oregonian luthier, Dave Bagwill, sends this for our delectation:

PROSPERO (to FERDINAND) 

 

Look thou be true. Do not give dalliance

Too much the rein. The strongest oaths are straw

To th' fire i' th' blood. Be more abstemious,

Or else, goodnight your vow.

 

The Tempest, Act 4, Sc. 1

Dave's emphasis.

Bob Seger expatiates on the theme in "The Fire Down Below." I shall resist the temptation to link to it.

Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained

The 'pro-choice' movement, to use the polite euphemism, is fueled by concupiscence.  Not entirely, of course. To what extent, then?

One naturally wants the pleasures of sexual intercourse without any consequences. One seeks cost-free indulgence in the most intense sensuous pleasure known to man. Unrestricted abortion on demand is a convenient remedy to an inconvenient pregnancy should other birth-control methods fail.  Combine the following: a fallen being, a powerful drive, advanced birth-control and abortion technology, the ever-increasing irrelevance of religion and its moral strictures, 24-7 sex-saturation via omni-invasive popular media -- combine them, and the arguments against the morality of abortion come too late. As good as they are in themselves, they are impotent against the onslaught of the factors mentioned.

It's always been that reason is reliably suborned by passion; it's just that now the subornation is quicker and easier.

And then there is the feminist angle. Having come into their own in other arenas, which is good, women are eager to throw off the remaining shackles of family and pregnancy. They insist on their rights, including reproductive rights. And isn't the right to an abortion just another reproductive right?  Well, no it isn't; but the sexual itch in synergy with emancipatory zeal is sure to blind people to any arguments to the contrary. (That there are some reproductive rights I take for granted.)

And now for a little paradox. Sexual emancipation 'empowers' women. But in a sex- and power-obsessed society this 'empowerment' also empowers men by increasing the cost-free availability of women to male sexual exploitation. Enter the 'hook-up,' the name of which is a perfect phrase, hydraulic in its resonance, for the substitution of impersonal fluid-exchange for the embodiment of personal love.

It is no surprise that men with money and power who operate in enclaves of like-minded worldings take full advantage of the quarry on offer.  But lust like other vices is hard to control once it is given free rein. And so the depradations of Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer and a hundred others is the natural upshot. 

Women rightly push back but too many veer to the extreme of #metoo. 

The result is a strange blend of sexual licentiousness-cum-sanctimony.

A lefty will say that I preaching, posturing, moralizing. But for a lefty all moral judgment is moralizing, except when they do it not knowing what they do; and all preaching is hypocritical, except when they do it.

But don't ever expect to get through to benighted people whose will to power has so suppressed their will to truth that they cannot look into the mirror and see themselves. 

Related:

The Role of Concupiscence

Ohne Fleiß Kein Preis

The Role of Concupiscence in the Politics of the Day

Shakespeare on Lust

Word of the Day: Cack-Handed

British. 1. Left-handed; 2. clumsy, awkward. See here.

Example:

“Rape is a crime, but trying to seduce someone, even persistently or cack-handedly, is not – nor is men being gentlemanly a macho attack,” said the letter published in the newspaper Le Monde.

I'm with Catherine Deneuve and Christina Hoff Sommers on this one.  Real women know how to handle obnoxious men: with a stern warning or a slap across the face.  They don't go crying to their feminist mommies. And real men accept the rebuke.

The Left has lost its collective mind (hive mind?) on this as on so many other issues.  You are one stupid and/or vile leftist if you cannot or will not distinguish among: a bit of old-fashioned gallantry, a risqué  joke, the use of an offensive term such as 'broad,' a pat on the derriere, a Frankenian ass grab, a Weinsteinian manipulation, a full-on Clintonian sexual assault, and rape.

To conflate all of these behaviors under the umbrella 'sexually inappriopriate' shows the typical liberal/left incapacity to draw necessary distinctions as well as an inappropriate use of 'inappropriate.'  

More on Deneuve & Co. at NYT.

A Liberal's Notion of Self-Restraint

Tavis Smiley Too? 'Inappropriate' Sexual Conduct?

The witch hunt is on and the Left eats its own.  PBS has suspended distribution of Smiley's late-night talk show. I don't think much of Smiley's opinions, you understand, but I fear that we may end up like the Soviet Union or China under the Cultural Revolution. Don't tell me it can't happen here; just look at the outrages that have already happened here. From the L. A. Times:

“I have the utmost respect for women and celebrate the courage of those who have come forth to tell their truth,” Smiley said. “To be clear, I have never groped, coerced, or exposed myself inappropriately to any workplace colleague in my entire broadcast career, covering six networks over 30 years.” [emphasis added]

If Smiley had exposed himself appropriately, then no problem?

By the way, what is it about liberals that makes them use 'inappropriately' inappropriately?

Whipping out your schlong in front of a female colleague is not inappropriate behavior but morally wrong behavior.  Why can't you liberal boneheads say that? Too 'judgmental'? But that's what you are doing: you are making moral judgments. Did Bubba behave 'inappropriately' with Juanita Broderick? But if Clinton had shown up at a black-tie event in a swimsuit, then you could say, appropriately, that  his behavior was inappropriate.

'Inappropriate' is far too weak a word for rape and sexual intimidation. On the other hand, 'reach out' is too strong a phrase for the uses to which it is put by contemporary language morons. If I hear that your wife has suddenly died, I may 'reach out' to you in sympathy and with an offer of assistance. But if I phone you to inform you that one of your tail lights is out, I haven't 'reached out' to you.

Finally, Smiley's 'tell their truth' is quite the howler. For his accusers are (at least) telling their truth.  Truth is truth. There is no such thing as his or hers or their truth.