Maverick Philosopher

Man Does not Live by Bread Alone

Or by bed alone.

Top o' the Stack.

Good Societies and Good Lives

A Substack post on state-run lotteries.

The Racism of Reduced Expectations

To tolerate and excuse Harvard president Claudine Gay's  plagiarism has been cited by some as an example of the so-called 'racism of reduced expectations' (RRE). For what you are then doing by your toleration and excusal is lowering the standard for blacks when, or rather on the assumption that, they are as capable as any other group of meeting those standards.  Such a slighting  of blacks would indeed be racist.

But is the assumption true? The assumption underpinning  RRE is that blacks as a group are the equal of Jews, Asians, and whites in respect of intelligence, intellectual honesty, love of truth, interest in the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, commitment to the traditional values of the university, respect for high standards of scholarship, and the like. If this is the case, then it is indeed racist to tolerate and excuse the bad behavior of blacks such as President Gay, and in her case 'sexist' as well.  

So whether there is racism here or not depends on whether the underlying assumption is true. Most establishment conservatives believe that it is.  They believe that blacks are the equals of the other groups mentioned in respect of the attributes mentioned. I don't doubt their good faith. Jesse Watters a few nights ago played the RRE card: to tolerate and excuse President Gay's plagiarism is to treat her as either incapable or unwilling due to her race of being objective, truth-seeking, and intellectually honest. It is to suggest black intellectual and moral inferiority when they are not inferior. Hence the racism of reduced expectations.  But if blacks as a group really are inferior when it comes to the appreciation and implementation of the values in question then the reduced expectations are justified and there is no racism of reduced expectations.

My point is that reduced expectations are racist only if the assumption is true.  If the assumption is false then a reduction in expectations is in order  and there is no racism.  One is entitled to play the RRE card only if one has already shown or given good evidence for the truth of the assumption.

"He be Good for the Hood"

I have some mind-numbingly substantive posts in the works, but for now here are three items from the (non-fake) news you may want to opine about.

1) The mug shot heard or rather seen 'round the world and its appeal to blacks. "He be good for the hood." "The more they indict, the more we unite."

2) Gold Star dad to Biden: "It's two-fucking-thirty, asshole." (1:30 ff.) Civility is a good old conservative virtue. But anyone who calls for civility in the present political situation is simply not perceiving said situation. We need to condemn morally our political enemies, in blunt and brutal ways. Yes or no? Argue the pros and cons.

3) My man Victor Davis Hanson was on Sean Hannity's show tonight. I have been linking to him for years. But I got annoyed with him tonight when he kept repeating, in reference to Biden's disastrous border policy, "It makes no sense!"

But it makes perfect sense if you are a globalist like Traitor Joe out to destroy the USA as she was founded to be. Does my man  lack the cojones (testicular fortitude) to come right out and say what I suspect he believes, namely, that the whole point of the open border policy is destroy the republic? Could he really be confused or puzzled about what's going on? Is he tempering his remarks to keep from getting shit-canned like Tucker?  'Defenestrate' is a polite word, and I could have used it instead of 'shit- can,' but again what good is politeness? You will get nowhere being polite or civil with mendacious thugs. Around thugs you have to be able to  project danger credibly and elicit fear. Jordan Peterson is pretty good on this. 

A good man is not a weak man. A good man is a dangerous man who is in control of the animal in him. 

Virtue, Vice, and Mastery

Substack latest. An note on akrasia in reverse.

Continence

There is continence sexual and gustatory. Custody of the eyes and of the heart are forms of continence.  Continence should also extend to rebuttals, replies, ripostes, rejoinders, responses, and reactions. Deny yourself the desire for vindication, and getting in the last word. Better retraction than self-serving reaction. The self denied is the ego; the self that denies is the soul.

Odd Man Out

Among the cardinal virtues, courage is the odd man out. It is almost always prudent to be prudent, temperate, and just, but not often  prudent to be courageous. 

The Odd Man Out Among the Cardinal Virtues

It is always prudent to be prudent, temperate, and just, but often imprudent to be courageous.

Thomas Klingenstein on Trump's Virtues

Outstanding! Memorize it and propagate it.

I am very happy to have discovered Klingenstein. He is right on target. Here is a short (4:28) explanation of the war we are in. This is the truth. Face it!

Courage

Mut verloren — alles verloren!

Da wär es besser, nicht geboren!

To lose courage is to lose everything, in which case it would have been better never to have been born.

 

A few stabs at rhyme-preserving translation:

Of courage shorn, of everything shorn!

In that case better, never to have been born!

Courage lost — everything lost!

Then having been born's too high a cost!

Loss of courage, something fatal!

Better then, never natal!

Loss of heart — loss of all!

'Twould then have been better, not to be at all!

Callicles and the Marquis de Sade

Substack latest.

Virtue, Vice, and Mastery

I lately quoted St. Augustine  to the effect that a bad man has as many masters as he has vices. But to be mastered by one's virtues, though better than to be mastered by one's vices, is arguably shy of the ne plus ultra of mastery.

The ultimate in mastery is mastery of both one's vices and one's virtues.

My pithy formulation wants explanation. It may have been from Donald Davidson that I picked up the notion of akrasia in reverse. Akrasia is weakness of the will.  Imagine a runner who runs every day without exception. He is proud of himself, his 'streak' going on two years now, and his self-mastery. And then a day comes when conditions are bad; there are patches of ice on the roads and a freezing rain is falling. Our man is tired from a hard day at work, and a cold is taking hold. He suits up anyway. The upshot? He slips on the ice, smashes a knee and is out of the running for a good long spell.   Our runner has demonstrated akrasia  in reverse. 

In this instance he has failed to master his virtue: it has mastered him to his own detriment.

The virtues exists for us and our flourishing; we do not exist for them.

The ultimate in mastery is mastery of both one's vices and one's virtues. 

Another Advantage of Old Age

The abandoning of your vices becomes easier as they abandon you.

The mechanism of flight of the vices of the flesh is powered by the mortal coil's decline, which is why the old man out for spiritual gain should rejoice, not rue, his libido on the wane. 

The old man, unlike the young, has a good shot at freedom from lust's subornation even in the decadent West if freedom he wants, the wanting standing in inverse relation to the subornation.

Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.  (St. Augustine, City of God)

Civility

Civility is no virtue if a cover for cowardice.

The Noble and the Base

If a noble man becomes aware of my moral defects, he is saddened, disappointed, disillusioned perhaps.  But the base man reacts differently: he is gleeful, pleased, reassured. "So he isn't better than me after all! Good!"

The noble seek those who are above them so that they can become like them.  The base deny that anyone could be above them.

The Near Occasion of Doubt

Acutely aware of our moral weakness, the wise among us do not continually test our virtue: we  avoid the near occasion of vice. Tests will come without our seeking them. But the wise among us  are also keenly aware of our intellectual weakness.  Reason in us we know to be infirm, prone to error, and easily swayed by our passions and especially the suggestions of others. It does not follow what we should refrain from testing our beliefs or entertaining doubts about them.   Doubt is the engine of inquiry. What follows is only that the testing and the entertainment should be kept within limits.

So while we ought to avoid the near occasion of vice, we ought merely to beware of the near occasion of doubt.

Courage

Courage is the hardest and hence the rarest of the four cardinal virtues. A Substack 'sermon.' Leftists hate sermons, which is good reason to give them.

The best sermon, however, is one's own existence. (Kierkegaard)

Attributed to Robert Frost

Here:

"A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel” is usually credited to American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963). Frost used the quote in January 1961 (discussing John F. Kennedy, who Frost thought was not this type of liberal) and Frost used it again in January 1962. A popular form of the quotation is: “A liberal is someone who won’t take his own side in a fight.”

William Ernest Hocking (1873-1966) wrote this in his book What Man Can Make of Man (1942): “He lends himself to the gibe that he is ‘so very liberal, that he cannot bring himself to take his own side in a quarrel.’” It is not known where Hocking got the phrase, or if Frost (who was an avid reader) was borrowing from another source.

One can be hobbled by one's virtues. There is something noble about being fair-minded, objective, and considerative of all points of view. It is the way of the philosopher, the lover of objective truth, "the spectator of all time and existence" in a stirring line from Plato's Republic. But before a man is a philosopher, he is a man of flesh and blood, brutally embedded in a brutal world in which he must stand his ground and battle his enemies. He must not allow his noble viewership of life's parade to make impossible  his marching in it.  

Moral Progress Report

Between my abandonment of my vices and their abandonment of me, progress has been made. The weaker the flesh, the stronger the spirit.

The End of Moderation

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (Pantheon, 1950, tr. Dru), p. 29:

Many a man thinks to satisfy the great virtue of moderation by using all his shrewdness and bringing all his experience to bear upon limiting his pleasure to his capacity for pleasure. But simply by the fact of setting enjoyment as the end, he has radically violated the virtue.

A penetrating observation.  What is the end or goal of moderation? Haecker is rejecting the notion that the purpose of moderation, conceived as a virtue, is to maximize the intensity and duration of pleasure. Of course, moderation can be used for that end -- but then it ceases to be a virtue. For example, if I am immoderate in my use of alcohol and drugs, I will destroy my body, and with it my capacity for pleasure. So I must limit my pleasure to my capacity for pleasure. And the same holds for immoderation in eating and sexual indulgence. The sex monkey can kill you if you let him run loose. And even if one's immoderation does not lead to an early death, it can eventuate in a jadedness at odds with enjoyment. So moderation can be recommended merely on hedonistic grounds. The true hedonist must of necessity be a man of moderation. If so, then the ill-starred John Belushi, who took the 'speedball' (heroin + cocaine) express to Kingdom Come, did not even succeed at being a very good hedonist.

But if enjoyment is the end of moderation, then moderation as a virtue is at an end. Haecker, however, does not tell us what the end of moderation as a virtue is. He would presumably not disagree with the claim that the goal of moderation as a virtue is a freedom from pleasure and pain that allows one to pursue higher goods. He who is enslaved to his lusts is simply not free to pursue a truer and higher life.

The Intellectual Chutzpah of David Bentley Hart

Here (HT: Karl White):

Let me, however, add one more observa­tion that will seem insufferably pompous or a little insane: to wit, that the argument I make in my book—that Chris­tianity can be a coherent system of belief if and only if it is understood as involving universal salvation—is irrefutable. Any Christian whom it fails to persuade is one who has failed to understand its argument fully. In order to reject it, one must also reject one or another crucial tenet of the faith. The exits have all been sealed. I suppose I could be wrong about that, but I do not believe it likely.

Hart seems not to have noticed that he embraces a logical contradiction when he says that the argument he has given is irrefutable AND that he could be wrong about that.  For if an argument is irrefutable, then it cannot be refuted; if, on the other hand, the producer of an argument can be wrong about whether it is irrefutable, then the argument can be refuted. Hence the contradiction: the argument cannot be refuted AND the argument can be refuted.

But a man can be a pompous ass and a blowhard and still have interesting things to say. If you are interested in the question of universal salvation, see Douglas Farrow, Harrowing Hart on Hell in First Things. (HT: Dave Lull)

Superiority and Superbia

The truly superior do not succumb to superbia.

Is Greed the Engine of Capitalism?

I must have written this in 2004. It makes good on yesterday's promise to say more about why greed is not the origin of capitalism.

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

The C-Span Washington Journal of 31 May 2004 with Steve Scully at the helm was particularly excellent.  One of the guests was a sweet old lady by the name of Mary Alice Herbert, the vice-presidential candidate of the Socialist Party USA in 2004.

She spouted a lot of nonsense, but the assertion that really got my blood up was the claim that, and I quote from my notes, "The engine of capitalism is greed." This is no better than saying that the engine of socialism is envy.

Greed (avarice) and envy are vices. A vice is a habit. Habits don't float in the air; they are dispositions of agents. A greedy person is one who is disposed toward inordinate acquisition, while an envious person is one who is disposed to feel diminished by the success or well-being of others to the extent of hating them for their success or well-being. Clearly, one can support, and participate in, a free market economy without being greedy. Anyone who is reading this post is most likely an example. Equally, one can support, and participate in, a socialist economy without being envious. Think of all the good Russians who really believed the Commie nonsense, made their selfless contributions, but ended up in the Gulag anyway, not to mention non-Russians who succumbed as well, Freda Utley being one example among many.

Winifred Utley (January 23, 1898 – January 21, 1978), commonly known as Freda Utley, was an English scholar, political activist and best-selling author. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1927 as a trade union activist, she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1928. Later, married and living in Moscow, she quickly became disillusioned with communism. When her Russian husband, Arcadi Berdichevsky, was arrested in 1936, she escaped to England with her young son. (Her husband would die in 1938.)

In 1939, the rest of her family moved to the United States, where she became a leading anticommunist author and activist.^[1] She became an American citizen in 1950. ^[2]

Greed is not what drives a free market economy; indeed, greed is positively harmful to such an economy. Take Enron. The greed of Jeffrey Skilling, Kenneth Lay, et al. led to the collapse of the company and to massive losses for the shareholders. Please don't confuse greed with acquisitiveness. A certain amount of acquisitiveness is reasonable and morally acceptable. Greed is inordinate acquisitiveness, where 'inordinate' carries not only a quantitative, but also a normative, connotation: the greedy person's acquisitiveness harms himself and others. Think of the miser, and the hoarder. What's more, greed cannot be measured by one's net worth. Bill Gate's net worth is in the billions. But he is not greedy as far as I can tell: he benefits millions and millions of people with his software, the employment and investment opportunities he provides, and the vast sums he donates to charities. 

C-Span viewers who called in to object to Herbert that socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried were met with the standard Marxist response, namely, that capitalist encirclement, capitalist opposition, is responsible for socialism's failure. This is an example of the classic double standard leftists employ. The problems of capitalism are blamed on capitalism, but the problems of socialism are ALSO blamed on capitalism. Another form of the double standard involves the comparison of capitalist reality, not with socialist reality, but with socialist ideality, socialist fiction, socialist utopia. A reality-to-reality comparison issues in an unfavorable judgment on socialism.

Finally, there is a problem with the sort of 'bottom up' or democratic socialism that people like Herbert espouse. This is supposed to avoid the problems attendant upon the sort of 'top down' socialism attempted in the Soviet Union. The latter required a revolutionary vanguard unequal in power to those on whom it sought to impose socialism — in obvious contradiction to the ultimate socialist desideratum of equality. Simply put, if equality is the end, the means cannot be dictatorship by the Party or by one man of steel. No entity, once it gains power, is likely to give it up. This is why Castro still rules his island paradise, forty six years after his 1959 ousting of Battista. [Remember, this was written in aught-four.] The will to power is the will to the preservation and expansion of power. 

Therefore, many socialists nowadays call themselves democratic socialists. But this smacks of a contradiction in terms. If socialism is to replace capitalism — as opposed to being confined to isolated pockets of society such as communes — then it must be imposed by force by a central authority. For there are just too many of us who cannot see why material (as opposed to formal) equality is even a value. 

Addendum 29 March 2019:

I've modified my view a bit. Then as now I hold that  there is nothing wrong with material inequality as such, assuming that it has arisen by just means and thus not by force and fraud, and that the worthy worst-off have the minimal needed.   But that strikes me now as logically consistent with saying that a reduction in material inequality would be a good thing.  X can be axiologically preferable to Y even if no one is under any moral obligation to bring about X over Y.

Inequality is a breeding ground for envy, an ugly thing indeed, and one of the Seven Deadly Sins to boot. But you would be morally obtuse if you thought that clamping down on the liberty that naturally issues in material inequality is a moral requisite.  Envy is a free choice of the morally benighted who practice the vice. Inequality may be conducive to the exercise of the vice, but nothing and no one forces anyone to be envious.

The Self-Reliant Don't Snivel

Louis L’Amour, Education of a Wandering Man, Bantam, 1989, p. 180:

Times were often very rough for me but I can honestly say that I never felt abused or put-upon. I never felt, as some have, that I deserved special treatment from life, and I do not recall ever complaining that things were not better. Often I wished they were, and often found myself wishing for some sudden windfall that would enable me to stop wandering and working and settle down to simply writing. Yet it was necessary to be realistic. Nothing of the kind was likely to happen, and of course, nothing did.

I never found any money; I never won any prizes; I was never helped by anyone, aside from an occasional encouraging word – and those I valued. No fellowships or grants came my way, because I was not eligible for any and in no position to get anything of the sort. I never expected it to be easy.

It is very difficult these days to explain the classic American value of self-reliance to 'liberals,' especially that species thereof known as the 'snowflake.'   Not understanding it, they mock it, as if one were exhorting people to pull themselves up by their own boot straps. 

Why Are People So Easy to Swindle?

People are so easy to swindle because the swindler has as accomplices the victim's own moral defects.  When good judgment and moral sense are suborned by lust or greed or sloth or vanity or anger, the one swindled participates willingly in his own undoing.  In the end he swindles himself.

How is it, for example, that Bernie Madoff 'made off' with so much loot?  You have  otherwise intelligent people who are lazy, greedy and vain: too lazy to do their own research and exercise due diligence, too greedy to be satisfied with the going rate of return, and too vain to think that anything bad can happen to such high-placed and sophisticated investors as themselves.

Or take the Enron employees.  They invested their 401 K money in the very firm that that paid their salaries!  Now how stupid is that?  But they weren't stupid; they enstupidated themselves by allowing the subornation of their good sense by their vices.

The older I get the more I appreciate that our problems, most of them and at bottom, are moral in nature.  Why, for example, are we and our government in dangerous debt?  A lack of money?  No, a lack of virtue.  People cannot curtail desire, defer gratification, be satisfied with what they have, control their lower natures, and pursue truly choice-worthy ends.

To Exemplify Virtues . . .

. . . more than suffices unto the signalling thereof.

The Afterlife of Habit Upon the Death of Desire

Desire leads to the gratification of desire, which in turn leads to the repetition of the gratification.  Repeated gratification in turn leads to the formation of an intensely pleasurable habit, one that persists even after the desire wanes and  disappears, the very desire without whose gratification the  habit wouldn't exist in the first place.  Memories of pleasure conspire in the maintenance of habit. 

The ancient rake, exhausted and infirm, is not up for another round of debauchery, but the memories haunt him, of pleasures past.  The memories keep alive the habit after the desire has fled the decrepit body that refuses to serve any longer as an engine of pleasure.

And that puts me in mind of Schopenhauer's advice.  "Abandon your vices before they abandon you."

Virtue and Opportunity

A man ought not plume himself on his virtues if his opportunities to go astray have been few or nonexistent. Virtue untested is virtue in doubt.

Courage Under Fire

Putting Epictetus to the Test by James Bond Stockdale

Courage: The Hardest of the Virtues

The cardinal virtues are four: temperance, prudence, justice, and courage. Of the four, courage is the most difficult to exercise. Why is that?

Temperance and prudence are virtues of rational self-regard. Anyone who cares about himself and his long-term well-being will be temperate and prudent, whether or not he is just or courageous.  This is not to say that the temperate and prudent don't benefit others; they do: The temperate who refrain from drunkenness and drunk driving benefit others by not causing trouble and by setting a good example. The prudent who save and invest do not become a burden on others and are in a position to contribute to charities and make loans to the worthy.  This is why it is foolish to glorify the poor and demonize the rich. When was the last time a poor person helped fund a worthy enterprise or gave someone a job?

Temperance and prudence, then, are easy virtues despite the world's being full of the intemperate and imprudent. They are easy in that anyone who values his own life and future will be temperate and prudent.  Such a one will not select as his hero the foolish John Belushi (remember him?) who took the Speedball Express to Kingdom Come.

It is harder to be just: to habitually render unto others that which is due them. For the just man must not only be other-regarding and other-respecting; he must be willing and able to discipline his lust, greed, and anger.

But courage is hardest of all. That man is courageous who, mastering his fear, exposes himself to danger for his cause. One thinks of the firefighters who entered the Trade Towers on 9/11, some of whom made the ultimate sacrifice. But Muhammad Atta and his gang were also profiles in courage. Their ends were evil, but that does not detract from the courageousness of their actions. To think otherwise, as so many do, is to fail to grasp the nature of courage.  

Courage, then, is the most difficult and the noblest of the cardinal virtues.  It is an heroic virtue, a virtue of self-transcendence.  By contrast there is nothing heroic about the bourgeois virtues of temperance and prudence. 

But now a question is lit in the mind of this aporetic philosopher: Is it prudent to be courageous? Is there an antinomy buried within the bosom of cardinal virtues? Can there be such a thing as a virtuous man if such a man must have all four of the cardinal virtues?

At most, there is a tension between prudence and courage.  But this tension does not spill over into an antinomy. In the virtuous, prudence is subordinated to courage in the sense that, in a situation in which acting courageously is imprudent, one must act courageously.  

Concupiscence

If we were just animals, no problem. If we were pure spirits, no problem. Concupiscence is a problem because we are spiritual animals. Neither angels nor beasts, we 'enjoy' dual residency in opposing spheres. The problem is not that the flesh is weak while the spirit is willing. The problem is that the spirit is fallen and wills the wrong thing: inordinate sensuous pleasure for its own sake.

The animal in us plays along supplying the playground for the spirit's perversity. The sins of the flesh do not originate there, but in the spirit. The flesh is merely the matter in which they are realized.

Or perhaps what I've just written, which is pretty standard MavPhil 'boilerplate,'  is nonsense. 

Maybe it is like this. Whatever 'spirituality' there is in us is merely a sickness that impedes our vitality and conjures up the ghosts of sin and guilt and free will and moral scrupulosity and talk of concupiscence.  I never did get around to reading Ludwig Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, though I can guess at his dark vision. 

The powerful take what they want. The weak, who want what the powerful want but are too impotent to acquire it, invent morality. 

As I said, a dark vision. And one to be found in the identity-political of the present day, both on the Right and on the Left.

You understand that I am not endorsing the dark vision.

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Bourgeois Norms and Race

This from an alt-right correspondent. My responses in blue. For the record, I am not alt-right, neo-reactionary, or dissident right (except for my contempt for the yap-and-scribble, do-nothing, anti-Trump, elitist, bow-tie brigade).

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

As part of my ongoing attempt to nudge you further to the right . . . consider these "life-enhancing bourgeois values preached by Amy Wax".  In your earlier entry on this topic you say:

Now let me see if I understand this. The bourgeois values and norms are 'racist' because blacks are incapable of studying, working hard, deferring gratification, controlling their exuberance, respecting legitimate authority and the like?  But surely blacks are capable of these things. So who are the 'racists' here? The conservatives who want to help blacks by teaching them values that are not specifically white, but universal in their usefulness, or the leftists who think blacks incapable of assimilating such values?

I'm sure that almost all blacks are capable of deferred gratification and hard work (etc.) to some degree.  And I'm sure that many are capable of being 'bourgeois' to pretty much the same degree as typical white people.  But is it sure that blacks as a group, on the whole, are capable of exhibiting these virtues and being inspired by these bourgeois values to the same degree as whites, on the whole? 

BV: But I didn't say that blacks as a group are equally as capable as whites as a group at deferring gratification, saving and investing, avoiding drugs and crime, etc.  I don't believe that this is the case as a matter of empirical fact at the present time.  I merely said that they are capable of these things, and in fairly large numbers. So I'd say you are attacking a straw man here. My present view is that blacks as a group are capable of deferring gratification, etc. but not to the same degree as whites, and that for this very reason it is important to preach the values that Amy Wax and her colleague preach.  

I assume that people of good will want every group to do as well as it can.  

My question is why leftists object so ferociously to Wax and Co.  What explains this?  My reader has an explanation. He begins with the fact that blacks are not as good as whites at implementing the bourgeois values that make for success.  Given this fact,

 

. . . it might also be 'racist' in a sense to demand that all groups embrace these bourgeois values.  Maybe it just doesn't come naturally, or as naturally, to all of these groups.  It's not 'racist' in the idiotic SJW sense, of course.  But maybe a proper respect for distinct varieties of human nature does require us to let different groups live in the ways that they find natural and comfortable and reasonable.  An analogy with sex differences might help.  It's not 'sexist' to have different expectations for men and women in many areas of life.  Just because we expect men to support themselves and protect their families, and we tend to look down on men who won't or can't do these things, it doesn't follow that we should have the same expectations of women--or that we should never tell men to 'be a man about it' or 'man up' (or whatever) just because we don't talk that way to women.  Just because we expect women to be nurturing and empathetic, and we frown on women who don't want to spend lots of time with their young children, it doesn't follow that we should have exactly the same expectations of men.  Since they tend to have different abilities and interests, a reasonable society allows for some differences in expectations and norms appropriate to their different strengths and weaknesses.

BV: The idea that my correspondent is floating seems to be that it is 'racist' to demand or even suggest to a racial group that it behave in ways that don't come all that naturally to it even if those ways of behaving would benefit them enormously. My suggestion, above, was the opposite, namely, that it is 'racist' not to suggest that they behave in these 'bourgeois' ways.  For then you are falsely denying, on racial grounds, that they can improve their lot by implementing life-enhancing values.

This brings me back to one of my standard complaints: people sling the world 'racism' around with no preliminary clarification as to what it is supposed to mean.

Still it's true that if people are going to live in a bourgeois society where these particular virtues and values are pretty important, and often necessary for having a decent life, then everyone will have to act like a typical bourgeois white European.  And yet, if my hypothesis about group differences is true, this would be especially hard for some groups--a problem or obstacle that only some groups have to deal with.  Maybe a more humane and sustainable policy would be to let these groups live differently, let them have their own societies, where different norms are accepted.  These societies wouldn't have to be purely race- or ethnic-based.  You could have an explicitly bourgeois society, where it's understood that people who just won't or can't live by these particular values are not wanted; you could have some other, non-bourgeois society with a different understanding.  But inevitably the first one would be predominantly white (with some north Asians).  Is this a rejection of 'universal values' in your view?  I'm not sure.  In a sense, yes it is--but then rejection of 'universal values' in that sense seems reasonable, or just as reasonable as rejection of 'universal values' with respect to the sexes.  What do you think?

BV: I stick to my assertion that bourgeois virtues and values are universal in the sense that all people of whatever race can profit by their acquisition and implementation. But it doesn't follow that all groups are equally good at their acquisition and implementation. What I oppose is  the notion that these virtues and values are inherently white, whatever that might mean. Do whites own them?  Does 'whitey' own them such that if a black studies, improves himself, works hard, saves, invests, buys a house, etc. then he is guilty of 'cultural appropriation' in some pejorative sense?

I say the virtues and values in question are no more white than the theorem of Pythagoras of Samos is 'Samosian.' 

The True and the Good are universal.   

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How Did We Get to be So Proud?

Recalling our miserably indigent origin in the wombs of our mothers and the subsequent helplessness of infancy, how did we get to be so arrogant and self-important?

In a line often (mis)attributed to St. Augustine, but apparently from Bernard of Clairvaux, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: "We are born between feces and urine." 

So inauspicious a beginning for so proud a strut upon life's stage.

Pride, result of the Fall, comes before a fall -- into the grave.

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The Marvellous Powers We Misuse

Thought, speech, free action, sexual generation.

Continence

The Catholic Church is in sad shape. Have you heard a good sermon lately? I could do better off the top of my head, and I am a very poor public speaker.

Here are some notes for a sermon I will never give, unless this weblog is my pulpit.

Remind people of the importance of continence both for their happiness here below, and for the good of their souls. Distinguish the following sorts of continence: mental (control of thoughts), emotional (control and custody of the heart), sensory-appetitive (custody of the eyes together with sexual restraint). Explain the importance of containing the outgoing flow, whether mental, emotional, or sensory-appetitive, and the misery consequent upon incontinence.

Illustrate by adducing the sad case of Bill Cosby.

Explain the key words and phrases. Don't use words like 'adduce.'  Attention spans in these hyperkinetic times are short, so keep it short.

The abdication of authorities has lead to the dumbing-down of the masses. Don't expect much.

On Demonizing Opponents

Here is an entry from my first weblog. It first saw the light on 23 June 2004. Don't say it is dated. The distinctions and truths it contains are timeless. The bit about courage is important and not widely understood.

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

One night on Hannity and Colmes, Sean Hannity interviewed Al Sharpton. Sharpton had recently visited Fidel Castro in his island paradise. Hannity was quite shocked to hear all the fine things Sharpton had to say about the Cuban dictator. I had the impression that Hannity would not allow even one good thing to be said about Fidel. Fidel is an evil dictator, so there cannot be anything good about him!

That seemed to be Hannity’s (specious) reasoning. Here we encounter the phenomenon of demonizing one’s opponents, a phenomenon found on both the Right and the Left. Although Fidel is an evil dictator, it does not follow that he has no good attributes. The same goes for Adolf Hitler, who practically everyone cites as the personification of evil. But it is obvious to any clear-thinking person free of political correctness that Hitler had many excellent attributes. He was disciplined, idealistic, courageous, resolute, a great orator, etc. No doubt Hitler had the wrong ideals, but having the wrong ideals is not the same as lacking ideals. No doubt Lenin used his courage for the wrong ends, but using one’s courage for the wrong ends is not the same as lacking courage. It took courage to break all those eggs especially when there was no guarantee of an omelet. A bad man can have (some) good attributes, just as a good man can have (some) bad attributes.

Democrat party operatives thought they could smear Arnold Schwarzenegger by claiming that he had once praised Hitler. Suppose he had. That by itself does nothing to cast aspersions on Schwarzenegger. Qua instance of courage, discipline, etc., Hitler is surely praiseworthy. That is not to say that Hitler was a good man. To repeat, a bad man can instantiate (some) good attributes.

But people are so blinded by political correctness, so befuddled by uncritically imbibed speech codes, that they cannot wrap their minds around such simple points as I am making. People say that liberals don’t think, they emote. I would add that when liberals do try to think, they rarely do more than associate. “Hitler bad man! Schwarzenegger mention Hitler! Schwarzenegger bad man!” Another tactic used against Schwarzenegger was to claim that his father had been a Nazi. Suppose he had been. What does that have to do with our man? Do these lefties in their imbecilic group-think mean to suggest that the guilt of the father is inherited by the son?

Bill O’Reilly of The O’Reilly Factor once got into a silly argument with Bill Maher. Maher had praised the 9/11/01 hijackers for their courage, which elicited howls of protest from O’Reilly, who called them cowards. Now surely my man O’Reilly, right as he is about so much, is in the wrong here. Muhammad Atta and the boys displayed great courage in the successful execution of their nihilistic acts. No doubt the acts in question were unspeakably evil; but courage and cowardice are (dispositional) properties of agents, not of their acts.

A courageous person is one who is typically able to master his fear and perform the difficult act that he envisages. It doesn’t matter whether the act is morally good or evil. So although courage is a virtue, hence something good, it does not follow that every act of a courageous person will be morally good. Equivalently, the performance of an evil act does not show that its agent is a coward. A cowardly person is one who is typically unable to master his fear, and is instead mastered by it, with the result that he cannot perform the act he envisages. It is clear that Atta and his crew were the exact opposite of cowards.

At the root of O’Reilly’s confusion was his demonization of the opponent. He could not allow that Atta and his gang had any virtues, so he could not allow that they were courageous, courage being a good thing.

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Why Do We Remember the Dead?

One reason, the best reason, is to keep ourselves face-to-face with the reality of death.  To live well is to live in the truth, without evasion. Trans-humanist and cryonic fantasies aside,  death cannot be evaded.  We remember the dead, then, for our own spiritual benefit. 

Where they are, we will be.  And soon enough.  But people think they have plenty of time.  They fool themselves. Don't put off until the eleventh hour your preparation for death.  You may die at 10:30.

Another reason is because we owe the dead something: honor, remembrance, gratitude, care of their monuments, legacies and intentions. On Memorial Day and every day.

Virtue and its Exhortation

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 72:

Virtue is not hateful. But speeches on virtue are. Without a doubt, no mouth in the world, much less mine, can utter them. Likewise, every time somebody interjects to speak of my honesty . . . there is someone who quivers inside me.

This entry betrays something of the mind of the leftist. Leftists are deeply suspicious of anything that smacks of 'preaching.'  Theirs is the hermeneutics of suspicion. Nothing is what it manifestly is; there is always something nefarious at work below the surface. Too much enamored of the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, leftists failed to achieve a critical stance toward them where a critical stance allows for a separation (krinein) of the true from the false, the coherent from the incoherent.

Surely Camus goes entirely too far in the above entry. If speeches are hateful, then so are sermons and exhortations. Civilization and its transmission are impossible, however, without appeals to our higher natures.

To a leftist, preaching can only be 'moralizing' and 'being judgmental.'  It can only be the phony posturing of someone who judges others only to elevate himself.   The very fact of preaching  shows one to be a hypocrite.  Of course, leftists have no problem with being judgmental and moralizing about the evil of hypocrisy.  When they make moral judgments, however, it is, magically, not hypocritical.  

And therein lies the contradiction.  They would morally condemn all moral condemnation as hypocritical.  But in so doing they condemn themselves as hypocrites.

We cannot jettison the moral point of view. Marx tried, putting forth his theories as 'science.'  But if you have  read him you know that he moralized like an Old Testament prophet.

A Note on Civil Courage

This needs saying again. Originally posted 17 November 2015.

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

Responding to a commenter who states that one exposes oneself to tremendous risk by speaking out against leftist insanity, Malcolm Pollack writes:

Most bloggers who write from a contrarian position about these things seem to use noms de plume. In fact, I do have another blog I’ve set up for this purpose, but I almost never post anything to it. I prefer to speak under my own name — not because I’m trying to be “brave”, which this really isn’t at all, but just because it feels more honest, and because I have a right to, and because I’m ornery. (Running into that theater in Paris to try to save the people inside, knowing you are overwhelmingly likely to be killed: that’s brave. Writing grumpy blog-posts from the comfort and safety of my home is not.)

I would underscore the First Amendment right to free speech under one's own name without fear of government reprisal.   Use it or lose it.  (Unfortunately, the disjunction is inclusive: you may use it and still lose it.)  But use it responsibly, as Pollack does. The right to express an opinion does not absolve one of the obligation to do one's level best to form correct opinions.  Note however that your legal (and moral) right to free speech remains even if you shirk your moral (but not legal) obligation to do your best to form correct opinions.  

I would add to Pollack's reasons  for writing under his own name  the credibility it gives him.  You lose credibility when you hide behind a pseudonym.  And when you take cover behind 'anonymous,' your credibility takes a further southward plunge, and shows a lack of imagination to boot.  

Pollack is right: it doesn't take much civil courage to do what he and I do.  I've made mine, and he is on the cusp of making his, if he hasn't already.  (You could say we are 'made men.') We don't need jobs and we have no need to curry favor.  And our obscurity provides some cover.  Obscurity has its advantages, and fame is surely overrated. (Ask John Lennon.)

This is why I do not criticize the young and not-yet-established conservatives who employ pseudonyms. Given the ugly climate wrought by the fascists of the Left it would be highly imprudent to come forth as a conservative if you are seeking employment in academe, but not just there.  

What is civil courage?  The phrase translates  the German Zivilcourage, a word first used by Otto von Bismarck in 1864 to refer to the courage displayed in civilian life as opposed to the military valor displayed on the battlefield.  According to Bismarck, there is more of the latter than of the former, an observation that holds true today.  (One example: there is no coward like a university administrator, as recent events at the university of Missouri and at Yale once again bear out.) Civil courage itself no doubt antedates by centuries the phrase. 

Addendum

Claude Boisson writes to inform me that the first attestation is in French, see pp. 2-3, and only later by the young Bismarck. But we need to make a three-way distinction among civil courage the virtue, Zivilcourage the German word, and civil courage the concept which, I agree from the source cited, does come into play before Bismarck introduced the German word.

So while the expression of the concept in the French language by the use of Courage civil and Courage civique occurs before Bismarck's use of Zivilcourage, the German word was first used by Bismarck.  'Civil courage itself' as it occurs in my final sentence refers to the virtue, one exercised by the ancients. One of course thinks of Socrates. 

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Plagiarism

How could you, Monica Crowley?  Well, at least you are in good company. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. plagiarized portions of his Boston University dissertation:

A committee of scholars appointed by Boston University concluded today [10 October 1991] that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. plagiarized passages in his dissertation for a doctoral degree at the university 36 years ago.

[. . .]

"There is no question," the committee said in a report to the university's provost, "but that Dr. King plagiarized in the dissertation by appropriating material from sources not explicitly credited in notes, or mistakenly credited, or credited generally and at some distance in the text from a close paraphrase or verbatim quotation."

[. . .]

The dissertation at issue is "A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman." Dr. King wrote it in 1955 as part of his requirements for a doctor of philosophy degree, which he subsequently received from the university's Division of Religious and Theological Studies.

Does King's plagiarism disqualify him from being honored?  No. He was a great civil rights leader and he died in the service of his cause.  

Crowley's plagiarism appears to have been much worse than King's.

Every man has his 'wobble' as I like to say, and every woman too. If we honored only those who are in all respects honorable we would honor no mortal. 

If truth be told, no one of us is all that admirable, although some of us are more admirable than others.

A Righteous Form of Schadenfreude?

I posed the question in the aftermath of the election and because of the pleasure many of us are feeling at the Left's comeuppance:

Is there a righteous form of Schadenfreude or is it in every one of its forms as morally objectionable as I make it out to be here?

Edward Feser supplies an affirmative Thomistic answer.  Ed concludes:

Putting the question of hell to one side, though, we can note that if schadenfreude can be legitimate even in that case, then a fortiori it can be legitimate in the case of lesser instances of someone getting his just deserts, in this life rather than the afterlife.  For example – and to take the case Bill has in mind -- suppose someone’s suffering is a consequence of anti-Catholic bigotry, brazen corruption, unbearable smugness, a sense of entitlement, groupthink, and in general from hubris virtually begging nemesis to pay a visit.  When you’re really asking for it, you can’t blame others for enjoying seeing you get it.

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The Clintons as Grifters

Victor Davis Hanson:

The Hillary/Bill fortune — generated by pay-for-play influence peddling on the proposition that Bill would return to the White House under Hillary’s aegis and reward friends while punishing enemies — hit a reported $150 million some time ago, a fortune built not on farming, mining, insurance, finance, high-tech, or manufacturing, but on skimming off money. The Clintons are simply grifters whose insider access to government gave them the power to make rich people richer.

[. . .]

The Clintons suffer from greed, as defined by Aristotle: endless acquisition solely for the benefit of self. With their insatiable appetites, they resented the limits that multimillionaire status put on them, boundaries they could bypass only by accumulating ever greater riches. The billion-dollar foundation squared the circle of progressive politicians profiting from the public purse by offering a veneer of “doing good” while offering free luxury travel commensurate with the style of the global rich, by offering sinecures for their loyal but otherwise unemployable cronies, and by spinning off lobbying and speaking fees (the original font of their $100-million-plus personal fortune and the likely reason for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s decision to put all her communications, mercantile included, on a private server safe from government scrutiny). Acquiring money to the extent that money would become superfluous was certainly a Clinton telos — and the subtext of the entire Podesta trove and the disclosures about the Clinton Foundation.

Power and pride were the other catalyst for Clinton criminality. I don’t think progressive politics mattered much to the Clintons, at least compared with what drives the more sincere Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Hillary, like Bill, has no real political beliefs — though she doesn’t hesitate to pursue a mostly opportunistic progressive political agenda. By temperament and background, the Clintons are leftists and will follow a leftist vision, sort of, but one predicated on doing so within the constraints of obtaining and keeping power.

That's right.  Hillary is Ambition in a pant-suit.  What drives her are lust for power and greed.  Her leftism is merely the means to her personal ends.  But the main reason she must be stopped is not because of her vices, but because of her destructive leftism which will "fundamentally transform," which is to say, destroy, America as she was founded to be.

Hanson ends with this curious sentence:

And one wonders whether, in fleeting seconds here at the end of things, they still believe that it was all worth what they have become. 

Is Hanson predicting Hillary's defeat in the election with the suggestion that they sense her defeat?  Or is Hanson alluding to the horror of those who, at the end of their lives, come to realize that they have sold their souls in pursuit of worthless things?  Or both?  Or neither?  Perhaps all he means by "the end of things" is the end of the presidential campaign, the last Hillary-Billary power-grab.

On occasion a good writer may indulge in a bit of obscurity to make the reader think -- or, less nobly, to make himself appear profound.

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Moral Phenomena in the Vicinity of Hypocrisy

When is one a hypocrite?  Let's consider some cases.

C1. A man sincerely advocates a high standard of moral behavior, and in the main he practices what he preaches.  But on occasion he succumbs to temptation, repents, and resolves to do better next time.  Is such a person a hypocrite?  Clearly not.  If he were, then we would all be hypocrites, and the term 'hypocrite,' failing of contrast, would become useless.  A hypocrite cannot be defined as one who fails to practice what he preaches since we all, at some time or other, fail to practice what we preach.  An adequate definition must allow for moral failure.

C2. A man sincerely advocates a high standard of behavior, but, for whatever reason, he makes no attempt to live in accordance with his advocacy.  Here we have a clear case of a hypocrite.

C3. Let the high standard be sexual purity in thought, word, and deed.  Consider now the case of a person, call him Lenny, who does not accept this standard.  He has no objection to impure thoughts or pornography or to the sort of locker-room braggadocio in which men like Donald Trump boast of their sexual escapades.  But Lenny  knows that his neighbor, a Trump supporter, does advocate the high standard that he, Lenny, does not acknowledge.  

In an attempt to persuade his neighbor to withdraw his support from Trump, Lenny says to the neighbor, "Look, man, you are appalled by Trump's sexual morality, or lack thereof; how then can you vote for him?"  This is an example of a non-fallacious ad hominem argument.  The argument is 'to the man,' in this case the neighbor.  It starts with a premise that the neighbor accepts but Lenny does not; the argumentative aim is to expose an inconsistency among the neighbor's beliefs.  

Is Lenny a hypocrite?  No.  He does not accept the neighbor's stringent sexual morality.  He thinks it is 'puritanical.'  He may even think that it sets the bar so high that no one can attain it, the end result being that people who try to live by the standard are driven to hypocrisy.  But Lenny himself is not a hypocrite.  For it is not the case that he makes no attempt to live by a moral standard that he sincerely advocates. He does not accept the standard. 

C4. Now we come to the most interesting case, that of 'Saul.'   Lenny made it clear that he does not accept as objectively morally binding the demand to be pure in thought, word, and deed.  Like Lenny, Saul does not accept the moral standard in question. Unlike Lenny, Saul feigns a commitment to it in his interactions with conservatives. Suppose Saul tries to convince Lenny's neighbor to withdraw his support from Trump. Saul uses the same argument that Lenny used.

Is Saul a hypocrite or not?  Not by one definition that suggests itself.  On this definition there are two conditions one must satisfy to be a hypocrite: (i) one sincerely advocates a moral standard he believes to be morally obligatory; (ii) one makes little or no attempt to live by the standard.  In other words, a hypocrite is a person who makes no attempt to practice what he sincerely preaches and believes to be morally obligatory.  Saul does not satisfy condition (i); so, on this definition, Saul is not a hypocrite.

Or is he?

It depends on whether (i) is a necessary condition of being a hypocrite.  Suppose we say that a hypocrite is one who makes little or no attempt at practicing what he preaches, whether what he preaches is sincerely or insincerely advocated as morally obligatory. Then Saul would count as a hypocrite along with all the other Alinskyite leftists who condemn Trump for his sexual excesses.

Whether or not we call these leftist scum hypocrites, they use our morality against us when they themselves have nothing but contempt for it.

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Schadenfreude

How much of your righteous satisfaction at another's comeuppance is really just Schadenfreude?

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The Absurdity of Envy

You envy me?  What a wretch you must be to feel diminished in your sense of self-worth by comparison with me!  I have something you lack?  Why isn't that compensated for by what you have that I lack?  You feel bad that I have achieved something by my hard work? Don't you realize that you waste time and energy that could be used to improve your own lot?

You ought to feel bad, not because I do well, but because you are so foolish as to indulge envy. Vices vitiate, they weaken.  You weaken yourself and make yourself even more of a wretch by succumbing to envy.

Companion post: Two Cures for Envy

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Self-Control and Self-Esteem

"Self-control is infinitely more important that self-esteem."  (Dennis Prager)

Delete 'infinitely' and you have an important truth pithily and accurately expressed.  With self-control one can develop attributes that justify one's self-esteem.  Without it one may come to an untimely end as did Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri, who brought about his own death through a lack of self-control.

Liberals, of course, preach an empty self-esteem. 

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Machiavelli, Arendt, and Virtues Public and Private

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

So my question to Catholic bishops and their fellow travellers is this: Do you have a death wish for you and your flocks and your doctrine?

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

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

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

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

Consider the Christian virtues preached by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.  They include humility, meekness, love of righteousness, mercy, purity of heart, love of peace and of reconciliation.  Everyone who must live uncloistered in the world understands that these pacific and essentially womanish virtues have but limited application there.  (I am not using 'womanish' as a derogatory qualifier.) You may love peace, but unless you are prepared to make war upon your enemies and show them no mercy, you may not be long for this world.  Turning the other cheek makes sense within a loving family, but no sense in the wider world.  (Would the Pope turn the other cheek if the Vatican came under attack by Muslim terrorists or would he call upon the armed might of the Italian state?)  This is perfectly obvious in the case of states: they are in the state (condition) of nature with respect to each other. Each state secures by blood and iron a civilized space within which art and music and science and scholarship can flourish and wherein, ideally, blood does not flow; but these states and their civilizations battle each other in the state (condition) of nature red in tooth and claw.

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

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

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

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

There is a tension  between man qua philosopher/Christian and man qua citizen.  As a philosopher raised in Christianity, I am concerned with my soul, with its integrity, purity, salvation. I take very seriously indeed the Socratic "Better to suffer wrong than to do it" and the Christian  "Resist not the evildoer." But as a citizen I must be concerned not only with my own well-being but also with the public welfare. This is true a fortiori of public officials and people in a position to  influence public opinion, people like Catholic bishops many of whom are woefully ignorant of the simple points Arendt makes in the passage quoted. So, as Arendt points out, the Socratic and Christian admonitions are not applicable in the public sphere.

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

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

NYT op-ed

Of Books and Gratitude

Occasionally, Robert Paul Wolff says something at his blog that I agree with completely, for instance:

To an extent I did not anticipate when I set out on life’s path, books have provided many of the joys and satisfactions I have encountered.  I am constantly grateful to the scholars and thinkers who have written, and continue to write, the books from which I derive such pleasure, both the great authors of the past . . . and those less exalted . . . .

Gratitude is a characteristically conservative virtue; hence its presence in Wolff softens my attitude toward him. 

As Wolff suggests, our gratitude should extend to the lesser lights, the humbler laborers in the vineyards of Wissenschaft, the commentators and translators, the editors and compilers and publishers.  Beyond that, to the librarians and the supporters of libraries, and all the preservers and transmitters of high culture, and those who, unlettered themselves in the main, defend with blood and iron the precincts of high culture from the barbarians who now once again are massing at the gates.

Nor should we forget the dedicated teachers, mostly women, who taught us to read and write and who opened up the world of learning to us and a lifetime of the sublime joys of study and reading and writing.