Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical

Conservatives, Liberals, and Happiness

It turns out that conservatives are happier than liberals.  But why?

Conservative explanation.  Marriage and religious faith are conducive to happiness.  More conservatives are married than liberals, and more practice a religion. Ergo, conservatives as a group are happier than liberals as a group.

Liberal explanation.  Conservatives are happier because they turn a blind eye to the injustices of the world.  They are oblivious to inequality.  And when they do see it,they rationalize it. Ignorance is bliss.  Conservatives naively believe that people can better themselves by the practice of the old virtues of frugality, perseverance, hard work, self-control, deferral of gratification, and the like, when the truth is that people are products of their environment and need government help to do well.

As a conservative, I of course consider the liberal explanation to be bogus.

Do we conservatives, ostrich-like, ignore injustice?  The answer depends on what one takes justice to be.  The liberal tendency is to see justice as fairness, and to understand fairness in terms of material equality, equality of wealth and equality of power.  A just society for a liberal, then, is one in which material inequality is either eliminated or severely mitigated.  Along these lines the prominent political philosopher John Rawls puts forth his famous Difference Principle the gist of which is that social and economic inequalities in a society are justified only if they benefit the worst off, i.e., only if the worst off are better of than they would have been without the inequality.

But why should my having more than you be considered unjust unless it benefits you?  Of course, my having more than you will typically benefit you. "A rising tide lifts all boats."  

My roof was leaking  in two places. Now I could have done an amateur patch job myself: roofing ain't rocket science.  But I decided to have the entire house professionally re-roofed with all that that entails in terms of new flashing, etc.  My ability to afford such an expensive job gave support to a local company and all its jobbers, not to mention the crew of workers who had employment for a week.  And having extra dough, I laid $60 in tips on the workers.  I could give a hundred examples of how my having more than certain others benefited those others. 

When's the last time a poor man made a loan to a friend, or a contribution to a charity?  How many poor people give people jobs?  And of course people like me who are modestly well-off due to hard work and the practice of the old virtues have been benefited in innumerable ways by people who are wealthy.  Think of those who have endowed art museums and university chairs. 

But suppose, contrary to fact, that my having more did not benefit others. Why should that affect the justice of my having more?  If I work harder, longer, and smarter than you, and practice the old-fashioned virtues that liberals mock even when they themselves owe their success to them, then it is a good bet that I will end up with more than you.  Unless I engage in force or fraud I am entitled to what I earn or what I inherit or what falls out of the sky into my lap.  Take my intelligence and my good genes.  Do I deserve them?  No, but I have a right to them. I have a right to them and right to what I acquire by their use. 

I grant that a certain amount of luck is ingredient in every success.  But I have a right to my good luck even though I don't deserve it.  Of course, liberals often 'see' luck where there is no luck at all but  hard work and the exercise of conservative virtues.  Hence the conservative saying, "The harder I work the luckier I become."   The point is that what the liberal misconstrues as luck is really not luck at all but effort.  Should we help life's unlucky?  I should think so.  But not if the helping is really a harming, a making of the recipients of charity weaker and more dependent.  

Liberals consider it legitimate for the state to use its coercive powers to promote material equality by taking from the highly productive and giving to the unproductive and less productive.  This cannot work in the long run.  The well-off will resist being ripped off by government functionaries who line their own pockets and feather their nests with perquisites purchased at taxpayer expense.  Many will expatriate.  Government, it is clear, is too often a hustle like any hustle rigged by those who benefit from it for their own benefit.  Government needn't be a hustle, but too often it is, which is why vigilance on the part of the citizenry is necessary to keep it in check.

The value of liberty trumps that of material equality.  This is a key difference between conservative and libertarian on the one side and leftist on the other.  Naturally I believe in formal equality, equality of treatment, treating like cases in a like manner, not discriminating on the basis of irrelevant criteria such as race, sex, or creed.

Of course, it depends on the creed. If you are a radical Muslim out to impose sharia and subvert our way of life, and act upon your beliefs, then you ought to be deported, or jailed, or executed, depending on the nature of your actions.  You should never have been let in in the first place.  After all, toleration, though a good thing, has limits, and if you do not see that it has limits then you are hopelessly foolish.  In a word, you are a liberal.

For more on toleration and its limits see my aptly titled Toleration category.

Trotsky's Misguided Faith

The last days of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, prime mover of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, are the subject of Bertrand M. Patenaude's Trotsky: The Downfall of a Revolutionary (HarperCollins, 2009).  It held my interest from the first page to the last, skillfully telling the story of Trotsky's Mexican exile, those who guarded him, and their failure ultimately to protect him from an agent of the GPU/NKVD sent by Stalin to murder him.  Contrary to some accounts, it was not an ice pick that Ramon Mercader drove into Trotsky's skull, but a climber's ice axe.  Here is how Trotsky ends his last testament, written in 1940, the year of his death:

For forty-three years of my conscious life I have been a revolutionary; and for forty-two I have fought under the banner of Marxism . . . I will die a proletarian revolutionary, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist.  My faith in the communist future of mankind is no less ardent, indeed it is even stronger now than it was in the days of my youth.

[. . .] Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air might enter more freely into my room.  I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight is everywhere.  Life is beautiful.  Let the future generations cleanse it of evil, oppression, and violence, and enjoy it to the full. (Patenaude, pp. 234-235)

No pie-in-the-sky for old Trotsky, but pie-in-the-future.  Those of us who take religion seriously needn't deny that it can serve as opium for some.  But if one can see that, then one should also be able to see that secular substitutes for religion can be just as narcotic.   Why is utopian opium less narcotic than the religious variety?  Why is a faith in Man and his future more worthy of credence than faith in God?

I should think that it is less credible.  Note first that there is no Man, only men.  And we human beings are a cussedly diverse and polyglot lot, a motley assortment of ornery sons-of-bitches riven by tribalisms and untold other factors of division.  The notion that we are all going to work together to create a workers' paradise or any sort of earthly paradise is a notion too absurd to swallow given what we know about human nature, and in particular, what we know of the crimes of communism.  In the 20th century, communists  murdered 100 million to achieve their utopia without achieving it.  That is a lot of eggs to waste for a nonexistent omelet.

We know Man does not exist, but we do not know that God does not exist. Religious faith, therefore, has a bit more to recommend it than secular faith.  You say God does not exist? That may be so. But the present question is not whether God exists or not, but whether belief in Man makes any sense and can substitute for belief in God. I say it doesn't and can’t, that it is a sorry substitute if not outright delusional. We need help that we cannot provide for ourselves, either individually or collectively. The failure to grasp this is of the essence of the delusional Left, which, refusing the tutelage of tradition and experience, and having thrown overboard every moral standard,  is ever ready to spill oceans of blood in pursuit of their utopian fantasies.

Why Women are 'Under-Represented' in Philosophy: A Politically Incorrect View

Prerequisites: What is Political Correctness? Generic Statements

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Differences in social role as between the sexes are grounded in hard biological facts.   The biological differences between men and women are not 'social constructs.'  The male sex hormone testosterone is not a 'social construct' although the words 'hormone' and 'testosterone' and the theory in which which they figure are.  That women are better at nurturing than men is grounded in their biological constitution, which lies deeper than the social.  This is not to say that all women are good at raising and nurturing children.  'Woman are nurturers' is a generic statement, not a universal statement.  It is like the statement, 'Men are taller than women.'  It does not mean that every man is taller than every woman.   

Does it follow from the obvious biologically-grounded difference between men and women  that women should be discouraged from pursuing careers outside the home and entering the professions?  Here I begin to diverge from my alt-right and neo-reactionary interlocutors. They don't like talk of equal rights though I cannot see why a woman should not have the same right to pursue a career in medicine or engineering or mathematics or philosophy as a man if she has the aptitude for it.   (But of course there must be no erosion of standards.)  How do our alt-rightist/NRs, who do not like talk of equality, protect women from men who would so dominate them as to prevent them from developing their talents? On the other hand,  men as a group are very different from women as a group.  So we should not expect equal outcomes.  It should come as no surprise that women are 'under-represented' in STEM fields, or in philosophy. 

Why are women 'under-represented' in philosophy?  Because women as a group are not as good at it as men as a group, because women as a group are not as interested in it as men as a group, and because the feminine nature is conciliatory and averse to what they perceive as the aggressive, combative, and hostile aspects of philosophical dialectic.  This is surely a large part, if not the whole, of the explanation, especially given the Affirmative Action advantage women have enjoyed over the past half a century.

The hostility often felt by women reflects something about the nature of philosophy, namely, that its very lifeblood is dialectic and argument. Argument can be conducted civilly, often is, and of course ought to be.  But it still looks to the female nature as a sort of 'fighting,' a sublimated form  of the physical combat that men are wont to engage in, even when dialectic at its best is no such thing.  So there is something in the nature of philosophy and something about females that explains their 'under-representation.' Those are sneer quotes, by the way.  Anyone with an ounce of philosophical intelligence can see that the word I am sneering at conflates the factual and the normative.  Therefore  it shouldn't be used without sneer quotes.

You cannot refute my point about women by citing women who like the blood-sport aspect of philosophy.  They are the exceptions that prove the rule. Harriet Baber, for example, who is Jewish and exemplifies the Jewish love of intellectual combat, writes:

I *LIKE* the blood-sport aspect of philosophy. To me, entering my first philosophy class, freshman year (1967) and discovering that you were not only allowed to fight but that the teacher actually encouraged it was liberating. As a girl, I was constantly squeezed and suppressed into being "nice" and non-confrontational. I was under chronic stress holding back, trying to fudge, not to be too clear or direct. But, mirabile dictu: I got into the Profession and through my undergrad, and, oh with a vengeance in grad school at Johns Hopkins, everything I had been pushed throughout my childhood to suppress, and which I failed to suppress adequately to be regarded as "normal," was positively encouraged.

Anecdote.  I once roomed with an  analytic philosopher at a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute.  I recall a remark he made about philosophical discussion: "If you are not willing to become a bit of an asshole about it, you are not taking it seriously." The guy was obnoxious, but he was right.  In a serious discussion, things can get a little tense.  The feminine nature shies away from contention and dispute.  

If you deny that, then you have no knowledge of human nature and no experience of life.  Ever wonder why women are 'over-represented' among realtors? It is because they excel men when it comes to conciliation and mediation.  I don't mean this as a snarky put-down of the distaff contingent.  I mean it as praise.  And if females do not take it as praise are they not assuming the superiority of male virtues?

It is a non sequitur to think that if the Xs are 'under-represented' among the Ys, then the Xs must have been the victims of some unjust discrimination.  Men are 'under-represented' among massage therapists, but the explanation is obvious and harmless: men like to have their naked bodies rubbed by women in dark rooms, but women feel uncomfortable having their naked bodies rubbed by men in dark rooms.   It is not as if there is some sort of sexism, 'institutional' or individual, that keeps men out of massage therapy.

Blacks are 'over-represented'  in the NFL and the NBA. Is that because of some racism 'institutional' or individual, that keeps whitey out?  Of course not. Blacks are better than whites at football and basketball.  Jews are just terrible.  Chess is their athletics.  Jews dominate in the chess world.  Is that because the goyim have been suppressed?  

Does my talk of blacks and Jews make me a racist and an anti-Semite ?  To a self-enstupidated liberal-leftist,  yes.  For they are incapable of distinguishing between a statement whose content is race and a racist statement.  If you accuse me of retailing stereotypes, I will point out that some stereotypes have a basis in reality.

As it seems to me, I am treading a via media between the excesses of the neo-reactionaries and the even worse excesses of the leftists. My challenge to the NRs:  How can you fail to see the importance of equal treatment of men and women?  One NR of my acquaintance claimed that the notion of equality of opportunity is vacuous. Why?  To require that applicants for a job not be discriminated against on the basis of race, sex, or creed, is not vacuous.  It has a definite content.  That it could use some spelling out is not to the point.  

What I mean is this. Some creeds are such that people who hold them must be discriminated against.  Suppose you are an orthodox Muslim: you subscribe to Sharia and hold that it takes precedence  over the U. S. Constitution. You ought to be discriminated against.  You ought not be allowed to immigrate.  The U. S. Constitution is not a suicide pact. This is a point that Dr. Ben Carson made a while back in connection with eligibility to become POTUS.  But vile leftists  willfully misrepresented him.  

What is Political Correctness?

(Written 7 May 2016. Corrigendum below)

One often reads the following definition of political correctness.  "Someone who is politically correct believes that language and actions that could be offensive to others, especially those relating to sex and race, should be avoided." Here.  Merriam-Webster, Wikipedia, and other sources offer similar definitions.

This is not at all what 'political correctness' means when used by people in the know.  The above definition conflates being politically correct with being polite, civil, and respectful of others and it conflates being politically incorrect with being rude, offensive, and disrespectful of others.   For example, Donald Trump was not being politically incorrect when he made his vile comments about Megan Kelly and Carly Fiorina.  He was being rude and offensive in a politically foolish display of misogyny.

It is worth noting that in some cases rude and offensive speech is justified as a response to same.  Justified or not, the politically incorrect and the rude/offensive/disrespectful are separate categories.  A Venn diagram may help where the A region below contains politically incorrect statements and behaviors, the B region contains rude/offensive/disrespectful statements and behaviors, and the intersection of the two classes contains statements and behaviors that are both.  

For example, suppose someone says, 'Broads do not belong in the Navy SEALs or the Army Rangers.'  This statement is both rude/offensive/disrespectful and politically incorrect while 'Women do not belong in Navy SEALs or the Army Rangers' is politically incorrect but not (objectively) offensive.  Of course, one might take inappropriate offense at the second statement, but that is his or her problem. People, cry bullies and liberals especially, take offense at the damndest things!

One way to define a term is extensionally by giving a list of the items to which it applies.  These are the items that fall within the extension of the term.  I will now provide  a list of some politically incorrect statements and then ask what they have in common.  This will allow us to pin down the intension of the term 'politically incorrect,' and from there the intension of 'politically correct.' Here then are some politically incorrect statements:

• Blacks are incarcerated in proportionally greater numbers than whites because they commit proportionally more crimes.
• Not only do black lives matter; all lives matter including the lives of law enforcement agents and the lives of the unborn.
• While Muslims qua Muslims ought not be barred from political office, Sharia-supporting Muslims ought to be.
• The killing of innocent human beings is a grave moral evil, and this includes the killing of pre-natal human beings.
• At the present time, the majority of terrorists in the world derive their ideological support from one religion, Islam.
• The Crusades were defensive wars.
• The purpose of taxation is to raise monies to cover the costs of governance, not to redistribute wealth.
• Free market economies under the rule of law are more likely to lead to human flourishing than socialist economies.
• There was no moral equivalence  between the USA and the USSR.
• Women are 'underrepresented' in philosophy, not because of 'sexism' or a male conspiracy to exclude them, but because of the following factors: women as a group are not as interested in philosophy as men are; the feminine nature is averse to the argumentative and occasionally 'blood sport' aspect of philosophy; women as a group are just not as good at philosophy as men, where exceptions such as Elizabeth Anscombe prove the rule.
• Apart from the STEM disciplines, the universities of the land have become leftist seminaries, hotbeds of leftist indoctrination. They have lost touch with their noble ideals and traditions.
• Equality of opportunity is no guarantee of equality of outcome, and it is fallacious to argue from inequality of outcome to sexism or racism as the cause.
• Political correctness is a major threat to the values of the West including the West's commitment to open debate, toleration, and free inquiry. 

So there you have a baker's dozen of politically incorrect statements.  There are plenty more where those came from.  I would say that each is true, though I will grant that some are rationally debatable.  But whether true or false, rationally defensible or indefensible, they are all clear examples of politically incorrect statements.

Now what do they have in common in virtue of which they are all instances of political incorrectness?  The most important  common feature is that each opposes the contemporary liberal or leftist or 'progressive' worldview.  To be politically correct, then, is to support the leftist worldview and the leftist agenda.  It follows that a conservative cannot be politically correct.  

P.C. comes from the C.P.  The P. C. mentality is a successor form of the Communist mentality.  To be politically correct is to toe the party line.  It is to support leftist positions and tactics, including the suppression of the free speech rights of opponents. Essential to leftism is the double standard.  So while  the politically correct insist on their own free speech rights, they deny them to their opponents, which is why they routinely shout them down.

Corrigendum: 

While many leftists employ double standards, the characteristically hard-Left tactic is Alinskyite in nature as explained here.

Is Reason a White Male Euro-Christian Construct?

I read John D.Caputo years ago, in the late '70s, in connection with work I was doing on Heidegger. I read a couple of his early Heidegger articles and a couple of his books.  One of them, The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought, is in my library.  Caputo seemed worth reading at the time.  But he appears to have gone off the deep end.  This from a New York Times  Opinionator interview entitled "Looking White in the Face":

John D. Caputo: “White” is of the utmost relevance to philosophy, and postmodern theory helps us to see why. I was once criticized for using the expression “true north.” It reflected my Nordo-centrism, my critic said, and my insensitivity to people who live in the Southern Hemisphere. Of course, no such thing had ever crossed my mind, but that points to the problem. We tend to say “we” and to assume who “we” are, which once simply meant “we white male Euro-Christians.”

Postmodern theory tries to interrupt that expression at every stop, to put every word in scare quotes, to put our own presuppositions into question, to make us worry about the murderousness of “we,” and so to get in the habit of asking, “we, who?” I think that what modern philosophers call “pure” reason — the Cartesian ego cogito and Kant’s transcendental consciousness — is a white male Euro-Christian construction.

White is not “neutral.” “Pure” reason is lily white, as if white is not a color or is closest to the purity of the sun, and everything else is “colored.” Purification is a name for terror and deportation, and “white” is a thick, dense, potent cultural signifier that is closely linked to rationalism and colonialism. What is not white is not rational. So white is philosophically relevant and needs to be philosophically critiqued — it affects what we mean by “reason” — and “we” white philosophers cannot ignore it.

This is truly depressing stuff.  It illustrates the rarefied, pseudo-intellectual stupidity to which leftist intellectuals routinely succumb, and the level to which humanities departments in our universities have sunk.  We speak of 'true North' in distinction from 'magnetic North,' which is what a compass needle points to.  The difference in location between the two is called declination and must be taken into account for accurate navigation.  The phrase 'true North' has nothing to do with Nordo-centrism or insensitivity to those who live in the Southern Hemisphere.  It is just a physical fact that compass needles track magnetic North, and that magnetic North is not the same as true North.

I feel as if I should apologize for pointing out something so obvious, but in the lunatic precincts of the postmodern, the obvious gets no respect.  Does Caputo perhaps imagine that the Earth and its magnetic properties are social constructs?  I hope not.  One wonders what is going on in his head.  Perhaps he is afraid of hurting the feelings of people who live in the Southern Hemisphere by his use of 'true North.'  But for them to take offense at that phrase would be like a black person taking offense at  'black hole,' which, mirabile dictu, has actually happened. The phrase is from cosmology.  Roughly, a black hole is a region of spacetime from which nothing can escape including no form of electromagnetic radiation such as light.  Black holes have nothing to do with people of African-American descent or with black whores: 'hos' in black street idiom.  And this is the case even when 'black hole' is used metaphorically to refer to, say, a windowless office.

It is the same with 'true North.'  If used literally, it does not mean that the North is 'true' and the South 'false' or any such nonsense.  And the same goes for the phrase used metaphorically. 

People with basic common sense know that there is such a thing as taking inappropriate offense and that one should not cater to the whims of the absurdly sensitive.  In this connection I remind you of the case of the poor schlep  who lost his job because of his use of the perfectly innocuous English word 'niggardly,' which, of course, has nothing to do with 'nigger.'  By the way, I just mentioned the word 'nigger'; I did not use it. I said something about the word; I did not apply it to anyone.  (Is your typical Continental philosopher aware of the use-mention distinction?)

The purveyors of POMO need to be reminded that thinking is not association of ideas:  if you associate 'niggardly' with 'nigger,' that is your problem and no basis for an argument to the conclusion that a user of 'niggardly' is a racist. 

Should we question our presuppositions?  Of course.  That is essential to the philosophical enterprise.  But one ought to do this without absurd exaggerations ("the murderousness of 'we' ") and double standards.  I say we ought to question our presuppositions.  Who am I referring to with my use of 'we'? To those of us who aspire to be reasonable and to seek the truth.  I am afraid I don't see the "murderousness" of that.  And I don't see how a white person is barred from referring to rational truth-seekers by his use of 'we' just because he or she is a white person.

Now to our title question.  Is pure reason a white male Euro-Christian construction? This is just nonsense and is really beneath refutation.  But given the sorry state of things, refutation is needed.  Caputo is alluding to Kant's 1781 (2nd ed. 1787) Critique of Pure Reason.  And Caputo must know that for Kant 'pure' means: free of empirical elements (CPR B 3) and that pure reason is the faculty that "contains the principles whereby we know anything absolutely a priori." (CPR A 11 B 24)  This has nothing to do with racial purity.

Caputo is here instantiating the role of Continental mush-head:  he is not thinking but engaging in argument by association, which is not argument at all, any more than another Continental favorite, argument by incantation, is argument at all.

But it is worse than this because Caputo is engaged in a sort of philosophical smear job.  Here we have a great philosopher, Immanuel Kant, who is undertaking to evaluate the cognitive 'reach' of pure reason.  His project is to assess the capacity of reason unaided by sensory input to secure knowledge in special metaphysics (metaphysica specialis) whose main objects are God, the soul, and the world as a whole.  Corresponding to these objects are the highest concerns of humanity: God, freedom, and immortality.

And what does Caputo do?  He conflates the purity that Kant speaks of with racial purity and then goes on to associate, scurrilously and irresponsibly, pure reason with "terror and deportation" and "colonialism."  This of course is right out of the cultural Marxist's playbook. 

For a leftist, anything a reasonable person says is 'code' for something else. The leftist cannot take anything at face value as meaning what it obviously means.  He is out to debunk and deconstruct and unmask.  As cultural Marxists, they are out to cut through 'false consciousness' and 'bourgeois ideology.' Theirs is the hermeneutics of suspicion.  So 'pure reason' cannot mean what Kant says it means; it has to mean something else: it is a "cultural signifier" for terror and deportation and what all else.  Or if I speak of truth and of seeking truth, then my use of 'truth' really signifies power and white privilege and what all else. 

And when I refute the POMO nonsense and show that it is self-contradictory, that too cannot be taken at face-value as meaning what it manifestly means and showing what it manifestly shows; it has to be 'deconstructed' as masking some sort of power play or re-affirmation of 'white privilege.'

Is Caputo trying to convince us of certain truths?  Then he presupposes truth, in which case truth cannot be a social construct.  It is not that there are no social constructs; the point is that not everything can be.  Truth, for example.  Who constructs it?  White males collectively?   But if this is so, then that is the case  beyond all constructions, in which case truth cannot be a white male construction or a construction by any person or persons.  Truth is absolute by its very nature. 

Could reason be a social construct?  When Caputo tries to convince us of something he appeals to our reason to convince us of what he takes to be reasonable and true.  He gives arguments and adduces various considerations.  He makes assertions that purport to be true.  (And, of course, in purporting to be true, they purport to be objectively and absolutely true, which is to say: not merely true for me or for us or for this social class or that historical epoch.)  But how can Caputo, who is a  white male who enjoys all sorts of perquisites and privileges, appeal to reason if reason is a white male Euro-Christian construct?

Of course, it may be that Caputo has no intention of appealing to reason.  It could be that his POMO verbiage is nothing  but obfuscatory rhetoric that masks a bid for power for him and his ilk.  I prefer not to believe this, if possible; I met the man once and he seemed like a decent human being. 

Is Caputo appealing to a 'true reason' that is not a white male Euro-Christian construct?  But he can't do this by his own constructivist, relativist principles.  For then he would have to put a different construct in its place, say reason as a black female Afro-Islamic construct.  But then he won't be able to convince us or himself of anything rationally.  For that different construct would just be another contingent, unbinding framework.  If there is a 'true reason,' then it cannot be any sort of contingent human construct vriable across races andf sexes, regions and religions.

The problem, very simply, is that if reason is culturally or racially or in any way relative, then there is no such thing as reason. Reason is like truth in this respect.  Truth is absolute by its very nature; talk of relative truth is nonsense.  Similarly, reason is normative and  impartially adjudicative by its very nature. Talk of reason as reflective of class interests or racial biases is nonsense.  So either there is no reason or it is not a social construct.  And if it is not a social construct, then of course it is not a white male Euro-Christian construct.