Month: July 2011

Flannery O’Connor

Bukowski was my last binge, literarily speaking.  I feel a Flannery binge in the offing.  How's that for catholic tastes?  I found a copy of her first novel, Wise Blood, in a used bookstore back in December while on the hunt for Bukowski materials.  But I just recently started in on it.  Repellent and boring at first, dismal and gothic, but she is clearly a talent of a very high order — unlike Buk — so I will press on. 

My best piece of scribbling during my Bukowski binge was Charles Bukowski Meets Simone Weil.  I note that Flannery was intrigued by Simone, which is not surprising, and discusses the latter in her letters.  That will have to be looked into.  All in good time.  Study everything, join nothing.  Nihil humanum, et cetera.

Here is a worthwhile essay on O'Connor.

And Flannery O'Connor Banned is yet another proof –as if we need one — of the Pee Cee dementia of  the liberal element. 

She Won’t ‘Bach’ Down

You can stand Michelle Bachmann up at the gates of hell and she won't back down.  (Or at least I hope not.) I thought she acquitted herself well on Hannity's show last night.  She talks sense unlike the blather mouth who is unfortunately our current POTUS. 

But the slimeballs of the Left are out in force against her.  Why doesn't that make them sexists by their own perverse 'logic'?  Criticize Obama's policies and they call you a racist.  Viciously attack Bachmann herself and you are not a sexist?

Requisites of Happiness

Edward Ockham at Beyond Necessity quotes Flaubert:  "To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless."

Witty, but false.  Comparable and  less cynical is this saying which I found attributed to Albert Schweitzer on a greeting card: Happiness is nothing more than good health and a poor memory.  (Whether the good Schweitzer ever said any such thing is a further question; hence my omission of quotation marks.)

I am inclined to agree with both gentlemen that good health is a necessary condition of happiness.  But happiness does not require a poor memory, it requires the ability to control one's memory, and the ability to control one's mind generally.  I am happy and I have an excellent memory; but I have learned how to distance myself from any unpleasant memory that may arise. 

An unhappy intellectual may think that stupidity is necessary for happiness, but then he is the stupid one.  A keen awareness of the undeniable ills of this world is consistent with being happy if one can control his response to those ills.  There is simply no necessity that one dwell on the negative.  But this non-dwelling is not ignorance.  It is mind control. 

As for selfishness, it is probably true that its opposite is more likely to lead to happiness than it.

The temptation to wit among the literary often leads them astray.

If You Are a Conservative, Don’t Talk Like a Liberal

I've made this point before but it bears repeating. We conservatives should never acquiesce in the Left's acts of linguistic vandalism. Battles in the culture war are often lost and won on linguistic   ground. So we ought to resolutely oppose the Left's attempts at linguistic corruption.

Take 'homophobia.'

A phobia is a fear, but not every fear is a phobia. A phobia is an  irrational fear. One who argues against the morality of homosexual practices, or gives reasons for opposing same-sex marriage is precisely — presenting arguments, and not expressing any phobia. The arguments  may or may not be cogent. But they are expressive of reason, and are intended to appeal to the reason of one's interlocutor. To dismiss them as an expression of a phobia show a lack of respect for reason and for the persons who proffer the arguments.

There are former meat-eaters who can make an impressive case against the eating of meat. Suppose that, instead of addressing their arguments, one denounces them as 'carniphobes.' Can you see what is wrong with that? These people have a reasoned position. Their reasoning may be more or less cogent, their premises more or less disputable. But the one thing they are not doing is expressing an irrational fear of eating meat. Many of them like the stuff and dead meat inspires no fear in them whatsoever.

The point should be obvious: 'homophobia' is just as objectionable as 'carniphobia.' People who use words like these are attempting to close off debate, to bury a legitimate issue beneath a crapload of PeeCee jargon. So it is not just that 'homophobe' and 'homophobia' are
question-begging epithets; they are question-burying epithets.

And of course 'Islamophobia'  and cognates are other prime examples.  Once again, a phobia is an irrational fear.  But fear of radical Islam is not at all irrational.  You are a dolt if us use these terms, and a double dolt if you are a conservative.

Language matters.

  

Crimes Against Blacks and Nazi Art Thefts

From a Boston reader:

I read your post titled, On Black Reparations after having spent a fair amount of time recently at one of my favorite places, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In the museum, there are signs next to some pieces indicating that their provenance may include Nazi-era acquisitions in World War II Germany. If it's determined that any piece was acquired as a result of theft, illegal sales, etc. then every attempt is made to return it to the rightful owner or to the owner's heir, and this is judged to be a moral obligation. This made me think about how your argument against reparations would apply to such cases. But to make the case analogous in terms of the time that has elapsed between the crime and the proposed method of restitution, suppose the following argument is being made in 2091:

1. All of the perpetrators of the crimes associated with Nazi-era thefts of art in World War II Germany (and areas occupied by Germany at the time) are dead.

2. All of the victims of the crimes associated with Nazi-era thefts of art in World War II Germany are dead.

3. Only those who are victims of a crime are entitled to reparations for the crime, and only those who are the perpetrators of a crime are obliged to pay reparations for it.

Therefore

4. No one now living is entitled to receive reparations for the crimes associated with Nazi-era thefts of art in World War ii Germany, and no one now living is obliged to pay reparations. (Assume anyone owning such a piece was not aware, when he purchased it, of its Nazi-era provenance).

I wonder if such an argument could be run to refute the notion that such works should be returned to any living heirs, or to museums from which they might have been looted. It seems to me that counter this possibility, we might point out that one relevant disanalogy may be the fact that here we're dealing with concrete items — with property — and not with difficult (impossible?) to calculate contemporary harms caused by past wrongs. After all, it's easier to argue that Jones has been harmed by not owning a painting he would have plausibly (probably?) inherited were it not stolen than it is to argue that Smith has been harmed by the fact that his great-great-great grandfather was enslaved. But I'm not sure if this works, for the force of your argument doesn't come from pragmatic concerns like that, but from the moral issues involved, and they seem to apply with similar force to cases concerning whether one is obligated to return art of Nazi-era provenance to identifiable heirs. Do you think that the argument you've formulated would imply that, at least in 2091, Museums would not be obligated to return items acquired by Nazis and Nazi collaborators during World War II to identifiable heirs, and would you agree that if this is so, the conclusion minimally conflicts with our moral intuitions? Sorry for the length of the post, and thanks for taking the time to read it.

An interesting response.

I think the cases are disanalogous for reasons different from the one the reader mentions.  Suppose a piece was stolen by the Nazis from the Louvre in Paris and it ends up in the MFA in Boston.  Said piece is the property of the Louvre and ought to be returned there despite the fact that the Nazi thieves and the Louvre curators are all dead.  The wrong was committed against the Louvre which continues to exist.  And therein lies one point of disanalogy.  The blacks who were enslaved and maltreated no longer exist.   A second point of disanalogy is that when restitution is made nothing is taken from the MFA that it has a right to possess.  But when a present-day non-black is forced to pay reparations to blacks  he is having something taken from him that he has a right to possess.