Month: March 2012

Why are Conservatives Inarticulate?

From the mail:

My two cents on why so many people who hold conservative views come across as inarticulate: most of the values that ordinary, conservative people live by do not require much reflection or explanation. After all, how much justification does a man need for being loyal to his friends, not cheating his customers, and being kind to his neighbors? It is the man who seeks to undermine those values who needs the rhetorical dodges and obfuscations. It takes little mental skill to tell a lie, but it takes quite a bit of deviousness to construct a justification for abolishing the principle of honesty altogether . . . .

My correspondent supplies part of the explanation.  For those with a conservative bent there is a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional practices, beliefs, and values.  They place the burden of proof on those who would question the traditional practices, beliefs, and values.  For the conservatively inclined there is no need to justify that loyalty is good, cheating is wrong, being kind is better than being cruel, and that killing infants is murder.  Feeling, with some justification, no need to justify his practices, beliefs, and values,  the conservative rarely acquires the skills to do so, and so comes across as inarticulate and unreflective to those skilled in the verbal arts.  Of course, I am talking not about conservative intellectuals but about ordinary conservative folk and their political and talk-show representatives.

What my correspondent may not appreciate, however, is that it is not enough to have the right views and values; one must also know how to articulate and defend them when they come under attack.  And this is where conservatives are woefully inadequate.  How many conservatives could say what I said in the preceding paragraph?  Can you imagine George W. Bush speaking of "a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional practices, beliefs, and values"?  Even if he could get the words out without stumbling, could he explain what they mean? His defense of marriage consisted of the repetition of the flat-footed, "Marriage is between a man and a woman."  A gratuitous assertion, however, calls forth a gratuitous counter-assertion. His mere assertion, unexplained and unjustified, makes him appear a bigot to those who find opposition to same-sex marriage 'discriminatory.'  What he ought to have done is provide a brief justification of why the state is involved in marriage in the first place and why same-sex 'marriage' is not something the state should support.  But could he do that off the top of his head?  I doubt it.  He's got the right view, but he can't defend it.  And that's the problem.

Or consider Charlie Sykes the talk-show host I mentioned the other day.  He claimed that the reasoning in support of the moral acceptability of infanticide was "academic gobbledygook."  When you say something like that about careful and clear reasoning, you make yourself out to be a dumbass, allergic to distinctions and nuances.  You come across as a rube, a redneck, a hick, a yahoo, an anti-intellectual, an Archie Bunker, a beer-swilling, sports-watching, tobacco-chewing ignoramus, a benighted denizen of fly-over country.  Many others who got worked up over that infanticide article claimed that it was 'illogical,' thereby betraying a failure to understand what logic is.  They thought that since the conclusion is morally outrageous, which of course it is, the reasoning to it had to be incorrect.  But that's an elementary mistake since one can reason correctly to a false conclusion.

A local talk show guy, Mike Gallagher I think it was, was fulminating againt the article in question and came out with the remark that 'medical ethics' is an oxymoron.  Well of course it isn't.  What he was trying to say was that a medical ethicist who argues that infanticide is morally permissible cannot be an ethicist . . . .

Or consider my man O'Reilly.  He often points out that we live in a capitalist country.  It's true, more or less.  But citing a fact does not amount to a justification of the fact.  What O'Reilly may be incapable of doing is to provide arguments including moral arguments in favor of capitalism.  That is what is needed in the face of libs and lefties who, when told that we live in a capitalist country, will respond, "Well then, let's change it!" 

But having a nasty streak of anti-intellectualism in him, O'Reilly would probably dismiss such arguments as mere 'theory' in his Joe Sixpack sense of the term.

Conservatives, by and large, are doers not thinkers, builders,  not scribblers.  They are at home on the terra firma of the concrete particular but at sea in the realm of abstraction.  The know in their dumb inarticulate way that killing infants is a moral outrage but they cannot argue it out with sophistication and nuance in a manner to command the respect of their opponents.  And that's a serious problem

To beat the Left we must out-argue them in the ivory towers and out-slug them in the trenches.  Since by Converse Clausewitz  politics is war conducted by other means, the trench-fighters need to employ the same tactics that lefties do: slanders, lies, smears, name-calling, shout-downs, pie-throwing, mockery, derision.  And now I hand off to Robert Spencer commenting on Andrew Breitbart. 

Politics is war and war is ugly.  We could avoid a lot of this nastiness if we adopted federalism and voluntary Balkanization.  But that is not likely to happen: the totalitarian Left won't allow it.  So I predict things are going to get hot in the coming years.

The Problem with Conservatism

Here:

The problem with conservatism is that it is a school of political activity based almost completely on nonconfrontation. It is quietist, scholarly, and unassuming, acting very much in the mode of the upper-class William F. Buckley and the reclusive Russell Kirk. This is not altogether a bad thing. Conservatives have always argued — with some justice — that a major goal of the movement is to maintain standards, to avoid descending to the level of the opposition. But like anything else, it becomes a bad thing when it is taken too far, when conservatives allow themselves — as they so often do — to be bullied out of the arena and on to the sidelines and irrelevance. (Buckley, to his credit, and as Gore Vidal well knows, never allowed it to go quite this far.) This is so common that it shocks both sides when it occurs otherwise. Recall the "blue-blazer riot" at the 2000 Florida election recount, with all the staid, Brooks-wearing paleos banging on the windows and shouting, "I say there," at the vote-counters. Nobody ever saw that before. The problem is, we haven't seen it since, either.

This is not meant as an attack on the bow-tie brigade. We need those types. We need the WASP ethos and the civilized behavior that it promotes. But we also need the hard boys in their black t-shirts and shades who can jump into the trenches and give as good as they get — the kind of cadre that conservatism has for many years lacked.

Nominalism and Being

Today I preach on an old text of long-time commenter and sparring partner, London Ed:

Nominalism is the doctrine that we should not multiply entities  according to the multiplicity of terms. I.e., we shouldn't  automatically assume that there is a thing corresponding to every  term. Das Seiende is a term, so we shouldnât automatically assume there is a thing corresponding to it. Further arguments are needed to show that there is or there isnât. A classic nominalist strategy is to rewrite the sentence in such a way that the term disappears.

 My first concern is whether this definition of 'nominalism' is perhaps too broad, so broad that it pulls in almost all of us. Does anyone think that every term has a referent? Don't we all hold that there can be no automatic assumption that every occurrence of a term in a stretch of discourse picks out an entity? For example, one would be hard pressed to find a philosopher who holds that 'nothing' in

   1. Nothing is in the drawer

refers to something. (Carnapian slanders aside, Heidegger does not maintain this, but this is a separate topic about which I have written a long unpublished paper.) Following Ed's excellent advice, the
apparently referential 'nothing' can be paraphrased away:

   2. It is not the case that there is something in the drawer.

This then goes into quasi-canonical notation as

   2*. ~(Ex)(x is in the drawer).

In (2*) the tilde and the particular quantifier are syncategorematic elements. On the face of it, then, there is no call to be anything other than a nominalist about 'nothing,' using 'nominalism' as per the
suggestion above.

Whether there is call to be a nominalist about 'being' is another matter. Before proceeding to it, consider the following example:

   3. Peter and Paul are blond

which could be parsed as

   3*. Peter is blond and Paul is blond.

Now I rather doubt that anyone maintains that every word in (3*) — or rather every word in a tokening of this sentence-type whether via utterance or inscription or some other mode of encoding — has an entity corresponding to it. This suggests a taxonomy of nominalisms:

Mad-Dog Nominalism: No word has an existing referent, not even 'Peter' and 'Paul.' (I write 'existing referent' to disallow Meinongian objects as referents. The waters are muddy enough without bringing Meinong into the picture — please pardon the mixed metaphor.)

Extreme Nominalism: The only words that have existing referents are names like 'Peter' and Paul'; nothing in reality corresponds to such predicates as 'blond.' And a fortiori nothing corresponds to copulae and logically connective words like 'and' and 'or.'

Nominalism Proper: Particulars (unrepeatables) alone exist: there are no universals (repeatables). This view allows that something in reality corresponds to predicates such as 'blond.' It is just that what this predicate denotes is not a universal but a particular, a trope say, or an Aristotelian accident.

Methodological Nominalism: This is just Ed's suggestion that we not assume that for each word there is a corresponding entity.

I hope no one is crazy enough to be a mad-dog nominalist, and that everyone is sane enough to be a methodological nominalist. The two middle positions, however, are subject to reasonable controversy. What I am calling Extreme Nominalism has little to recommend it, but I think Nominalism Proper is quite a reasonable position.  There has to be something extralinguistic (and extramenal) corresponding to the predicate in 'Peter is blond,' but it is not obvious that it must be a universal.  

Now let's think about whether we should be nominalists with respect to words like das Seiende, that-which-is, the existent, beings, and the like. Heidegger has been known to say such things as Das Seiende ist,  or

   4. That-which-is is. (Beings are.)

Now is there anything in reality corrresponding to 'that-which-is' and 'beings'? Well of course: absolutely everything comes under 'that-which-is.' There is nothing that is named by 'Nothing.' And if I met nobody on the trail, that is not to say that I met someone named 'Nobody.' But absolutely everything falls under 'a being,' 'an existent,' ein Seiendes, das Seiende.

So I see no reason to have any nominalist scruples about the latter expressions. I don't see any problem with forming the substantive das Seiende from the present participle seiend.  But you will be forgiven if you balk at the transformation of the infinitive sein into the the substantive das Sein and take the latter to refer to Majuscule Being.

An Ideal Spouse

My opinion of Maureen Dodd went up a notch when I read this NYT column in which she quotes a Catholic priest.  He proffers good advice about marriage one piece of which is:

     Don't marry a problem character thinking you will change him.
 
Excellent advice, Schopenhauerian advice. You will remember his riff on the unalterability of character. It is true as a general rule: people do not change. What you are characterologically at twenty you are for life. If you catch your inamorata lying to you or engaging in any sort of duplicity, know that you have been vouchsafed an insight into an underlying mendacity that will manifest itself time and time again. If one time she racks up a credit card bill that she cannot pay in full at the end of the month, she will do it a thousand times. And so on down the line. Enter into matrimony with such a person if you must, but do it with eyes open and thoughts clear.

My wife has a wide range of virtues and no vices to speak of. But in point of punctuality, she falls down. I am by contrast punctual to a fault. So 29 years ago I tried to change her, to make her punctual like me, but soon realized my folly and changed myself instead. I simply gave up making precise dates with her, rather than courting vexation at her nonshowing at appointed exact times. Instead of: Meet me at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth at the stroke of high noon, this: I'll be at the Sufficient Grounds coffee house from 2 PM on writing and playing chess; fall by when you get a chance.

I also realized that part of her being such a sweet and agreeable person is her not being hung up on precision.  And I furthermore bore in mind Plato's point in the Symposium, namely, and to put it in my own way, that a partner should be a complement, not a copy.

As a rule of thumb: You can't change others, but you can change yourself. And you should. A bit more precisely: character is largely invariant but attitude admits of adjustment.  

Koran Jihad and Advanced Dhimmitude

By Diana West.  Excerpt, emphas is added:

Behold what is perhaps the most advanced state of dhimmitude. Here we see the dhimmi — Jan Kubis and the UN hierarchy — mimic perfectly the perpetual aggrievement of Islam. Islam's aggrievement becomes their own aggrievement, indeed, becomes even more important than any by now atavistic concept of Western justice and reason, as they draw power from the obviously more kinetic Islamic position. Because this whole affair is, and must be understood as, a barely concealed power play. It is a power play thinly disguised by the Islamic pose of victimhood. Such feigned victimhood becomes a trap for the " perpetrator" of the perceived aggrievement — in this case, the US military. Falling for the trap, as we in the West do time and time again, means accepting these intemperate, immoral and murderous manifestations of Islamic dementia in the same way that a "co-dependent" family member accepts and accommodates a mentally sick relative's manifestations of dementia in the home in order to create or preserve some measure of family peace or quiet; in order to stop the outburst, to tamp down the rage and violence, to make it all better — even if "better" is always just a lull before the next demented power play.

Hocus Pocus

Here we find, "The magical spell of common parlance, 'hocus pocus,' derives from the words of consecration in the Latin Mass, “hoc est enim corpus”–this is my very body."

True or false?  I don't know.  I do know that one ought not believe everything one reads.

Addendum:  I was fishing of course, my OED and other relevant reference works being packed away at the moment, and I did indeed quickly snag a juicy morsel from the blogosphere's vasty deeps.  The following  courtesy of Jonathan Watson:

We have, it seems, at least this from the OED:

hocus-pocus, n., adj., and adv.
Pronunciation: /ˈhəʊkəsˈpəʊkəs/
Forms:  hocas pocas, hokos pokos, hokus pokus.
Etymology: Appears early in 17th cent., as the appellation of a juggler (and, apparently, as the assumed name of a particular conjuror) derived from the sham Latin formula employed by him: see below, and compare Grimm, Hokuspokus .
 
The notion that hocus pocus was a parody of the Latin words used in the Eucharist, rests merely on a conjecture thrown out by Tillotson: see below.

1655 T. Ady Candle in Dark 29, I will speak of one man‥that went about in King James his time‥who called himself, The Kings Majesties most excellent Hocus Pocus, and so was called, because that at the playing of every Trick, he used to say, Hocus pocus, tontus talontus, vade celeriter jubeo, a dark composure of words, to blinde the eyes of the beholders, to make his Trick pass the more currantly without discovery.

1694 J. Tillotson Serm. (1742) II. xxvi. 237 In all probability those common juggling words of hocus pocus are nothing else but a corruption of hoc est corpus, by way of ridiculous imitation of the priests of the Church of Rome in their trick of Transubstantiation.

On Hairsplitting

As a follow-up to Anti-Intellectualism in Conservatives, here is an old post from the Powerblogs site.  A surprising number still languish there in cyber-limbo awaiting their turn to be brought back to life. 

………………….

The charge of hairsplitting has always been one of the weapons in the arsenal of the anti-intellectual. One root of anti-intellectualism is a churlish hatred of all refinement. Another is laziness. Just as there are slugs who will not stray from their couches without the aid of motorized transport, there are mental slugs who will not engage in what Hegel calls die Anstrengung des Begriffs, the exertion of the   concept. Thinking is hard work. One has to be careful, one has to be precise; one has to carve the bird of reality at the joints. It is no surprise that people don't like thinking. It goes against our slothful grain. But surely any serious thinking about any topic issues in the making of distinctions that to the untutored may seem strained and  unnecessary.

Consider the question of when it is appropriate to praise a person.

Should we praise a person who has merely done his duty? Should we praise people who feed, clothe, house, and educate their children? Should wives praise their husbands for being faithful, as I once heard Dennis Prager recommend?  Of course not. For this is what they ought to do. We ought not praise them for doing such things; we ought to condemn them for not doing them. Praise is due only those actions that are above and beyond the call of duty. Such actions are called supererogatory. So we have a distinction between the obligatory and the supererogatory. The former pertains to those actions that must be done or else left undone, while the latter to those actions that are non-obligatory but such that if they are done they bring moral credit upon their agents.

Is that hairsplitting? Obviously not. We are in the presence of a genuine distinction. One would have to quite obtuse not to discern it. Clarity in moral matters demands the making of this distinction, and plenty of others besides.

A second example. The phrase, 'the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,' will strike some as containing redundant verbiage. But there are three distinct notions here since one can tell the truth without telling the whole truth, and one can tell the whole truth without telling nothing but the truth. This is not hairsplitting, but the making of necessary distinctions. Necessary for what? Necessary for clarity of thought. Why is that a good thing? Because clarity of thought is required for ethical action and for prudent action.

So what is hairsplitting if this is supposed to be something objectionable? One idea is that it is to make distinctions that correspond to nothing real, distinctions that are merely verbal. The 'distinction' between a glow bug and a fire fly, for example, is merely verbal: there is no distinction in reality. A glow bug just is a firefly. Similarly there is no distinction in reality between a bottle's being half-full and being half-empty. The only possible difference is in the attitude of someone, a drunk perhaps, who is elated at the bottle's being half-full and depressed at its being half-empty.

But this is not what people usually mean by the charge of hairsplitting. What they seem to mean is the drawing of distinctions that don't make a practical difference. But whether a distinction makes a practical difference depends on the context and on one's purposes. A chess player must know when the game is drawn. One way to draw a chess game is by three-fold repetition of position. But there
is a distinction between a consecutive and a nonconsecutive three-fold repetition of position, a distinction many players do not appreciate. When it is explained to them, as it is here some react with hairsplitting!

The truth of the matter is that there are very few occasions on which the charge of hairsplitting is justly made. On almost all occasions, the accuser is simply advertising his inability to grasp a distinction that the subject-matter requires. He is parading before us his lack of culture and mental acuity and his churlish refusal to be instructed.

Too many conservatives are like this.

Anti-Intellectualism on the Right

As I write, the 'infanticide is just post-natal abortion' controversy is being discussed by Charlie Sykes who is sitting in for Dennis Prager on the latter's radio show.  Sykes is obviously intelligent, but he just did something that is not uncommon for conservatives to do but is harmful to the conservative cause, namely, display an anti-intellectual attitude.  He used the phrase "academic gobblydegook" to refer to the reasoning in After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?  (My discussion of the issues here.)

The article's reasoning, however,  is clear and free of unnecessary jargon.  For the anti-intellectual, however, any attempt to make necessary distinctions and couch them in a technical vocabulary is dismissed as 'gobbledegook,' 'hairsplitting,' 'semantics,' etc.  It's unfortunate but  it is the way too many conservatives are.  I am not talking about conservative intellectuals, but conservatives that have influence.  Bill O'Reilly is an example.  He does good work, and his influence is mainly salutary.  But when a guest begins to nuance the discussion with a distinction or two, O'Reilly dismisses it as 'theory' using the word in the way of Joe Sixpack.  (That would make a good separate post, "Joe Sixpack on 'Theory'")

Conservatives have the right views but are too often incapable of defending them. This makes them easy targets for leftists.  Liberals and leftists lack common sense including moral sense, but they possess verbal facility in spades.  So if you talk like George W. Bush or dismiss careful, albeit wrongheaded, reasoning as 'gobbledegook' you just make yourself look stupid, not just to liberals but to everyone who values careful thinking.

The Range of Light

John Muir (The Mountains of California, 1894, Ch. 1) on California's Sierra Nevada mountain range:

. . . the Sierra should be called not the Nevada, or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years spent in the heart of it, rejoicing and wondering, bathing in its glorious floods of light, seeing the sunbursts of morning among the icy peaks, the noonday radiance on the trees and rocks and snow, the flush of the alpenglow, and a thousand dashing waterfalls with their marvelous abundance of irised spray, it still seems to me above all others the Range of Light, the most divinely beautiful of all the mountain-chains I have ever seen.

Would we have this beautiful description if John Muir had heeded the injunction, Never hike alone!? Note his use of 'mountain-chains'  near the end of the passage. That is a term that has fallen into desuetude if it ever saw much use. It is an exact equivalent of the German Bergketten.

The best guide to that region of the Sierra Nevada known as the High Sierra is R. J. Secor, The High Sierra: Peaks, Passes and Trails  (The Mountaineers, 1992, 2nd ed. 1999). It is a beautifully written book. Here is a taste:

The High Sierra . . . is the best place in the world for the practice of mountains. By the practice of mountains, I am referring to to hiking, cross-country rambling, peak bagging, rock climbing, ice climbing and ski touring. One of my goals in life is to go around the world three times and visit every mountain range twice. But whenever I have wandered other mountains, I have been homesick for the High Sierra. I am a hopeless romantic, and therefore my opinions cannot be regarded as objective. But how can I be objective while discussing the mountains that I love? (p. 9)

My kind of guy. During one of my High Sierra backpacking trips I met a man who knew Secor. Secor the climber smokes cigarettes! To be a climber you have to be all legs and lungs. Take that, you tobacco-wackos!

The following photograph is from Edwin Farrell's Sierra Nevada Gallery:

Sierra-nevada-convict-lk-2005

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Guns and Gun Violence

Jr. Walker and the All Stars, Shotgun
Beatles, Revolver (the whole album!)
Hoyt Axton, Pistol Packin' Mama.  Al Dexter wrote the song and had a hit with it in '43.
Lloyd Price, Stagger Lee, 1959.  "Stagger Lee went home and got his .44 . . ."  Mississippi John Hurt's version.
The Leaves, Hey Joe.  "Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?"
Gene Pitney, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962
Johnny Western, The Ballad of Palladin.  Theme song of "Have Gun Will Travel." Duane Eddy's cheesy version.
Tom Waits, Sixteen Shells from a Thirty-Aught Six
Phil Ochs, The Men Behind the Guns
Joan Baez, Rock Salt and Nails.  "If the ladies was squirrels with high bushy tails/I'd fill up my shotgun with rock salt and nails."
No, I will not link to Sonny and Cher's "Bang, Bang"!

Ockham and Induction

Ed of Beyond Necessity reports that he has translated some chapters on induction from Ockham's Summa Logicae. He goes on:

Ockham says that induction "is a progression from singulars to the universal", which is pretty much the modern understanding of the term.

That is not wrong, but it is not quite right either.  On a well-informed modern understanding induction need not involve "a progression from singulars to the universal."

Suppose that every F I have encountered thus far is a G, and that I conclude that the next F I will encounter will also be a G. This is clearly an inductive inference, but it is one that moves from a universal statement to a statement about an individual. The inference is from Every F thus far encountered is a G to The next F I will encounter will be a G.  So it is simply not the case that every inductive inference proceeds from singular cases to a universal conclusion. Some such inferences do, but not all.  This is a common misunderstanding.

It is also a mistake to think that deduction always proceeds from the universal to the singular.  See On Falsely Locating the Difference Between Deduction and Induction.