I almost entitled this post, "Jack Klugman Enters the Twilight Zone," except that this is the vale of twilight. Be that as it may, Jack Klugman, who died yesterday, starred in four Twilight Zone episodes. The news accounts mention that fact but don't say which. "A Passage for Trumpet," "In Praise of Pip," "A Game of Pool," and "Death Ship." Twilight Zone marathon coming up on New Year's Eve. Check it out to see what TV can be.
Month: December 2012
On Light
Today I preach on a text from Joseph Joubert:
Light. It is a fire that does not burn. (Notebooks, 21)
Just as the eyes are the most spiritual of the bodily organs, light is the most spiritual of physical phenomena. And there is no light like the lambent light of the desert. The low humidity, the sparseness of vegetation that even in its arboreal forms hugs the ground, the long, long vistas that draw the eye out to shimmering buttes and mesas — all of these contribute to the illusion that the light is alive. This light does not consume, like fire, but allows things to appear. It licks, like flames, but does not incinerate. ('Lambent' from Latin lambere, to lick.)
Light as phenomenon, as appearance, is not something merely physical. It is as much mind as matter. Without its appearance to mind it would not be what it, phenomenologically, is. But the light that allows rocks and coyotes to appear, itself appears. This seen light is seen within a clearing, eine Lichtung, which is light in a transcendental sense. But this transcendental light in whose light both illuminated objects and physical light appear, points back to the onto-theological Source of this transcendental light.
Augustine claims to have glimpsed this eternal Source Light upon entering into his "inmost being." Entering there, he saw with his soul's eye, "above that same eye of my soul, above my mind, an unchangeable light." He continues:
It was not this common light, plain to all flesh, nor a greater light of the same kind
. . . Not such was that light, but different, far different from all other lights. Nor was it above my mind, as oil is above water, or sky above earth. It was above my mind, because it made me, and I was beneath it, because I was made by it. He who knows the truth, knows that light, and he who knows it knows eternity. (Confessions, Book VII, Chapter 10)
'Light,' then, has several senses. There is the light of physics, which is but a theoretical posit. There is physical light as we see it, whether in the form of illuminated things such as yonder mesa, or sources of illumination such as the sun, or the lambent space between them. There is the transcendental light of mind without which nothing at all would appear. There is, above this transcendental light, its Source.
One could characterize a materialist as one who is blind to the light, except in the first of the four senses lately mentioned.
Merry Christmas
Ed Farrell sent me the above. Here is more of his spectacular photography. The New Testament verse he chose is one of the most beautiful in the whole Bible. One of the gifts of the Father of lights is the Range of Light, as she is called since John Muir so named her, the Sierra Nevada of California. Ed's Sierra Nevada Gallery does justice to this, one of the great mountain ranges of the world.
Companion post: The Range of Light
Christmas Eve at the Oldies
Merry Christmas everybody. Pour yourself a drink, and enjoy.
Cheech and Chong, Santa Claus and His Old Lady
Canned Heat, Christmas Boogie
Leon Redbone and Dr. John, Frosty the Snowman
Beach Boys, Little St. Nick. A rarely heard alternate version.
Ronettes, Sleigh Ride
Elvis Presley, Blue Christmas
Charles Brown, Please Come Home for Christmas
Wanda Jackson and the Continentals, Merry Christmas Baby
Chuck Berry, Run Rudolph Run
Eric Clapton, Cryin' Christmas Tears
Judy Collins, Silver Bells
Ry Cooder, Christmas in Southgate. Don't miss this one. Great video.
Bob Dylan, Do You Hear What I Hear
Who could possibly follow Dylan's growl except
Tom Waits, Silent Night. Give it a chance.
Properties as Parts: More on Constituent Ontology
Skin and seeds are proper parts of a tomato, and the tomato is an improper part of itself. But what about such properties as being red, being ripe, being a tomato? Are they parts of the tomato? The very idea will strike many as born of an elementary confusion, as a sort of Rylean category mistake. "Your tomato is concrete and so are its parts; properties are abstract; nothing concrete can have abstract parts." Or: "Look, properties are predicable entities; parts are not. Having seeds is predicable of the tomato but not seeds! You're talking nonsense!"
I concede that the notion that the properties of an ordinary particular are parts thereof, albeit in some extended unmereological sense of 'part,' is murky. Murky as it is, the motivation for the view is fairly clear, and the alternative proposed by relational ontologists is open to serious objection. First I will say something in motivation of the constituent-ontological (C-ontological view). Then I will raise objections to the relational-ontological (R-ontological) approach.
For C-Ontology
Plainly, the blueness of my coffee cup belongs to the cup; it is not off in a realm apart. The blueness (the blue, if you will) is at the cup, right here, right now. I see that the cup before me now is blue. This seeing is not a quasi-Platonic visio intellectualis but a literal seeing with the eyes. How else would I know that the cup is blue, and in need of a re-fill, if not by looking at the cup? Seeing that the cup is blue, I see blueness (blue). I see blueness here and now in the mundus sensibilis. How could I see (with the eyes) that the cup is blue without seeing (with the same eyes) blueness? If blueness is a universal, then I see a universal, an instantiated universal. If blueness is a trope, then I see a trope, a trope compresent with others. Either way I see a property. So some properties are visible. This would be impossible if properties are abstract objects as van Inwagen and the boys maintain. Whether uninstantiated or instantiated abstract properties are invisible.
Properties such as blueness and hardness, etc. are empirically detectable. Blueness is visible while hardness is tangible. That looks to be a plain datum. Their being empirically detectable rules out their being causally inert abstracta off in a quasi-Platonic realm apart. For I cannot see something without causally interacting with it. So not only is the cup concrete, its blueness is as well.
This amounts to an argument that properties are analogous to parts. They are not parts in the strict mereological sense. They are not physical parts. So let's call them metaphysical or ontological constituents. The claim, then, is that ordinary particulars such as tomatoes and cups have their properties, or at least some of them, by having them as ontological constituents. To summarize the argument:
1. Some of the properties of ordinary concrete material particulars are empirically detectable at the places the particulars occupy and at the times they occupy them.
2. No abstract object is empirically detectable. Therefore:
3. Some properties of ordinary concrete material particulars are not abtract objects. Therefore:
4. It is reasonable to conjecture that some of the properties of ordinary concrete material particulars are analogous to (proper) parts of them.
Against R-Ontology
I grant that the above is not entirely clear, and that it raises questions that are not easy to answer. But does R-ontology fare any better? I don't think so.
Suppose an R-ontologist is staring at my blue cup. Does he see something colorless? Seems he would have to if the blueness of the cup is an abstract object merely related by exemplification to the concrete cup. Abstracta are invisible. Suppose we introduce 'stripped particular' to designate the R-ontological counterpart of what C-ontologists intend with 'bare particular' and 'thin particular.' A stripped particular is an ordinary particular devoid of empirically detectable properties. If the R-ontologist thinks that my cup is a stripped particular, then he is surely wrong. Call this the Stripped Particular Objection.
But if the R-ontologist agrees with me that the blueness is empirically detectable, then he seems to be involved in an unparsimonious duplication of properties. There is the invisible abstract property in Plato's heaven or Frege's Third Reich that is expressed by the open sentence or predicate '___ is blue.' And there is the property (or property-instance) that even the R-ontologist sees when he stares at a blue coffee cup.
Isn't that one property too many? What work does the abstract property do? More precisely, what ontological work does it do? I needn't deny that it does some semantic work: it serves as the sense (Fregean Sinn) of the corresponding predicate. But we are doing ontology here, not semantics. We want to understand what the world — extramental, extralinguistic reality — must be like if a sentence like 'This cup is blue' is true. We want to understand the property-possession in reality that underlies true predications at the level of language. We are not concerned here with the apparatus by which we represent the world; we are concerned with the world represented.
In my existence book I called the foregoing the Duplication Objection, though perhaps I could have hit upon a better moniker. The abstract property is but an otiose duplicate of the property that does the work, the empirically detectable propery that induces causal powers in the thing that has it.
So I present the R-ontologist with a dilemma: either you are embracing stripped particulars or you are involved in a useless multiplication of entities.
Coda
It's Christmas Eve and there is more to life than ontology. So I'll punch the clock for today. But there are two important questions we need to pursue. (1) Couldn't we reject the whole dispute and be neither a C- nor an R-ontologist? (2) Should ontologists be in the business of explanation at all? (My point that abstract properties are useless for purposes of accounting for predication and property-possession presupposes that there is such a legitimate enterprise as philosophical explanation.)
Gun Lovers and Abortion Lovers
One often hears liberals refer to gun owners as gun lovers. Would they refer to pro-choicers as abortion lovers? I don't think so. Why the differential usage? Is it just liberal bias?
If you are pro-choice, then you stand for the right of a woman to have an abortion. You want abortion to be legally permissible. The maintenance of such a stance is consistent with wanting there to be fewer abortions. The following is a logically consistent position: "It would be better if there were fewer or no abortions, but women ought to have the right to choose for themselves."
The analogy with guns is fairly close. The following is a logically consistent position: "It would be better if there were fewer or no guns in civilian hands, but citizens ought to have the right to keep and bear arms if they so choose."
I am making a point about political rhetoric. Unless you liberals are prepared to call pro-choicers abortion lovers, you ought not call gun owners gun lovers. If, that is, you are interested in a calm, serious, truth-seeking discussion. A big 'if'!
Lest any of my conservative friends get the wrong idea, I am (obviously) not maintaining that abortion and gun ownership are on a moral par, that both are morally permissible, and that both ought to be legally permissible. Not at all. Abortion is a grave moral evil. Gun ownership is not. In fact, in some situations gun ownership may be morally obligatory. (But brevity is the soul of blog, so the exfoliation and defence of this latter suggestion belongs elsewhere.)
The Problem: Gun Culture or Liberal Culture?
Without wanting to deny that there is a 'gun culture' in the USA, especially in the red states, I would insist that the real problem is our liberal culture. Here are four characteristics of liberal culture that contribute to violence of all kinds, including gun violence.
1. Liberals tend to have a casual attitude toward crime.
This is well-documented by Theodore Dalrymple. Here is a list of his articles. No Contrition, No Penalty is a short read. See also my Crime and Punishment category.
It is interesting to note that Connecticut, the state in which the Newtown massacre occurred, has recently repealed the death penalty, and this after the unspeakably brutal Hayes-Komisarjevsky home invasion in the same state.
One of the strongest voices against repealing the death penalty has been Dr. William Petit Jr., the lone survivor of a 2007 Cheshire home invasion that resulted in the murders of his wife and two daughters.
The wife was raped and strangled, one of the daughters was molested and both girls were left tied to their beds as the house was set on fire.
The two men convicted of the crime, Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes, are currently on death row.
Anyone who cannot appreciate that a crime like this deserves the death penalty is morally obtuse. But not only are liberals morally obtuse, they are contemptibly stupid in failing to understand that one of the main reasons people buy guns is to protect themselves from the criminal element, the criminal element that liberals coddle. If liberals were serious about wanting to reduce the numbers of guns in civilian hands, they would insist on swift and sure punishment in accordance with the self-evident moral principle, "The punishment must fit the crime," which is of course not to be confused with lex talionis, "an eye for an eye." Many guns are purchased not for hunting or sport shooting but for protection against criminals. Keeping and bearing arms carries with it a grave responsibility and many if not most gun owners would rather not be so burdened. Gun ownership among women is on the upswing, and it is a safe bet that they don't want guns to shoot Bambi.
2. Liberals tend to undermine morality with their opposition to religion.
Many of us internalized the ethical norms that guide our lives via our childhood religious training. We were taught the Ten Commandments, for example. We were not just taught about them, we were taught them. We learned them by heart, and we took them to heart. This early training, far from being the child abuse that A. C. Grayling and other militant atheists think it is, had a very positive effect on us in forming our consciences and making us the basically decent human beings we are. I am not saying that moral formation is possible only within a religion; I am saying that some religions do an excellent job of transmitting and inculcating life-guiding and life-enhancing ethical standards, that moral formation outside of a religion is unlikely for the average person, and that it is nearly impossible if children are simply handed over to the pernicious influences of secular society as these influences are transmitted through television, Internet, video games, and other media. Anyone with moral sense can see that the mass media have become an open sewer in which every manner of cultural polluter is not only tolerated but promoted. Those of use who were properly educated way back when can dip into this cesspool without too much moral damage. But to deliver our children over to it is the real child abuse, pace the benighted Professor Grayling.
The shysters of the ACLU, to take one particularly egregious bunch of destructive leftists, seek to remove every vestige of our Judeo-Christian ethical traditiion from the public square. I can't begin to catalog all of their antics. But recently there was the Mojave cross incident. It is absurd that there has been any fight at all over it. The ACLU, whose radical lawyers brought the original law suit, deserve contempt and resolute opposition. Of course, I wholeheartedly endorse the initial clause of the First Amendment, to wit, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ." But it is hate-America leftist extremism on stilts to think that the presence of that very old memorial cross on a hill in the middle of nowhere does anything to establish Christianity as the state religion. I consider anyone who believes that to be intellectually obtuse and morally repellent. One has to be highly unbalanced in his thinking to torture such extremist nonsense out of the First Amendment, while missing the plain sense of the Second Amendment, one that even SCOTUS eventually got right, namely, the the right to keep and bear arms is an individual, not a collective, right.
And then there was the business of the tiny cross on the city seal of Los Angeles, a symbol that the ACLU agitated to have removed. Commentary here. I could continue with the examples, and you hope I won't.
3. Liberals tend to have low standards, glorify the worthless, and fail to present exemplary human types.
Our contemporary media dreckmeisters apparently think that the purpose of art is to degrade sensibility, impede critical thinking, glorify scumbags, and rub our noses ever deeper into sex and violence. It seems obvious that the liberal fetishization of freedom of expression without constraint or sense of responsibility is part of the problem. But I can't let a certain sort of libertarian or economic conservative off the hook. Their lust for profit is also involved.
What is is that characterizes contemporary media dreck? Among other things, the incessant presentation of defective human beings as if there are more of them than there are, and as if there is nothing at all wrong with their way of life. Deviant behavior is presented as if it is mainstream and acceptable, if not desirable. And then lame justifications are provided for the presentation: 'this is what life is like now; we are simply telling it like it is.' It doesn't occur to the dreckmeisters that art might have an ennobling function.
The tendency of liberals and leftists is to think that any presentation of choice-worthy goals or admirable
styles of life could only be hypocritical preaching. And to libs and lefties, nothing is worse than hypocrisy. Indeed, a good indicator of whether someone belongs to this class of the terminally benighted is whether the person obsesses over hypocrisy and thinks it the very worst thing in the world. See my category Hypocrisy for elaboration of this theme.
4. Liberals tend to deny or downplay free will, individual responsibility, and the reality of evil.
This is connected with point 2 above, leftist hostility to religion. Key to our Judeo-Christian tradition is the belief that man is made in the image and likeness of God. This image is that mysterious power in us called free will. The secular extremist assault on religion is at the same time an assault on this mysterious power, through which evil comes into the world.
This is a large topic. Suffice it to say for now that one clear indication of this denial is the bizarre liberal displacement of responsibility for crime onto inaminate objects, guns, as if the weapon, not the wielder, is the source of the evil for which the weapon can be only the instrument.
John Pepple on Guns
John Pepple has posted a number of interesting entries on guns. Here he writes,
. . . we are repeatedly told by multiculturalists that we must respect other cultures and that we must “understand” them, even if we find them repulsive. Yet, there is nothing about the current rage of progressives against gun lovers that suggests they respect gun culture or have any understanding of it, either in the ordinary sense of the word “understand” or in their sense, which means “accept.”
Good point, John, except that I would replace 'gun lovers' with 'gun owners.' I love my cats, not my guns. I respect my guns in the way I respect such other tools as chain saws and automobiles that, misused or carelessly used, can add to the stockpile of human misery. In my experience, most gun owners are like me in this regard.
Do Not Multiply Enemies Beyond Necessity
Suppose you value an old friend, a neighbor, a family member, a hiking companion, but differ with him or her on one or more points of ideology. As a general rule, one admitting of exceptions, I recommend assiduously avoiding the points of difference and cleaving to the uncontroversial. Do not multiply enemies beyond necessity! It is a sound conservative principle. We conservatives have no illusions about human nature or its improvability. People are what they are, and they do not and will not change. You cannot improve their thinking or their morals, not by much leastways, but you can make things worse by adding unnecessarily to the hostility in the world, hostility that can come back to bite you.
I once had a chess and hiking partner name of 'Bill.' We were two miles into the 9.1 mile Black Mesa Loop in the western Superstitions when he came out with a remark of such incomparable moral and intellectual obtuseness that my Italian blood began to boil. He said that a prenatal human being is "just tissue."
As someone who has thought deeply and rigorously about this topic (see Abortion category), I had at my command a full arsenal of responses. But I knew I would be wasting my time on the fellow. Only a very few are teachable. You can't make a piston out of ice.
So I said, "Bill, we have a long way to go in this unforgiving wilderness. In the interests of a pleasant hike, I suggest we not talk about this topic."
As so we had a good day, and parted friends.
Double Indemnity, 1944
I took a welcome break from the cable shout shows and the gun 'conversation' the other night to watch the 1944 film noir Double Indemnity, starring Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, and Edward G. Robinson. The Stanwyck character talks an insurance agent played by MacMurray into murdering her husband in order to collect on a double indemnity policy. The husband is strangled mafia-style, murderer in back seat, victim in front. But the act is not shown. The viewer is shown enough to 'get the picture.' These old films had sex and violence but one's nose wasn't rubbed in them. Sex and violence were part of the story line. If Bogie was shown taking the leading lady into a bedroom, one knew what was about to transpire, but one was spared the raw hydraulics of it.
But thanks to 'progressives' we've made 'progress.' Much of what passes as 'entertainment' today is meant to demean, dehumanize, degrade and undermine whatever moral sense is left in people. I leave it to you to decide whether Tucson, Aurora, Sandy Hook and like atrocities are more appropriately charged to the account of liberal culture rather than to that of gun culture.
Why Would Anyone Need a Semi-Automatic Rifle?
A sweet old lady in the pool the other morning asked me this question. Actually, she asked a much stupider question,"Why would anyone need an assault weapon?' I smiled indulgently and refused to engage her. I knew she wasn't baiting me, and I like her, and 'tis the season to be jolly, and so in the interests of comity I let it slide, realizing that no good would come of giving her the dialectical thrashing she so richly deserved.
First a point of history and a bit of terminology.
Fully automatic rifles, ‘machine guns,’ are heavily regulated. The National Firearms Act of 1934 " requires that before a private citizen may take possession of a fully-automatic firearm he must pay a $200 tax to the Internal Revenue Service and be approved by the Treasury Department to own the firearm, which is registered to the owner with the federal government." (reference) A semi-automatic pistol, rifle, or shotgun fires exactly one round with each pull of the trigger until the magazine is exhausted, unlike a fully automatic which does not require a separate trigger pull for each round fired. The distinction is important and is blurred by use of the emotive phrase 'assault weapon.'
Why would anybody need a semi-automatic rifle such as an AR-15? Well, you might be a Korean shopkeeper who needs to defend his life and livelihood from rampaging ghetto blacks in South Central Los Angeles. (Remember the aftermath of the acquittal of the cops who took the 'motorist' Rodney King into custody using perfectly legal and reasonable methods?) Or perhaps you live along the southern border and need to defend yourself and your family against heavily armed drug cartel members from the corrupt narco-state to the South. Your snub-nosed .38 special is a nice walk-around piece, and better than nothing, but insufficient for the defensive task at hand.
(A gun enthusiast acquaintance of mine referred to my Colt .38 Detective Special as a nice 'heirloom,' recommending that I get a 1911 model semi-auto .45, which I did.)
Any conservative can continue with answers like the above ad libitum, but the best strategy for a conservative is to reject the question altogether.
The right question is not: Why does the citizen need to be armed? The right question is: By what right does the government violate the liberty of the law-abiding citizen? Gun-ownership is a liberty issue similarly as taxation is a liberty issue. With respect to taxation, the right question is not: Why should citizens be allowed to keep their wealth? The right question is: What justifies the government in taking their wealth? The onus justificandi is not on the citizen to defend his keeping of his money; the onus justificandi is on the government to justify its taking of his money. The same goes for guns. The burden is on the government to justify its curtailment of individual liberties, not on the citizen to justify his keeping of his liberties. This is because governments exist for the sake of their citizens, and not the other way around.
You might think that liberals would understand all of this. Although liberals are absurdly sensitive about First Amendment rights, nary a peep will you hear from them concerning Second Amendment rights. And yet it is the Second Amendment that backs up the First. Chairman Mao was right about one thing, namely, that power emanates from the barrel of a gun. Power to the people!
There is a curious inconsistency here, is there not? If liberals believe that our civil liberties are under serious assault from Ashcroft & Co., and continue to be as Obama continues Bush-era policies, then why are they so unwilling to ensure that real power remain in the hands of the people?
There is something schizophrenic about contemporary liberals. They have a libertarian streak: they want to be able to spout any kind of nonsense, no matter how offensive and irresponsible, and have it protected as ‘dissent.’ Fair enough. Though I find Michael Moore contemptible, I would defend his right to pollute the air waves with his ideological flatulence. But when it comes to gun rights, liberals become as collectivist as Hitler or Fidel Castro. It’s curious, and a worthy theme of further rumination.
Passing Through
This great version of a great song is back on YouTube. Catch it while you can. The lineup is all-star: Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Buffy St. Marie, Joan Baez imitating Dylan, Ramblin' Jack Elliot.
Race Matters
For your holiday enjoyment:
Victor Davis Hanson, The New Racial Derangement Syndrome
John Derbyshire, White People are Pussies
When Guns are Used to Thwart Crimes . . .
. . . it is rarely news, and it is never big news, unless the liberal media can put a 'vigilante' spin on it. Remember Bernie Goetz. the NYC subway gunman? As I reported about a year ago:
Bernard Goetz, mild-mannered electronics nerd, looked like an easy mark, a slap job. And so he got slapped around, thrown through plate glass windows, mugged and harrassed. He just wanted to be left alone to tinker in his basement. One day he decided not to take it any more and acquired a .38 'equalizer.' And so the black punks who demanded money of him on the New York subway in December of 1984 paid a high price for their thuggishness to the delight of conservatives and the consternation of liberals. To the former he became a folk hero, to the latter a 'racist.' It was a huge story back then. One of the miscreants, James Ramseur, has been found dead of an apparent drug overdose.
Ramseur was freed from prison last year after serving 25 years for a rape, according to NBC NewYork.com. He was one of four black teens shot by Goetz on a train on Dec. 22, 1984, in a shooting that earned Goetz the nickname of "subway vigilante" by city newspapers.
Meanwhile Goetz, 64, flourishes and runs a store called "Vigilante Electronics." A
heart-warming story on this, the eve of Christmas Eve.
Now let us assume that you desire a balanced understanding of the gun issue. It seems to me that you would have to take into consideration the many cases in which guns are used to save lives, protect property and livelihoods, thwart rapes and muggings and massacres, etc. If you care to gain this balanced understanding, if, in other words, you are not a liberal, you can start here, and then go here, in both cases following out the hyperlinks.
Equality
Image borrowed from Political Correctness Watch.
"'Equality,' I spoke the word/As if a wedding vow/Ah, but I was so much older then/I'm younger than that now." Bob Dylan, My Back Pages.
Where would liberals be without their double standards?