Bobby Bare's 1963 Country and Western crossover hit features the lines, "By day I make the cars, by night I make the bars . . . ." But that was '63, around the time a series of Democrat mayors took control of the city. Since then there have been seven, five of them black, with nary a Republican, and now 50 years later the place is a disaster with the bars outnumbering the cars. Post hoc ergo propter hoc? I don't think so. Liberalism has destroyed the city in five ways as detailed here.
1. Unions crippled the auto industry.
2. Whites were demonized until they left.
3. Out-of-control crime helped drive much of the black middle class out of the city.
4. Reckless government spending bankrupted the city.
Mayor Bloomberg has been slapped down by the courts once again. So not all news is bad. Malcolm Pollack in "Sugar Daddy" gets it exactly right:
The issue here is personal responsibility. Implicit in this ban is the idea that it is the proper role of the State to intervene in the choices of its citizens when the citizens themselves cannot be trusted to choose wisely. But this is nothing more or less than the State assuming the relation of a parent to a child. If it is indeed the case that certain of our citizens are so incapable of adult judgment that they must be treated as children in this regard, then for consistency’s sake they ought to be assumed to be children in other respects as well, and declared wards of the State: incompetent to vote, to enter into contractual obligations, or to assume the other rights and privileges of adulthood. [. . .]
Say 'no' to the food fascists and oppose these nanny-stating nicompoops every chance you get. The liberty you save may be your own. You many not care about sugary sodas, but there may be something you do care about, peanuts, say. "When they came for the soda, I didn't care because I didn't drink the stuff; when they came for the red meat I did nothing, being a vegetarian . . . ." You know how the rest of it should go.
UPDATE: Chad M. points us to Christopher Hitchens' protest against Bloomi in I Fought the Law. The piece begins entertainingly with a couple of Sidney Morgenbesser anecdotes.
The intuitive puzzle is clear, and McGinn presents it with multilayered intensity. He is right that we can never hope to understand how consciousness as we know it in everyday life relates to the brain considered as a lump of matter. But it doesn't follow that consciousness is a mystery — except insofar as everything is. This move rests on a large assumption that is almost universally held, although it is certainly false.
This is the assumption that we have a pretty good understanding of the nature of matter — of matter in space — of the physical in general. It is only relative to this assumption that the existence of consciousness in a material world seems mystifying. For what exactly is puzzling about consciousness, once we put the assumption aside? We know just what it is like. Suppose you have an experience of redness, or pain, and consider it just as such. There doesn't seem to be any room for anything that could be called failure to understand what it is. You know what it is.
BV comments: Strawson is right about one thing: we know what consciousness is from our own case. We experience pains and pleasures, and so on. (And he is also right to avoid the eliminativism that tempts many.) But he misses the problem that McGinn so masterfully presents. It is is not consciousness as we experience it that is puzzling, but how consciousness arises from the gray matter in our skulls. We understand consciousness from the first-person point of view, and our physics gives us a very good understanding of matter from the third-person point of view. What we don't understand is how matter can be conscious.
It is not consciousness that is puzzling, then, but matter. What the existence of consciousness shows is that we have a profoundly inadequate grasp on the nature of matter. McGinn agrees with this last point, in fact: with considerable speculative panache, he develops the idea that there must be something deficient in our idea of space, as well as in our idea of matter. But he still wants to stress the mysteriousness of consciousness; to which the reply, once again, is that we find consciousness mysterious only because we have a bad picture of matter.
BV: Strawson is not making sense. There is nothing particularly puzzling about consciousness, and, contrary to what he says, there is nothing particularly puzzling about brains. What is puzzling is how a brain can be conscious. He doesn't seem to grasp the problem. Besides, how can the existence of consciousness show that we have an inadequate grasp of matter? What does that even mean?
Can anything be done? I think physics can help, by undermining features of our picture of matter that make it appear so totally different from consciousness. The first step is very simple: to begin with, perhaps, one takes it that matter is simply solid stuff, uniform, non-particulate (the ultimate Norwegian cheese). Then one learns that it is composed of distinct atoms — solid particles that cohere closely together to make up objects, but that have empty space (roughly speaking) between them. Then one learns that these atoms are themselves made up of tiny, separate particles, and full of empty space themselves. One learns that matter is not at all what one thought.
Now one may accept this while retaining the idea that matter is at root solid, dense lumpen stuff, utterly different from consciousness. For so far this picture preserves the idea that there are true particles of matter: tiny grainy bits of ultimate stuff that are in themselves truly solid. And one may say that only these, strictly speaking, are matter — matter as such. But it's been a long time since the 18th-century philosopher-chemist Joseph Priestley pointed out that there are no scientific grounds for supposing that the fundamental constituents of matter have any truly solid central part, and the picture of grainy, inert particles has effectively disappeared in the strangenesses of modern quantum theory and superstring theory.
Current physics, then, thinks of matter as a thing of forces, energy, fields. And it can also seem natural to think of consciousness as a form or manifestation of energy, as a kind of force, and even, perhaps, as a kind of field. You may still feel the two things are deeply heterogeneous, but you really have no good reason to believe this. You just don't know enough about matter. When McGinn speaks of the ''squishy'' brain, he vividly expresses part of our ordinary idea of matter. But when physics inspects the volume of space-time occupied by a brain, what does it find? It finds a vibrant play of energy, an astonishingly insubstantial, radiant form.
All this being so, do we have any good reason to think that we know anything about the physical that legitimates surprise at the thought that consciousness is itself wholly physical? We do not. And that is the first, crucial step that one must take when facing up to the problem of consciousness.
BV: Strawson is maintaining that the sense of the utter heterogeneity of matter and consciousness arises from an inadequate conception of matter, and that if we had an adequate conception the sense of heterogeneity would dissipate. We would then understand consciousness to be a purely material phenomenon. Now it is true that our concept of matter is pegged to the state of physics, and also true that we now have a more adequate conception of matter than we had in earlier centuries. Well, suppose the volume of space-time occupied by a brain is filled with "a vibrant play of energy, an astonishingly insubstantial, radiant form," as Strawson lyrically puts it. The problem remains: how does brain matter so conceived give rise to consciousness, not to mention thought? The problem remains on any extant conception of matter, no matter how "insubstantial." Strawson is fooling himself if he thinks that the problem arises only on the assumption that matter is the 'ultimate Norwegian cheese."
Strawson is doing nothing more than giving expression to his faith and hope that someday physics will have advanced to the point where it will become intelligible how the brain matter in animals of our complexity can be conscious. But he has no idea of what the solution will look like. He is gesturing hopefully in the direction of he-knows-not-what. Both he and McGinn are naturalists. But he is an optimist where McGinn is a pessimist. Strawson pins his hopes on future physics. McGinn has no such faith or hope. His view is that the matter-consciousness problem has a solution but it is one our cognitive architecture prevents us from ever knowing.
Both philosophers are naturalists who maintain that there is nothing non-natural or supernatural about consciousness. I am not a naturalist. But if I were I would say that McGinn's position is the more reasonable of the two. What best explains the intractability, hitherto, of the problems in the philosophy of mind? Our lack of understanding of physics, or something about our cogntive architecture that makes it impossible for us to grasp the solution? I'd put my money on the latter.
When I reported to Peter Lupu over Sunday breakfast that Hugh McCann denies that natural causation is existence-conferring, he demanded to know McCann's reasons. He has three. I'll discuss one of them in this post, the third one McCann mentions. (Creation and the Sovereignty of God, p. 18)
The reason is essentially Humean. Rather than quote McCann, I'll put the matter in my own rather more detailed way.
But first I should limn the broader context. McCann's God is not a mere cosmic starter-upper. He keeps the universe in existence moment to moment after its beginning to exist — assuming it has a beginning — such that, were God to cease his creative sustenance, the universe would vanish. On such a scheme, God is needed to explain the universe and its continuance in existence even if it always existed. But now suppose natural causation is existence-conferring and the universe always existed. Then the naturalist might argue as follows: (i) the universe is just the sum-total of its states; (ii) each state is caused to exist by earlier states; (iii) there is no first state; ergo (iv) every state has an immanent causal explanation in terms of earlier states; (v) if every state has an explanation of its existence in terms of earlier states, then the universe has an immanent, naturalistic explanation of its existence; ergo, (vi) there is no need for a God to explain why the universe exists, and (vii) if there were a God of McCann's stripe, then the existence of the universe would be causally overdetermined.
The above reasoning rests on the assumption that natural causation is existence-conferring. This is why McCann needs to show that natural causation is not existence-conferring. Here is one reason, a Humean reason.
One monsoon season I observed a lightning bolt hit a palm tree which then exploded into flame. A paradigm case of event causation. Call the one event token Strike and the other Ignition. One would naturally say that Strike caused Ignition. To say such a thing is to refer to the salient cause without denyng the contribution of such necessary causal conditions as the presence of atmospheric oxygen.
But what exactly did I observe? Did I observe, literally observe, an instance of causation? Not clear! What is clear is that that I observed two spatiotemporally contiguous events. I also observed that Strike occurred slightly earlier than Ignition. Thus I observed the temporal precedence of the cause over the effect. But I did not observe the production (the bringing-into-existence) of the effect by the cause. Thus I did not observe the cause conferring existence on the effect. Strike and Ignition were nearby in space and time and Ignition followed Strike. That I literally saw. But I did not literally see any producing or causing-to-exist. What I actually saw was consistent with there being no causal production of the effect by the cause. Admittedly, it was also consistent with there being unobservable causal production.
The point is that conferral of existence by natural causation is not empirically detectable. One cannot see it, or hear it, etc. Nor is there any such instrument as a causation-detector that one could use to detect what one's gross outer senses cannot detect.
Nothing changes if we add the third Humean condition, constant conjunction. Some event sequences are causal and some are not. How do we distinguish the causal from the noncausal? Since we cannot empirically detect existence-conferral, we cannot say that causal event sequences are those that involve existence-conferral. So the Humean invokes constant conjunction: in terms of our example, whenever an event of the Strike-type occurs it is spatiotemporally contiguously followed by an event of the Ignition type. Accordingly, there is nothing more to causation on this empiricist approach than regular succession. A causal event sequence is one that instantiates a regularity. What makes a causal sequence causal is just its instantiation of a regularity. But then, causation is not the bringing into existence of one event by another. The two events are what Hume calls "distinct existences." The events are out there in the world. But the causal link is not out there in the world, or rather, it is not empirically detectable.
I hope my friend Peter will agree to at least the following: if we adopt a regularity theory of causation, then natural causation is not existence-conferring. The regularity theory can be stated as follows:
RT. x (directly) causes y =df (i) x and y are spatiotemporally contiguous; (ii) x occurs earlier than y; (iii) x and y are subsumed under event types X and Y that are related by the de facto empirical generalization that all events of type X are followed by events of type Y.
If this is what causation is, it is is not existentially productive: the cause does not produce, bring about, bring into existence the effect. On the contrary, the holding of the causal relation presupposes the existence of the cause-event and the effect-event. It follows that causation as understood on (RT) merely orders already existent events and cannot account for the very existence of these events. Since Peter is a B-theorist about time, he should be comfortable with the notion that the universe is a four-dimensional space-time manifold the states or events of which are all tenselessly existent logically in advance of any ordering by whatever the exact relation is that is the causal relation.
Peter should tell me whether he accepts this much.
Of course, the naturalist needn't be a Humean about causation. But then the naturalist ought to tell us what theory of causation he accepts and how it can be pressed into service to explain the very existence of events. My challenge to Peter: describe a theory of natural causation on which the cause event confers existence on the effect event, as opposed to merely ordering already existent events. Nomological and counterfactual theories won't fill the bill (or satisfy the Bill.)
Here is another little puzzle for Peter to ruminate over. Causation is presumably a relation. But a relation cannot obtain unless all its relata exist. So if x directly causes y, and causation is a relation, then both x and y exist. But then x in causing y does not confer existence on y. To the contrary, the obtaining of the causal relation presupposes the logically antecedent existence of y.
This little conundrum works with any theory of causation (regularity, nomological, counterfactual, etc.) so long as it is assumed that causation is a relation and that no relation can hold or obtain unless all its relata exist. For example, suppose you say that x causes y iff had x not occurred, then y would not have occurred. That presupposes the existence of both relata, ergo, etc.
For details and a much more rigorous development, see my article "The Hume-Edwards Objection to the Cosmological Argument," Journal of Philosophical Research, vol. XXII, 1997, pp. 425-443, and the second article below.
I saw the movie Hannah Arendt this afternoon. I thought it well worth my time despite the bad reviews it received. Critics complained about the clunky portrayal of New York intellectuals and the hagiographic depiction of Arendt, but those faults and others escaped me immersed as I was in the ideas. The movie is about Arendt's coverage for The New Yorker of the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and the bitter controversy that erupted among the magazine's readership upon the publication of an article series by Arendt on the trial.
"No man speaketh safely but he that is glad to hold his peace. " (Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Chapter XX.)
Excellent advice for Christian and non-Christian alike. Much misery and misfortune can be avoided by simply keeping one's mouth shut. That playful banter with your female student that you could not resist indulging in – she construed it as sexual harrassment. You were sitting on top of the world, but now you are in a world of trouble. In this Age of Political Correctness examples are legion. To be on the safe side, a good rule of thumb is: If your speech can be misconstrued, it will be. Did you really need to make that comment, or fire off that e-mail, or send that picture of your marvellous nether endowment to a woman not your wife?
Part of the problem is Political Correctness, but another part is that people are not brought up to exercise self-control in thought, word, and deed. Both problems can be plausibly blamed on liberals. Paradoxically enough, the contemporary liberal promotes speech codes and taboos while at the same time promoting an absurd tolerance of every sort of bad behavior. The liberal 'educator' dare not tell the black kid to pull his pants up lest he be accused of a racist 'dissing' of the punk's 'culture.'
You need to give your children moral lessons and send them to schools where they will receive them. My mind drifts back to the fourth or fifth grade and the time a nun planted an image in my mind that remains. She likened the tongue to a sword capable of great damage, positioned behind two 'gates,' the teeth and the lips. Those gates are there for a reason, she explained, and the sword should come out only when it can be well deployed.
The good nun did not extend the image to the sword of flesh hanging between a man's legs. But I will. Keep your 'sword' behind the 'gates' of your pants and your undershorts until such time as it can be brought out for a good purpose.
Many of the questions that philosophers ask have the form, What is (the nature of) X? What is knowledge? What is consciousness? What is the self? What is free will? What is causation? What are properties? What is motion? Time? Existence? . . .
These are typical philosophical questions that arise from what appear to be plain facts: we know some things but not others; we are sometimes conscious; one's uses of the first-person singular pronoun refer to something; things exist and some of these things move and they couldn't move if there weren't time, and some of the moving things causes changes in other things, and there couldn't be change unless things had different properties at different times . . . . And so on.
Now it is notorious that philosophers disagree about the answers to these questions. For example, some say that propositional knowledge is justified true belief, which implies that knowledge includes belief, while others maintain that knowledge excludes belief: if a person knows that p, then he does not believe that p. Still others maintain that knowledge is consistent with disbelief: some of the things people know are not believed by them. All three positions have been represented by competent practitioners. But the contending parties, while agreeing that there is propositional knowledge, cannot agree on what it is.
Or consider causation. Philosophers who agree that some of the event sequences in the world are causal and even agree on what causes what, cannot agree on what causation is: there are regularity theories, transfer theories, counterfactual theoris, nomological theories and others.
But you haven't fathomed the depth of philosophical disagreement until you appreciate that the disagreement goes far deeper than perennial disagreement about the answers to questions like the foregoing. For questions of the form What is the nature of X? typically presuppose the existence of X. When one asks what properties are one typically presupposes that there are some. For example, what motivates my question about properties might be my encounter with the blueness of my coffee cup. One cannot ask what causation is unless one has encountered instances of it. And it is spectacularly obvious that if nothing existed, then there would be nothing to ask about and no one to ask the question, What is existence?
The truly awful and abysmal depth of philosophical disagreement is first descried when you appreciate that philosophers sometimes disagree about the very existence of what they ask about.
To the outsider it might appear that certain of these denials are unserious or sophistical or just plain crazy. Perhaps some of them are. But others are motivated and argued. Some philosophers, for example, deny that there are selves. They have arguments. Here is one: (i) Only that which can be singled out in experience can be rightly said to exist; (ii) the self cannot be singled out in experience; ergo, etc. I don't buy the argument, but it has some plausibility, and some philosophers swear by it, philosophers who are neither unserious nor sophistical nor crazy.
Here is another eliminativist argument that convinces some competent practioners:
1. If beliefs are anything, then they are brain states;
2. Beliefs exhibit original intentionality;
3. No physical state, and thus no brain state, exhibits original intentionality;
Therefore
4. There are no beliefs.
I reject this argument by rejecting (1). I would run the argument in reverse, arguing from the negation of (4) to the negation of (1) via (2) and (3). But that's not my present point. My point is to illustrate the depth of philosophical disagreement.
If you deny that there is consciousness, then I will show you the door: you are either stupid or unserious or a sophist or crazy or something equally distasteful. For consciousness is immediately given. You experience consciousness by feeling pain or seeing red. But if you deny that there are beliefs, I will be more respectful. I occurrently believe that my wife is now at a movie. But is the belief-state (which is distinct from its content) an introspectible item, a phenomenological datum, in the way a sensory quale is? No. Do I introspect my self as in the state of belief? No: the self does not appear to introspection, hence it does not appear in this state or that. What appears phenomenologically is only the content: that my wife is at the movies. One goes beyond the given if one maintains that beliefs are mental states. (For details, see An Argument for Mental Acts)
So the eliminativist about beliefs as mental states cannot be as easily given the boot as the consciousness denier.
My present theme is the misery of philosophy. As one my aphorisms has it, "Philosophy is magnificent in aspiration, but miserable in execution." The magnificence, however, cannot be denied. For our sinking into the abyss of interminable disagreement is the night side of our noble quest for the light of truth, a light that philosophy strives after, but apparently cannot attain by its own efforts.
J. J. Cale has died at the age of 74. Better known to musicians than to the general public, Cale was the writer behind such songs as Eric Clapton's After Midnight and Lynyrd Synyrd's Call Me the Breeze. Here he is on Mama Don't.
The summer of 1963 — 50 years ago! — featured an amazing number of great tunes in several different genres. Here is a sample from the Billboard Top 100.
Those were just some of the songs from that summer of '63, the summer before the JFK assassination. It was a hopeful time, race relations were on the mend. But then everything fell apart and here we are 50 years later in the midst of serious national decline with a incompetent race-baiting leftist occupying the White House.
Would you please start a series of posts akin to the "Saturday Night at the Oldies" except about books? A few books presented every week, each with a one sentence description, from as wide a thematic range as possible — fiction, history, philosophy, biography and others. I would profit from it immensely, as would many others.
An excellent idea. So, in keeping with my masthead motto "Study everything," here are (some of) my recent reads. Disclaimer: Much of what follows are quick bloggity-blog remarks scribbled mainly for my own use. They are not intended as balanced reviews.
1. Hugh J. McCann, Creation and the Sovereignty of God (Indiana University Press, 2012).
I am finishing a review article about this book for American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. Three sentences from the introduction: "Hugh McCann is an old pro in action theory and the philosophy of religion whose expertise is well-displayed in the eleven chapters of his magisterial Creation and the Sovereignty of God. [. . .] McCann’s central conviction is that God is absolutely sovereign, so much so that God is not only sovereign over the natural order, but also over the moral order, the conceptual order, and the divine nature itself. [. . .] The book can be summed up by saying that it is a detailed elaboration in all major areas of the consequences of the idea that God is absolutely sovereign and thus unlimited in knowledge and power.
2. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow's Heart: A Son's Memoir (Bloomsbury 2013). Held my attention to the end. A son comes to grips with his relation to his famous conservative father. I found the son's uncritical liberalism annoying in places.
3. Colin McGinn, Problems in Philosophy: The Limits of Inquiry (Blackwell, 1993). One-sentence summary: The central problems of philosophy have naturalistic solutions, but we are prevented by our cognitive architecture from ever knowing them. Here is Peter van Inwagen's review. (A tip of the hat to sometime MavPhil commenter, Andrew Bailey, for making PvI materals available online.)
4. Marcia Clark (with Teresa Carpenter), Without a Doubt (Viking, 1997). Marcia Clark was the lead prosecutor in the ill-starred O.J. Simpson trial. Simpson was accused of first-degree murder in the brutal deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, but acquitted. Clark's side of the story. I'm at p. 159 of 486 pp.
5. Dominick Dunne, Another City, Not My Own: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir (Crown, 1997). Another book about the Trial of the Century as Dunne calls it (the Simpson murder trial) by the late novelist, socialite, reporter, and gossip. Aficionados of that vast, sprawling monstrosity know as the City of the Angels will find this and the previous title of interest. I'm from there, so that helps explain my interest.
6. Aurel Kolnai (1900-1973), Ethics, Value, and Reality: Selected Papers of Aurel Kolnai (Hackett, 1978). I thank my young friend Kid Nemesis for bringing Kolnai's work to my attention. One of the ten papers collected here is Kolnai's seminal "Forgiveness" (orig. in Proc. Arist. Soc. 1973-74). David Wiggins and Bernard Williams co-author a useful introduction to Kolnai's life and work.
7. Josef Pieper, Hope and History: Five Salzburg Lectures, tr. D. Kipp (Ignatius, 1994, orig. publ. as Hoffnung und Geschichte by Koesel-Verlag in 1967). The German Thomist meditates on hope with the help of Kant, Teilhard de Chardin, Franz Kafka, and the Marxist Ernst Bloch. Pieper very politely criticizes Bloch's Marxist idiocies which cumlinate in the simultaneously outrageous and hilarious Ubi Lenin, ibi Jerusalem!
8. Ralph C. Wood, Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Eerdman's 2004). A study of themes from the work of a Catholic novelist in the fundamentalist South.
9. Daniel C. Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (W. W. Norton 2013). Is Dennett a philosopher or a pseudo-philosopher? He is undoubtedly brilliant, as brilliant as he is sophistical, snarky, and unserious. I find the man and his works repellent. But Colin McGinn, atheist, naturalist, and apparently also a liberal, I find simpatico. McGinn is a real philosopher! You want to know my criteria? Some other time. My Dennett drubbings are here.
Correction. Monterey Tom correctly points out that " the title 'Trial of the Century' should go either to the Hiss Case or the Rosenberg case, both of which had social and political ramifications far beyond the mere sensationalism of the Simpson fiasco. The only reason why so few college graduates, even graduate students specializing in national security affairs, are familiar with the Hiss and Rosenberg cases is that both trials disprove one of the essential tenets of PC, namely that there never were any Communists in the first place. Of course, only a system as twisted as PC could require people to believe at the same time that while there never were any Communists they were good people."
Why not, given the incorrigible stupidity of reactionary liberals? Krauthammer:
But Detroit is an object lesson not just for other cities. Not even the almighty federal government is immune to Stein’s Law. Reactionary liberalism simply cannot countenance serious reform of the iconic social welfare programs of the 20th century. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are pledged to their inviolability. President Obama will occasionally admit that, for example, Medicare cannot go on as is, but then reverts to crude demagoguery when Republicans propose a structural reform, such as premium support for Medicare or something as obvious as raising the retirement age to match increasing longevity.
On the contrary. Obama added one enormous new entitlement (Obamacare) and, in his last State of the Union address, proposed yet another (universal preschool).
Another old post from my first weblog, written 16 August 2004. I'd best capture these old posts before Google pulls the plug.
………………
My tendency as a conservative is to see moral equivalence between Communism and National Socialism. This equivalentism is reflected in my occasionally calling Communists ‘Commies.’ This offends some, but if National Socialists may be called ‘Nazis,’ then fair play would demand that Communists may be called ‘Commies.’ Note also that if one calls National Socialists ‘Nazis,’ one obscures the fact that they are socialists – which is precisely something they have in common with Communists. Both systems are totalitarian and tend to dissolve the individual into the social whole. And both systems confuse this dissolution with salvation. Genuine salvation, however, is salvation of the individual in his unique individuality, not salvation from the individual by dissolution into the collective.
Slavoj Zizek, who is most decidely on the Left, denies the moral equivalence of the two movements. In On Belief (Routledge 2001, p. 39), we read:
…the Communist project was one of common brotherhood and welfare, while the Nazi project was one of domination. So when Heidegger alluded to the ‘inner greatness’ of Nazism betrayed by the Nazi ideological peddlers, he attributed to Nazism something that effectively holds only for Communism: Communism has an ‘inner greatness,’ an explosive liberatory potential, while Nazism was perverted through and through, in its very notion: it is simply ridiculous to conceive of the Holocaust as a kind of tragic perversion of the noble Nazi project – its project WAS the holocaust.
The obvious response to this is that there is no difference that makes a moral difference between a movement that calls for genocide –- the extermination of Jews and non-Aryans generally –- and a movement that calls for ‘classicide,’ the extermination of an entire class of people, the bourgeoisie. Extermination is extermination: you are equally dead if you are murdered for belonging to an ethnic group or to a socioeconomic class. Contra Zizek, the Communist project was not one of “common brotherhood” but of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” – a notion that expresses a desire for domination just as surely as Nazi racism does. It is certainly clear that in practice Communism did not promote “common brotherhood” – unless you think that brotherhood is compatible with the murder of 100 million people. (This is the standard figure given for the number of those murdered by Communists in the 20th century. See The Black Book of Communism.) But my main point is that, regardless of practice, Communist theory does not aim at “common brotherhood,” but at the extermination of all who oppose Communist ideas. There is nothing liberal – in the classical sense –about Communism: they will not tolerate a diversity of views, but send you to a gulag for ‘re-education’ – or liquidation.
Zizek is aware of something like this objection and addresses it in an endnote which I reproduce verbatim:
So what about the ‘revisionist’ argument according to which the Nazi elimination of the racial enemy was just the repetitive displacement on the racial axis of the Soviet Communist elimination of the class enemy? Even if true, the dimension of displacement is crucial, not just a secondary negligible feature: it stands for the shift from the SOCIAL struggle, the admission of the inherently antagonistic character of social life, to the extermination of the NATURALIZED enemy which, from outside, penetrates and threatens the social organism.” (On Belief, p.154, n.34)
Slicing through the obfuscatory Continental verbiage, we may take Zizek to be saying that the moral difference between Commies and Nazis is that the former see the fundamental struggle as a class struggle within society, while the latter see it as a struggle between society and an external natural threat. But this does nothing to show the moral superiority of Commies to Nazis; all it does is reiterate a well-known non-moral difference between the two. Explaining how the two totalitarian systems differ does nothing to show that one is morally superior to the other.
The plain truth of the matter is that both totalitarian systems are morally reprehensible. That they are reprehensible in different ways and by different methods is entirely consistent with their moral equivalence. Zizek is committing the elementary mistake of inferring a normative difference from a non-normative one. But our Continental brethren are not known for their clarity of mind.
It is difficult to get lefties to appreciate the moral equivalence of the two totalitarian movements because there is a tendency to think that the Commies had good intentions, while the Nazis did not. But this is false: both had good intentions. Both wanted to build a better world by eliminating the evil elements that made progress impossible. Both thought they had located the root of evil, and that the eradication of this root would usher in a perfect world. It is just that they located the root of evil in different places. Nazis really believed that Judentum ist Verbrechertum, as one of their slogans had it, that Jewry is criminality. They saw the extermination of Jews and other Untermenschen as an awful, but necessary, task on the road to a better world. Similarly with the Commie extermination of class enemies.
This may well be the best column Victor Davis Hanson has written. He meticulously documents the widespread lying, prevarication, and other offenses against truth among our elites, offers a diagnosis, and then addresses the question, Why not lie? Here is his beautiful answer:
I end with three reasons to tell the truth. The majority has to tell the truth — to the IRS, to the police, to the DA, to the census — if a consensual society is to work. You readers tell the truth so that the society can survive an Eric Holder or Mike Barnicle. Average people must speak honestly or our elites’ lies will overwhelm, even destroy us. If 100 million tell the IRS lies during audits or take the 5th Amendment, our voluntary tax system collapses. We can take only so many Lois Lerners.
Two, this often sordid, sometimes beautiful world is not the end. There is transcendence. Lies damage our soul. Selling out in the here and now has consequences later on. If you are religious, your immortal soul is lost. If you are not, at least consider that your legacy, heritage, and remembrance are forever ruined. Ask the ghost of Stephen Ambrose. What good was all that money, all those interviews if based on a lie? All the insight and delight that he brought millions of readers was tarnished. And for what, exactly?
Third, we must strive to be tragic heroes, perhaps not as dramatic as Ajax, not as cool as Shane. Would you rather have been Ethan Edwards or Will Kane or have run Lehman Brothers in 2008? Sometimes, in less dramatic fashion, the choices are that Manichean.
We must try to tell the truth, not doctor films, edit tapes, erase talking points, or lie before Congress, fabricate heroic war records, or invent false sources. Again, why? Because we seek to do the right thing with the full resignation that in the here and now we will often still lose and will lose often and gladly telling the truth.
“We always lose,” says Chris at the end of the The Magnificent Seven after he did the right thing. Or to paraphrase the cinematic T.E. Lawrence about Auda Abu Tayi, we will not lie, as do our elites, because it is simply “our pleasure”[32] not to.
The second reason is the best, though I would add that legacy counts for little: the vast majority of us will be forgotten and our works with us. We will be lucky to end up footnotes in unread archives, archives themselves slated for eventual deletion. This world is a vanishing quantity and we who for a time strut its stage even more so.
Care of the soul is the solid reason to love and honor truth.
