The Black Notebooks have ignited a controversy with repercussions far beyond the Black Forest. Here are three links for those who read German (HT: Kai Frederik Lorentzen):
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/streit-um-heidegger-lehrstuhl-martin-edmund-13452086.html
http://www.badische-zeitung.de/literatur-und-vortraege/heidegger-lehrstuhl-perdu--101142616.html
http://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/die-austreibung-des-geistes-1.18496785
It's a movie I haven't seen. I have no strong desire see it. I understand the principle; why do I need to rub my nose in the details? I know what a sniper is and I know what he does. It is an awful world in which snipers are needed, but they are, and they do a job that few of us could do. Could you put a high-powered round through the head of a child who was about to be sent on a suicide mission? I am not referring primarily to the mechanics of getting off a good clean shot that hits its target from a great distance after you have been lying in the weeds for hours in a war zone. I am talking about bearing the psychological burden.
There are two extremes to avoid: the bellicose jingoism of the my-country-right-or-wrong types and the knee-jerk, hate-America mentality of moral equivalentists and blame-America-firsters. If the brunt of my scorn in these pages is aimed at the latter, it is because they are in the ascendancy and need it more.Think of it as akin to a quasi-Kierkegaardian 'corrective' to quasi-Hegelian excesses.
. . . do you also think that all political ideologies are equal? Equal, say, in their conduciveness to human flourishing?
At least one lefty gets religion.
Actually, the preceding sentence is ambiguous. The thought is that at least one leftist understands that religion has far deeper roots in human nature than a typical leftist analysis can expose, let alone eradicate. The following quotation borrowed from the weblog of Keith Burgess-Jackson:
The left has always had difficulty recognizing the power of religion. Aren’t all religions the ideological tools of the ruling class? And aren’t all millenialist and messianic uprisings the ideologically distorted response of subaltern groups to material oppression? Religious zealotry is a superstructural phenomenon and can only be explained by reference to the economic base. These ancient convictions are particularly obfuscating today. Parvez Ahmed, a Florida professor who is fully cognizant of the “scourge” of Boko Haram, provides a typical example in a recent blog [sic]. He argues that “much of the violence [committed] in the name of Islam is less motivated by faith and more so by poverty and desperation.” Similarly, Kathleen Cavanaugh from the National University of Ireland, writing on the Dissent website, insists that “the violent and oppressive actions [of ISIS] have little to do with religion per se,” but rather are “underpinned” by material interests. But is this right? Why don’t poverty, desperation, and material interests produce a leftist rather than an Islamist mobilization? In fact, the religious revival, not only among Muslims but around the world, among Jews and Christians, Hindus and Buddhists, has enlisted supporters from all social classes, and the driving motive of revivalist activity seems, incredibly, to be religious faith (Fawaz Gerges’s Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy provides ample evidence of religion’s power).
(Michael Walzer, "Islamism and the Left," Dissent 62 [winter 2015]: 107-17, at 112-3 [brackets in original])
Although Walzer has a better understanding of human nature than most lefties, he betrays his residual leftism by his use of 'incredibly' in the last sentence above.
Why is it "incredible" that people should have religious faith? Only a benighted leftist, soulless and superficial all the way down, bereft of understanding of human nature, could think that human beings could be satisfied by a merely material life. Religion answers to real needs of real people, the need for meaning, for example. Some meaning can be supplied by non-exploitative, mutually beneficial social interaction. But not ultimate meaning, meaning in the face of death. To put it cryptically, an "existing individual" (Kierkegaard) standing alone before God and eternity is no Marxian Gattungswesen.
Whether any religion can supply ultimate needs for sense and purpose and transcendence is of course a very different question. Suppose that no religion can. It would be a mistake to conclude that the needs are not real. It would be even more of a mistake to conclude that something as paltry as the utopias envisaged by Marxists could satisfy religious needs. Supplying everyone with a overabundance of natural goodies will never sate the human spirit. But it takes spirit to understand this point.
Leftists, and atheists generally, typically have a cartoon-like (mis)understanding of religion.
No higher religion is about providing natural goodies by supernatural means, goodies that cannot be had by natural means. Talk of pie-in-the-sky is but a cartoonish misrepresentation by those materialists who can only think in material terms and only believe in what they can hold in their hands. A religion such as Christianity promises a way out of the unsatisfactory predicament in which we find ourselves in this life. What makes our situation unsatisfactory is not merely our physical and mental weakness and the shortness of our lives. It is primarily our moral defects that make our lives in this world miserable. We lie and slander, steal and cheat, rape and murder. We are ungrateful for what we have and filled with inordinate desire for what we don't have and wouldn't satisfy us even if we had it. We are avaricious, gluttonous, proud, boastful and self-deceived. It is not just that our wills are weak; our wills are perverse. It is not just that our hearts are cold; our hearts are foul. You say none of this applies to you? Very well, you will end up the victim of those to whom these predicates do apply. And then your misery will be, not the misery of the evil-doer, but the misery of the victim and the slave. You may find yourself forlorn and forsaken in a concentration camp. Suffering you can bear, but not meaningless suffering, not injustice and absurdity.
Whether or not the higher religions can deliver what they promise, what they promise first and foremost is deliverance from ignorance and delusion, salvation from meaninglessness and moral evil. No physical technology and no socio-political restructuring can do what religion tries to do. Suppose a technology is developed that actually reverses the processes of aging and keeps us all alive indefinitely. This is pure fantasy, of course, given the manifold contingencies of the world (nuclear and biological warfare, terrorism, natural disasters, etc.); but just suppose. Our spiritual and moral predicament would remain as deeply fouled-up as it has always been and religion would remain in business.
It helps to study history. The Communists slaughtered 100 million 'cows' in the 20th century alone. But where's the beef?
It could be like this. All religions are false; none can deliver what they promise. Naturalism is true: reality is exhausted by the space-time system. You are not unreasonable if you believe this. But I say you are unreasonable if you think that technologies derived from the sciences of nature can deliver what religions have promised, or any socio-political re-arrangement can.
As long as there are human beings there will be religion. The only way I can imagine religion withering away is if humanity allows itself to be gradually replaced by soulless robots. But in that case it will not be that the promises of religion are fulfilled by science; it would be that no one would be around having religious needs.
If Islam is the religion of peace, is it also the religion of archeological conservation? An indication to the contrary. And not the first!
Whatever we are here for, if anything, we are not here to pile up loot. Unfortunately, our predicament is such that we cannot even agree about this!
Yes, the ones in Israel.
In soul-trying times, 'lead' joins gold as a precious metal.
……………………………………..
Addendum on the Art of the Aphorism. Elliot comments,
Your aphorism sparked my thinking. After reading the aphorism, it occurred to me that there are at least two interpretations: one material and one spiritual.
The material interpretation is that 'lead' refers to the metal, symbol Pb, atomic number 82, which can be used to make bullets. This point may be why the aphorism is categorized in the ATF section. The spiritual interpretation is that 'lead' refers to the verb 'to lead' or 'to be led'. In soul-trying times, the presence of wise guidance to lead (or to be led by wise guidance) is more precious than gold. Images of leading out and being led out of Plato's Cave came to mind. Proverbs 8:10-11 and 16:16 came to mind as well. Both passages put wisdom and instruction above precious metals.
It's a wonderful aphorism!
Elliot's comment, for which I am grateful, shows that there is more to an aphorism than what the writer intends. There is also what the reader takes away from it.
The material interpretation is what I had in mind. Lead is not a precious metal. But lead is the stuff of bullets, and bullets — or rather the rounds of which bullets are the projectiles – are precious as means for the defense of the Lockean triad of life, liberty, and property, including gold. So while lead is not a precious metal, 'lead' is precious.
'Soul-trying times' is a compressed way of bringing the reader to recall Thomas Paine: "These are the times that try men's souls." So my first version went like this:
In these times that try men's souls, 'lead' joins gold as a precious metal.
But I changed it for three reasons. First, briefer is better when it comes to aphorisms. Second, the revision is less of a cliché. Third, while I insist on the propriety of standard English, I was not this morning in the mood to distract or offend my distaff readers, all five of them.
Is the final version a good aphorism? Logically prior question: is it an aphorism at all? Just what is an aphorism? R. J. Hollingdale:
In its pure and perfect form the aphorism is distinguished by four qualities occurring together: it is brief, it is isolated, it is witty, and it is 'philosophical.' This last quality marks it off from the epigram, which is essentially no more than a witty observation; the third, which it shares with the epigram, marks it off from the proverb or maxim . . . (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, p. x)
My effort is brief, and it is isolated. It is isolated in that it stands alone. But I don't take this to imply that an aphorism may consist of only one sentence. It may consist of two or more. But at some point it becomes what I call an 'observation.' Hence my category, Aphorisms and Observations. Another aspect of isolation is that an aphorism to be such must be bare of argumentative support. No aphorism can be split into premise(s) and conclusion. One does not argue in an aphorism; one states.
"What about Descartes' cogito?" If cogito ergo sum is an enthymematic argument, then it is not an aphorism.
I also take isolation to imply that an aphorism, in the strict sense, cannot be a sentence taken from a wider context and set apart. In a wider context that I don't feel like hunting down at the moment, Schopenhauer writes, brilliantly,
Das Leben ist ein Geschaeft das seine Kosten nicht deckt.
Life is a business that doesn't cover its costs.
That is not an aphorism by my strict definition. For it lacks isolation in my strict sense of 'isolation.'
Is my effort witty and 'philosophical'? It is witty and therefore not a proverb or maxim. These are competing proverbs, not competing aphorisms:
Haste makes waste.
He who hesitates is lost.
Is it 'philosophical'? Yes, inasmuch as it is more than merely witty for reasons that I think are obvious. It is not an epigram.
So my effort is an aphorism. But is it a good aphorism? It is pretty good, though not as good as this gem from the pen of Henry David Thoreau:
A man sits as many risks as he runs.
But my effort, like Thoreau's involves a 'twist,' which is part of what distinguishes an aphorism from a proverb or maxim and makes it witty. It is idiomatic that we run risks. We don't sit risks. The brilliance of Thoreau's aphorism resides in the collision of the hackneyed with the novel.
Similarly with
In soul-trying times, 'lead' joins gold as a precious metal.
My aphorism arranges a collision between the mundane fact that lead is not a precious metal with the less obvious fact that guns and ammo are necessary for the defense of life, liberty, and property. It also exploits an equivocation on 'precious metal.'
As for what occasioned this morning's aphorism, see here.
Innovations are guilty until proven innocent. There is a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional beliefs, usages, institutions, arrangements, techniques, and whatnot, provided they work. By all means allow the defeat of the defeasible: in with the new if the novel is better. But the burden of proof is on the would-be innovator: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Conservatives are not opposed to change. We are opposed to non-ameliorative change, and change for the sake of change.
And again, how can anyone who loves his country desire its fundamental transformation? How can anyone love anything who desires its fundamental transformation?
You love a girl and want to marry her. But you propose that she must first undergo a total makeover: butt lift, tummy tuck, nose job, breast implants, psychological re-wire, complete doxastic overhaul, sensus divinitatis tune-up, Weltanschauung change-out, memory upgrade, and so on. Do you love her, or is she merely the raw material for the implementation of your currently uninstantiated idea of what a girl should be?
The extension to love of country is straightforward. If you love your country, then you do not desire its fundamental transformation. Contrapositively, if you do desire its fundamental transformation, then you do not love it.
Life prepares us for death whether we prepare or not. One way it does so is by weaning us of any over-estimation of the significance of the things of this world. For this weaning to take effect, however, one must take care to grow old. Disillusionment takes time. The passage of time, and plenty of it, will reliably reduce both the number of things that matter and the degree of the mattering of those that remain to matter.
Ageing may therefore be recommended as a way to wisdom, though it be a narrow gate thereto, trodden by few, the rest serving to show that there is no fool like an old fool.
The old saw that age brings wisdom is resisted by Susan Jacoby. I resist her resistance.
Daniel Greenfield:
In 1967, Benjamin Netanyahu skipped his high school graduation in Pennsylvania to head off to Israel to help in the Six Day War. That same year Obama moved with his mother to Indonesia.
When Obama suggested that Israel return to the pre-1967 borders, described by Ambassador Eban, no right-winger, as “Auschwitz borders,” it was personal for Netanyahu. Like many Israeli teens, he had put his life on hold and risked it protecting those borders.
In the seventies, Obama was part of the Choom Gang and Netanyahu was sneaking up on Sabena Flight 571 dressed as an airline technician. Inside were four terrorists who had already separated Jewish passengers and taken them hostage. Two hijackers were killed. Netanyahu took a bullet in the arm.
The Prime Minister of Israel defended the operation in plain language. “When blackmail like this succeeds, it only leads to more blackmail,” she said.
Netanyahu’s speech in Congress was part of that same clash of worldviews. His high school teacher remembered him saying that his fellow students were living superficially and that there was “more to life than adolescent issues.” He came to Congress to cut through the issues of an administration that has never learned to get beyond its adolescence.
Obama’s people had taunted him with by calling him “chickens__t.” They had encouraged a boycott of his speech and accused him of insulting Obama. They had thrown out every possible distraction to the argument he came to make. Unable to argue with his facts, they played Mean Girls politics instead.
Benjamin Netanyahu had left high school behind to go to war. Now he was up against overgrown boys and girls who had never grown beyond high school. But even back then he had been, as a fellow student had described him, “The lone voice in the wilderness in support of the conservative line.”
“We were all against the war in Vietnam because we were kids,” she said. The kids are still against the war. Against all the wars; unless it’s their own wars. Netanyahu grew up fast. They never did.
Netanyahu could have played their game, but instead he began by thanking Obama. His message was not about personal attacks, but about the real threat that Iran poses to his country, to the region and to the world. He made that case decisively and effectively as few other leaders could.
He did it using plain language and obvious facts.
Netanyahu reminded Congress that the attempt to stop North Korea from going nuclear using inspectors failed. The deal would not mean a denuclearized Iran. “Not a single nuclear facility would be demolished,” he warned. And secret facilities would continue working outside the inspections regime.
He quoted the former head of IAEA’s inspections as saying, “If there’s no undeclared installation today in Iran, it will be the first time in 20 years that it doesn’t have one.”
And Netanyahu reminded everyone that Iran’s “peaceful” nuclear program would be backed by ongoing development of its intercontinental ballistic missile program that would not be touched under the deal.
He warned that the deal would leave Iran with a clear path to a nuclear endgame that would allow it to “make the fuel for an entire nuclear arsenal” in “a matter of weeks”.
Iran’s mission is to export Jihad around the world, he cautioned. It’s a terrorist state that has murdered Americans. While Obama claims to have Iran under control, it has seized control of an American ally in Yemen and is expanding its influence from Iraq to Syria.
Its newly moderate government “hangs gays, persecutes Christians, jails journalists.” It’s just as bad as ISIS, except that ISIS isn’t close to getting a nuclear bomb.
“America’s founding document promises life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Iran’s founding document pledges death, tyranny, and the pursuit of jihad,” he said. It was the type of clarity that he had brought to the difficult questions of life as a teenager. It is a clarity that still evades Obama today.
When the otherwise distinguished Robert Paul Wolff over at The Philosopher's Stone plays the stoned philosopher and quits the reservation of Good Sense, I call him 'Howlin' Wolff.' Hear him howl:
I need to say this. If anyone wants to call me a self-hating Jew, so be it.
Israel is far and away the militarily most powerful nation in the entire Middle East. It has a large, fully functional nuclear arsenal with appropriate delivery systems, and a well-trained army with a large Ready Reserve. If Israel wants to start a war with Iran, let it put its own young men and women at risk, instead of adopting a belligerant [sic] stance and inviting the United States to shed our blood and spend our treasure making good on Israel's threats.
Let me warm up with a bit of pedantry. 'Self-hating Jew' seems not quite the right expression. After all, a Jew who hates himself needn't hate himself because he is a Jew. He might hate himself, not in respect of his Jewishness, but in respect of some other attribute, say, that of being white. I recommend 'Jew-hating Jew.' On whether Wolff is one or not I have no opinion. You may also draw your own conclusions from Wolff's having penned Autobiography of an Ex-White Man.
But it is entirely typical of a delusional leftist to engage in the sort of Orwellian reversal expressed in the paragraph quoted above.
According to Wolff, Israel threatens Iran, and not the other way around. And it is Israel's "stance" that is "belligerent," not Iran's.
Israel is militarily supreme in the Middle East. It has nuclear war-making capacity. Iran doesn't, at least not yet. But so what?
I detect the typical leftist confusion of weapon and wielder, as if weapons themselves are the problem, not the character of their wielders. That, in tandem with some such silly equivalentism as that all actors are morally equivalent and that if one actor has nukes, then it is not fair that the others not have them. Should the U. N. provide them all around to 'level the playing field'?
I could go on, but my readers do not need their noses rubbed in the obvious.
Besides, some notions are beneath refutation. Their mere exposure suffices to refute them.
War is peace. Slavery is freedom. Less liberty is more liberty. Defense is attack. Concern for one's survival in a situation in which one's adversaries have threatened one with nuclear annihilation is belligerence. The Orwellian template: X, which is not Y, is Y.
In the interests of full disclosure, I am not now and never have been a Jew either ethnically or religiously, nor an Israeli, nor do I have any intention of becoming the two of these three that it would be possible for me to become.
For what is perhaps my best response to Wolffian excess see Robert Paul (Howlin') Wolff in Cloud Cuckoo Land.
Lately liberalism has gone from psychodrama to farce.
Take Barack Obama. He has gone from mild displeasure with Israel to downright antipathy. Suddenly we are in a surreal world where off-the-record slurs from the administration against Benjamin Netanyahu as a coward and chickensh-t have gone to full-fledged attacks from John Kerry and Susan Rice, to efforts of former Obama political operatives to defeat the Israeli prime minister at the polls, to concessions to Iran and to indifference about the attacks on Jews in Paris. Who would have believed that Iranian leaders who just ordered bombing runs on a mock U.S. carrier could be treated with more deference than the prime minister of Israel? What started out six years as pressure on Israel to dismantle so-called settlements has ended up with a full-fledged vendetta against a foreign head of state.
In my various defenses of capital punishment (see Crime and Punishment category) I often invoke the principle that the punishment must fit the crime. To my surprise, there are people who confuse this principle, label it PFC, with some barbaric version of the lex talionis, the law of the talion, which could be summed up as 'An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.' The existence of this confusion only goes to show that one can rarely be too clear, especially in a dumbed-down society in which large numbers of people cannot think in moral categories. Recently I received the following from a reader:
If your argument is that the punishment must fit the crime, what about cases of extreme cruelty (Ted Bundy, e.g.)? Should the state have tortured him? Of course not, that would be inhumane. What makes this different from the death penalty?
This question shows a confusion of PFC with the 'eye for an eye' principle. Everything I have written on the topic of capital punishment assumes the correctness of Amendment VIII to the magnificent U. S. Constitution: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments imposed." (emphasis added).
The exact extension of 'cruel and unusual punishments' is open to some reasonable debate. But I should hope that we would all agree that drawing and quartering, burning at the stake, crucifixion, the gouging out of eyes, and disembowelment are cruel and unusual. And here in the West we would add to the list the stoning of adulterers, the cutting off the hands of thieves, the flogging of women for receiving a kiss on the cheek from a stranger, genital mutilation, and beheading.
So PFC does not require the state-sanctioned gouging out of the eye of the eye-gouger, or the raping of the rapist, or the torturing of Ted Bundy, or the beheading of the beheader, or the poisoning by anti-freeze of the woman who disposes of her husband via anti-freeze cocktails. ("Try this, sweetie, it's a new margarita recipe I found on the Internet!")
PFC is a principle of proportionality. The idea is that justice demands that the gravity of the punishment match or be proportional to the gravity of the crime. Obviously, a punishment can 'fit' a crime in this sense without the punishment being an act of the same type as that of the crime. Suppose a man rapes a woman, is caught, tried, convicted, and sentenced to a night in jail and a $50 fine. That would be a travesty of justice because of its violation of PFC. The punishment does not fit the crime: it is far too lenient. But sentencing the rapist to death by lethal injection would also violate PFC: the punishment is too stringent.
Now consider the case of the man Clayton Lockett — a liberal would refer to him as a 'gentleman' — who brutally raped and murdered a girl, a murder that involved burying her alive. His execution was supposdely 'botched' because ". . . lethal injection has becoming increasingly difficult after European pharmaceutical companies stopped exporting drug compounds used for the death penalty in line with the EU outlawing of executions . . . ." I am tempted to say: if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.
Death is surely the fitting punishment for such a heinous deed. If you deny that, then you are violating PFC.
But if death is the appropriate punishment in a case like this, it does not follow that the miscreant ought to be brutally raped, tortured, and then buried alive. That would be 'cruel and unusual.' Death by firing squad or electric chair would not be cruel and unusual.
Now either you see that or you don't. If you don't, then I pronounce you morally obtuse. You cannot think in moral categories. You do not understand what justice requires. End of discussion.
Related issue. Suppose you believe that we either are or have immortal souls. Would you still have good reason to consider murder a grave moral breach? See Souls and Murder.
A neighbor recently introduced me to 66 proof Fireball cinnamon whisky. Turns out the stuff contains propylene glycol, an ingredient used in anti-freeze and other industrial products. Well, as I told the twenty-something counterman at the liquor store, "Whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger."
I rather doubt the kid could name the source of the line, and I didn't bother to offer enlightenment into Nietzsche's dark mind. He replied, "I like your attitude."
So we parted in generation-spanning solidarity, me with my whisky, cigars, and incense, but no peppermints.
Whisky is like socializing. A little is good from time to time, or at least not bad. But more is not better.
UPDATE (3/5): Bill H. writes,
Just some clarification, if you don't mind: propylene glycol is relatively nontoxic, and is an actual approved food additive.Its chemical cousin ethylene glycol is the quite poisonous one that is used in some antifreeze.Keep up the good work, though.