Michael Medved uncorked a good one yesterday when he referred to the ACLU as the American Criminal Liars Union.
That's pretty harsh, but then the ACLU has shown itself on numerous occasions to be a contemptible bunch of leftist shysters.
What justifies the use of invective? The fact that we are in a war. Why are we in a war? Because there is no longer the common ground upon which to resolve differences. And what has brought us to this pass? The fact that so-called 'liberals' are becoming more and more extreme.
An article by Jason Riley, a black conservative I highly recommend. Unfortunately, in this brief piece he does not penetrate to the philosophical heart of the matter by making the important point that education is not a legitimate function for the Federal government. Education is properly conducted by parents, families, and the local institutions of civil society such as local schools, churches, clubs, and the like. The Left, being totalitarian, hates these institutions of civil society that occupy the buffer zone between the naked individual and the Leviathan.
It is not always right to say what one has a right to say.
Thus one of my aphorisms. It is worth unpacking, however, especially in the light of the incident at Garland, Texas.
First of all, the following is not a logical contradiction: You have a right to say X but you ought not say X. For you may have a legal right, but no moral right, or what you have a legal right to say may be highly imprudent to say. In fact, it may be so imprudent that moral and not merely prudential considerations become relevant.
So while Pamela Geller & Co. undoubtedly had the legal right to express themselves by hosting a cartoon fest in mockery of Muhammad, it is at least a legitimate question, one whose answer is not obvious, whether their doing so was morally acceptable.
On the one side are those who say that it was not morally acceptable given the high likelihood that violence would erupt. Indeed, that is what happened. Luckily, however, the Muslim savages1 were shot dead, and only one non-savage was wounded. But it might have been worse, much worse. Innocent passersby might have been caught in the cross-fire; the shooter who dispatched the Islamist fanatics might not have been such a good shot and a long melee may have ensued; the Islamists might have shown up with heavier armament and killed all the cartoonists; they might have laid waste to the entire neighborhood, etc. We know from bitter world-wide experience what the barbarians of Islam are capable of. Do you recall, for example, the Taliban's destruction of the ancient Buddhist statuary?
On the other side are those who insist that we must not engage in what they call 'self-censorship.' We must not limit or curtail the free exercise of our liberties in the face of savages who behead people because of a difference in political and theological views.
So what is the correct view?
Suppose that Muslim reaction to the mockery and defamation of their prophet was just as nonviolent as Christian reaction to the mockery and defamation of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary. Then I would condemn as immoral the mockery and defamation of Muhammad. I would invoke my aphorism above. There are things that one is legally entitled to say and do that one must not, morally speaking, say or do.
Example. There is no law against private drunkenness, nor should there be; but it is immoral to get drunk to the point of damaging the body. The same goes for gluttonous eating. Closer in, we cannot and ought not have laws regulating all the inter-personal exchanges in which people are likely to mock, insult, and generally show a lack of respect for one another. And yet it is in general surely wrong to treat people with a lack of respect even if the lack of respect remains on the verbal plane. If you don't accept these examples, provide your own. If you say that there are no examples, then you are morally and probably also intellectually obtuse and not in a position to profit from a discussion like this.
So if the Muslim and Christian reactions to mockery and defamation were both physically nonviolent, then, invoking my aphorism above, I would condemn the activities of Geller and Co. at Garland, Texas, and relevantly similar activities. But of course the reactions are not the same! Muslims are absurdly sensitive about their prophet and react in unspeakably barbaric ways to slights, real and imagined. Every Muslim? Of course not. (Don't be stupid.)
So I say we ought to defend Pamela Geller and her group.
My reason, again, is not that that I consider it morally acceptable to mock religious figures. After all, I condemned the Charlie Hebdo outfit and took serious issue with the misguided folk who marched around with Je Suis Charlie signs. Perpetually adolescent porno-punks should not be celebrated, but denounced. That the Islamo-head-chopper-offers are morally much worse than the porno-punks who make an idol of the free expression of their morally and intellectually vacuous narcissistic selves does not justify the celebration of the latter.
The reason to defend Geller is because, in the present circumstances in which militant Muslims and their leftist enablers attack the the values of the West — which are not just Western values, but universal values – including such values as free expression and toleration, the deadly threat from the Islamist barbarians justifies our taking extreme measure in defense of values whose implementation will prove beneficial for everyone, including Muslims and their benighted leftist fellow-travellers.
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1. If you understand the English language, then you understand that 'Muslim savages' does not imply that all Muslims are savages any more than 'rude New Yorker' implies that all New Yorkers are rude.
Should one be bothered, morally speaking, that the mutual funds (shares of which) one owns invest in companies that produce alcoholic beverages, tobacco products, and firearms? I say no. 'Socially conscious' is an ideologically loaded phrase, like 'social justice,' and the loading is from the Left.
Alcohol
For some, alcohol is the devil in liquid form. They should avoid the stuff, and it is certainly within their power to do so. For most of us, however, alcohol is a delightful adjunct to a civilized life. What good is a hard run on a hot day that doesn’t eventuate in the downing of a couple of cold beers? To what end a plate of Mama Gucci’s rigatoni, if not accompanied by a glass of Dago Red? I am exaggerating of course, but to make a serious point: alcohol for most us is harmless. Indeed, it is positively good for healthy humans when taken in small doses (1-2 oz. per diem) as numerous studies have been showing for the last twenty years or so.
The fact that many abuse alcohol is quite irrelevant. That is their free choice. Is it Sam Adam’s fault that you tank up on too much of his brew? No, it is your fault. This is such a simple point that I am almost embarrassed to make it; but I have to make it because so many liberals fail to grasp it. So read your prospectuses and be not troubled when you come across names like Seagrams.
I would also point out to the ‘socially conscious’ that if they enjoy an occasional drink, then they cannot, consistently with this fact, be opposed to the production of alcoholic beverages. You cannot drink alcohol unless alcohol is there to be drunk. Consistency demands of them complete abstention.
Standing on a hill behind my house, looking down on it, the thought occurred to me: It's enough. One modest house suffices. And then the thought that the ability to be satisfied with what one has is a necessary condition of happiness.
Satisfied with what one has, not with what one is.
Perhaps it is like this.
The fool, satisfied with what he is, is never satisfied with what he has. The philosopher, satisfied with what he has, is never satisfied with what he is. The sage is satisfied with both.
There are many fools and a few philosophers; are there any sages?
In the preface to his magnum opus, F. H. Bradley observes that "Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct." (Appearance and Reality, Oxford 1893, p. x) The qualifier 'bad' is out of place and curiously off-putting at the outset of a 570 page metaphysical tome, so if, per impossibile, I had had the philosopher's ear I would have suggested 'good but not rationally compelling.' Be that as it may, the point is that our basic sense of things comes first, and only later, if at all, do we take up the task of the orderly discursive articulation of that basic sense.
Thus atheism is bred in the bone before it is born in the brain. The atheist feels it in his bones and guts that the universe is godless and that theistic conceptions are so many fairy tales dreamt up for false consolation. This world is just too horrifying to be a divine creation: meaningless unredeemed suffering; ignorance and delusion; the way nature, its claws dripping with blood, feasts on itself; moral evil and injustice — all bespeak godlessness. There can't be a God of love behind all this horror! For most atheists, theism is not a Jamesian live option. What point, then, in debating them?
This deep intuition of the godlessness of the world is prior to and the force behind arguments from evil. The arguments merely articulate and rationalize the intuition. The counterarguments of theists don't stand a chance in the face of the fundamental, gut-grounded, atheist attitude. No one who strongly FEELS that things are a certain way is likely to be moved by what he will dismiss as so much verbiage, hairsplitting, and intellectualizing.
But for the theist it is precisely the horror of this world that motivates the quest for a solution, or rather, the horror of this world together with the conviction that we cannot provide the solution for ourselves whether individually or collectively. Evil is taken by the theist, not as a 'proof' of the nonexistence of God, but as a reason, a motive, to seek God. 'Without God, life is horror.'
I should add that it would be pointless to seek God if any of the atheist arguments were rationally compelling. But none are.
In fact, no argument for any substantive conclusion in such fields of controversy as philosophy and theology is rationally compelling. Reason is a god-like element in us, but she is weak, very weak. As I see it, the infirmity of reason is itself part of the problem of evil.
You don't mock 'the Prophet.' You keep your head down and your mouth shut. You hide in the precincts of the private. You are an apolitical runner, say, but one good enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon. Still not safe.
I had breakfast with the boys this morning. Mike Valle mentioned Christina Hoff Sommers' Factual Feminist YouTube series. Here is the episode on trigger warnings.
I should warn you that the strident fulminations of this conservative virago may cause distress.
Herewith, a second response to Aidan Kimel. He writes,
The claim that God is a being among beings is immediately ruled out, so it seems to me, by the classical understanding of divine transcendence: if all beings have been created from nothing by the self-existent One, then this One cannot be classified as one of them, as sharing a world with them. To think of God as a being would thus represent nothing less than a return to paganism. We would be back at Mt Carmel with Elijah and the priests of Ba’al.
I myself incline to the view that the divine transcendence entails that God cannot be a being among beings. But I do not see in the passage above a good argument for the view to which I incline. Fr. Kimel's argument appears to be this:
1. All beings have been created from nothing by the self-existent One.
Therefore
2. The self-existent One cannot be a being among beings.
This argument is valid in point of logical form — the conclusion follows from the premise — but the premise is false. If all beings have been created ex nihilo by the self-existent One, then, given that the One cannot create itself, it follows that the One does not exist and thus cannot be self-existent. The premise is self-refuting.
But let us be charitable. Perhaps what Fr. Kimel intends is the following argument:
1*. All beings other than the self-existent One have been created from nothing by the self-existent One.
Therefore
2. The self-existent One cannot be a being among beings.
The premise is now true, but the conclusion does not follow — or at least it is not clear how the conclusion is supposed to follow. Why cannot it be like this? God, the self-existent One, creates beings distinct from himself. These beings 'now' (either temporally or logically) form with God a collection of beings. So although God has all sorts of properties that make him the supreme being such as omniscience, and the rest of the omni-attributes, he remains a being among beings.
It is a simple point of logic that one can give a bad argument for a true conclusion. This is what Fr. Kimel does above. I agree with his conclusion, but I reject his reasoning as confused. He in effect confuses the two arguments displayed. The first is valid with a false premise; the second is invalid with a true premise.
At his weblog Eclectic Orthodoxy, Fr. Aidan Kimel references the discussion Dale Tuggy and I are having about whether God is a being among beings, or Being itself. Fr. Kimel writes,
That God, as conceived by Christians (and I’m not really interested in any other God), is not a being among beings is so utterly obvious to me that I honestly do not know how to argue against it. One of the very first theology books I read back in the 70s was He Who Isby Eric Lionel Mascall. When I look back now on my theological development since then, I have come to realize how profoundly he influenced my understanding of God, even though it was decades later before I read even a little Aquinas. My paperback copy of the book is filled with underlining (ditto for my copy of Existence and Analogy). Here’s one passage that I underlined:
We cannot lump together in one genus God and everything else, as if the word “being” applied to them all in precisely the same sense, and then pick out God as the supreme one. For if God is the Supreme Being, in the sense in which Christian theology uses the term, “being” as applied to him is not just one more instance of what “being” means when applied to anything else. So far from being just one item, albeit the supreme one, in a class of beings, he is the source from which their being is derived; he is not in their class but above it. … In the technical term, when we apply to God a term which is normally used of other beings, we are using it not univocally but analogically; for he is not just one member of a class with them, but their ground and archetype. (p. 9)
Although I incline to the view that God is not a being among beings, I don't think it is at all obvious that this is so. We all agree that God is the source of the Being or existence of everything other than God. What exists other than God exists because God has created it, and would not exist if God had not created it. So far, so good. But how is it supposed to follow that God is not a being among beings? How is it supposed to follow that God is not a being in the very same sense in which Socrates is a being? I think my friends Dale Tuggy and Alan Rhoda – theistic personalists to slap a label on them — are on solid ground here. They could reply to Fr. Kimel that the following is a non sequitur:
1. Everything other than God has been created by God ex nihilo and so depends on God for its very existence.
Therefore
2. 'Exists' in 'God exists' and 'Socrates exists' cannot be taken in the precisely the same (univocal) sense.
Dale and Alan might plausibly maintain that while (1) is true, (2) does not follow because the negation of (2) is consistent with (1). The theistic personalist might reasonably insist that 'exists' in both of the above occurrences has exactly the same sense — this is a semantic point — and that the corresponding ontological point holds as well, namely, that God and Socrates exist in the very same way.
So we are in need of some supplemental premise to mediate a valid transition from (1) to (2). Note that Mascall above uses the phrase "ground and archetype." I think Dale and Alan could be brought to accept the term 'ground' as in 'ultimate metaphysical real-ground or first cause.' Surely God is that. But archetype? Here Dale and Alan might reasonably balk at this Plato talk. 'Archetype' suggests that God is more than an efficient cause, but a formal cause as well, something like a Platonic Form. (I recall a passage wherein Aquinas speaks of God as forma formarum, form of all forms.) Now if God is something like a Platonic Form, then the relation of creatures and creator is something like Platonic participation (methexis): Socrates, a being, an ens, is by participating in the divine Being or To Be (esse). The Latin ens is the present participle of the Latin infinitive esse (to be), and this linguistic relation suggests the metaphysical relation of participation.
Now if God is something like a Platonic Form, then he is the Being of creatures. But God also is. Now if God is Being (esse) and God is, then God is self-subsistent Being, ipsum esse subsistens. That is, God is Being (esse) and being (ens). Both! But then it follows that God is not a being among beings, a being on a par with other beings. Why not? Well, the other beings, creatures, are not identical to their Being (esse) whereas God is the being that is also Being. In God and God alone, esse and ens 'coalesce' if you will: they are one in reality; they are not really distinct ever though we perhaps cannot think of them except as distinct. In Socrates, however, esse and ens are really distinct, distinct in reality, outside the mind.
As St. Augustine says, "God is what he has." So God has Being by being (identical to) Being.
God cannot be a being because that implies that he is just one of an actual or possible plurality of beings. God is rather the being who is also Being. God is Being or Existence (Deus est esse), and Existence itself exists. This is why in my book I speak of Existence as the Paradigm Existent.
Thus we have at least two ways of Being, the creaturely way and the divine way. But they are connected: creatures participate in divine Being. Thus we have an analogia entis, not an aequivocatio entis.
Now what could Dale and Alan say in rebuttal of this? They could say that there is no justification, scriptural or philosophical, for thinking of God as an archetype, to use Mascall's word. Thomists typically invoke Exodus 3:14, "I am who am" which suggests to some of us that God is referring to himself as Being itself. In conversation, Dale told me he rejects this reading and said (if I understood him) that the Hebrew just means that God is telling Moses that he is and will remain constant. Dale and Alan could say that the God of the Bible is nothing like a Platonic Form.
Conclusions
1. It is not obvious that God is not a being among beings. (Contra Fr. Kimel)
2. It is not obvious that God is a being among beings. (Contra Drs. Tuggy and Rhoda)
3. In general, "It ain't obvious what's obvious." (Hilary Putnam) Leastways, not in philosophy.
4. For Dale and Alan, God is a being among beings in the precise sense I attached to that phrase in my first post in this series. They are mistaken if they think that can show that God is not a being among beings by making such obvious points as that God creates everything distinct from himself or that God is unique or that God has properties that nothing else has, or that God is a metaphysically necessary being, etc. Those sorts of points are logically consistent with God's being a being among beings.
5. 'Being among beings' is a technical phrase; it doesn't mean whatever one wants it to mean. Nor is it a 'dirty' or pejorative phrase. It is not a 'kosher' move in a philosophical discussion, once a term or phrase has been defined, to ignore the definition and use it in some other sense.
6. The question whether God is a being among beings or rather ipsum esse subsistens is a very difficult one with no easy answer.
7. The question cannot be answered apart from a deep-going inquiry into general metaphysics. One has to tackle head-on such questions as What is existence? What are properties? What is property-possession? What is creation? What is the difference between primary and secondary causation and how are they related? and plenty of others besides.
8. It may well be that the problem whether or not God is being among beings is insoluble, a genuine aporia, and that the arguments on both sides cancel out.
