The party line on Donald Trump is that he is an 'agent' of ISIS, a 'recruiter' for them. A typically supine liberal-left line in response to a real threat. Spouting the party line as Hillary did in the recent Democrat 'debate' is analogous to saying in the late '30s or early '40s that any opposition to Hitler would only 'recruit' more Nazis.
There are already enough ISIS members and other Muslim terrorists to destroy our way of life. There is no need to recruit more. There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world. On a very conservative estimate, 10% of them support Islamic law (Shari'a). Other estimates are as high as 25%. 10% of 1.2 billion = 120 million, a sizeable number! But of course not all of them would participate actively in terrorist activities. Suppose only 1% of them would. That would still leave 1.2 million. And of these, only a few need to get through with a little luck and the right weaponry.
Whether it is haiku or not, it is 17 syllables, and a good addition to the Stoic's armamentarium:
Avoid the near occasion Of unnecessary conversation.
Avoiding the near occasion is not always practicable or even reasonable, but pointless conversation itself is best avoided if one values one's peace of mind. For according to an aphorism of mine:
Peace of mind is sometimes best preserved by refraining from giving others a piece of one's mind.
The other day a lady asked me if I had watched the Republican debate. I said I had. She then asked me what I had thought of it. I told her, "I don't talk politics with people I don't know extremely well." To which her response was that she is not the combative type. She followed that with a comment to the effect that while in a medico's waiting room recently she amused herself by listening to some men talking politics, men she described as 'bigots.'
I then knew what I had earlier surmised: she was a liberal. I congratulated myself on my self-restraint. At that point I excused myself and wished her a good day.
Companion post: Safe Speech. "No man speaketh safely but he that is glad to hold his peace. " (Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Chapter XX.)
Merry Christmas everybody. Pour yourself a drink, and enjoy. Me, I'm nursing a Boulevardier. It's a Negroni with cojones: swap out the gin for bourbon. One ounce bourbon, one ounce sweet vermouth, one ounce Campari, straight up or on the rocks, with a twist of orange. A serious libation. The vermouth rosso contests the harshness of the bourbon, but then the Italian joins the fight on the side of the bourbon. Or you can think of it as a Manhattan wherein the Campari substitutes for the angostura bitters. That there are people who don't like Campari shows that there is no hope for humanity.
"Here is Rhodes, jump here" (through the hoops of political correctness). A graduate of Oriel College, Oxford University, sent me this statement concerning the Rhodes Must Fall petition. A memorial to Cecil Rhodes, that is. Can you say Der Untergang des Abendlandes?
"Here is Rhodes, jump here." From Aesop's Fables #209, "The Boastful Athlete." A man who had been off in foreign lands returns home. He brags of his exploits. He claims that in Rhodes he made a long jump the likes of which had never been seen before. A skeptical bystander calls him on his boast: Here's your Rhodes, jump here!
The moral? Put your money where your mouth is. Don't talk about it, do it!
Perhaps an erudite classicist such as Mike Gilleland could say more on this topic. He would have to do at least the following: dig up all the ancient sources in Greek and Latin; trace the saying in Erasmus and Goethe; comment on Hegel's variation on the saying in the Vorrede zur Philosophie des Rechts, explaining why he has saltus for salta; find and comment on Marx's comment on Hegel's employment of the saying.
Finally, if Alan Rhoda were to rename his cleverly titled, but now defunct, weblog Alanyzer — and I'm not saying he should — he might consider Hic Rhoda, Hic Salta. He is a very tall man; I'm 6' 1'' and had to look up to see his face when I met him in Las Vegas some years back. To jump over him would be quite a feat.
UPDATE 12/19: Dave Lull, argonaut nonpareil of cyberspace and friend and facilitator of bloggers, informs me that Dr. Gilleland has taken note of my call for an erudite classicist. This bibliomaniac, antediluvian, and curmudgeon does not, however, consider himself "truly erudite." If his self-deprecatory consideration is just, then he had me fooled.
Laicity is the solution that modern Europe found in order to escape its religious civil wars. But contemporary Europe doesn’t take religion seriously enough to know how to stick to this solution. She has exiled faith to the fantastic world of human irreality that the Marxists called “superstructure”… thus, precisely through their failure to believe in religion, the representatives of secularism empty laicity of its substance, and swallow, for humanitarian reasons, the demands of its enemies.
I haven't read anything by Finkielkraut except the above and a few other excerpts translated and edited by Ann Sterzinger. But that won't stop me from explaining what I take to be the brilliant insight embedded in the above quotation.
Laicity is French secularity, the absence of religious influence and involvement in government affairs. It has had the salutary effect of preventing civil strife over religion. But to appreciate why laicity is important and salutary one must understand that the roots of religion lie deep in human nature. Religion is even less likely to wither away than the State. Leftists, however, are constitutionally incapable of understanding that man by nature is homo religiosus and that the roots of religion in human nature are ineradicable. The Radicals don't understand the radicality (deep-going rootedness) of religion. (Radix is Latin for 'root.') In their superficial way, leftists think that religion is merely "the sigh of the oppressed creature" (Marx) and will vanish when the oppression of man by man is eliminated, which of course will never happen by human effort alone, though they fancy that they can bring it about if only they throw enough people into enough gulags. Leftists cannot take religion seriously and they don't think anyone else really takes it seriously either, not even Muslims. They don't believe that most Muslims really do believe in Allah and divine origin of the Koran and the 72 black-eyed virgins and the obligation to make jihad. They project their failure to understand religion and its grip into others. See my Does Anyone Really Believe in the Muslim Paradise in which I report on the Sam Harris vs. Scott Atran debate.
The issue is not whether religion is true but whether it answers to deep human needs that cannot be met in any other way. My point is not that leftists think that religion is false or delusional, although they do think it to be such; my point that they don't appreciate the depth of the religious need even if it is a need that, in the nature of things, cannot be met.
Not understanding religion, leftists fail to understand how important laicity is to prevent civil strife over religion. And so they don't properly uphold it. They cave in to the Muslims who reject it. Why don't they understand the dire existential threat that radical Islam poses to European culture? I suspect that it is because they think that Muslims don't really believe in all their official claptrap and what Muslims really want are mundane things such as jobs and material security and panem et circenses.
In nuce: leftists, who are resolutely secular, fail to uphold the secularity that they must uphold if they are to preserve their loose and libertine way of life, and they fail to uphold it by failing to understand the dangers of religion, dangers they do not understand because they fail to take religion seriously and to appreciate the deep roots it has in human nature. Even pithier:
Leftists, whose shallow heads cannot grasp religion, are in danger of losing their heads to radical jihadi. Cause and effect of the lapse of laicity.
Two quibbles with Finkielkraut. First, it is not that leftists "do not believe in religion," but that they do not believe that religion is a powerful and ineradicable force in human affairs. You don't have to believe in religion to believe facts about it. Second, if I remember my Marx, the superstructure (Ueberbau) though a repository of fantastic ideas devoid of truth such as religious ideas and the ideas of bourgeois law and morality, also contains all ideology and therefore the 'liberating' Marxist ideology as well. It too is a reflection of the Unterbau, the social base and the means of production. So not everything in the superstructure is "fantastic." This conception leads to relativism, but that's not my problem.
The following entry has been languishing in the queue for years. I just now finished it for what it's worth.
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Which is worse, the fundamentalism of a Jerry Falwell or the snarling hatred of religion of a Christopher Hitchens, who, in his anti-Falwell diatribe, shows just how far someone who is a leftist about religion can sink?
Readers of this blog know that I have little patience with fundamentalist forms of religion. But whatever one thinks of Falwell's views, he was a decent human being capable of compassion and forgiveness. (I recall with admiration the kindness and forbearance he displayed when he confronted his tormentor, the pornographer Larry Flynt, on Larry King Live.) Can one say that Hitchens is a decent human being after his unspeakably vicious attack on a dead man while he was still warm? I have in mind the matchbox quotation. In "Faith-Based Fraud," Hitchens wrote:
In the time immediately following the assault by religious fascism on American civil society in September 2001, he [Falwell] used his regular indulgence on the airwaves to commit treason. Entirely exculpating the suicide-murderers, he asserted that their acts were a divine punishment of the United States.
The problem with Falwell's statement was that he was in no position to know that the 9/11 attacks were divine punishment. What is offensive about such statements is the presumption that one is en rapport with the divine plan, that one has some sort of inside dope as to the deity's designs. In his credulousness and self-confidence, Falwell displayed a lack of respect for God's transcendence and unsearchableness. But this is just part of what is wrong with fundamentalism, which is a kind of theological positivism.
It is also offensive to hear some proclaim in tones of certainty that Hitchens is now no longer an atheist. They know that God exists and persons survive bodily death? They know no such thing, any more than Hitchens knew the opposite. Convictions, no matter how strong, do not amount to knowledge. (Here is a quick little proof. Knowledge entails truth. So if A and B have opposite convictions, and convictions amount to knowledge, then one and the same proposition can be both true and not true, which violates the Law of Non-Contradiction.)
But although Falwell's 9/11 statement can be criticized, he can't be criticized for making it. He had as much right to make that statement as Hitchens had for his cocksure proclamation that no God exists, not to mention his assaults on Mother Teresa and who all else. After all, that was Falwell's view, and it makes sense within his system of beliefs. There was certainly nothing treasonous about Falwell's statement, nor did it "entirely exculpate the suicide-murderers." Perhaps Falwell was a theological compatibilist, one who finds no contradiction in people acting freely in accordance with a divine plan.
So while we should certainly not follow Hitchens' nasty example and trash the dead, we should not go to the other extreme and paper over the foul aspects of Hitchens' personality. And we should also give some thought to the extent to which his viciousness is an upshot of his atheism.
For in the end, the atheist has nothing and can be expected to be bitter. This world is a vanishing quantity and he knows it; and beyond this world, he believes, there is nothing. That is not to say it isn't true. But if you are convinced that it is true, then you must live hopelessly unless you fool yourself with such evasions as living for some pie-in-the-future utopia such as Communists and other 'progressives' believe in, or for some such abstraction as literature.
Nobody will be reading Hitchens in a hundred years. He'll be lucky if he is still read in ten years.
Have you ever heard of Joseph McCabe (1867-1955)? Not until now. But he too was a major free-thinker and anti-religion polemicist in his day. Who reads him now?
"My father is 95 years old except that he's dead." Is this a nonsensical thing to say?
No. Death is an entirely effective bar to aging: you can't age if you are dead. But you can get older. The sentence sounds like nonsense or a joke because we tend to conflate aging with getting older. That they are different is clear from the fact that some of us age faster than others while we all get older at the same rate.
Here is the first comment on Ross Douthat's December 16th column. The comment has been awarded 'verified' status, meaning that ". . . it is earned based on a history of quality [read: high quality] comments." Ready?
The following means Douthat knows he is neing dishinest, but it is debatable by he and his buddies, so ok, and, he is not accountable. It is like a talisman to negate reaponsibility for dishinonest: pure phony conservative. "Of course one can dispute how much of this was actually Obama’s fault, and argue over what might have been done differently. "
But anything to say, phony conservative hack style, liberals suck. Douthat's god.
And why is Trump popular?Cathartic howl? Typical cute Douthat rhetoric with all the depth teo dimensions can bring, yeah sure, like the nazis were a cathartic howl. Trump is popular, six months in, because he is reaping what the republican Party has sown and real american republican trash, his countrymen who Douthat respects less than Star Wars dolls,(Haravrd baby!) like the guy and think he is better than the other chump clown .1% lackeys. This, requires daily lies from Douthat and lie he does.
Yet another proof that the only good NYT combox is a closed NYT combox. Or: the best arguments against an open NYT combox are the contents of one.
As for the quality of the Opinion Pages themselves, they are piss-poor with only two or three exceptions, Douthat being one of them. He is worth reading. The aptronymically-appellated Charles Blow comes across as an affirmative action hire. I saw him on C-SPAN once. A very nice man with a beautiful wife, and I'm sure he means well.
By the way, if you are a conservative you ought to do everything in your power to defund the Left, and that includes not subscribing to the Rag of Record.
Only politically correct topics may be discussed. So Eric Holder called for a 'conversation' on race as if we had never talked about this before. But I don't recall him calling for a 'conversation' on immigration.
The other constraint is that 'conversation' must consist in an acquiescence by the conservative in the leftist's nonsense. No dialog allowed.
So whatever you say about Donald Trump, we ought to give him this much: he began a real conversation (no sneer quotes) about immigration. And the RINOs are going to be dragged into it.
You don't like Trump's crudity, bombast, and exaggeration? Me neither. He is undoubtedly lacking in the gravitas department. But on immigration he is basically on the Right track. For proposals more temperate and nuanced we may turn to thinkers such as Daniel Pipes. See here.
Let the conversation (no sneer quotes) begin. Let's see how serious you leftists are about real conversation.
Christopher Hitchens died on this date in 2011. Herewith, a meditation composed in August 2010, slightly revised.
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I just caught the last third of an interview of Christopher Hitchens by Charlie Rose. Hitchens looks bad, the chemotherapy having done a nasty tonsorial number on him. But his trademark intellectual incandescence appears undiminished. 'Brilliant' is a word I don't toss around lightly, but Hitch is one to whom it unarguably applies. Public intellectuals of his caliber are rare and it will be sad to see him go. Agree or disagree with him, it is discourse at his level that justifies the high regard we place on free speech.
In the teeth of death the man remains intransigent in his unbelief. And why not? He lived in unbelief and so it is only fitting that he should die in it as well. He lived for this life alone; it is fitting that he should die without hope. God and the soul were never Jamesian live options for him. To cop out now as debility and death approach must appear to him to be utterly contemptible, a grasping at straws, a fooling himself into a palliative illusion to ease the horror of annihilation.
For what he takes to be the illusion of immortality, Hitchens substitutes literary immortality. "As an adult whose hopes lay assuredly in the intellect, not in the hereafter, he concluded, 'Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and — since there is no other metaphor — also the soul.'" (Here)
But to the clearheaded, literary immortality is little more than a joke, and itself an illusion. Only a few read Hitchens now, and soon enough he will be unread, his books remaindered, put into storage, forgotten. This is a fate that awaits all scribblers but a tiny few. And even they will drink the dust of oblivion in the fullness of time.
To live on in one's books is a paltry substitute for immortality, especially when one recalls Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's aphorism: Ein Buch ist ein Spiegel, aus dem kein Apostel herausgucken kann, wenn ein Affe hineinguckt. "A book is a mirror: if an ape peers in, no apostle will look out." Most readers are more apish than apostolic. The fame they confer cannot be worth much, given that they confer it.
To live on in one's books is only marginally better than to live on in the flickering and mainly indifferent memories of a few friends and relatives. And how can reduction to the status of a merely intentional object count as living on?
The besetting sin of powerful intellects is pride. Lucifer, as his name indicates, is or was the light-bearer. Blinded by his own light, he could see nothing beyond himself. Such is the peril of intellectual incandescence. Otherworldly light simply can't get through. One thinks of Nietzsche, Russell, Sartre, and to a lesser extent Hitchens. A mortal man with a huge ego — one which is soon to pop like an over-inflated balloon.
The contemplation of death must be horrifying for those who pin all on the frail reed of the ego. The dimming of the light, the loss of control, the feeling of helplessly and hopelessly slipping away into an abyss of non-being. And all of this without the trust of the child who ceases his struggling to be borne by Another. "Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven." But this of course is what the Luciferian intellect cannot do. It cannot relax, it must hold on and stay in control. It must struggle helplessly as the ego implodes in upon itself. The ego, having gone supernova, collapses into a black hole. What we fear when we fear death is not so much the destruction of the body, but the dissolution of the ego. That is the true horror and evil of death. And without religion you are going to have to take it straight.
What would Hitchens lose by believing? Of course, he can't bring himself to believe, it is not a Jamesian live option, but suppose he could. Would he lose 'the truth'? But nobody knows what the truth is about death and the hereafter. People only think they do. They bluster and whistle in the dark. But suppose 'the truth' is that we are nothing but complex physical systems slated for annihilation. Why would knowing this 'truth' be a value? Even if one is facing reality by believing that death is the utter end of the self, what is the good of facing reality in a situation in which one is but a material system? How could truth be a value in a purely material world?
If materialism is true, then I think Nietzsche is right: truth is not a value; life-enhancing illusions are to be preferred. If truth is out of all relation to human flourishing, why should we value it? And if materialism is true, could truth even exist? It is not a physical thing or property. It is not empirically detectable. It is inherently mind-involving.
I often find myself among what might be called postmodern philosophers. They are willing to say things like "I don't accept the law of non-contradiction." Does this seem to be sufficient enough to say that further conversation is not possible?
In general, yes. Life is short, philosophy is long, and fools are many. One shouldn't waste precious time debating with mush-heads, including many in POMO precincts. That being said, there are some discussions about LNC that I would engage in.
If a student sincerely wants to learn about LNC, then I would surely talk to him.
If a person doubts the truth of LNC, or wants to know how we know it to be true, then I would talk to him.
Also worthwhile are discussions with serious and well-informed people about the 'reach' of such logical principles as LNC. The following sort of discussion I would take to be highly profitable:
Are the 'laws of thought' 'laws of reality' as well? Since such laws are necessities of thought, the question can also be put by asking whether or not the necessities of thought are also necessities of being. It is surely not self-evident that principles that govern how we must think if we are to make sense to ourselves and to others must also apply to mind-independent reality. One cannot invoke self-evidence since such philosophers as Nagarjuna and Hegel and Nietzsche have denied (in different ways) that the laws of thought apply to the real. (See here.)
As I read Aristotle, he too was aware of a possible 'gap' between thought and reality.
The Law of Non-Contradiction, in its property version, can be put like this:
LNC. (F)(x)~(Fx & ~Fx)
which is to say: for any property F-ness, and any object x, it is not the case that x is F and x is not F. For example, nothing is both red and non-red.
This is subject to the usual three qualifications: an object cannot be F and not F (i) at the same time, (ii) in the same respect, and (iii) in the same sense. Thus a ball could be both red and non-red at different times, or red and non-red in respect of different hemispheres, or in different senses: Jack can be both red and non-red at the same time if 'red' in its first occurrence refers to a color, and in its second occurrence to a political affiliation. One can be a redskin without being a commie.
Now Aristotle was quite clear that first principles like (LNC) are non-demonstrable. They are so basic that they cannot be proven. Since a proof cannot be circular, (LNC) cannot be derived from itself or from any logically equivalent proposition. To use (LNC) to prove (LNC) would be to beg the question. It is also clear that no proof can have infinitely many inferential steps. So what justifies (LNC)? Is it perhaps unjustifiable, a dogmatic posit? Is it a groundless assumption?
One might just announce that (LNC) is (objectively) self-evident, that it is self-justifying, that it 'glows by its own epistemic light.' But then how respond to someone like Heraclitus who sincerely maintains that it is not self-evident? If a proposition is subjectively self-evident, self-evident to one, it does not follow that it is objectively self-evident, self-evident in itself.
At Metaphysics Gamma, 3, 4, Aristotle can be read as using retortion to establish (LNC). Since he cannot, on pain of begging the question, resort to a direct proof in the case of this most fundamental of all principles, "the surest principle of all," (1005b10) he must try to show that anyone who denies (LNC) falls into performative inconsistency. As I read Aristotle, the key idea is that (LNC) is " a principle one must have to understand anything whatever. . . ." (1005b15) It is a principle that governs all understanding, all definite and determinate speech. So it is at least a transcendental principle in a roughly Kantian sense of 'transcendental.'
As such, (LNC) seems to function as a semantic constraint: one cannot mean anything definite or make any definite judgment unless one abides by, and thus presupposes, the principle that no subject of discourse both has and does not have a property at the same time and in the same respect. To counter the (LNC)-denier, Aristotle simply demands that the man say something, that he express the same idea to himself and to another, "for this much is necessary if there is to be any proposition (legein, dicere) at all." (1006a20) If the (LNC)-denier says nothing, then "he is no better than a plant" (1006a15) and one can ignore him. But if he says anything definite at all, then he makes use of (LNC). For suppose he asserts 'The arrow is at rest.' He thereby commits himself to 'It is not the case that the arrow is not at rest.' If he asserts both 'The arrow is at rest' and 'The arrow is not at rest,' then, far from making two assertions, he does not even make one. He expresses no definite thought since he violates a principle observance of which is necessary for making sense.
The idea here is that he who asserts something contradictory asserts nothing at all: a necessary condition of there being a definite thought, a definite proposition, is that (LNC) be satisfied. The retortion might be spelled out as follows. The denier states
2. (LNC) is false.
But in making this definite statement, a statement that opposes what the (LNC)-affirmer states, the (LNC) denier commits himself to
3. It is not the case that (LNC) is not false.
But the commitment to (3) is tantamount to an acceptance of (LNC). So the denier's performance — his stating of (2) — 'contradicts' the content of (2).
But what exactly does the retortion show? Does it show that (LNC) is true of reality, or does it show merely that it is true of thought-contents? Is it an ontological principle or is it merely a law of thought, a principle that governs how we must think if we are to make sense to ourselves and others? Is it an ontological principle or merely a transcendental one? Is it perhaps true of only phenomenal reality but not of noumenal reality?
The film presents [Dalton] Trumbo as a hero and martyr for free speech, a principled rich Communist who nevertheless stands firm, sells his beautiful ranch for a “modest” new house in Los Angeles, and survives by writing film scripts — most run of the mill but some major films (such as the Academy Award-winning Roman Holiday) — using a “front” who pretended to be the writer.
[. . .]
While Trumbo was an interesting and colorful character, the film gives us the story of the Communists and the blacklist in the mold of the Ten’s own propaganda book published after their HUAC appearances. The book is Hollywood on Trial, which portrayed them as advocates of free speech who were defending the American Constitution, civil liberties, and American freedom itself.
[. . .]
In presenting this rosy picture, Trumbo avoids dealing with the actual nature of Communism and the role played by the CPUSA in Hollywood in the 1940s. It shows Trumbo and the others of the Ten who invoked the First Amendment as unadulterated heroes, and contrasts them with a group of nasty and brutish anti-Communist villains, including Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, Roy Brewer, two conservative groups that supported a blacklist and opposed the Communists, and virtually all those in Hollywood who opposed Communism.
[. . .]
Trumbo was no defender of free speech. He was a serious Communist and a defender of Stalin and the Soviet Union.
[. . .]
He could not have claimed innocence of Stalin’s crimes. In 1956, after Nikita Khrushchev’s speech about Stalin to a Party Congress, he told an old friend of his that he was not surprised, because he had read George Orwell, Koestler, James Burnham, Eugene Lyons and Isaac Don Levine, authors who told the truth about Soviet totalitarianism. In other words, Trumbo supported Stalin while knowing at the time that “Uncle Joe” was a monster and murderer.
[. . .]
Moreover, as the blacklist came to an end, Trumbo had time to reevaluate much of what he believed that led him to join the Communist Party. When my wife and I were doing research for our book Red Star Over Hollywood, we came across an article Trumbo had written but never published.
In this 1958 article, Trumbo told some frank truths about the Party — truths which eventually led him to quit. You would never suspect this from Roach’s film. There is nothing about the Party accusing him of “white chauvinism” — in today’s terms, racism. The CP, he told one old comrade, threw “a bucket of filth over me.” Moreover, he wrote that the Ten did not “perform historic deeds,” but took part “in a circus orchestrated by CP lawyers, all to save [ourselves] from punishment.”
He concluded that the blacklist took place not only because of the Committee, but because of the antics of the CP itself. In this article, he wrote that “the question of a secret Communist Party lies at the very heart of the Hollywood blacklist,” which is why Americans believed the Communists had something to hide. They lived in the United States, not Stalin’s U.S.S.R., and should have openly proclaimed their views and membership so that the American people could judge them for what they believed. Instead, they formed secret Leninist cells. The CPUSA should have been open and its members all known, he wrote, or the Communists in Hollywood should “not have been members at all.”
The following entry is from November, 2013. One reason to repost it is because a couple of neo-reactionary conservatives have, to my surprise, asked me what is wrong with being a tribalist. I had naively assumed that among philosophers at least tribalism would be deemed a Bad Thing. So I want to give them the opportunity to make a case for tribalism. If they choose to respond, however, I hope they keep it pithy. As one of my aphorisms has it:
Brevity is the soul of blog.
We live in a hyperkinetic age. Short incisive comments are better than long rambling ones, leastways in a venue such as this.
Recent examples of what I am calling tribalism are Juan Williams' and Colin Powell's refusal to condemn the virulently anti-cop thugs that parade under the banner of Black Lives Matter while chanting "Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon." It is as if these otherwise outstanding gentlemen identify as blacks first and as Americans second. Tribalism was on prominent display among the jurors in the O. J. Simpson trial. It is evinced by women who will vote for Hillary because she is a woman. The whiff of tribalism is about Geraldo Rivera, whom I greatly respect by the way, when he says things that suggest that he identifies as Hispanic first and as American second.
By the way, let me say that my opposition to tribalism is entirely consistent (as it seems to me) with wanting to keep out of our country those who would destroy it and its culture, at the present time these being radical (or, if you will, orthodox) Muslims, Muslims who support sharia and have no intention of assimilating to American culture and accepting our values. There is nothing tribal about standing up for Western values, values I have already argued are universal even if not universally recognized. The fact that dead white men discovered and promoted these values does not make them racially white values: they are universal values contributory to everyone's flourishing white or black, brown or yellow or red. And let's not leave out pinkos. We're inclusive!
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Suppose you present careful arguments against Obama's policies and ideas, foreign or domestic or both. Some black is sure to jump up and shout, "Racist! You hate him because he's black!" Oprah Winfrey is the latest example. There is no point in arguing with such an idiot, argument being fruitful only with those who inhabit the plane of reason; but you must respond. I suggest "If I'm a racist, then you are a tribalist."
If I oppose Obama's policies because he is black, then you support them because he is black. If I'm a racist, then you are a tribalist! If his being black is no reason to oppose his policies, then his being black is no reason to support them either. If racism is bad, then so is your knee-jerk tribalism.
One of the sad facts about American blacks is that many if not most of them cannot seem to transcend their tribal identification. They identify, not as human beings or as rational animals or as Americans, but as blacks. That tribal identification so dominates their consciousness that even the calmest and most polite arguments against Obama's ideas cannot be comprehended except as personal attacks on their man who is, first and foremost, a black man, even though he is half-white. That tribal identification was also at play in the O. J. Simpson trial. The prosecution presented a mountain of evidence of his guilt and yet the black-dominated jury acquitted him of double homicide.
My advice to blacks: if you want to be judged by "the content of your character and not the color of your skin," to adapt the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., then drop the tribal identification. if you want to be treated as individuals, then stop identifying as members of a racial group. Why is your race so important to you? Are you perhaps raaacists?
