Is there one root of all evil such that this root is (i) empirically identifiable, and (ii) eliminable by human effort alone? Can we humans locate and remove the one source of all evil?
My claim is that an affirmative answer is at once both false and extremely dangerous. ‘Root’ in Latin is radix, whence ‘eradicate,’ to uproot, and ‘radical.’ A radical is one who goes to the root of the matter. But some of our dear radicals make the mistake of thinking that there is one empirically identifiable root of all evils, one root the eradication of which will solve all our problems. Thinking that there is such a root, they are liable to ignore the real root, the one that cannot be empirically identified, and cannot be eradicated, the one that is operative in them. Here are my theses:
1. There is no one root of all evil that is empirically identifiable or isolable in experience. Thus one cannot locate the root of all evil in the Jews, or in the bourgeoisie, or in capitalism, or in corporations, or in ‘globalization,’ or in the infidel, or in the ‘Zionist entity’ or in 'racism,' or in religion, or in 'white privilege.' I’ll even concede that it cannot be located in liberals and socialists and hate-America leftists.
2. The attempt to eradicate evil by eliminating some empirically identifiable entity or group of people must fail given the truth of (1), and must lead to greater evil since genocide, forced collectivization, jihad, suicide bombing of innocents, etc. violate moral laws. Nazis, Commies and Islamists become ever more evil in their attempt to locate and eradicate evil.
3. There is a root of all moral evil, namely, the human misuse of free will. Not free will itself, of course; the misuse thereof. We misuse our free will when we fail to subordinate its use to transcendent standards.
4. Free will, grounded as it is in our spiritual being, is not empirically identifiable: it cannot show up as an object among objects. This is a reason why materialists deny it. And this is why (3) does not contradict (1). Since moral evil cannot exist without free will, to deny free will is to deny moral evil.
5. Free will is not subject to our freedom. I am not free to become unfree. I cannot freely decide to become a deterministic system, though there are times when I would definitely like to! I am ‘condemned to be free’ to use a Sartrean phrase. Being part of our nature, free will cannot be eradicated without eradicating us. It follows (though the inference needs more defense than I can give it here) that the root of all moral evil – the human misuse of free will – cannot be uprooted. Not even God can uproot it. For if God eliminated the human misuse of free will, he would thereby eliminate human free will itself, and us with it. This is because he could not prevent us from freely doing evil (in thought, word, or deed) without removing free will from us, which is the main respect in which we are god-like, imago dei.
6. The upshot is that we must learn to live with evil and not try to eliminate it. Of course, we must do what we can to limit the spread of evil in the world. We do well to start with ourselves by opposing our own evil thoughts and desires, words and actions. After we have made some headway with this, we can then worry about others and ‘society.’ What we cannot do, and must not try to do, is to locate evil outside ourselves so as to eradicate it. Its root, the human misuse of free will, cannot be eradicated, and we are all more or less evil. Although people are not equally good or evil, we all possess elements of both.
7. We cannot by our own efforts eliminate the evil that is in us. And we cannot eliminate the evil that is outside us and is outside us because it was first in us. (Evil thoughts and words are the seeds of evil deeds.) Homo homini lupus is never so true as when man tries to redeem himself. The Communists murdered 100 million in the 20th century in an attempt to eliminate the evils of class conflict, war, and economic catastrophe. They broke a lot of eggs for a nonexistent omelet. There is either no redeemer or the redeemer is divine. Nietzsche’s “Will is the great redeemer” is nonsense. But that’s a topic for another occasion.
8. 'Progressives' as they like to call themselves mistakenly think, as John Gray points out, that "evil can be vanquished." They are meliorists who, if they believe in evil at all, believe that it "is not an inbuilt human flaw, but a product of defective social institutions, which can over time be permanently improved."
That is a great illusion, a murderous illusion.
"Man is neither an angel nor a beast, and it is unfortunately the case that anyone trying to act the angel acts the beast." (Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Krailsheimer tr., p. 242)
. . . the University of Notre Dame ha[s] awarded its prestigious 2016 Laetare Medal to Vice President Joe Biden – a man who is both a Catholic and at the same time one of the nation’s most conspicuous defenders of abortion rights and same-sex marriage.
Disgusting. The solution? Revolt of the alumni. The greedy, overpaid, cowardly, p.c.-whipped administrators will knuckle under if the alumni withhold funds.
. . . I turned up this delightful tidbit in Gilleland the Erudite's archive of arcana from 2006:
Bill Vallicella (aka Maverick Philosopher) quotes the Latin phrase "Post coitum omne animal triste est," translates it as "After sexual intercourse every animal is sad," and remarks "The universal quantifier causes me some trouble." A variant of the phrase gives exceptions to the general rule: "Triste est omne animal post coitum, praeter mulierem gallumque," every animal except woman and rooster. Or should that be "Gallum," Frenchman?
And one of them, a doctor of the Law, putting him to the test, asked him, "Master, which is the great commandment in the Law?" Jesus said to him, "'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind.' This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like it, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets." (Matthew 22:35-40)
Can love be reasonably commanded? Love is an emotion or feeling. As such it is not under the control of the will. And yet we are commanded to love God and neighbor. How is this possible? An action can be commanded, but love is not an action. Love is an emotional response. So how can love be commanded?
In the case of loving God, there is not only the problem of how love can be commanded, but also the problem of how one can love what one doesn't know. Some people are such that to know them is to love them. Their lovableness naturally elicits a loving response. But apart from the mystical glimpses vouchsafed only to some and even to them only rarely and fitfully, God is not known but believed in. He is an object of faith, not of knowledge. (If you say that God is known by description via theistic 'proofs,' my response will be that such knowledge is not knowledge of God but knowledge that something or other satisfies the description in question.) How can we love God if we are not acquainted with God? Genuine love of God is love de re, not de dicto.
I won't be discussing the second problem in this entry, that of how one can love what one doesn't know, but only the first, namely: How can love be commanded, whether it be the love of God or the love of neighbor?
Here is quick little modus tollens. If love can be commanded, then love is an action, something I can will myself to do; love is not an action, not something I can will myself to do, but an emotional response; ergo, love cannot be commanded.
One way around the difficulty is by reinterpreting what is meant by 'love.' While I cannot will myself to love you, I can will to act benevolently toward you. And while it makes no sense to command love, it does make sense to command benevolent behavior. "You ought to love her" makes no sense; but "You ought to act as if you love her" does make sense. There cannot be a duty to love, but there might be a duty to do the sorts of things to and for a person that one would do without a sense of duty if one were to love her.
The idea, then, is to construe "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" as "Thou shalt act towards everyone as one acts toward those few whom one loves" or perhaps "Thou shalt act toward one's neighbor as if one loved him."
The above is essentially Kant's view as reported by William E. Mann, God, Modality, and Morality, pp.236 ff. It makes sense. But how does it apply to love of God?
Perhaps like this. To love God with one's whole heart, mind, and soul is to to act as if one loves God with one's whole heart, mind, and soul. But how does one do that? One way is by acting as if one loves one's neighbor as oneself. Another way, and this is my suggestion, is by living the quest for God via prayer, meditation, and philosophy.
We are in the age of post-consensus politics. We Americans don't agree on much of anything any more. As our politics comes more and more to resemble warfare, the warrior comes more and more to replace the gentleman.
Here is the best description of a gentleman I have encountered:
The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others, rather than his own; and who appears well in any company, a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe. -– John Walter Wayland
By this definition, Trump is no gentleman; he is rather the anti-gentleman. But a gentleman among thugs is a loser. You cannot appeal to the higher nature of a thug; he has none. So you need someone who can repay the leftist in his own Alinskyite coin. You need a man who will get into the gutter and fight the leftist with his own weapons. You need a man who will not shrink from the politics of personal destruction preached by V. I. Lenin and used so effectively by his successors in the Democrat Party.
Herein an argument for Trump. I am beginning to think that he alone can defeat the evil Hillary. Ted Cruz is a brilliant man compared to whom Trump is a know-nothing when it comes to the law, the Constitution, and the affairs of state, and Cruz is a better man than Trump; but the Texan is a senator and thus part of the Republican establishment against which there is justified rebellion.
Personality-wise, too, Cruz is not that attractive to the average disgruntled voter. He is not enough of a regular guy. And being a better man than Trump he probably won't descend deep enough into the gutter to really annihilate Hillary as she so richly deserves. Trump can mobilize Joe Sixpack and Jane Lipstick. These types don't watch C-SPAN or read The Weekly Standard. They can't relate to the bow-tie brigade over at National Review. They are heartily sick and tired of the empty talk of the crapweasels* of the Republican establishment. They want action.
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*I borrow this delightful bit of invective from the fiery Michelle Malkin.
Here is an extreme example of the leftist's reflexive love of underdogs qua underdogs. A Muslim terrorist stabs an Israeli in the neck. The Israeli pulls the knife out of his neck and stabs the terrorist to death with it. Now anyone who is morally sane will cheer the Israeli for his effective and morally legitimate self-defense. But a left-wing group took the side of the Muslim terrorist! How typical.
Peace Now is a leftist anti-Israel group funded by the EU, George Soros and the usual international gang of creeps and cretins. Its opposition to self-defense against Islamic terrorism is so extreme that it even condemns a stabbing victim for fighting back against his killer.
If Donald Trump is a sort of neo-Calliclean who celebrates the winner qua winner, regardless of how he came to be a winner, the typical leftist is the neo-Calliclean's opposite number who celebrates the loser qua loser, regardless of how he came to be a loser.
Some think so. The following from Thomas Mann's Diaries 1918-1939, entry of August 5, 1934:
A cynical egotism, a selfish limitation of concern to one's personal welfare and one's reasonable survival in the face of the headstrong and voluptuous madness of 'history' is amply justified. One is a fool to take politics seriously, to care about it, to sacrifice one's moral and intellectual strength to it. All one can do is survive, and preserve one's personal freedom and dignity.
I don't endorse Mann's sentiment but I sympathize with it. Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. Imagine the effect that must have had on a man of Mann's sensitivity and spiritual depth. You witness your country, the land of Kant and Schiller, of Dichter und Denker, poets and thinkers, in Heinrich Heine's phrase, transformed into a land of Richter und Henker, judges and hangmen.
My response to Mann would be along these lines: It is precisely because men of the spirit must survive and must survive to create and enlighten that they must be concerned with politics and with those who can kill and suppress them. You escaped to the USA, but what if there were no such country to which to escape because all of the people of high quality practised your cynical egotism, your selfish limitation to the personal?
I will have to find the passage in Plato's Laws where he says that the good who refuse to get involved in politics will end up ruled by the evil.
I'll grant you that it does if you grant me that truth, existence, order, conscience and twenty of so other phenomena prove the existence of God. And let's not leave out the moral heroism of Maximilian Kolbe.
You can reasonably ask how there could be a God given the fact of natural and moral evil. You can also reasonably ask how there could not be a God given the transcendent moral heroism and selflessness of Kolbe and others like him.
I'll grant you that evil argues the nonexistence of God if you grant me that evil also argues the existence of God. (Click on the first hyperlink and locate the argument from evil for the existence of God.)
My point is that there are no rationally compelling arguments for or against the existence of God.
According to Charles Krauthammer (Things That Matter, Crown Forum, 2013, p. 64),
To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.
Robert Paul Wolff unwittingly provides corroboration:
On Easter Sunday, it is only fitting that the reliably despicable Ross Douthat should once again rise from the dead with an incoherently dreadful column on Piketty. I will not try to summarize it. As Aristotle observed [I think], shit has no form, and hence cannot easily be apprehended by reason. You may read it for yourself. I take Douthat's column as a good sign, a harbinger of Spring. When the rats on the sinking ship of capitalism pause in their scramble down the hawsers to acknowledge the reemergence of Marx from the dustbin of history [how's that for a mixed metaphor?], there is hope on this annual celebration of resurrection.
Note that Wolff does not address the content of Douthat's essay, though he does have the decency to link to it. What he does is portray Douthat as a reliably despicable zombie and rat, a shill for capitalism, who has penned an incoherently dreadful column, a piece of shit beneath the apprehension of reason.
Well thank you Professor Wolff for this wonderful Easter Sunday illustration of the Central Axiom and for reminding us once again of how dangerous you leftists are, and, indirectly, how important our Second Amendment rights are.
A leftist is a person who can justify unspeakably evil deeds to advance a worldview according to which people are basically good and evil does not exist.
As far as I can tell, our thoughts on Trump’s unfitness are pretty close, and the way you’ve laid out the matter in your most recent post (Trumpian Propositions) also mirrors my thinking. This extends to the following sentence, which I’ve uttered almost verbatim to friends and family: “we know what Hillary will do, while we do not know what Trump will do.”
Where we disagree – or rather, where I may disagree with you, but am still working out my thoughts and waiting for further developments – is in evaluating the implications of that statement. You take it as an argument to vote for Trump; after all, you say, “[h]e might actually do something worthwhile.” I agree with that quotation as well. It seems to me that HRC will be a terrible President 100 times out of 100, while DJT may only be terrible 98 or 99 times out of 100.
But here’s the problem: I fear that his worst could be worse, maybe much worse, than Hillary’s. He is a thug, or at least often behaves like one (e.g. in his use of eminent domain both in the U.S. and in Scotland) and expresses admiration for thugs (e.g. Putin, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Un, the Chinese in cracking down in the Tiananmen Square massacre back in ’89, etc.). Trump, it seems to me, wants to be El Jefe, not merely the commander in chief of a Republic, subject to checks and balances and limitations on executive power. (See for example his incredible statement in the debate that he would give illegal orders to members of the armed forces, and they would follow them.)
BV: If we use 'thug' to refer to someone who habitually engages in thuggish behavior, then perhaps Trump is not fairly called a thug. But he is often thuggish, and he clearly admires thugs and thuggish behavior. This is a disqualifier. Lacking self-knowledge, he cannot see this fact about himself. This is another disqualifier.
It is also important to note that much of the admiration and support for Trump reflects a dark side of human nature, namely, the tendency secretly to admire supposed tough guys and 'winners,' and to have contempt for 'losers' many of whom 'lose' because they are reasonable, civil, conciliatory, and concerned for the common good, Mitt Romney being one example. To admire a winner just in virtue of his winning while ignoring the question of the morality of the means to victory is human-all-too-human. It is rooted in our animal nature. In Trump's moral calculus, the worst sort of human being is the loser. This is why the first thing he said in his response to Mitt Romney was that the latter lost.
To the extent that we can ascribe a moral theory to a shallow-pate like Trump, his is the morality of Thrasymachus, if we take that to be the view that it is right and just that the strong should dominate the weak. Might makes right. Success justifies. If the panzers of the Wehrmacht roll into Poland crushing all resistance, then the fact justifies the deed. My power to kill you confers moral justification on my killing you. On the other hand, failure condemns. If you are too weak to win and you lose, then it is right and just that you lose. When Hitler saw that the fatherland was about to be destroyed, his attitude was that it deserved to be destroyed. So he ordered the scorched earth Nero Decree as much to punish the Germans for losing as to prevent useful infrastructure from falling into the hands of the enemy.
In light of this it is easy to understand Trump's mocking of the man with the palsied hand and his reference to Megyn Kelly's menstrual cycle. The cripple is weak and less worthy of life. Women are weaker than men and so their claims can be dismissed as products of their weakness. It also sheds light on Trump's assuring us that his sexual apparatus is large and in good working order. For any weakness in that area would detract from his status as alpha male and argue his lack of value. For a man as crude as Trump the measure of a man is the size and rigidity of his penis and the extent of his net worth. Now many a man is concerned with penis and pelf; but few are so morally vacuous as to have no compunction about tying one's worth as a person to such things.
What matters for our latter-day Thrasymachus is to win, whatever the cost. And or course winning is measured in the crudest quantitative terms imaginable. Trump tweeted to a journalist who criticized him, "I get more pussy than you." What matters is quantity of 'pussy,' size of net worth, height of buildings . . . . It doesn't matter that those buildings are casinos wherein people degrade and impoverish themselves.
And notice that he doesn't care that these damning facts are known about him. He is not ashamed to be the crude vulgarian that he is. He is like Bill Clinton in this regard. Nixon, who was brought up right, could be shamed, but not Bill Clinton. "I did it because I could." And like Bill Clinton, Trump has no compunction about lying. It comes as naturally to him as breathing.
And nothing he says has to make sense since it is not about making sense but about winning. So he can make noises as if he is supportive of Christianity even though, by his own moral calculus, he ought to despise Jesus Christ. For the world has never known a bigger loser and more utter failure than Jesus. Humanly speaking, Jesus was a total loser. If that is not obvious, the case has been made most convincingly by Romano Guardini in Jesus Christus, chapter 3, "Failure."
Like Obama, Trump will say anything if he thinks it will get him what he wants. It doesn't matter whether it is true or even makes sense, or contradicts what he said the day before.
My correspondent is worried that Trump's worst may be worse than Hillary's worst. Could be. We just don't know. But we do know Hillary will do whereas we do not know what Trump will do. So it strikes me as reasonable to roll the dice in his favor should he get the nomination. Meanwhile, we should do our damndest to make sure he doesn't get the nomination.
It isn’t clear to me that he’s better than Hillary Clinton, even leaving aside his Napoleonic complex. Is there anything that you know he stands for? He thinks Planned Parenthood is “great”, he’ll let all the “good ones” (Mexicans) back in, likes H1B visas, imported immigrants to work at his resort while rejecting American labor as recently as last July, was for restrictions on the second amendment until about 30 seconds ago, recommends higher taxes on the rich, has advocated torture, opposes free trade, wants to further limit the first amendment, has been playing footsies with the KKK and the white supremacists (the “bad earpiece” try was a joke, as he himself mentioned David Duke and white supremacists in that CNN interview), has a decades-long track record of engaging in crony “capitalism” – and the list goes on and on. I don’t see where he’s better than she is, except on a very few issues where his “conversion” goes back to the instant he decided to run, and which in every case has been retracted or at least undermined by later statements during the campaign. He’s a bullshitter, a bully, and a blusterer, and if you go by his actions instead of his words he’s just another liberal democrat.
BV: There is one thing I KNOW Trump stands for, namely, his own ego. He is all the awful things you say he is. And I agree that it is not CLEAR that he is better than Hillary.
So I just don’t see it. [. . .]
The only possible and meaningful plus I see for Trump is the possibility that he appoints conservatives to SCOTUS. There is no chance that Hillary will do so, but he might. (I’m not absolutely sure about that, but it’s moderately possible.) Maybe that’s a good enough reason. Given that his sister is a pro-choice judge, and given his social liberalism, and given his seeming ignorance of and disdain for the U.S. Constitution (I especially liked his recent comments about judges signing bills into law), the odds of his nominating an originalist justice are iffy at best. But again, maybe that’s good enough. Still: does one elect a liberal ignoramus who might be Mussolini for a shot at 2-3 (relatively) good Supremes?
BV: Hillary is Obama in a pant suit. She will continue his "fundamental transformation of America." Like Obama, she is a destructive leftist. She must be stopped. Therefore, you must vote for the Republican nominee whoever it is. It will be either Trump or Cruz.
I don't think it is right to say that the only good thing Trump might do is appoint conservatives to the Supreme Court. It is a very good bet that he will put a severe dent in the influx of illegal aliens across the southern border. (Forget his bluster about making Mexico pay for the wall.) But we KNOW that hate-America Hillary will do nothing to stem the illegal tide. If anything she'll encourage it because in her cynical eyes they are undocumented Democrats.
A third thing Trump might very well do is stop the outrage of sanctuary cities. But we KNOW Hillary won't.
A fourth thing Trump can be expected to do enforce civil order in the face of rampaging blacks of the Black Lives Matter ilk. These lying scum have targeted the police and are actively working to undermine the rule of law. Hillary is in bed with them. The evil bitch repeats all the lies about Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, 'mass incarceration' and so on. And what is most despicable is that she does it cynically for her own personal advantage.
A fifth thing Trump might do is defend religious liberties. We KNOW that Hillary won't. Never forget that the Left is anti-religion and has been since 1789. Part of the reason for this is that the Left is totalitarian: it can brook no competitors to State power. This is why it must destroy belief in God and in the family. The god of the leftist is the State, the apparatchiks of the latter being the State's 'priesthood.'
A sixth thing Trump might do is defend Second Amendment rights. We KNOW that Hillary won't. She is a mendacious 'stealth ideologue' who won't admit that she is for Aussie-style confiscation, but that is what the liberty-bashing bitch is for. She realizes that guns in the hands of citizens is a check on her leftist totalitarianism.
Here is the situation. If it comes down to Trump versus Hillary, then you face a lousy choice between two awful candidates. So you must vote for the least awful of the two. And that is Trump. Alles klar?
"But why not vote for neither?"
The short answer is that the Left is totalitarian. You can't withdraw from politics, because they won't let you. And again, we know that Hillary is a leftist who will try to extend the reach of government into every aspect of our lives. You must take a stand.
