We are regularly forced to endure a new left-wing manufactured, media-supercharged hysteria.
The latest is the tsunami of horror in reaction to Donald Trump's gross and juvenile comments made in private 11 years ago.
The tsunami of condemnation of his remarks is quintessential left-wing hysteria. That more than a few Republicans and conservatives have joined in is a testament to the power of mass media and hysteria to influence normally sensible people.
This is hysteria first and foremost because the comments were made in private. I would say the same thing if crass comments made by Hillary Clinton in private conversation had been recorded. In fact, I did. In 2000, in a Wall Street Journal column, I defended Hillary Clinton against charges that she was an anti-Semite. That year it was reported that Clinton had called Paul Fray, the manager of her husband's failed 1974 congressional campaign, a "f—ing Jew bastard."
Even the left-wing newspaper, the Guardian, reported that three people — two witnesses and Fray — confirmed the report.
Nevertheless, I wrote in the Journal, "I wish to defend Mrs. Clinton. I do so as a practicing Jew and a Republican. … We must cease this moral idiocy of judging people by stray private comments."
(Emphasis added.)
Month: October 2016
Defunding the Left
You know things have come to a sorry pass when defunding the Left might have to include withdrawal of financial support from The Society of Christian Philosophers.
What we really need is an Association of Conservative Philosophers. (The resonance of the initials ACP will not be lost on my astute readers.) The contributors to Rightly Considered may want to take this ball and run with it.
Why No Calls For Hillary to Withdraw?
Talk about a double standard!
We've known all along that Trump is crude and Clintonian in his sexual appetite, although not as bad as Bill in terms of deeds; but the Wikileaks data dump brought something new and objectively far more important to our attention. It is another revelation of Hillary's greed, mendacity, secretiveness, and lust for power. We get a whiff of her doctrine of 'two truths' one for the insiders, the other for public consumption. There is her assault on national sovereignty with her call for a borderless world. This supercilious stealth ideologue who has enriched herself in government 'service' absolutely must be stopped, and there is only one man who can do it. Jeb! never was up to the job.
What's worse, a P-grabber or a gun grabber? The former operates on occasion and in private in the 'noble' tradition of Jack Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, and Bill Clinton. The latter would violate sacred American rights for all and forever. Don't believe Hillary's lies about supporting the Second Amendment. She lies whenever it is useful for advancing herself and her destructive agenda. In that order.
And then there is the utter hypocrisy of liberals who, having presided over when not promoting the injection of moral toxins into our culture, moralize about Trump's admittedly disgusting and puerile locker-room talk. Heather MacDonald gets it right in Trumped-Up Outrage. As does Margot Anderson who points out that Dems have no problem with the objectification of females if they are small enough. Rebecca Tetti offers this important insight:
These people who celebrate porn and abortion and make heroic figures out of small-souled, sex-deluded creatures such as Bill Maher and Lena Dunham and Sandra Fluke and lionize sick predator men like the Kennedys and Bill Clinton are not merely being hypocrites or playing politics when they denounce Trump. They are deliberately engaging in The Lie: the corruption of meaning itself. They aren’t outraged because they’re decent. They’re using our decency as a pawn in their quest for political power.
The insight is that the Left uses our decency, which they don't believe in, against us, mendaciously feigning moral outrage at what doesn't outrage them at all. (Cf. Saul Alinsky's RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”)
And then there are the milquetoast pseudo-conservatives who have withdrawn their support from Trump out of fear of losing their position, power, perquisites, and pelf. That other 'P-word,' to use Megyn Kelly's demure expression, seems rightly applicable to them. The motivations of Senator McCain and the boys are transparent enough.
But enough of this. For now.
Robert De Niro . . .
. . . must be getting some 'Mean Tweets' along about now over his attack on Donald Trump.
I've admired De Niro as an actor ever since Martin Scorsese's 1973 Mean Streets.
Now actors and actresses have a right to their political opinions, but I can't see that most of them have a right to their high opinion of their political opinions. I wrote the following in June of 2013:
The encomia continue to pour in on the occasion of the passing of James Gandolfini. 'Tony Soprano' died young at 51, apparently of a heart attack, while vacationing in Italy. Given the subtlety of The Sopranos it would be unfair to say that Gandolfini wasted his talent portraying a scumbag and glorifying criminality, and leave it at that. But I wonder if people like him and De Niro and so many others give any thought to the proper use of their brief time on earth.
It's at least a question: if you have the talents of an actor or a novelist or a screen writer or a musician, should you have any moral scruples about playing to the basest sides of human nature? Are we so corrupted now that this is the only way to turn a buck in the arts?
Related:
Why are Actors and Actresses Held in Such Low Esteem?
Robert De Niro Calls Jon Voight 'Delusional' Over Support for Trump
Has political disagreement ever been worse in these United States? Well, yes, during the Civil War. So it could be worse. But keep your powder dry.
Political Legitimacy and Rent Seeking
This is not an election fought over competing policies but a struggle for legitimacy. A very large portion of the electorate (how large a portion we will discover next month) believes that its government is no longer legitimate, and that it has become the instrument of an entrenched rent-seeking oligarchy.
By and large, I agree with this reading. "America's economy is corrupt, cartelized and anti-competitive," I wrote in August. It is typical of rent-seeking that Lockheed Martin's stock price has tripled during the past three years, and payment to its top management team has risen from $12 million a year to over $60 million a year, while Lockheed Martin's F-35 languishes in cost overruns and deployment delays. Produce a lemon and get rich: that's Washington. It is not a trivial matter, or unrepresentative of our national condition, that the FBI director who declined to prosecute Mrs. Clinton for mishandling of classified material just returned to government from a stint at Lockheed Martin, where he was paid $6 million for a single year's service. I don't know whether FBI Director Comey is corrupt. But it looks and smells terrible.
That's why it was so important for Trump to talk about jail time for his opponent. If things had not gotten to the point where former top officials well might belong in jail, Trump wouldn't be there in the first place. The Republican voters chose a reckless, independently wealthy, vulgar, rough-edged outsider precisely because they believe that the system is corrupt. They are right to so believe; if the voters knew a tenth of what I know about it, they would march on Washington with pitchforks.
What is rent seeking? Here:
"Rent seeking” is one of the most important insights in the last fifty years of economics and, unfortunately, one of the most inappropriately labeled. Gordon Tullock originated the idea in 1967, and Anne Krueger introduced the label in 1974. The idea is simple but powerful. People are said to seek rents when they try to obtain benefits for themselves through the political arena. They typically do so by getting a subsidy for a good they produce or for being in a particular class of people, by getting a tariff on a good they produce, or by getting a special regulation that hampers their competitors. Elderly people, for example, often seek higher Social Security payments; steel producers often seek restrictions on imports of steel; and licensed electricians and doctors often lobby to keep regulations in place that restrict competition from unlicensed electricians or doctors.
Hillary’s Nonsense About “No Religious Test”
Hillary got clobbered in last night's debate, but Trump missed an opportunity to refute her nonsensical claim that vetting Muslim immigrants involves the application of a "religious test."
In Article VI of the U. S. Constitution we read:
. . . no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.
Two questions. One concerns Muslim citizens of the U.S. The other concerns Muslims who are attempting to immigrate. The first question first.
Does it follow from the passage quoted that the U. S. Constitution allows a Muslim citizen who supports Sharia (Islamic law) to run for public office? No! For the same Constitution, in its First Amendment, enjoins a salutary separation of church/synagogue/mosque and state, though not in those words. Sharia and the values and principles enshrined in the founding documents are incompatible. On no sane interpretation is our great Constitution a suicide pact.
It is important to realize that Islam is as much an anti-Enlightenment political ideology as it is a religion. It is an unholy hybrid of the political and the religious. Our Enlightenment founders must be rolling around in their graves at the very suggestion that Sharia-subscribing Muslims are eligible for the presidency and other public offices.
A religion that requires the subverting of the U. S. Constitution is not an admissible religion when it comes to applying the "no religious Test" provision. On a sane interpretation of the Constitution, Islam, though a religion, is not an admissible religion where an admissible religion is one that does not contain core doctrines which, if implemented, would subvert the Constitution.
Or one might argue that Islam is not a religion at all. Damn near anything can and will be called a religion by somebody. Some say with a straight face that leftism is a religion, others that Communism is a religion. Neither is a religion on any adequate definition of 'religion.' I have heard it said that atheism is a religion. Surely it isn't. Is a heresy of a genuine religion itself a religion? Arguably not. Hillaire Belloc and others have maintained that Islam is a Christian heresy. Or one could argue that Islam, or perhaps radical Islam, is not a religion but a totalitarian political ideology masquerading as a religion. How to define religion is a hotly contested issue in the philosophy of religion.
The point here is that "religious" in ". . . no religious Test shall ever be required" is subject to interpretation. We are under no obligation to give it a latitudinarian reading that allows in a destructive ideology incompatible with our values and principles.
As for immigration, would-be immigrants have no rights under our Constitution. So Article VI doesn't apply to them at all.
As for gaseous talk of blocking Sharia-supporting Muslims as being "not who we are," it suffices to say that 'liberals' who gas off like this ought simply to be ignored.
There is no right to immigrate, and a nation is under no obligation to allow in subversive elements. But it does have every right to protect its culture and values. Here alone is a decisive reason to vote for Trump and block Hillary. Trump punched hard last night, but not hard enough. He should have pointed out that Hillary is a destructive leftist globalist who aims at the same "fundamental transformation" that Obama called for. He should have pointed out that no patriot calls for the fundamental transformation of his country. For what that implies in our case is the destruction of the U.S. as it was founded to be.
The Anthropomorphism of Perfect-Being (Anselmian)Theology
One approach to God and his attributes is Anselmian: God is "that that which no greater can be conceived." God is the greatest conceivable being, the most perfect of all beings, the being possessing all perfections. But what is a perfection? A perfection is not just any old (positive, non-Cambridge) property, but a great-making property. Some of these properties admit of degrees while some do not. To say of God that he is the ens perfectissimum, the most perfect of all beings, is to say that he possesses all great- making properties, and of those that admit of degrees, he possesses them to the highest degree.
For example, power admits of degrees; so while Socrates and God are both powerful, only God is maximally powerful. Wisdom too admits of degrees; so while both Socrates and God are both wise, only God is maximally wise. And the same holds for love and mercy and moral goodness. Many of the divine attributes, then, are maxima of attributes possessed by humans.
Are Socrates and God wise in the same sense of 'wise'? This follows if wisdom in God is just the highest degree of the same attribute that is found in some humans. Accordingly, the predicate 'wise' is being used univocally in 'Socrates is wise' and 'God is wise' despite the fact that God but not Socrates is all-wise.
Thus a commitment to univocity appears to be entailed by the Anselmian or perfect-being approach.
The polar opposite of univocity is equivocity. The phenomenon of equivocity is illustrated by this pair of sentences: 'Socrates is wise,' 'Hillary is in no wise fit to be president.' The meaning of 'wise' is totally different across the two sentences. Midway between univocity and equivocity there is analogicity. Perhaps an example of an analogical use of 'wise' would be in application to Guido the mafioso. He's a wise guy; he knows the score; but he is not a wise man like Socrates, though he is like the latter in being knowledgeable about some things. But I mention analogy only to set it aside.
My thesis: an Anselmian approach to God and his attributes such as we find in Alvin Plantinga and T. V. Morris is anthropomorphic. One takes God to have the very same great-making properties that (some) humans have, but to the maximal degree. Socrates is benevolent and merciful; God is omnibenevolent and all-merciful. And so on. In so doing, one approaches God from the side of man, assimilating God to man. God is 'made' in the image and likeness of man, as a sort of superman, but with defects removed and attributes maximized.
Well, what is wrong with anthropomorphism? The problem with it is that it fails to do justice to God's absolute transcendence and ineffability. If the difference between creatures and God is only a matter of degree, then God would not be worthy of worship. He would be "the greatest thing around" and no doubt an object of wonder and admiration, but not an appropriate object of worship. (See Barry Miller, A Most Unlikely God, U. of Notre Dame Press, 1996, p. 3)
God is the Absolute. As such, he is radically other than creatures. His attributes cannot be 'in series' with human degreed attributes even if at the limits of these series. God in not just another thing that exists and possesses properties in the way creatures possess properties.
A subsequent entry will examine the view opposite to that of perfect-being theology, that of negative theology.
Gratitude is the Memory of the Heart
A masterpiece of the aphorist's art. Attributed to Jean Massieu (1772-1846).
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ships and Trains and Boats and Planes
Doors, Crystal Ship
Clancy Bros., When the Ship Comes In. Peter, Paul, and Mary also do a fine job with the great Dylan anthem.
Brewer and Shipley, One Toke Over the Line. What you'll be when the shit comes in. Matters feculent bring Brian Leiter to mind. Speculation is running high according to a New York Times piece that he mailed feces to four philosophers.
Dionne Warwick, Trains and Boats and Planes
Peter, Paul, and Mary, Leaving on a Jet Plane
Arlo Guthrie, City of New Orleans. Classic Americana.
Jimmy Dean, PT 109
Frankie Ford, Sea Cruise
Phil Ochs, Pleasures of the Harbor
Credence Clearwater Revival, Proud Mary
Gordon Lightfoot, Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Powerful song, great lyrics. "Does anyone know where the love of God goes/When the waves turn the minutes to hours?"
Beach Boys, Sloop John B.
The Discursive Framework, Logic, and Whether the Via Negativa is the Path to Nowhere
The Historian of Logic comments:
It seems to me that what you call the ‘Discursive Framework’ is what I and others call ‘logic’, and that it reflects a Kantian view of logic that prevailed before Russell and Frege, namely that logic reflects the ‘laws of thought’ only. Are you mooting the possibility of beings which defy conception under these laws, or realms where the laws do not apply?
I was re-reading Kant’s Logic last week and it is full of this stuff.
Logic. I would define logic as the normative science of inference. Science: scientia, study of. Inference: the mental process of deriving a proposition (the conclusion) from one or more propositions (the premises). Normative: logic is not concerned with how people think as a matter of fact, which is a concern of psychology, but with how they ought to think if they are to arrive at truth and move from known truths to further truths. The task of logic is to set forth the criteria whereby correct inferences may be distinguished from incorrect inferences.
The above definition is neutral with respect to any number of ontological questions. Thus I used 'proposition' above innocuously without presupposing any theory as to what propositions are. I spoke of inference as a mental process, but this too is innocuous inasmuch as one could be a mind-brain identity theorist and agree with me about logic. (But if you are an eliminativist about the mental, then you 'get the boot': it is a Moorean fact that there are inferences.)
Discursive Framework. This is not the same as logic, pace the Historian, even though it does contain such logical principles as LNC and LEM, and indeed the whole of standard logic. (We can argue about 'standard' in the ComBox.) The DF also contains principles that are not strictly logical — they are not logical truths — but are better classifiable as metaphysical, as propositions of metaphysica generalis. Examples:
a. Everything exists: There are no nonexistent items. Pace van Inwagen, the negation of this is not a logical contradiction.
b. Everything has properties. (Partisans of bare or thin particulars do not deny this.)
c. Nothing has a property P by being identical to P. (The 'is' of predication is not assimilable to the 'is' if formal identity.)
d. Principles of logic, such as For any x, x = x, are not just true of objects of thought qua objects of thought, but are also true of mind-independentally real items. Thus the principles of logic are not merely principles of thought but principles of reality as well. Not merely logical, they are also ontological. There is a jump here, from the logical to the ontological, that Aristotle was aware of. With that jump comes the problem of justifying it.
e. The thinking of ectypal intellects such as ourselves is necessarily such as to involve a distinction between subject and predicate. There are no simple thoughts/propositions if by that we mean thoughts/proposition lacking sub-propositional structure. Every proposition is internally structured, e.g. Fa, Rab, (x)Fx, etc.
Laws of Thought but No Psychologism. Kant, Husserl, and Frege all rejected psychologism in logic. Are the laws of logic laws of thought? Yes, of course. What else would they be? But this is not to say that they are laws of human psychology. They are laws that govern the thinking of any actual or possible ectypal intellect. They might also be laws of reality, all reality, with no exceptions. But surely it would be uncritical simply to assume this. It wants proof, or at least argument. As I said, Aristotle had already seen the problem.
Are you mooting the possibility of beings which defy conception under these laws, or realms where the laws do not apply?
Yes, that is what I am doing, although I wouldn't speak of beings. That's plural, and the singular-plural distinction is part and parcel of the Discursive Framework. My aim is to make philosophy safe for mysticism. My aim is to show that while remaining in philosophy, in the DF, one can come to descry the 'possibility' of a, or rather, THE transdiscursive realm. I deny that the via negativa is the road to nowheresville or u-topia.
I am not attempting anything new; the novelty is merely in the way I go about it. And there is nothing illogical about it. Or can you find non sequiturs or other strictly logical mistakes in the above or in recent cognate posts? If there is a suprarational realm would it not be sloppy thinking, and thus 'illogical,' to assume that it must be infrarational?
Nothing new: we have seen this sort of thing in the Far East in Buddhist schools like that of Nagarjuna and in Taoism; in the ancient and medieval Western world, e.g., Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite, and in the modern period with Kant and then again in the early Wittgenstein.
The Doctrine of Divine Simplicity (DDS) Helps Focus The Issue. Duality is unavoidable on the discursive plane. To think is to judge, and to judge at the most basic level is to judge of a that it is or is not F. At a bare minimum, then, there is the duality of subject and property. (Brentano transformations of predications into existential sentences avail nothing: the duality of existence-nonexistence remains.) As I said above, no thought/proposition, no content of an act of thinking, is simple. But God is simple according to DDS. He is identical to his attributes, which implies that each attribute is identical to every other one. If he weren't then he would be dependent on his attributes for his nature, and he would not be the absolute reality. He could not possess aseity. He could not be uniquely unique. If God were unique only in the sense that he is necessarily one of a kind, then he would one of a class of such beings, and a greater could be conceived, namely, a being uniquely unique, i.e., unique in the sense of transcending the very distinction between instance and kind.
Now if God is simple, then how can our talk and thought, which is necessarily discursive, be literally true of him? One response is that God talk is literal but analogical. This needs exploring in a separate post. But if we cannot accept the doctrine of analogy, then the simple God lies entirely beyond the DF.
“I Swear, If You Existed, I’d Divorce You.”
If the recipient of this insult had been a philosophy professor instead of a mere history professor, he might have responded as follows. "Darling, by the Existence Symmetry of Relations, if a relation R holds, then either all of its relata exist or none of them do. Now one cannot divorce a person to whom one is not married. So you and I stand in the marital relation. It follows that if I don't exist, then you don't either."
The ‘Liberal’ Speaks
If it ain't totalitarian, then it ain't government!
Thinker, Thought, Sentence
If thought is to sentence as soul to body, then thinker is to thought as God to soul.
George Orwell on the Renegade ‘Liberal’
The more things change, the more they remain the same. Here is the great Orwell from 1945 in The Freedom of the Press:
One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought. This argument was used, for instance, to justify the Russian purges. The most ardent Russophile hardly believed that all of the victims were guilty of all the things they were accused of: but by holding heretical opinions they ‘objectively’ harmed the régime, and therefore it was quite right not only to massacre them but to discredit them by false accusations. The same argument was used to justify the quite conscious lying that went on in the leftwing press about the Trotskyists and other Republican minorities in the Spanish civil war. And it was used again as a reason for yelping against habeas corpus when Mosley was released in 1943.
This is quite applicable to the liberal-left termites of the present day who are undermining our institutions, so much so that not even an outfit such as the Society of Christian Philosophers is free of their infestation.
The Academic Curtain
Thomas Sowell on the sad state of our elite universities. Excerpt:
There is no barbed wire around our campuses, nor armed guards keeping unwelcome ideas out. So there is no "iron curtain." But there is a curtain, and it has its effect.
One effect is that many of the rising generation can go from elementary school through postgraduate education at our leading colleges and universities without ever hearing a coherent presentation of a vision of the world that is fundamentally different from that of the political left.
There are world class scholars who are unlikely to become professors at either elite or non-elite academic institutions because they do not march in the lockstep of the left. Some have been shouted down or even physically assaulted when they tried to give a speech that challenged the prevailing political correctness.
Harvard is just one of the prestigious institutions where such things have happened — and where preemptive surrender to mob rule has been justified by a dean saying that it was too costly to provide security for many outside speakers who would set off campus turmoil.
Despite the fervor with which demographic "diversity" is proclaimed as a prime virtue — without a speck of evidence as to its supposed benefits — diversity of ideas gets no such respect.