April 2017 – Page 2 – Maverick Philosopher

Hate Speech

Glenn Reynolds talks sense against such liberal knuckleheads as Howard Dean:

The other hallmark of constitutional illiteracy is the claim that the First Amendment doesn’t protect “hate speech.” And by making that claim last week, Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont and Democratic presidential candidate, revealed himself to be a constitutional illiterate. Then, predictably, he doubled down on his ignorance.

In First Amendment law, the term “hate speech” is meaningless. All speech is equally protected whether it’s hateful or cheerful. It doesn’t matter if it’s racist, sexist or in poor taste, unless speech falls into a few very narrow categories — like “true threats,” which have to address a specific individual, or “incitement,” which must constitute an immediate and intentional encouragement to imminent lawless action — it’s protected.

The term “hate speech” was invented by people who don’t like that freedom, and who want to give the — completely false — impression that there’s a kind of speech that the First Amendment doesn’t protect because it’s hateful. What they mean by “hateful,” it seems, is really just that it’s speech they don’t agree with. Some even try to argue that since hearing disagreeable ideas is unpleasant, expressing those ideas is somehow an act of “violence.”

I would add that 'liberals' have a strange tendency to conflate dissent with hate. Obviously, if I dissent from what you maintain, it does not follow that I hate you. And if I express my dissent in speech, it does not follow that my speech is 'hate speech.'

I suspect most 'liberals' have the intellectual equipment to grasp these simple distinctions. So what ought we conclude? That they are hate-filled individuals?

And another thing. If a liberal claims that the Great Wall of Trump is 'hateful,' then I will put to him the question: Is it 'hateful' when you lock your doors at night? No? But doesn't anyone have the right to 'migrate' anywhere he pleases? You just hate people that are different from you, you xenophobe!

Nothing So Stupid a Liberal Won’t Embrace It

Another example. (HT: Karl White) My correspondent, an Irishman living in London, really ought to change his 'racist' surname. And while he's at it, he should ditch his 'Nazi' Christian name or have the decency to change the spelling to 'Carl.' His very name is a two-termed 'micro-aggression'!

The Collapse of the Catholic Universities

Yet another example, one so egregious that I pinch myself to see if I am awake:

Stéphane Mercier, a lecturer in philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven (UCL) in Belgium initially was suspended from teaching, pending the outcome of disciplinary proceedings, because there was opposition in a class from a feminist group to his philosophical argument to the effect that abortion is the killing of an innocent unborn human life, which is an “intrinsically evil,” always unacceptable, regardless of the circumstances. The response from both the UCL administration and the Belgium Bishops Conference to his philosophical argument, which was put forth in a document entitled “The Philosophy Supporting Life: Against a so-called Right to Choose an Abortion", has been confusing.

UPDATE 2/24:

A reader sends this:

A student at the institution informs me this is the passage that led to the lecturer's sacking. It was a First Year Philosophy course:

"[…] reminds me of Newspeak, the official language of Oceania in George Orwell's 1984. Voluntary interruption of pregnancy is a euphemism that hides a message, namely the truth, which is that abortion is the murder of an innocent person. It is a murder particularly abject, because the victim has no defense against it. if murdering an innocent person capable of self-defense weren't repulsive enough, taking the life of someone who doesn't have the power to defend himself is even more vile. Today, we hear people who believe abortion is immoral, but don't think about making it illegal, a disturbingly absurd way of reasoning. […] Imagine that the same person declares rape immoral, but thinks it shouldn't be made illegal in order to protect the freedoms of an individual (except for the victim…). that's absurd, right? So, if abortion is murder, as it is said to be by some, doesn't that make it worse than rape? Rape is immoral, and fortunately illegal as well. Shouldn't abortion, which is even more immoral, be illegal too?"

BV's comment: Imagine getting sacked at any university, let alone a supposedly Catholic university with the word 'Catholic' in its name, for giving this argument!

Leftist termites are undermining the great institutions of the West, and the authorities in charge of these institutions have either abdicated, or are termites themselves. The edifices of higher culture are in dire need of fumigation. Figuratively speaking, of course . . . .

Why Do You Carry a Notebook?

If I am wearing a shirt with pockets, I almost always carry a 3 X 5 notebook and a pen in my top left pocket. People sometimes ask why I carry it. I have a prepared response:

It's in case I get a good idea. Haven't had one yet, but you never know.

And if I am out walking around, another element of my schtick is my stick which is distinctive and also elicits questions. Ask me why I carry it and I have a line at the ready:

Time was when I needed it to beat off women; but now I just need it to keep from toppling over.

I have found that the second line doesn't go over as well. While both involve self-deprecation, which will often endear you to people, or at least blunt the blade of their hidden hostility, the self-deprecation in the second line comes too late for some.

So I cannot recommend the second line in all circumstances. The perceived machismo of the first clause of the second line will sometimes stick in the craw of a humorless feminist.

Perhaps the best advice I could give is to paraphrase a line attributed to the cowboy wit, Will Rogers:

Never miss an opportunity to keep your mouth shut.

That of course is an exaggeration. But exaggerations are rhetorically useful if they are in the direction of truths. The truth here is that the damage caused by idle talk is rarely offset by its paltry benefits.

My mind drifts back to the fourth or fifth grade and the time a nun planted an image in my mind that remains. She likened the tongue to a sword capable of great damage, positioned behind two 'gates,' the teeth and the lips. Those gates are there for a reason, she explained, and the sword should come out only when it can be well deployed.

Related: Safe Speech

Who is to Trump what Goldwater was to Reagan?

Answer here.

The Real Meaning of the O’Reilly Ouster

Andrew Klavan may have nailed it.

Posts of mine anent Klavan.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Leaving, Good Bye, Farewell

Lynn Anderson, Red River Valley. A very satisfying version. Stevie Nicks' effort is a bit overdone. A spare Woody Guthrie version. Classic Americana. No Woody, no Ramblin' Jack Elliot, no Dylan.

Bob Dylan, Farewell.

Oscar Isaac and Marcus Mumford, Fare Thee Well. Fabulous.

Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, What's So Good About Goodbye?

Paul McCartney, I'll Follow the Sun

Red Sovine, Farewell, So Long, Goodbye. Probably better known for his Phantom 309.

Ramblin' Jack Elliot, So Long, It's Been Good to Know You

Everly Bros., Bye Bye Love

Muddy Waters, Baby Please Don't Go. Mick Jagger and the boys show up.

Ray Charles, Hit the Toad Road, Jack "You can't mean that!"

Shawn Colvin, You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go. Dylan tune.

Peter, Paul, and Mary, Leavin' on a Jet Plane

Patrick Kurp on Arthur Krystal

Long-time friend of this weblog, and an accomplished blogger himself, Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence has an article out in the Los Angeles Review of Books entitled "Literature with a Capital L": On Arthur Krystal's "This Thing We Call Literature." (HT: Dave Lull)

Krystal was a protégé of Jacques Barzun, editing the late polymath’s The Culture We Deserve. Like Barzun, Krystal has resisted specialization. His approach to books is not academic: “There’s nothing wrong with admiring Elmore Leonard without likening him to Proust or Henry James.” To this he adds: “One can be a fan of Agatha Christie, but one can’t really be a fan of George Eliot.” Tell that to the Janeites and Trollopians, and to the devotees of Lee Child and Dean Koontz. Strictly speaking, Krystal isn’t a critic at all, and he certainly has no theories to peddle. We might think of him as an enthusiastic reader who happens to write. He reminds us of the respect once shown to Dr. Johnson’s notion of the common reader, “uncorrupted with literary prejudices.”

Cal Berkeley

Just cut their federal funding. With Trump in the saddle this is a real possibility. Why should taxpayers be forced to support leftist seminaries? Separation of church and state doesn't go far enough. We need separation of Left and state. Just as the state has no right to impose religion on the populace, it has no right to impose that destructive ersatz religion, leftism.

A rollback in funding is probably the only way to get the attention of the corrupt administrators of once great universities and force them to cease their abdication of authority and defend the classical values of the university.

John Updike, Seven Stanzas at Easter

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

John Updike, 1960. (Source)

Given what we know from yesterday's Updike entry, the suspicion obtrudes that, while Updike clearly understands the Resurrection as orthodoxy understands it, his interest in it is merely aesthetic in Kierkegaard's sense, and not ethical in the Dane's sense, which suspicion comports well with the charge that Updike radically divorced Christian theology from Christian ethics.

Or perhaps, as a Protestant, Updike thinks that since God in Christ did all the work of atonement, he needn't do anything such as reform his life and struggle and strive for metanoia but can freely enjoy himself in the arms and partake of the charms of other men's wives. Am I being fair?

John Updike’s Christianity

Gerald R. McDermott (emphases added):

In Updike’s religion, then, there are no commandments we are meant to keep except the obligation to accept what is: “Religion includes, as its enemies say, fatalism, an acceptance and consecration of what is.” Our only responsibility is to “appreciate” the great gift that life represents. He learned from Barth that the next life is simply this life in review, and from his Lutheranism, he wrote, “a rather antinomian Christianity”—the idea that there are no laws we should fear or live by—which he was “too timid to discard.” There is no hint of final judgment. Nor is there any imperative to repent or improve ourselves: in Begley’s words, “Original sin may be inescapable, but any concerted effort to improve one’s game resembles a righteous struggle for salvation.” And if there was anything he learned from Barth, it was that all human efforts to save ourselves are wrongheaded and futile. As one critic summed it up, Updike “radically divorced” Christian theology from Christian ethics.

The upshot was a self-indulgent religion that basked in self-affirmation while running from voices that would challenge the self to change, particularly in ways that were not pleasant. It is telling that Updike’s last poem ends with words of self-assurance from Psalm 23: “goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, forever.”

One cannot help thinking that Updike’s religion helped build the theological scaffolding for mainline Protestantism’s baptism of gay marriage. Updike wrote of mainline Protestants and their efforts to justify the sexual revolution. Although Updike himself regarded heterosexual sex as normative, his elevation of sex as a way to transcendence would prevent heterosexual Protestants from barring the door to other kinds of sex. Updike told the CBS reporter, “Sex is one of the means—maybe the foremost means—whereby the [moral and religious] search is conducted.” Once mainline America became persuaded—even in the absence of empirical evidence—that gays are born that way, how could they deny that their sex might be their way to the divine? Updike would surely have agreed. And millions of Updike readers could thank the novelist for helping them see that marriages defined by desire were not only a right but also a sacrament.

'See' is standardly employed as a verb of success. I wonder: does the author in his last sentence so intend it? 'Believe' would work better, no?

More importantly, it is just self-serving nonsense to view sex as the foremost means for conducting the moral and religious search. That sounds like a joke. I am put in mind of Chogyam Trungpa. According to one report, ". . . Trungpa slept with a different woman every night in order to transmit the teaching to them. L. intimated that it was really a hardship for Trungpa to do this, but it was his duty in order to spread the dharma."

We are concupiscent from the ground up. So it is no surprise that even Christianity can be so twisted as to serve the sex monkey by one who apparently was its slave.

But if truth be told, I just now ordered Couples to see how the brilliant Updike makes his case. Updike is a master of social phenomenology as I discovered when I read Rabbit is Rich in the early '90s.

As for the radical divorce of theology and ethics, there cannot be anything salutary about splitting them asunder. But if split them you must, it would be better to jettison the theology and keep the ethics for the sake of our happiness in this world, which we know, as opposed to the next which we merely believe in. It is an empirical question, but on balance the sexual revolution has not improved human eudaimonia. Our predicament post-pill is hardly a paradise.

Updike looks to be a poster boy for the false dichotomy of spirituality versus religion.

Related: A Death Poem at Year's End. I reproduce and comment on a fabulous Updike poem.

Be Neither Bohemian nor Bourgeois

The barfly and the gambler, the flâneur and the floozy, fritter away their time. And they are condemned for so doing by the solid bourgeois.

But the latter thinks, though he may not say, that the pursuits of the monastery and the ivory tower, though opposite to the low life's dissipation, are equally time-wasting. Prayer, meditation, study for its own sake, translation and transmission of culture, the vita contemplativa, Pieperian leisure, otium liberale, moral scrupulosity, mindfulness, the various disciplines of palate and penis, heart and memory, working out one's salvation with diligence – all will evoke a smile from the worldly bourgeois fellow, the man of substance solidly planted in the self-satisfied somnolence of middle-class mediocrity.

He's tolerant of course, and superficially respectful, but the respect becomes real only after the time-waster has managed to turn a buck or secure a livelihood from his time-wasting by becoming a teacher in a college, say, or a pastor of a church.

Why Physical Culture?

In part it is about control. I can't control your body, but I can control mine. Control is good. Power is good. Physical culture is the gaining and maintaining of power over that part of the physical world that is one's physical self.

Self-mastery, as the highest mastery, must include mastery of the vehicle of one's subjectivity. Control of one's vehicle is a clear desideratum. So stretch, run, hike, bike, swim, put the shot, lift the weight.

In short: rouse your sorry ass from the couch of sloth and attend to your vehicle. 'Ass' here refers to Frate Asino, Brother Jackass, St Francis' name for his body. Keep him in good shape and he will carry you and many a prodigious load over many a pons asinorum.

(It is interesting that the German Arsch, when it crossed the English Channel became 'arse,' but in the trans-Atlantic trip it transmogrified into the polyvalent 'ass.' Whatever you call it, get it off the couch.)

A Poke at Some Conservatives (and at Rawls’ Difference Principle)

Conservatives sometimes invoke facts as if the factuality of a fact justifies it. Rush Limbaugh: "Life is not fair." Bill O'Reilly: "We live in a capitalist society."

But you can't say that life is not fair and leave it at that; for this allows the lefty to come back with, "Then let's make it fair!" After all, the mere fact that such-and-such is the case doesn't justify its being the case. Similarly with capitalism. You cannot just say that our economy is capitalist. You have to go on to explain why capitalism is a superior form of economic arrangement.

John Rawls wrote a very influential book entitled A Theory of Justice in which he articulates the notion that justice is fairness. Key to his book is what he calls the Difference Principle.

Rawls' Difference Principle implies that social and economic inequalities are justified only if they benefit the worst off in a society. (Cf. A Theory of Justice, Harvard UP, 1971, p. 60) There is more to it than that, but that is an implication of it.

But I can't see why one ought to accept the implication. Suppose A and B are from similar backgrounds. They work at the same type of job. Person A devotes himself to wine, women, and song. B, however, practices the old virtues, saves, invests, and then buys, improves, rents and sells mid-range real estate. Person A has enough throughout his life but dies with nothing. B dies with a net worth of 5 million USD, which is not that difficult to acquire these days given inflation and a reasonably healthy economy.

I would say that the economic disparity between A and B is justified whether or not the inequality benefits the worst-off. Of course, the disparity will benefit others, and maybe even the worst-off. As conservatives like to point out, poor people don't hire anybody. Our small-scale developer, however, will hire all sorts of people.

Liberals like Rawls seem to assume that there is something unjust about inequality as such. I don't see it. Of course, inequality that has arisen from fraud, etc. is unjust. But inequality as such? Why?

My tendency is to think that not only are some inequalities allowed by justice, but positively required by it. But this is a huge topic, and to discuss it properly one has to delve into the theoretical apparatus (original position, veil of ignorance, etc.) with which Rawls supports his two principles of justice.

My point du jour is simply that too many conservatives lack the intellectual equipment and/or training properly to defend conservative ideas. They have the right ideas but they can't articulate and defend them. I am talking about influential conservatives, the ones in the trenches of talk radio and television, people like Limbaugh and O'Reilly and Hannity. I am not talking about the conservatives in the ivory towers that few have heard of such as Victor Davis Hanson.

Teaching Latin to Black Kids

An encouraging development. What happened to Ebonics?

It be a dead language, aks anyone in da hood.