Month: August 2017

Victor Davis Hanson on Joan Baez and Abolitio Memoriae

In Our War Against Memory, Hanson writes (hyperlinks added),

How about progressive icon Joan Baez? Should the Sixties folksinger seek forgiveness from us for reviving her career in the early 1970s with the big money-making hit “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”— her version of The Band’s sympathetic ode to the tragedy of a defeated Confederacy, written over a century after the Civil War. (“Back with my wife in Tennessee / When one day she called to me / Said, “Virgil, quick, come see / There goes the Robert E. Lee!”) If a monument is to be wiped away, then surely a popular song must go, too.

[. . .]

The logical trajectory of tearing down the statue of a Confederate soldier will soon lead to the renaming of Yale, the erasing of Washington and Jefferson from our currency, and the de-Trotskyization of every mention of Planned Parenthood’s iconic Margaret Singer, the eugenicist whose racist views on abortion anticipated those of current liberal Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (Ginsburg said, “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”)

[. . .]

The strangest paradox in the current epidemic of abolitio memoriae is that our moral censors believe in ethical absolutism and claim enough superior virtue to apply it clumsily across the ages — without a clue that they fall short of their own moral pretensions, and that one day their own icons are as likely be stoned as the icons of others are now apt to be torn down by black-mask-wearing avengers.

A final paradox about killing the dead: Two millennia after Roman autocrats’ destruction of statues, and armed with the creepy 20th-century model of Fascists and Communists destroying the past, we, of a supposedly enlightened democracy, cannot even rewrite history by democratic means — local, state, and federal commission recommendations, referenda, or majority votes of elected representatives. More often, as moral cowards, we either rely on the mob or some sort of executive order enforced only in the dead of night.

More on Dreher vs Buchanan on “All Men are Created Equal” and White Supremacy

Dr. Patrick Toner comments and I respond in blue:

Your piece on Dreher and Buchanan accepts Dreher's overall reading (or misreading, as I see it) of Buchanan's argument — you seem to accept that Buchanan actually means to somehow call into doubt the metaphysical doctrine of the equality of men.  This seems clearly wrong to me.  
 
But before coming to that point, I want to check with you about another thing, namely, Dreher's accusation that Buchanan is openly endorsing white supremacy in his essay.  Things you've said elsewhere about the failure to define terms such as "white supremacy" make me hesitant to actually ascribe to you the belief that Buchanan is a white supremacist, but if that's right–if you aren't accepting the white supremacy charge–at any rate nothing in Sunday's piece makes that explicit.  And when you end your piece by talking about Buchanan "apparently repudiating" the doctrine of equality, there is at least a hint that you're willing to accept the charge.
BV: Thank you for these fine comments, Patrick. As a philosopher you understand the importance of defining terms. And yet you haven't offered us a definition of 'white supremacist.' Absent a definition, we cannot reasonably discuss whether or not Pitchfork Pat is a white supremacist, and whether the white supremacy charge is clearly bunk as you claim it is.
 
We could mean different things by the phrase 'white supremacist' and cognates.  I hope you will agree with me, however, that the phrase is actually used by most people emotively as a sort of semantic bludgeon or verbal cudgel for purely polemical purposes in much the same way that 'racist,' 'Islamophobe,' 'fascist,' and other emotive epithets are used.  On this usage, no morally decent and well-informed person could be a white supremacist.  The implication is that a white supremacist is a bigot, i.e., an unreasonably intolerant person who hates others just because they are different. It is a term of very serious disapprobation.
 
I would guess that you understand 'white supremacist' in something very close to this sense — which is why you take umbrage at Dreher's claim that Buchanan is a white supremacist. Bear in mind that that is Dreher's claim. I don't make it. My point of agreement with Dreher is solely on the question of the meaning of "All men are created equal."  It is spectacularly clear that, in the piece in question, Buchanan shows a lack of understanding of the meaning of the sentence.  Buchanan reads it as an empirical claim subject to falsification by experience.  It is not, as I explain in my parent post. Here again is what he wrote:
 
“All men are created equal” is an ideological statement. Where is the scientific or historic proof for it? Are we building our utopia on a sandpile of ideology and hope?
I was really surprised when I read that. It occurred to me that it might just be a slip occasioned by old age, anger at recent developments, or too much Irish whisky.
 
Now consider the following candidate definition of 'white supremacist.'
 
D1. A white supremacist is one who holds that the culture and civilization produced by whites is, on balance, superior to the cultures and civilizations produced by all other racial groups.
 
One could be a white supremacist in this sense and hold all of the following: (a) Slavery is a grave moral evil; (b) All men are created equal in the sense I explained; (c) No citizen should be excluded from the franchise because of race; (d) No citizen should be excluded from holding public office because of race; (e) All citizens regardless of race are equal before the law.
 
Buchanan might well be a white supremacist in the (D1)-sense.  Here is a bit of evidence: "Was not the British Empire, one of the great civilizing forces in human history, a manifestation of British racial superiority?"  Buchanan is not saying that the Brits merely thought themselves to be racially superior but that they really were. 
 
I think the white supremacy charge is clearly bunk–or at any rate, I'll say this: nothing in that particular column of Buchanan's can reasonably support a charge of white supremacy.  And I don't say that on the basis that "white supremacy" hasn't been adequately defined, or any other such technicality.  I just mean it should be clear that Buchanan's point is not to endorse white supremacy, but simply to point out that if that charge applies to Lee and co, then it applies to Washington and Jefferson and co, and indeed then we need to throw out the whole western culture that gave us the metaphysical doctrine of equality.  
BV: Again, unless you tell us what you mean by 'white supremacy,' there is no way to evaluate what you are saying. The matter of definition is not a mere technicality; it is crucial. I sketched two senses of 'white supremacist,' the 'semantic bludgeon' sense and (D1).  Now I agree that Buchanan is not a white supremacist in the first sense, but it looks like he is in the second.  So I totally reject your claim that "nothing in that particular column of Buchanan's can reasonably support a charge of white supremacy." 
 
You are also failing to appreciate that, just like an alt-righty, he shows no understanding of "All men are created equal." He is clearly giving it an empirical sense. That's blindingly obvious. Now I am going just on this one column. Perhaps in other works he says something intelligent on this point.  This is why Dreher is right against Buchanan despite the former's over-the-top rhetoric.
 
And then on to the next point: having thrown out the grounding upon which that doctrine stands, upon what shall we build our egalitarian utopia?  We can't re-establish the equality doctrine on some universally-acceptable empirical ground!  Buchanan doesn't doubt the equality doctrine: he points out that the iconoclasts seeking to build their new world on it, have no basis upon which to rationally accept it.  It's not a new or brilliant claim–it's pretty standard and obvious, I'd have thought.
 
BV: I am not quite sure what you are driving at here, but a tripartite distinction may help:
 
a) The Declaration sentence is empirical but false.
b) The Declaration sentence is empirical and true.
c)  The Declaration sentence is metaphysical, and thus non-empirical.
 
The alt-righties accept (a). The loons on the Left accept (b).  You and I accept (c).  You and I agree that the equality doctrine cannot be built on empirical ground.  I would guess that you and I also agree that if the Declaration sentence is making an empirical claim, then that claim is false.
 
I wrote this up yesterday in a little blog post, and I'm encouraged a bit in my reading (not that, in truth, I doubted it before!) by finding this column (not by Buchanan) posted today on Buchanan's website.  
Generally, I try to follow the advice of Thoreau, "read not the Times, read the eternities," and so I ignore such issues.  But I do read your blog faithfully, and for some reason–maybe just a lingering respect for Buchanan, who has always struck me as a decent man–you prompted me to read a bit of political ephemera to try to sort it out.  :)  
I hope you're doing well!  
 
BV: Thank you, sir.  I think we agree on the main issues, except that I really think it is important to define 'white supremacist' and not bandy it about unclarified.
 
I too love the Thoreau aphorism (and I'll bet you found it on my site; if not, forgive me my presumption) but I would add that in dangerous times one has to attend to the Times lest our enemies win and make it impossible for us to read the Eternities. Boethius was able to do philosophy in a prison cell, but most of us lesser mortal are not Boethian in this regard.
 
Keep your powder dry! (May the loons of the Left vex themselves over whether this is some sort of 'dog whistle.' It does have a Pitchfork Pat, "locked and loaded" ring to it.)

How Bad are Nazis?

Kurt Schlichter:

. . . Nazis are so bad that you have to devote all your hating capacity to hating Nazis such that there's no room left to hate anybody else. Those hammer and sickle flag-carrying Communists? Well, you must love the Nazis if you hate them, because you have got to hate the Nazis with all your mind and all your heart since, as we learned this week, Nazis are bad. I'm so glad that our moral betters have this all figured out.

I would have thought that one could and should morally condemn numerous groups all at once including the fascists of the Left who have the chutzpah to name themselves 'antifa,' the thugs of Black Lives Matter, that vicious anti-cop operation that takes its inspiration from brazen lies about Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown of Ferguson 'fame,' the leftist termites who have infiltrated the universities and preside over the shouting-down of the speakers of truth, Muslim terrorists and their leftist enablers, and so on — but not excluding Nazis and neo-Nazis.

It has been fascinating to watch, over the last ten days or so, so-called conservatives falling all over themselves in a crazy attempt to achieve the apotheosis of high dudgeon in the condemnation of one relatively minor bunch of scumbags. Why? So that leftists will finally like you? Forget about it. It won't happen. To them you will always be a racist no matter what you say or do.  

Related articles

Politics and Language

I’m a Racist Because I Like Chess

BV at ChessI left the house at 5:15 this morning, hiked 45 minutes over the local hills to arrive at 6:00 sharp at Gecko Espresso where I met up with Lowell S. a local chess aficionado.  We played under the influence of caffeine for a solid two hours, one game, recorded, to be analyzed when next we meet. I checkmated the old man. 

Chess is a delightful game, especially when you win. An oasis of sanity in an insane world. But we must admit that it is a deeply racist game and that all who play it are racists. The following excerpt from a cognate post explains why.

Another proof that chess is racist and oppressive and ought to be banned is that blacks are woefully under-represented among its players. This evil can have only one explanation: racist suppression of black players. For everyone knows that blacks as a group are the equals of whites as a group in respect of intelligence, interest in chess, and the sorts of virtues needed to play the undemocratic and reactionary 'Royal Game.' Among these are the ability to study hard, defer gratification, and keep calm in trying situations.

For these and many other reasons, we must DEMAND that chess be banned.

We must manifest solidarity with our oppressed Taliban brothers who have maintained, truly, that chess is an evil game of chance.

Warning to University Admins: Abdication of Authority Carries a Cost

The cardinal virtues are four: temperance, prudence, justice, and courage. Of the four, courage is the most difficult to exercise. So it is no surprise that cowardice is so widespread among university administrators. There is no coward like a university administrator, to cop a line from Dennis Prager.

But the cowardice that issues in abdication of authority and the refusal to stand up for the classical values of the university in the face of barbarians and know-nothings comes with a cost, literally.

The University of Missouri is one of many universities where the administrative pussy-wussies are feeling the pinch:

Donors, parents, alumni, sports fans and prospective students raged against the administration’s caving in. “At breakfast this morning, my wife and I agreed that MU is NOT a school we would even consider for our three children,” wrote Victor Wirtz, a 1978 alum, adding that the university “has devolved into the Berkeley of the Midwest.”

As classes begin this week, freshmen enrollment is down 35% since the protests, according to the latest numbers the university has publicly released. Mizzou is beginning the year with the smallest incoming class since 1999. Overall enrollment is down by more than 2,000 students, to 33,200. The campus has taken seven dormitories out of service.

The plummeting support has also cost jobs. In May, Mizzou announced it would lay off as many as 100 people and eliminate 300 more positions through retirement and attrition. Last year the university reduced its library staff and cut 50 cleaning and maintenance jobs.

Mizzou’s 2016 football season drew almost 13,000 fewer attendees than in 2015, local media reported. During basketball games, one-third of the seats in the Mizzou Arena sat empty.

[. . .]

This phenomenon isn’t limited to Mizzou. Private institutions like Yale and Middlebury aren’t covered by public-records laws, so they can conceal the backlash. But when public universities have released emails after giving in to campus radicals, they have consistently shown administrators face the same public outrage.

Virginia Tech received numerous phone calls and more than 100 angry emails last year after it disinvited Jason Riley, a columnist for this newspaper, from speaking on campus. “While we can respond to the people who write to us, we cannot dispel the negative impression created by the media against the president, the university, the dean and the college and the department,” one administrator woefully told his colleagues.

Virginia Tech administrators also noted that news of the debacle reached millions on Twitter, where the reactions were “overwhelmingly negative toward the university and higher education in general.” Once again, a frustrated public vowed to yank support.

Universities have consistently underestimated the power of a furious public. At the same time, they’ve overestimated the power of student activists, who have only as much influence as administrators give them. Far from avoiding controversy, administrators who respond to campus radicals with cowardice and capitulation should expect to pay a steep price for years.

WSJ's Jason Riley, mentioned above, is one seriously black dude.  But he wasn't prevented from speaking because of his race but because he refuses to toe the Party Line: he is a conservative black and therefore, to a leftist shithead, 'a traitor to his race.'

This shows that the overpaid administrative assholes at Mizzou and elsewhere have no clue as to the purposes of a university.  You can't reach them with reasons, but they are very sensitive to emolument.

Were university admins always cowards?  No!

See Three Profiles in Civil Courage Among University Administrators 

Dreher contra Buchanan on “All men are created equal”

Rod Dreher quotes Patrick J. Buchanan:

“All men are created equal” is an ideological statement. Where is the scientific or historic proof for it? Are we building our utopia on a sandpile of ideology and hope?

Dreher responds:

With that, Buchanan repudiates not only the founding principle of our Constitutional order, but also a core teaching of the Christian faith, which holds that all men are created in the image of God. 

I am with Dreher on this without sharing quite the level of high dudgeon that he expresses in his piece. 

I am always surprised when people do not grasp the plain sense of the "that all Men are created equal" clause embedded in the opening sentence of the second paragraph of the American Declaration of Independence. It cannot be charitably interpreted as a statement of empirical fact. If it were so interpreted, it would be false. For we all know, and certainly the Founders knew, that human beings are NOT equal as a matter of empirical fact either as individuals or as groups.

Suppose a statement can be interpreted in two ways. One way it comes out plainly false; the other way it comes out either true or plausible or not obviously untrue. Then what I understand the Principle of Charity to require is that we go the second way. 

For Buchanan to demand "scientific or historic proof" shows deep misunderstanding. For again, the claim is not empirical. Is it then a normative claim as Mona Charen (quoted by Dreher) seems to suggest? It implies normative propositions, but it is not itself a normative proposition. It is a metaphysical statement. It is like the statement that God exists or that the physical universe is a divine creation. Both of the latter statements are non-empirical. No natural science can either prove them or disprove them. But neither of them are normative.  

Note that the Declaration's claim is not that all men are equal but that all men are created equal. In such a carefully crafted document, the word 'created' must be doing some work. What might that be?

There cannot be creatures (created items) without a Creator. That's a conceptual truth, what Kant calls an analytic proposition. So if man is created equal, then he is created by a Creator. The Creator the founders had in mind was the Christian God, and these gentlemen had, of course, read the Book of Genesis wherein we read that God made man in his image and likeness. That implies that man is not a mere animal in nature, but a spiritual being, a god-like being, possessing free will and an eternal destiny. Essential to the Judeo-Christian worldview is the notion that man is toto caelo different from the rest of the animals. He is an animal all right, but a very special one. This idea is preserved even in Heidegger who speaks of an Abgrund zwischen Mensch und Tier. The difference between man and animal is abysmal or, if you prefer, abyssal. Man alone is Da-Sein, the 'There' of Being; man alone is endowed with Seinsverstaendnis, an understanding (of) Being.  But I digress onto a Black Forest path.

Now if all men, whether male or female, black or white, are created equal by God, and this equality is a metaphysical determination (Bestimmung in the sense of both a distinctive determination and a vocation) then we have here the metaphysical basis for the normative claim that all men ought to be treated equally, that all men ought to enjoy equally the same  unalienable rights, among them, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.  (We note en passant that these are negative rights!)

All men are normatively equal because they are metaphysically equal. They are the latter because they are spiritual beings deriving from one and the same spiritual source.  Each one of us is a person just as God is a person. We are equal as persons even though we are highly unequal as animals.

Without this theological basis it is difficult to see how there could be any serious talk of equality of persons. As the alt-righties and the neoreactionaries like to say, we are not (empirically) equal either as individuals or as groups. They are absolutely right about that.   

Dreher is also right that the theologically-grounded equality of persons is "the founding principle of our Constitutional order," and thus of our political order.  Repudiate it, as Buchanan seems to be doing, and you undermine our political order.

What then does our political order rest on if the equality of persons is denied? 

Related: Sullivan is Right: Universalism Hasn't Been Debunked

Saturday Night at the Oldies: ‘The King’ Dead Forty Years

Elvis Presley died on 16 August 1977, 40 years ago. We can't let this weekend pass without a few tunes in commemoration.

First a couple of 'Italian' numbers modeled, respectively, on O Sole Mio and Torna a Surriento: 

It's Now or Never

Surrender

Continuing in the romantic vein:

Can't Help Falling in Love.  A version by Andrea Bocelli. A woman for a heterosexual man is the highest finite object. The trick is to avoid idolatry and maintain custody of the heart.

A Gospel number:

Amazing Grace

From the spiritual to the secular:

Little Sister

Marie's the Name of his Latest Flame

Devil in Disguise

And then there was hokey stuff like this reflecting his time in the Army in Germany:

Wooden Heart

Can't leave out the overdone and hyperromantic:

The Wonder of You. (Per mia moglie)

Out of time. Next stop: Judge Jeannine.

Why Something rather than Nothing? The ‘Why not?’ Response

According to a presumably apocryphal story, Martin Heidegger asked G. E. Moore, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Moore replied, "Why not?" A reader finds the 'Moorean' response cheap and unphilosophical. Let's think about this.

Suppose we ask a related but more tractable question: Why does the universe exist? and we get the response: Why not? Why shouldn't it exist?  Charitably interpreted, the response amounts to the suggestion that the question is gratuitous or unmotivated or unnecessary in the sense of unneeded.

Some explanation-seeking why-questions are gratuitous. (It is worth noting that grammatically interrogative formulations such as 'Why does anything at all exist?' might be used merely as expressions of wonder that the, or a, universe exists, and not as requests for an explanation. Here we are concerned with ultimate explanations.)

Suppose it is 110 degrees Fahrenheit.  I walk into your house where the temperature is a pleasant 80 degrees. If I were to ask why the air conditioning is on, you would be puzzled. "Why shouldn't it be on?"

But if your house were a miserable 95 degrees and I asked why the air conditioning was not on, or why it was so bloody hot in there, you would give some such answer as: "My A.C. unit is on the fritz; the repairman should be here in a couple of hours."

My first question is gratuitous; my second question is not. Some things need explaining; other things don't need explaining. 

Perhaps it is like that with the universe. Why should anyone think that it needs an explanation in terms of some item transcendent of it such as the One of Plotinus or the God of Aquinas? 

I assume, quite reasonably, that the universe U is modally contingent. Thus it does not exist of metaphysical necessity, the way God exists if he exists; nor is U's existence metaphysically impossible.  U exists, but it might not have: its nonexistence is possible.  That is to say: U exists, but its nonexistence is not ruled out by the laws of logic or the laws of metaphysics.  It exists, but its nonexistence is neither logically nor metaphysically impossible.

But if x is modally contingent, 'contingent' for short, it does not straightaway follow that x depends for its existence on something. It is a mistake to conflate modal contingency with contingency-on-something. That is an important conceptual/semantic point. 

So it might be like this: U exists, and exists contingently, but it exists without cause or reason or explanation. If this is the case, then we say that the universe exists as a matter of brute fact. The factuality of the fact resides in its existence; the 'brutality' in (a) its contingency and (b) its lacking a ground, cause, reason, explanation.

I conclude that one cannot argue a contingentia mundi to a prima causa without a preliminary demonstration that our ultimate explanation-seeking why-question is not gratuitous. Before one can mount a cosmological argument from a contingent universe to a transcendent Cause, one must show or at least give a good reason to think that the universe needs an explanation.

In my published work on this topic I argue that contingent particulars, taken by themselves as "independent reals" are contradictory structures. But they patently exist, and nothing can exist that is self-contradictory. So there must be something transcending th realm of contingent particulars to remove the contradiction. Now I cannot go into the many details here and fill in the steps in the argument, but the main point I want to make, in answer to my reader's query, is that it is not unphilosophical to take seriously the 'Why not?' response.

One needs to be able to show that the question, Why does the universe exist? is not gratuitous. 

Define or Drop

For leftists, words are weapons. If you are a lefty, and you disagree, then I invite you to define 'fascist,' 'racist,' 'white supremacist,' and the rest of the epithets in your arsenal. Define 'em or drop 'em.

Show us that you are people of good will.

Suppose I point out the incompatibility of Sharia with Western values and you call me an 'Islamophobe.' You thereby demonstrate that you are not a person of good will.  A person of good will does not dismiss the arguments of his rational interlocutor as driven by a phobia.  Here is a good illustration of what I mean when I say that for leftists, words are weapons, or as I also like to say, "semantic bludgeons."

Although righties are far less offensive in this regard, they too must be held to the standard of define or drop.

There were those who called Obama a socialist. But there can be no reasonable discussion of whether he is or isn't without a preliminary clarification of the term.  If a socialist is one who advocates the collective or government ownership of the means of production, then I know of no statement of Obama's in which he advocated any such thing.

Am I being soft on one of the worst presidents in American history? No, I am just being fair.

Related articles
Spotify bans white supremacist bands, as Apple CEO Tim Cook denounces neo-Nazis

How to Know You are in a Mass Hysteria Bubble

Scott Adams:

The most visible Mass Hysteria of the moment involves the idea that the United States intentionally elected a racist President. If that statement just triggered you, it might mean you are in the Mass Hysteria bubble. The cool part is that you can’t fact-check my claim you are hallucinating if you are actually hallucinating. But you can read my description of the signs of mass hysteria and see if you check off the boxes.

A Site Stat Coincidence

Yesterday and the day before this site received the same number of page views, 1,559.   That's never happened before. Deep Meaning or mere coincidence? I reckon the latter. (Total page views since Halloween, 2008: 4.3 million.)

In any case, I thank you all for your patronage. Any complaints? Double your money back if not completely satisfied.

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