Month: August 2017

The Kristol Crackup

You say that 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' is an over-the-top expression? Well, I bid you consider the sad case of Bill Kristol and his tweeting, twittering, meltdown.

I am put in mind of the opening line of Allen Ginsberg's Howl: 

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness . . . .

"So sad!" as the Orange Man might say.

Is Islam a Religion of Peace?

A video by Aayan Hirsi Ali. 5:09. Can you spare five minutes to improve your thinking on this topic?

Is Islam a religion of peace? Is it compatible with Western liberalism? Or does Islam need a reformation, just as Christianity had the Protestant Reformation? Somali-born author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali explains.

What is White Supremacy?

Robert Paul Wolff offers the following:

Hatred has fundamentally very little to do with White Supremacy.  White Supremacy is a policy of domination and economic superiority of Whites in a multi-racial society.  African-Americans are not worried about whether White people want to be friends.  Most of the African-Americans I know have quite enough friends, thank you very much.  African-Americans demand legal, economic, and political equality.  And that terrifies many Whites, who do not want to give up the superior legal, political, and economic position in American society that they acquired through being born White.

Perhaps Malcolm Pollack will comment on this definition over at his place. He tilts in the alt-right direction; I reject the alt-right.

Here are some preliminary thoughts/questions of my own.

1) If White Supremacy is a policy, who is implementing it? The government?  Is the government insuring the economic superiority of Whites? How? By what programs? 

2) Blacks have every right to demand legal and political equality, but they cannot reasonably demand economic equality. That is something they have to work for.  

3) Whites are in an economically superior position to blacks, no doubt, but one cannot validly infer from this that Blacks have been unjustly discriminated against. 

4) It is false that Whites enjoy by birth legal and political privileges denied to Blacks.  If you think they do, name the privileges.  

5) Suppose a white Southerner considers slavery a grave moral evil and is glad the Union was preserved. He opposes, however, the Left's iconoclasm re: statues of Robert E. Lee, et al.  Is this person a White supremacist?

6) If 'white supremacist' is not to be just another smear word like 'racist,' then it has to be defined. How ought it be defined?

7) Suppose Whites as a group are superior to Blacks as a group in some respect R, and suppose Jones points this out.  Is Jones a white supremacist with respect to R?  This raises the question: How can White Supremacism with respect to R be a bad thing, which it is supposed to be, if it is true?

8) Wolff's decoupling of White Supremacy from hatred suggests that he is thinking of it as something 'institutional' or 'systemic.' Are our institutions white supremacist? What might that even mean given that our institutions allowed for the elimination of slavery and Jim Crow?

Addendum (8/18)

Malcolm Pollack responds, and I agree (red emphasis mine, italics his):

Consider: a generation of identitarian politics across the West has deliberately cultivated tribal resentments among non-whites. For decades white people have been blamed in media and academia for all the world’s ills, while aggressive immigration policies have openly sought to make them minorities in every one of their homelands (a prospect that is widely celebrated in our mainstream institutions). In colleges and universities, white applicants are disfavored for admission, while curricula feature pugnacious courses on eliminating “whiteness”. At the Academy Awards, a black actor says of his latest film “I get to kill all the white people! How great is that?”, and the audience laughs and cheers.

Is it any wonder, then, that in this toxic climate, many white people are developing a sense of identitarianism themselves? This is not “supremacy”; it is nothing more than an perfectly natural (and, therefore, easily predictable) sense of unity and belonging, in an explicitly and increasingly hostile environment. Express this readily understandable sentiment in public, however, and you are now a “white supremacist” — and your sense of identity is not mere attachment, but can only be “hate”.

“White supremacist”, then, is nothing more than a cudgel, to be used without mercy against anyone who says, however reluctantly, that: yes, we are white, and we are not ashamed of it, and if you are determined to divide all of society into competing racial groups, then our people will have to play the game too. It is a truly awful state of affairs, and it will all get much, much worse before it gets any better. “Diversity is our strength”? Rubbish. As we are already learning to our sorrow, it is anything but: it is the death of peace and order and comity, and, at last, of nations and cultures. 

Abstain the Night Before, Feel Better the Morning After

Do you regret in the morning the spare supper of the night before or the foregoing of the useless dessert?  Do you feel bad that you now feel good and are not hung over?  You missed the party and with it the  ambiguity and unseriousness and dissipation of idle talk.  Are you now troubled by your spiritual continence?

As for idle talk, here is something good from  Franz Kafka: The Diaries 1910-1923, ed. Max Brod, Schocken 1948, p. 199:

In the next room my mother is entertaining the L. couple. They are talking about vermin and corns. (Mrs. L. has six corns on each toe.) It is easy to see that there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort. It is information that will be forgotten again by both and that even now proceeds along in self-forgetfulness without any sense of responsibility.

KafkaI have read this passage many times, and what delights me each time is the droll understatement of it: "there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort." No indeed. There is no progress because the conversations are not seriously about anything worth talking about. There is no Verantwortlichkeit (responsibility): the talk does not answer (antworten) to anything important in the world or anything real in the interlocutors. It is jaw-flapping for its own sake, mere linguistic behavior which, if it conveys anything, conveys: ‘I like you, you like me, and everything’s fine.’  An expression of boredom, it does little to alleviate it.

The interlocutors float along in the inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit) of what Heidegger calls das Man, the ‘they self.’ Compare Heidegger’s analysis of idle talk (Gerede) in Sein und Zeit (1927), sec. 35.

Am I suggesting that one should absolutely avoid idle talk?  That would be to take things to an unnecessary and perhaps imprudent extreme.  It is prudent to get yourself perceived as a regular guy — especially if you are an 'irregular guy.'

The Point of Solitude

Thomas Merton, Journals, vol. 7, p. 276:

The point of solitude is to preserve myself from a certain sort of contagion.

I would add that being alone is not enough if you are feeding on media dreck 'in solitude.' For then you are exposed to the contagion of 'discourse' that agitates but does not enlighten.

Why am I fascinated by the oftentimes flaky Merton? Because he is not just a flaky fellow. And he has 'Sixties' written all over him. Attention to his work and his shift in views is necessary for a deep understanding of that pivotal decade.

His journals are a delight. There is where the man himself dwells.

Abortion: The Actual Future Principle, An Objection, and a Sophistical Reply

Elizabeth Harman puts forth the following 'principle':

The Actual Future Principle: An early fetus that will become a person has some moral status. An early fetus that will die while it is still an early fetus has no moral status. ("Creation Ethics: The Moral Status of Early Fetuses and the Ethics of Abortion," Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 28, no. 4 (Autumn 1999), 310-324, 311. http://www.princeton.edu)/~eharman/creationethics.pdf)

What Harmon is saying is that the actual future of an early fetus determines its moral status. This implies that there are two different kinds of early fetuses. There are those that die while they are early fetuses. At no time during their existence do they instantiate the intrinsic properties that confer moral status. Thus the members of the first kind do not have moral status.  The members of the other kind will in the future have the full moral status of persons for they will come to instantiate the intrinsic properties that confer moral status.  Harman thinks that if an early fetus will one day possess the full moral status of a person then that is a "good reason" (her words) to think that it has that status when it is an early fetus.

The idea, then, is that an early fetus that does not, while it is an early fetus, have the properties that confer moral status nevertheless possesses moral status while it is an early fetus if it comes to have those properties later on in its development.

Harman is thus denying a widespread if not universal assumption, namely, that 

A. For any two early fetuses at the same stage of development and in the same health, either both have the same moral status or neither does. (311)

Questioning assumptions is something philosophers do and so she cannot be faulted for that. But not all assumptions are reasonably denied. This is one of them.  Her fancy footwork does nothing to detract from the evident truth of (A).

When I first encountered Harman's argument in the muddled form of a video in which she is interviewed (see below) by an actor and another professor the following objection occurred to me:

Harman is maintaining in effect that the moral status of a biological individual depends on something contingent: how long it lasts. Accordingly, moral status is not intrinsic to the early fetus  but depends on some contingent future development that may or may not occur. So the early fetus that developed into Elizabeth Harman has moral status at every time in its development, because it developed into what we all recognize as a person and rights-possessor, while an aborted early fetus has moral status at no time in its development because it will not develop into a person and rights-possessor. 

Harman's argument issues in the absurd consequence that one can morally justify an abortion just by having one. For if you kill your fetus (or have your fetus killed), then you guarantee that it has no actual future. If it has no actual future, then it has no moral status by Harman's principles. And if it has no moral status, then killing it is not morally impermissible, and is therefore morally justified. 

A reader points out, however, that Harman anticipated something like my objection in the above-cited paper:

"Third objection: "According to the Actual Future Principle, you just can't lose! If you abort, then it turns out that the fetus you aborted was that kind of thing it's okay to abort. If you don't abort, then it turns out that the fetus was the kind of thing it's not okay to abort." (320)

My objection, however, asserts only the first of Harman's conditionals. My objection has the form of a reductio ad absurdum: if you accept Harman's principles then you are committed to an absurdity; you are committed to saying that you can morally justify your abortion just by having one. But this is absurd in the sense of incoherent. One cannot justify an action just by performing it.

Harman responds by saying that here view is "very liberal." No doubt. "Therefore, according to the Actual Future Principle, no moral justification is required for an early abortion." (320)  But now she is contradicting herself: moral justification is required if the early fetus has an actual future.  It cannot be true both that no moral justification is required for an early abortion and that moral justification is required if the fetus has an actual future.

But there is no point in wasting any more time on this sophistry.

One gets the impression that many of the producers of these bad pro-abortion arguments want to have sex whenever they want, with whomever they want, with no consequences. Should a human life arise as a result of their sexual activities, they want to be able to dispose of it easily for their own convenience. One gets the impression that concupiscence is what drives these 'arguments,' suborning the otherwise truth-directed intellect, and seducing it into self-serving sophistry.

Related articles
Elizabeth Harman's Abortion Argument
Actor James Franco Proves Abortion Defenders Wrong on the "Morality" of Abortion ⋆ The Constitution
Fetuses That Will be Aborted Don't Have Moral Status Because They are about to Die, Says Professor | The News Guru

Iconoclasm: Another Similarity Between Muslims and Leftists

Muslims are well-known for their iconoclasm, hostility to the arts, and destruction of cultural artifacts. Leftists are like unto Muslims in this regard too. There is also the iconoclasm of the Left. For now, a couple of links to introduce the topic.

Leftist Iconoclasm Must Stop

Stomping on Jesus: The Iconoclasm of the Left

The trouble with iconoclasm is that all parties can play the game. 

Mass-murdering communist regimes are responsible for some 94 million deaths in the 20th century. Why not then destroy all the statues and monuments that honor the likes of Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin, Fidel Castro and all others who either laid the foundations for or carried out mass murder?  

You understand, of course, that I am not advocating this.  For one thing, the erasure of history would make it rather more difficult to learn from it. For another thing, there would be no end to it.  Why not destroy the Colosseum in Rome? You know what went on there.

Or how about St. Robert Bellarmine, S. J. ?  Should paintings and statues of him be destroyed?  He had a hand in the burning at the stake of the philosopher Giordano Bruno! According to Wikipedia:

Bellarmine was made rector of the Roman College in 1592, examiner of bishops in 1598, and cardinal in 1599. Immediately after his appointment as Cardinal, Pope Clement made him a Cardinal Inquisitor, in which capacity he served as one of the judges at the trial of Giordano Bruno, and concurred in the decision which condemned Bruno to be burned at the stake as a heretic.[5]

Better known is the fact that Bellarmine is the man who hauled the great Galileo before the Inquisition. 

Calling all philosophers and scientists! To your sledge hammers and blow torches!

And then there are the paintings, statues, etc. of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., plagiarist and adulterer.

There is no need to multiply examples. You should be getting the point along about now.

Statue_of_Lenin_SeattleThe Statue of Lenin is a 16-foot (4.9 m) bronze sculpture of Communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin located in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. Initially installed in Czechoslovakia in 1988, the sculpture was removed after the Velvet Revolution and brought to the United States in the 1990s.

Maximilian Kolbe

Although it is a deep and dangerous illusion of the Left to suppose that man is inherently good and that it is merely such contingent and remediable factors as environment, opportunity, upbringing and the like that prevent the good from manifesting itself, there are a few human beings who are nearly angelic in their goodness.  One can only be astonished at the example of Maximilian Kolbe and wonder how such moral heroism is possible. And this even after adjusting for a certain amount of hagiographic embellishment. 

Is there a good naturalistic explanation for Kolbe's self-sacrifice?

Dayton, Drugs, and Borders

Looks like I 'got' while the 'gittin' was good.  

I taught at the University of Dayton from 1978 to 1989 before moving on to Case Western Reserve University. Dayton the town was a boring place, but not a bad place to live in in those days. According to this Daily Mail piece, however, it has turned into an opioid hell-hole, indeed the worst such hell-hole in the entire country:

For this town, celebrated as the home of the Wright Brothers and birthplace of aviation, is now the epicentre of a horrific epidemic ripping apart families and communities.

[ . . .]

Montgomery County in Ohio, which includes Dayton, is currently thought to have highest rates of deadly overdoses in America. It is expecting 800 drug deaths this year – more than triple its 2015 tally. The 420 already logged easily exceeds last year’s total.

From the The New York Times:

In some Ohio counties, deaths from heroin have virtually disappeared. Instead, the culprit is fentanyl or one of its many analogues. In Montgomery County, home to Dayton, of the 100 drug overdose deaths recorded in January and February, only three people tested positive for heroin; 99 tested positive for fentanyl or an analogue.

Fentanyl isn’t new. But over the past three years, it has been popping up in drug seizures across the country.

Most of the time, it’s sold on the street as heroin, or drug traffickers use it to make cheap counterfeit prescription opioids. Fentanyls are showing up in cocaine as well, contributing to an increase in cocaine-related overdoses.

The most deadly of the fentanyl analogues is carfentanil, an elephant tranquilizer 5,000 times stronger than heroin. An amount smaller than a few grains of salt can be a lethal dose.

How do fentanyl and its analogues get into the country?  A lot of it comes from China via the U. S. Mail. But it also comes over the southern border  from Mexico by foot, car, drone and — wait for it — catapults!

So, to point out the obvious, here we have another good reason to control the borders.   

Dear 'liberals,' there is nothing hateful about a wall along the southern border. When you lock your doors at night, do you thereby demonstrate hatred of those outside your house? No, you demonstrate love and concern for those inside. Please try to think clearly about the issue while setting aside your irrational prejudices against conservatives. We are not xenophobes and we are not racists.  Besides, if you think about it, you should be able to grasp that illegal aliens do not constitute a race.

As for 'xenophobia,' if you look it up, you will see that xenophobia is an irrational fear of foreigners and things foreign. But a fear of drug traffickers, human traffickers, MS-13 gangsters and other illegal aliens of the criminal persuasion would seem to be rational, would it not?  

So my plea to you liberals is to give clear thinking a chance. For your own good.

In this Prager U video, Charles Krauthammer presents a workable and humane solution to the problem of illegal immigration and makes an impressive case for a border wall. About five and one half minutes long.