John O'Sullivan takes an apologist to task.
Month: October 2017
More Proof that Liberals are Insane
Don't waste time debating these loons. Just go to Whole Foods, spend money, and speak polite English.
"Thank you, sir, you have been most helpful."
"Excuse me, boys and girls, but politically correct language is deeply offensive to those of us who are sane."
"We respectfully oppose the tyranny of a tiny minority and will continue to exercise our free speech rights."
"May I suggest that you re-locate to Canada?"
‘Never-Trumper’
You are misusing 'never-trumper' if your usage does not comport with this conditional:
If you are a never-trumper, then you are a conservative, real or at least self-proclaimed.
Bill Kristol is a never-trumper; Hillary is not.
Underlying principle: do not engage in verbal inflation without a damned good reason. If a word or phrase has a specific meaning use it in that meaning.
The Monastery Sign
The sign reads, 'Peace.' It neglects to say that the desert is a place of unseen warfare.
The desert fathers of old believed in demons because of their experiences in quest of the "narrow gate" that only few find. They sought to perfect themselves and so became involved as combatants in il combattimento spirituale. They felt as if thwarted in their practices by opponents both malevolent and invisible. The moderns do not try to perfect themselves and so the demons leave them alone. They prefer deserts to flesh pots when it comes to hunting. Those who luxuriate in the latter have already been captured.
Moderns who enter the desert for spiritual purposes need to be aware that they may get more than they bargained for, phenomenologically, if not really.
Peter Wessel Zappfe’s Anti-Natalism
Here, with some critical commentary.
UPDATE:
A reader comments:
That older post on Zapffe and his absurdism is fantastic. You present the problem with deep sympathy and clarity. We're kindred spirits. I've often felt that if people just considered _seriously_ their own commitments, or our shared predicament–just to realize that it really is a predicament–their lives would be different. It is _not_ just talk and "word games". But it's so hard to get anyone to that point. People take comfort in a facile unserious unreflective nihilism or absurdism. Real philosophical thinking, with serious moral intent, offers a way out–as you argue, a rational freedom, at least, to embrace Meaning and Purpose and Value. But it's so hard to get people to see this. Anyway, thanks again for excellent essays like this.
Chess Players Commiserate on their Failed Marriages
A: "We were bishops of opposite color."
B: "Sorry to hear that. In our case the union ended when she discovered I had insufficient mating material."
C: "We just couldn't get it together. Whenever she wanted to make love, I was busy making Luft."
D: "She blew her stack when I gingerly brought up the topic of back-rank mate."
E. "She got tired of my excuses, especially 'Sorry, honey, not tonight. After a hard day at the office I'm weaker than f7.'"
F. "The bitch had a way of putting me in psychological Zugzwang: no matter what I said or did, I only dug my hole deeper."
G. "In bed one night she called me a perv when I muttered something about the Lucena position.
H. "Her frigidity did us in. She'd allow a check but never a mate."
I. "She said I lacked ambition citing my penchant for underpromotion."
J. "We fought like knights and bishops."
Maverick Philosopher: Various Images
Pap and Smear
'Pap and smear' is part of the explanation why Hillary lost. If you listen to her speak you soon realize that she has nothing concrete to offer. It is all empty rhetoric, or pap. But she really sealed her fate when she smeared as 'deplorables' the decent Americans who do not subscribe to her (well-hidden) agenda.
Pap and smear.
It is becoming increasingly clear how unfit for the presidency she is. Her complicity in the Uranium One scandal for starters.
Now there is a real Russia story.
A Note on Vox Clamantis in Deserto
This just over the transom from London Ed:
Pedantic, but I think you will secretly enjoy it.
Matt. 3:3 quoting Isaiah 40:3. The Vulgate has Vox clamantis in deserto: parate viam Domini. [Right, I checked both quotations in my Biblia Vulgata.] There has always been a question about the parsing of this. Is it
A voice of one calling in the wilderness, “prepare the way for the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God”,
as your quotation implies. Or is it
A voice of one calling: “In the wilderness prepare the way for the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God”.
Different translations differ. Of course the ancient Hebrew/Greek may be ambiguous, as they were not cursed with the quotation mark. I shall investigate further.
[Time passes]
OK I looked further. I always wondered if Matthew knew his scripture, but checking the Isa 40:3 in the Septuagint (the Jewish Alexandrian translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek), it is identical, i.e. Matthew’s Greek accurately reflects the Greek translation of Isaiah.
However, at least according to Pentiuc, the Septuagint Greek is a mis-translation of the Hebrew.
According to the reading proposed by the Masoretes, this voice "cries" to the one called "to clear" the way in the wilderness (cf. Mal 3:1). Babylonian texts speak in similar terms of processional ways prepared for a god or a victorious king; this is the road by which Yahweh will lead his people through the desert in a new exodus. Quite contrary to this reading is the Septuagint's rendering, where the "voice is crying in the wilderness." This version indicates that the wilderness is the location of the mysterious voice, rather than the meeting place for God and his people returned from exile.
My emphasis. The Masoretes were the Jewish scribe-scholars who worked on the interpretation of the ancient texts.
BV: I am not competent to comment on the scholarly punctilios, , but I prefer the Septuagint reading for the (non)reason that I live in a desert. And I know Ed Abbey, the author of Vox Clamantis in Deserto, would agree for he too lived in the desert, in fact, in Oracle, Arizona, not far from here.
By the way, the preceding sentence is not good English by the lofty standards of MavPhil. Can you see why? Combox open.
Kerouac at the End of the Road
A week or so and then I'll be through with Jacking off until next October. So bear with me, ragazzi.
Here is a NYT piece from 1988 by Richard Hill that gets at the truth of Jack. Excerpts:
He seemed uncertain of his friends from the 50's. Ginsberg was lost; he hadn't found the answers Jack had, in the Roman Catholic Church. Burroughs was a brilliant and heroic old devil, but Jack hadn't seen him since his trip to New York for William Buckley's Firing Line. ''I admire Buckley,'' he said. ''He stopped the show and took me into his office to give me hell about being drunk. Then we went back to do the show and I still gave those intellectuals the old raspberry.'' Burroughs was staying in the same hotel at the time, but didn't want to go out. ''Into those streets?'' said the man whose daring and decadence had become a legend, and Jack gave up on him.
But of Neal Cassady, Jack's companion on the road through many of the novels, he was more sure: ''Neal's not dead. He'll show up someday and we'll go someplace.'' Jack loved Cassady, who died on a railroad track in Mexico on one of the last trips of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. ''Turn your mind on,'' Jack said bitterly. ''I've been trying to turn mine off.''
Jack was also trying to get his affairs in order. He knew he was going to die soon; the doctor had told him his liver was nearly gone. He talked about his will, read and reread his genealogy and spoke much of the Kerouac family tradition and his boyhood home in Lowell. He worried that critics would fail to see his novels as he intended them to be read – not only as an ambitious chronicle of America, but also as a loving portrait of his family and his childhood home. In his later writings, he seemed more interested in capturing Lowell than in an America he no longer understood or liked. He asked about funeral homes and embalming: ''Do they treat you with dignity?'' He asserted his faith in the church he had abandoned years ago for Zen Buddhism.
[. . .]
People sometimes wrote or called me to ask what Jack had really been like, hoping I could confirm one romantic thesis or another. One man wanted to believe he died from the scuffle in the black bar. Ironic, but untrue. Nobody wanted to believe he died of drinking.
He did. Drinking was part of his pilgrimage. He was a sensitive soul who'd set his sights on nothing less than enlightenment. When the booze failed to take him there, it at least numbed the disappointment. It is a classic alcoholic pattern, which has produced statements as powerful as Under the Volcano as well as several Kerouac novels – from the sweetness of ''The Dharma Bums'' to the terrifying wine-soaked hallucination of the true cross over ''Big Sur.'' We may know the drinking wasn't necessary, but Jack didn't. And though he gave in to his drinking, he never completely abandoned his search. His record of that search reminds us why we value him so much. It was a sacrifice from which most of us shrink, a gift for which he paid the highest price. We can argue that his life was tragic or his talent misspent, but never doubt the passion that drove it. He showed us America through his innocent eyes, singing to us like the canary old-time coal miners took underground. When the bird died, they knew it as a warning that the air was deadly and that their own lives were no longer safe.
Should There be University Courses on Beat Generation Authors?
From a longer essay:
I've read my fair share of [William S. ] Burroughs and I concur [with Patrick Kurp] that his stuff is trash: Junkie, Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, Exterminator. All in my library. But there is a place for literary trash. It has its uses as do the pathologist's slides and samples. But put on your mental gloves before handling the stuff.
Kerouac alone of the Beat Triumvirate [Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs] moves me, though I surely don't consider him a great writer. In fact, I would go so far as to say that there really shouldn't be any university courses on Kerouac or Dylan or other culturally influential recent figures since their material is easily accessible and easily understandable. Universities ought not pander. They should remain — or rather return to being — institutions whose sacred task is the preservation and transmission of HIGH culture, great culture, culture which is not easily understood and requires expert guidance to penetrate and appreciate.
The thought is extended in Inheritance and Appropriation.
I am but a vox clamantis in deserto. You will be forgiven for thinking me a superannuated idealistic sermonizer out of touch with current events and trends. The West may be finished, and my preaching useless. The barbarians are at the gates and the destructive Left is eager to let them in. The authorities are in abdication. The Pope is a fool: a leftist first, a Catholic second. Leftist termites have rotted out the foundations of the universities.
On the other hand, it ain't over til it's over. So we battle on.
What is Man?
He is an animal, but also a spirit — and thus a riddle to himself. He reasons and speaks, he objectifies, he says 'I' and he means it. He does not parrot the word 'I' in the manner of a parrot or a voice synthesizer; uttering 'I' he expresses self-awareness. Man has a world (Welt), not merely an environment (Umwelt). Man envisages a higher life, a higher destiny, whether within history or beyond it. And then he puzzles himself over whether this envisagement is a mere fancy, a delusion, or whether it presages the genuine possibility of a higher life.
More than an animal, he can yet sink lower than any animal which fact is a reverse index of his spiritual status. He can as easily devote himself to scatology as to eschatology. The antics of a Marquis de Sade are as probative of man's status as the life of a St. Augustine. It takes a spiritual being both to willingly empty oneself into the flesh and to transcend it.
Kierkegaard writes that "every higher conception of life . . . takes the view that the task for men is to strive after kinship with the Deity . . . ." (Attack Upon Christendom, p. 265) We face the danger of "minimizing our own significance" as S. K. puts it, of selling ourselves short. And yet how difficult it is to believe in one's own significance! The problem is compounded by not knowing what one's significance is assuming that one has significance. Not knowing what it is, one can question whether it is.
Kierkegaard solves the problem by way of his dogmatic and fideistic adherence to Christian anthropology and soteriology. Undiluted Christianity is his answer. My answer: live so as to deserve immortality. Live as if you have a higher destiny. It cannot be proven, but the arguments against it can all be neutralized. Man's whence and whither are shrouded in darkness and will remain so in this life. Ignorabimus. In the final analysis you must decide what to believe and how to live.
You could be wrong, no doubt. But if you are wrong, what have you lost? Some baubles and trinkets. If you say that truth will have been lost, I will ask you how you know that and why you think truth is a value in a meaningless universe. I will further press you on the nature of truth and undermine your smug conceit that truth could exist in a meaningless wholly material universe.
The image is by Paul Klee, Engel noch tastend, angel still groping. We perhaps are fallen angels, desolation angels, in the dark, but knowing that we are, and ever groping.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Kerouac Goes Home in October
Jack Kerouac quit the mortal coil 48 years ago today, securing his release from the samsaric wheel of the quivering meat conception, and the granting of his wish:
The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead. (Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus).
The Last Interview, 12 October 1969. "I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic." "I just sneak into church now, at dusk, at vespers. But yeah, as you get older you get more . . . genealogical."
As much of a screw-up and sinner as he was, as irresponsible, self-indulgent, and self-destructive, Kerouac was a deeply religious man. He went through a Buddhist phase, but at the end he came home to Catholicism.
"Everybody goes home in October." (On the Road, Part I, Ch. 14, Para 1) Here's the whole paragraph:
At dawn my bus was zooming across the Arizona desert — Indio, Blythe, Salome (where she danced); the great dry stretches leading to Mexican mountains in the south. Then we swung north to the Arizona mountains, Flagstaff, clifftowns. I had a book with me I stole from a Hollywood stall, "Le Grand Meaulnes" by Alain-Fournier, but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing. In inky night we crossed New Mexico; at gray dawn it was Dalhart, Texas; in the bleak Sunday afternoon we rode through one Oklahoma flat-town after another; at nightfall it was Kansas. The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.
"Pretty girls make graves." (Dharma Bums)
Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels (G. P. Putnam 1965), p. 48:
Outside it's October night in Manhattan and on the waterfront wholesale markets there are barrels with fires left burning in them by the longshoremen where I stop and warm my hands and take a nip two nips from the bottle and hear the bvoom of ships in the channel and I look up and there, the same stars as over Lowell, October, old melancholy October, tender and loving and sad, and it will all tie up eventually into a perfect posy of love I think and I shall present it to Tathagata, my Lord, to God, saying "Lord Thou didst exult — and praise be You for showing me how You did it — Lord now I'm ready for more — And this time I won't whine — This time I'll keep my mind clear on the fact that it is Thy Empty Forms."
. . . This world, the palpable thought of God . . . [ellipsis in original]
Alela Diane, We Are Nothing
Jack Kerouac, Tristessa (written 1955-56, first published in 1960), p. 59:
Since beginningless time and into the never-ending future, men have loved women without telling them, and the Lord has loved them without telling, and the void is not the void because there's nothing to be empty of.
Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard, California Zephyr
10,000 Maniacs, Hey Jack Kerouac
Tom Waits, Jack Kerouac on the Road
Aztec Two-Step, The Persecution and Restoration of Dean Moriarty
Some readings:
Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues, 228th Chorus
Jack Kerouac, Safe in Heaven, Dead. Good sound quality. "I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel, safe in heaven, dead."
Jack Kerouac, Charlie Parker. "Charlie, Parker, lay the bane off me, and everybody."
Mindless Hostility to David Benatar
A scurrilous attack piece in The American Spectator actually provides a bit of support for pessimism about the human condition. One ought to be disturbed by the inability of so many journalists to control their emotions and assess arguments in a calm and rational manner. The attack piece in question is beneath refutation and so I won't waste my time rolling a drunk or beating up a cripple. My astute readers will be able to spot the mistakes and misrepresentations.
Here is what I would like you to do. First carefully read Benatar's succinct summary of his anti-natalism and think about his arguments. Then read the attack piece. Ask yourself whether Benatar's position has been fairly presented. If you think it has, then I pronounce you an idiot.
For the record, I am not now and never have been an anti-natalist. I am speaking out against mindless ideologizing and for open inquiry which is under threat not only from the Left and militant Islam, but also from some on the Right.
UPDATE (10/23)
Jordan Peterson joins those who dismiss without examining.
Can Belief in Man Substitute for Belief in God?
A slightly redacted re-post from 26 September 2009.
………………………………
The fact and extent of natural and moral evil make belief in a providential power difficult. But they also make belief in man and human progress difficult. There is the opium of religion, but also the opium of the intellectuals, the opium of future-oriented utopian naturalisms such as Marxism. Why is utopian opium less narcotic than the religious variety?
And isn’t it more difficult to believe in man than in God? We know man and his wretchedness and that nothing much can be expected of him, but we don’t know God and his powers. Man is impotent to ameliorate his condition in any fundamental way.
We have had centuries to experience this truth, have we not? Advances in science and technology have brought undeniable benefits but also unprecedented dangers. The proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, their possession by rogue states and their terrorist surrogates, bodes ill for the future of humanity. As I write these lines, the prime minister of a Middle Eastern state calls brazenly and repeatedly for the destruction of another Middle Eastern state while the state of which he is the prime minister prepares the nuclear weapons to carry out the unspeakably evil deed. Meanwhile the rest of the world is complacent and appeasing. We know our ilk and what he is capable of, and the bases of rational optimism seem slim indeed.
There is also the scarcely insignificant point that there is no such thing as Man, there are only individual men, men at war with one another and with themselves. We are divided, divisive, and duplicitous creatures. But God is one. You say God does not exist? That may be so.
But the present question is not whether God exists or not, but whether belief in Man makes any sense and can substitute for belief in God. I say it doesn't and can’t, that it is a sorry substitute if not outright delusional. We need help that we cannot provide for ourselves, either individually or collectively. The failure to grasp this is of the essence of the delusional Left, which, refusing the tutelage of tradition and experience, and having thrown overboard every moral standard, is ever ready to spill oceans of blood in pursuit of their utopian fantasies.
There may be no source of the help we need. Then the conclusion to draw is that we should get by as best we can until Night falls, rather than making things worse by drinking the Left's utopian Kool-Aid.