Month: February 2018

NeverTrumpers as Apolitical

Victor Davis Hanson:

The Trump catharsis has shown that about 10 percent of the Republican Party, the NeverTrumpers, was largely apolitical. That is, former cornerstone positions of deregulation and tax reform, oil and gas production, charter schools, deterrent foreign policy, restoring friendship with Israel and moving the embassy to Jerusalem were apparently always secondary to the more important criterion of offering a mild, sober and judicious frown to progressivism, through discerning losers like George H.W. Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney.

Such a Republican elite was so embedded within American establishment institutions as to be both immune from the economic stagnation of an Obama neo-socialist revolution (remember income inequality soared under Obama) and in no real need of a Reagan revolution or Trump’s often messy radical push-back against progressivism.

Its creed was not really, as advertised, the ethics of “losing nobly is better than winning ugly,” but rather the snobbery of “losing a cultural image is worse than winning a political agenda.” Put more bluntly, it is better to put up with a socialist with a “perfectly creased pant” than a prairie-fire conservative in rumpled Walmart slacks.

The acendancy of Trump has been wonderfully clarifying. He has forced the Democrats to show just how far Left they have moved, and he has exposed the Republican bow-tie brigade as do-nothings whose main concern has always been the preservation of their status and perquisites.

Word of the Day: ‘Inennarable’

I stumbled upon this word on p. 140 of John Williams' 1965 novel, Stoner.  (Don't let the title of this underappreciated masterpiece put you off: it is not about a stoner but about a professor of English, surname 'Stoner.')

Williams puts the following words in the mouth of Charles Walker, "Confronted as we are by the mystery of literature, and by its inenarrable power, we are behooved to discover the source of the power and mystery."

As you might have  guessed, 'inenarrable'  means: incapable of being narrated, untellable, indescribable, ineffable, unutterable, unspeakable, incommunicable.  One would apply this high-falutin' word to something of a lofty nature, the hypostatic union, say, and not to some miserable sensory quale such as the smell of sewer gas.

Serendipitously, given recent Christological inquiries, I just now came across the word in this passage from Cyril of Alexandria:

We affirm that different are the natures united in real unity, but from both comes only one Christ and Son, not that because of the unity the difference of the natures is eliminated, but rather because divinity and humanity, united in unspeakable and inennarrable unity, produced for us One Lord and Christ and Son.

The Left Eats Its Own: Andrew Sullivan

Despite 'credentials' that ought to endear him to the Left, Mr. Sullivan has learned the hard way that he still has too much good sense to count as one of them:

As for objective reality, I was at an event earlier this week — not on a campus — when I made what I thought was the commonplace observation that Jim Crow laws no longer exist. Uncomprehending stares came back at me. What planet was I on? Not only does Jim Crow still exist, but slavery itself never went away! When I questioned this assertion by an African-American woman, I was told it was “not my place” to question her reality. After all, I’m white.

The reason I can't take Sully all that seriously is that, while he sees through the insane lies of the Left, he refuses to do the one thing necessary to combat them effectively in the present constellation of circumstances, namely, support Donald Trump and his administration. Sullivan's deranged hatred of the man blinds him to Trump's political usefulness in beating back the destructive Left.

Look: I don’t doubt the good intentions of the new identity politics — to expand the opportunities for people previously excluded. I favor a politics that never discriminates against someone for immutable characteristics — and tries to make sure that as many people as possible feel they have access to our liberal democracy. But what we have now is far more than the liberal project of integrating minorities. It comes close to an attack on the liberal project itself. Marxism with a patina of liberalism on top is still Marxism — and it’s as hostile to the idea of a free society as white nationalism is. So if you wonder why our discourse is now so freighted with fear, why so many choose silence as the path of least resistance, or why the core concepts of a liberal society — the individual’s uniqueness, the primacy of reason, the protection of due process, an objective truth — are so besieged, this is one of the reasons.

Although Sullivan goes too far when he implies that it is never justifiable to discriminate against a person on the basis of immutable characteristics, see below, I basically agree with his little speech.  I agree with his four core concepts.

In particular, I oppose the tribalism of those who see others as mere tokens of racial/ethnic/sexual types and who identify themselves in the same way.   Tribalism could be defined as precisely this reduction of a person to a mere token or instance of a racial/ethnic/sexual type, whether the person is oneself or another. It is a refusal to countenance the potential if not actual uniqueness of the individual. The Left is tribal in this sense but so is the Alt-Right. What they have in common is the reduction of individual identity, personal identity, to group identity. My brand of conservatism resists this reduction and attempts to navigate a via media between the identity-political extremes.

I have found it difficult to get these ideas across to my open-minded and good-natured alt-right interlocutors. 

They will tell me that, as a matter of fact, people identify tribally.  I agree. My point, however, is that such identification is not conducive to social harmony and that we ought to at least try to transcend our tribalism.  

The claim that such-and-such ought to be done cannot be refuted by the fact that it is not done.  The propositions that people ought not sexually molest children, ought not drive drunk, ought not embezzle, etc.  cannot be refuted by invoking the fact that they do.  The same goes for institutions. The existence of an institution does not morally justify its existence.

The claim that people ought to do A could, however, be refuted if it could be shown that people, or some group of people, cannot do A.   Ought implies can. I cannot reasonably demand of blacks, say, that they think and act less tribally if they are simply incapable of so thinking and acting.  

So my interlocutors' point might be that urging people to be less tribal is empty preaching that unreasonably demands that people do what they cannot do. To which my response will be that many blacks and Hispanics and women — who can be thought of as a 'tribe' in an extended sense of the term — do transcend their tribal identities. For example, while Hispanics would naturally like there to be more Hispanics in the USA, many of them are able to appreciate that illegal immigration ought not be tolerated.

You might say that for Hispanics like these, their self-identification as a rational animal, zoon logikon, in Aristotle's sense, trumps their self-identification as Hispanic.

There are higher and lower, noble and base, modes of self-identification.  Philosopher versus cocksman, say. You can guess my view: self-identification in terms of race, ethnicity, and sex is toward the base end of the scale.

Do I deny that I am a white male? Not at all. What's more, those attributes are essential to me. To speak with the philosophers: I am a white male in every possible world in which I exist.  I cannot be an animal at all unless I have some immutable characteristics. (And to think of them as socially constructed is the height of leftist lunacy.)   Then why is it base to identify in terms of these characteristics? Because there are higher modes of self-identification. 

What makes them higher or better? They are less divisive and more conducive to social harmony. We are social animals and we benefit from cooperation. While competition is good in that it breeds excellence, conflict and enmity are bad. If we can learn to see one another as unique individuals, as persons, as rational beings rather than as interchangeable tokes of racial/ethnic/sexual types, then we are more likely to achieve more mutually beneficial social interactions.

The higher self-identifications are also more reflective of our status as free moral agents. I didn't choose my race or sex, but I did choose and continue to choose to develop myself as an individual, to actualize my potential for self-individuation.  My progress along that line of self-development is something I can be proud of.  By contrast there is something faintly absurd and morally dubious about black pride, white pride, gay pride, and the like.  You're proud to be white? Why? You had no say in the matter. Nancy Pelosi is apparently ashamed to be white. That is equally mistaken.

Am I saying that race doesn't matter? No. Race does matter, but it matters less than leftists and alt-rightists think and more than some old-time (sane) liberals and conservatives like Dennis Prager think. (See Dennis Prager on Liberalism, Leftism, and Race.) Certain racial and ethnic groups are better equipped to appreciate, i.e., both understand and value, the points I have been making.  Part of it has to do with intelligence. Asians and Jews, as groups, are more intelligent than blacks and Hispanics as groups. That is just a fact, and there are no racist facts. (A fact about race is not a racist fact.) What's true cannot be racist or sexist.

I spoke above of the uniqueness of the individual. I know that sounds like vacuous sermonizing and utter bullshit to many ears. But to adequately discuss it we would have to enter metaphysics. Some other time. But please note that ameliorative politics must be grounded in political theory which rests on normative ethics which presuppose philosophical anthropology which leads us back to metaphysics.

I should stop now. I have given my alt-right sparring partners enough to punch back at.  Have at it, boys. Comments crisp and concise are best.  People don't read long comments.  Many short, good; one long, bad.

Addendum: Is it ever morally justifiable to discriminate against a person on the basis of an immutable characteristic? 

Of course it is. I flunked my Army pre-induction physical. The Army discriminated against me because I hear out of only one ear. Southern Pacific Railroad did the same when, following in the footsteps of my quondam hero, Jack Kerouac, I tried to get a job as a switchman. Examples are easily multiplied. Want to join the Army? There are age restrictions. You can't be over 40. Should every combat role in the mlitary be open to females? Obviously not. 

You would have to be as willfully stupid as Nancy Pelosi to think that all discrimination is unjust.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Gary U. S. Bonds

I recently discovered this masterful 1981 cover of Jackson Browne's "The Pretender."

I'm going to be a happy idiot
And struggle for the legal tender
Where the ads take aim and lay their claim
To the heart and the soul of the spender
And believe in whatever may lie
In those things that money can buy
Though true love could have been a contender
Are you there?
Say a prayer for the Pretender
Who started out so young and strong
Only to surrender.

And in case you missed it from a couple of weeks ago: From a Buick 6.  

When Politics Becomes about the Nature of Reality

The hyperventilation of one Will Stancil at The Atlantic brought a wry smile to my face:

There are plenty of ways to explain this creeping acquiescence. Institutions abhor abnormality; even in politics, parties would often rather fight along familiar lines. The passage of time makes Trump’s America seem less strange. Politicos are wary of challenging a president presiding over a thriving economy. And on some level, Trump benefits from the basic dynamic that sustains any cult: His version of reality is so absurd that the only way to peacefully coexist with it is to accept his behavior as normal.

So Trump is a cult leader with an absurd version of reality?

What might these  absurdities be?

That it is a legitimate function of the federal government to enforce the nation's borders?  That there is a distinction between legal and illegal immigration? That every nation has a right to look to its own interests first? That an immigration policy must be to the benefit of the host country? That there is no right to immigrate? That, to put it mildly, it is a very bad idea to allow the immigration of those who do not accept our values but are pledged to the overthrow of our institutions and the values they embody?

‘Porn Literacy’ Class for Teens

We are one sick society getting sicker with every passing day. Rod Dreher registers an eloquent protest:

What they’re doing is “good” in the sense that a public health educator teaching teenage junkies how to shoot heroin without killing themselves is good. The whole thing is evil to the core. We live in a degenerate culture that believes it has to teach its children that despite what they’ve seen on their smartphones, not all women like to be sodomized, choked during sex, or to have men ejaculating on their faces.

He rightly points his finger at the authorities who abdicate:

You bishops, priests, and pastors who are so worried that we Christians might not “engage” the world? What, exactly, do you offer to protect parents and children in your flock from this scourge? What are you leading them to do? Or do you prefer to rest in your banal pieties, and to allow those in your spiritual care to believe the same comforting lies?

This is a time for choosing. Choose to “engage” the Culture of Death by accommodating it, and you will die, spiritually. Resist it, and your soul might live. Help others resist too. Do not collaborate with it!

Part of the accommodation is the refusal on the part of priests, pastors, and parents to warn against the unbridled concupiscence that is at the root of the mainstreaming of pornography and the widespread acceptance of unrestricted abortion on demand. 

See my Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained.

The Left’s War Against The New York Times

Here is more proof that the Left eats its own. The leftist Rag of Record under attack by leftists? Hard to believe, but I love it. May the extremists devour each other.

David Brooks writes a half-way sensible column and the mad dogs of the Far left are all over him like a cheap suit.

Related articles
Maverick Philosopher: King Midas, The Philosopher, and the Leftist
Maverick Philosopher: The Moronic Level of Leftist Race-Baiting

A Curious Mode of Refutation

Here:

To begin with, the idea that “existence exists” excludes the idea that existence doesn’t exist. It denies the subjectivist, pragmatist, postmodernist view that reality is an illusion, a mental construct, a social convention. Obviously, people who insist that reality is not real are not going to buy in to a philosophy that says it is real.

So that’s one huge problem with Rand’s philosophy.

Now I am no fan of Ayn Rand: my Rand category is chock-full of trenchant criticisms of her and her acolytes. But the above is so stupid as to be beyond belief.

Forgive me for stating the obvious. One cannot refute a view by pointing out that there are those who do not accept it.

UPDATE (7:40)

This just in from Patrick Toner:

Off to class in two minutes, but I thought I should send a quick note to say that I think Biddle's piece is satirical.  Or something like that.  It wasn't meant as a refutation.  I hope you're well!

Professor Toner may well be right. You decide.

FISA-Gate and Watergate

Unsure what FISA-Gate is all about? Victor Davis Hanson explains it clearly and how it differs from Watergate. His piece concludes:

Barack Obama was a progressive constitutional lawyer who expressed distrust of the secretive "Deep State." Yet his administration weaponized the IRS and surveilled Associated Press communications and a Fox News journalist for reporting unfavorable news based on supposed leaks.

Obama did not fit the past stereotypes of right-wing authoritarians subverting the Department of Justice and its agencies. Perhaps that is why there was little pushback against his administration's efforts to assist the campaign of his likely replacement, fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Progressives are not supposed to destroy requested emails, "acid wash" hard drives, spread unverified and paid-for opposition research among government agencies, or use the DOJ and FBI to obtain warrants to snoop on the communications of American citizens.

FISA-gate may become a more worrisome scandal than either Watergate or Iran-Contra. Why? Because our defense against government wrongdoing — the press — is defending such actions, not uncovering them. Liberal and progressive voices are excusing, not airing, the excesses of the DOJ and FBI.

Apparently, weaponizing government agencies to stop a detested Donald Trump by any means necessary is not really considered a crime.

Hold onto your (pussy)hats boys and girls, things are going to get nasty. 

Related articles
MARK LEVIN: Obama Likely Knew Hillary Clinton PAID FOR FISA Warrant To Surveil Trump Campaign – RedWireNews.com

Of Blood and Blog

My daily labors in the blogosphere since 2004, impressive as they are to some, have garnered nary a word of encouragement, or the opposite, from any relative. In compensation, I have a big fat file folder of tributes from strangers.

I suspect this is not unusual. The people we know we take for granted. Is it not written that "no prophet is welcome in his hometown"? (Luke 4: 24: nemo propheta acceptus est in patria sua. Cf. John 1:46.) 

One could call it the injustice of propinquity. We often underestimate those nearby, whether by blood or space, while overestimating those afar.

Copy Editor Makes Me Out to be a Disease

Dear Dr. Varicella:
 
Attached you will find two PDFs: a copyedited version of your manuscript and a version indicating changes to the original file. This is your final opportunity to make any clarifications or stylistic changes to the manuscript.
An honest mistake, no doubt, so I won't reveal the names of the editor or the journal.  But it is a little ironic that a copy editor would make such a mistake.  But it's tough being an editor.  It's a lousy job.  So I want to thank all of the editors out there without whom those of us who publish  would not see our words in print.
 
The only thing that really gets my goat is political correctness in a copy editor. I vent my spleen in The Paltry Mentality of the Copy Editor and Copy Editors and Political Correctness.
 
Let me end with a bit of praise for the tribe of bloggers.
 
Most people 'massacre' my name and it "pisses me off" in the phraseology of Jeff Dunham's Walter; but bloggers almost universally get it right.  No surprise, I suppose:  bloggers are an elite group of highly literate natural-born scribblers.

The Riddle of the Self

Jacques comments:

I like your reply to the reader who asked about the existence of the self.  All good points!  I wonder what you think about the following different response to people like Harris (or Hume)…  It seems to me that they just don't adequately support their claim that no self can be known or discovered or experienced.  A few thoughts:

(1) It just might be true that the self isn't found "when looked for in a more rigorous way", if meditation (or whatever) is a rigorous way of looking for it.  But does that support the conclusion that we don't experience the self in some other way–for example, without "rigorously" looking for it?  Phenomenologically, it seems to me that I'm aware of myself most of the time.  I can feel "self-conscious", for example, if I'm uncomfortable or worried how other people perceive me.  At other times, when I'm lost in the moment, I'm less aware of myself.  Why doesn't this kind of phenomenological fact (or seeming fact) count as evidence that there is such a thing?

BV: It is an interesting question whether the experience of self-consciousness you describe is evidence against the claim made by Sartre, Butchvarov, et al. that that there is no self or subject who is conscious. It is not obvious to me that it is. Suppose I feel self-conscious in a social situation. I am perhaps reading a paper before a large group of people I do not know.  Maybe it's part of a job interview! My one chance at securing a tenure-track position! A latter-day Humean might offer the following description.  There is in the speaker awareness of: the audience, the expressions on their faces, the body and sensations in the body such as dryness in the mouth and sweat forming on the forehead, a bit of queasiness in the stomach, the less-than-confident sound of one's voice, feelings of anxiety, nervousness, self-doubt, and so on. There needn't be a self that is aware of all this physical and mental data.  There is just (subject-less) awareness of it.

It is important to bear in mind that when a philosopher asks about the existence of the self, he is not asking about his possessions or his body or any part thereof, or his memories or any introspectible contents. He is not asking about what ordinary people identify as themselves. People identify themselves with the damndest things, their cars, their Zip codes, their bodies. For all of that is 'on the side of the object.' What he is asking is whether there is a subject distinct from all of that, distinct from the body and from the empirical psyche.

A much stronger objection to the Humean invokes the thesis of Brentano that every primary intentional awareness is accompanied by a simultaneous secondary awareness of that very awareness. This is essentially wat Sartre later described as the pre-reflective cogito.  Kant famously maintained that the 'I think' must be able to accompany all of my representations.  Brentano and Sartre maintain that the 'I think' does accompany all of my representings, or better, awarenesses — it is just that the 'I think' needn't be an act of explicit reflection.

Suppose I see a black cat. The act of visual awareness is typically, even if not always, accompanied by a simultaneous secondary awareness of the primary awareness.  I am aware of the cat, but I am also aware of being aware of the cat.  How does the Humean account for the awareness of being aware? He can say of the primary straightforward awareness that it is a subjectless awareness of a phenomenal object.  But he can't say the same of the secondary awareness. For it is not a phenomenal object over against the awareness of it.  It is not something presented but a state of affairs that involves me as subject.

'I am aware of a cat' can perhaps be rewritten subjectlessly  as 'There is awareness of a cat.' But 'I am aware of being aware of a cat' cannot be subjectlessly rewritten as 'There is awareness of awareness of a cat.' For the second sentence could be true without the first being true. Suppose there is in Tom visual awareness of a cat, but no awareness of awareness, and in God awareness of Tom's awareness, but no visual awareness of a cat.  The point here is that the primary and secondary awarenesses need to form a synchronic unity in one and the same subject. 

(2) Why shouldn't we allow that the self might be the kind of thing that "rigorous" examination will tend to obscure.  There are lots of things I can perceive, somehow or at some times, but which I can't perceive or can't easily perceive when I "rigorously" consciously attend to them.  If I consciously focus my attention on the question of what "truth" means I can easily get confused.  I might begin to doubt whether I'm really aware of truth, or the concept of truth.  It doesn't follow that I'm not somehow aware of truth at other times, e.g., when wondering whether what X said about Trump is really true.

BV: This is a line of thought worth developing. You mention truth. Time is another example. What is time?  Don't ask me, and I know.  Ask me, and I don't know. (Augustine).  We all have a pre-analytic or pre-theoretical understanding of what time is, but when we attempt an analysis or a theory we get tangled up.

One famous theory of time, McTaggart's, issues in the conclusion that time is unreal.  This is the analog of those theories of the self that deny that there is a self.  Another famous theory of time, the B-theory of D. H. Mellor and others, denies temporal passage, reducing (real) time to the static ordering of events by the B-relations (earlier than, later than, simultaneous with).  This is the analog of theories of the self like that of Hume's that do not outright deny the self, but reduce it to a bundle of impressions or of other items.

You might also develop your thought by exploring the the focus-fringe relation.  Focal awareness seems to presuppose fringe awareness.  What is on the fringe of my awareness can become my focus, but only if what was before at the focus moves to the fringe. Perhaps the self is like a permanent fringe that cannot be brought into focus, but must be there for anything to be brought into focus.  If so, that would explain why one cannot isolate the self as an object among objects. The notion of 'horizon' in Husserl and Heidegger is relevant here.

(3) They don't really justify the assumption that the kind of entity that they claim not to discover in their "rigorous" examination should be identified with the self.  Or the characterization is too vague to decide whether we do or don't discover this thing.  The vague idea of "an experiencer distinct from the flow of experience", for example.  In some sense, I'm pretty sure that I do know this kind of entity from first-hand experience:  right now I seem to be aware of the sensations and thoughts I'm having, and also something (i.e., me, my-self) that is the (distinct) subject of these experiences.  Presumably they'd say this isn't my experience, or else that they don't mean to deny that I can have that experience but rather some other kind of experience.  But then either their position seems false or it's just not clear what they're talking about.

BV: You are putting your finger on an important issue.  You can't search for a thing unless you have an idea of what you are  searching for. You won't be able to find my lost cygnet unless you know what a cygnet is.  One will miss the self — assuming there is one — if one searches for it under a description it cannot satisfy. Case in point:

Here are the words of Buddha according to the Anattalakkhana Sutta, his second discourse, the Sermon on the Mark of Not-Self:

 
     The body [rupa], monks, is not self. If the body were the self,
     this body would not lend itself to dis-ease. It would be possible
     (to say) with regard to the body, 'Let my body be thus. Let my body
     be not thus.' But precisely because the body is not self, the body
     lends itself to dis-ease. And it is not possible (to say) with
     regard to the body, 'Let my body be thus. Let my body not be thus.'

Buddha then goes on to argue similarly with respect to the rest of the five aggregates or categories of personality-constituents (khandhas, Sanskrit: skandhas), namely, feeling (vedana), perception (sanna), consciousness (vinnana), and mental formations (sankharas). All are claimed to be not-self. Thus we are told that feeling afflicts us and is not amenable to our control, whence it is inferred that feeling is not one's self, not one's own inner substance. The tacit premise of this enthymematic argument is that one's self would have to be something over which one would have complete control.  The tacit premise is that the self is  something wholly active and spontaneous and self-regulating.  It is clear that something wholly active will not suffer: to suffer is precisely to be afflicted by something external over which one has no control.  To suffer is to be passive.  An agent in excelsis is an impassible agent.  (In the West, impassibility became one of the divine attributes.)   

So if you set the bar really high, it will turn out that nothing we encounter in experience is a self or has self-nature. If so, we should discard, not the self, but the conception no actual self can instantiate.

David Hume too searches for the self under a description it cannot satisfy.  You know the famous passage from the Treatise wherein he speaks of entering most intimately into himself only to stumble upon nothing but perceptions. Hume reports,  "I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception." (Treatise of Human Nature, Selby-Bigge, 1978, p. 252.)

Well, if he is looking for a self that is bare of all perceptions (taking 'perception' broadly to subsume all mental states or conscious experiences), then it is no surprise that he finds nothing.  It could be like this: the self is a substance (an endurant, not a perdurant) that remains numerically self-same over time but is always in some state or other.  It would then be distinct from each of its states, and from all of them taken collectively, but also necessarily such that it cannot exist without being in some state or other.

And if that is so, then, when I am in a self-presenting state such as that of being euphoric, I am directly aware of my self as being in that state.  We may grant Hume that we cannot be aware of the self as an item apart from its states, but that is consistent with being aware of the self in and through its states. 

(4) I'd admit that the deep and detailed nature of this (seemingly) distinct entity is mysterious.  But then it seems that they're wrongly assuming that having experience or knowledge of X requires having experience or knowledge of X sufficient for some kind of exhaustive and perfect understanding of X.  I know about other people, and I experience them, without knowing everything about them (or what the ultimate nature of a person is, etc).  Harris seems to be saying merely that the precise character of his self is elusive, hard to individuate or define, at least while he's meditating.  I don't understand why that phenomenological fact is supposed to warrant the conclusion that he's found nothing of the kind.  Maybe I haven't meditated properly but, in my experience, I take myself to be always dimly aware of just that kind of thing.  But it's in the corner of the mind's eye, so to speak.

I agree that the self is mysterious and indeed beyond the reach of naturalistic understanding.

The Tet Offensive Fifty Years Later

It was around the time of Tet that I received a letter from Uncle Sam ordering me to downtown Los Angeles for my pre-induction physical. I went, and flunked. Due to a birth defect I hear only out of my right ear. I was classified 1-Y, and that was later changed to 4-F.

In any case, I had been awarded a California State Scholarship to attend college that fall. So I was doubly safe from the draft.

But enough about me. 

50 Years Later: What Tet Didn't Destroy, Deferments Did

 I would add:

There is something to be said in favor of an all-voluntary military, but on the debit side there is this: only those with 'skin in the game' — either their own or that of their loved ones — properly appreciate the costs of foreign military interventions.  I say that as a conservative, not a libertarian.

There is also this to consider:  In the bad old days of the draft people of different stations – to use a good old word that will not be allowed to fall into desuetude, leastways not on my watch — were forced to associate with one another — with some good effects.  It is 'broadening' to mingle  and have to get along with different sorts of people.  And when the veteran of foreign wars returns and takes up a profession in, say, academe, he brings with him precious hard-won experience of all sorts of people in different  lands in trying circumstances.  He is then more likely to exhibit the sense of a Winston Churchill as opposed to the nonsense of a Ward Churchill.