March 2018 – Page 3 – Maverick Philosopher

The Secularization of the Judeo-Christian Equality Axiom

It is a plain fact that humans are not empirically equal either as individuals or as groups. Why then is there so much politically correct resistance to this truth? It is because it flies in the face of a central dogma of the Left, namely, that deep down we are all the same, want the same things, have the same abilities, share the same values, and so on. So if women are 'under-represented' among the engineers, for example, then the only way to explain this, given the leftist equality dogma, is in terms of something nefarious such as sexism. For if we are all equal empirically, then the 'under-representation' — a word I enclose in sneer quotes because of its conflation of the factual and the normative — cannot be explained in terms of a difference in interests and values or a difference in mathematical aptitude. (Remember what happened to Lawrence Summers of Harvard?)

The dogma is false, yet widely and fervently believed. Anyone who dares offend against it faces severe consequences. Amy Wax, for example:

A University of Pennsylvania law school professor will no longer teach required courses following outcry over a video in which she suggested — falsely, according to the school — that black students seldom graduated high in their class.

Amy Wax, a tenured professor, will continue to teach electives in her areas of expertise but will be removed from teaching first-year curriculum courses, Penn Law Dean Theodore Ruger said in a statement Wednesday.

Ruger said Wax spoke “disparagingly and inaccurately” when she claimed last year that she had “rarely, rarely” seen a black student finish in the top half of their class.

Professor Wax spoke the truth, but the truth is no defense in the court of the politically correct. In present-day academe, all must toe the party line and woe to him who doesn't. The universities have become leftist seminaries.

What explains the fervor and fanaticism with which the Left's equality dogma is upheld? Could we explain it as a secularization of the Judeo-Christian belief that all men are created equal? Long before I read Carl Schmitt, I had this thought. But then I found this provocative assertion by Schmitt:

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development . . . but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. (Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, tr. G. Schwab, University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 36.)

The idea that all humans are equal in virtue of having been created by God in the image and likeness of God is a purely theological notion consistent with deep and wide empirical differences among humans. Its secularization, I suggest, involves several steps. (These are my ideas, not Schmitt's.)

The first step is to transform the metaphysical concept of equality of persons into an empirical concept of equality of measurable attributes.

The second step is to explain away the manifest empirical inequality of human groups and individuals in terms of sexism or racism or ageism or some other 'ism.' This involves a turn toward social constructivism and a reality-denying turn away from the mind-independent reality of biological differences between the sexes and the races. Sex becomes 'gender' and the latter a social construct. Similarly with race. The absurdities that result are foolishly embraced rather than taken as so many reductiones ad absurdum of the original mistake of making sex and race social constructs. Thus one foolishly embraces the notion that one can change one's race. For a calm and thorough critique of this notion as represented by a contemporary academic, see my Can One Change One's Race?

The third step is to jettison the theological underpinning of the original equality conception.

In this way a true, non-empirical claim of Christian metaphysics about persons as rights-bearers is transformed into a false empirical claim about human animals. At the same time the ground of the non-empirical claim is denied.

It is easy to see how unstable this all is. Reject God, and you no longer have a basis for belief in equality of persons. Man reverts to being an animal among animals with all the empirical inequality that that brings with it.

So the Left has a problem. It is virulently anti-theistic and anti-religious and yet it wants to uphold a notion of equality that makes sense only within a theistic framework. The Left, blind to this inconsistency, is running on the fumes of an evaporating Christian worldview. Equality of persons and rights secularizes itself right out of existence once the theological support is kicked away.

Nietzsche understood this long ago. The death of God has consequences. One is that the brotherhood of man becomes a joke. If my tribe can enslave yours, then it has all the justification it needs and can have for doing so. Why should I treat you as my brother if I have the power to make you my servant and I have freed my mind of Christian fictions?

For those of us who oppose both the Left and the Alt-Right faction that is anti-Christian and Nietzschean, the only option seems to be a return to our Judeo-Christian heritage.

Here is an example of an argument from the Alt Right faction I am referring to:

There is a strong anti-Christian tendency in contemporary White Nationalism.

The argument goes something like this: Christianity is one of the primary causes of the decline of the white race for two reasons. First, it gives the Jews a privileged place in the sacred history of mankind, a role that they have used to gain their enormous power over us today. Second, Christian moral teachings—inborn collective guilt, magical redemption, universalism, altruism, humility, meekness, turning the other cheek, etc.—are the primary cause of the white race’s ongoing suicide and the main impediment to turning the tide. These values are no less Christian in origin just because secular liberals and socialists discard their supernatural trappings. The usual conclusion is that the white race will not be able to save itself unless it rejects Christianity.

I agree entirely with the sentence I have bolded. Leftist secularization is essentially a suppression of the supernatural with a concomitant maintenance of virtues and precepts that make sense only within a supernatural framework. But 'trappings' is not the right word; 'supports' is better. The Left is engaged in the absurd project of kicking away the support of universal rights, the dignity and equality of persons, and all the rest while trying to hold on to these commitments.

The deeper question, though, is whether Christianity weakens us and makes us unfit to live and flourish as the animals we are in the only world there is, this world of space, time, matter and change, or whether Alles Vergaengliche ist nur ein Gleichnis (Goethe), time is a moving image of eternity (Plato), and this world is a fleeting vale of tears that veils an Unseen Order.

Beautiful but Untranslatable Italian Words and Phrases

Here

California and Abortion

The first is becoming as morally repugnant as the second. Here:

California has long promoted abortion on demand, and even forces taxpayers to pay for elective abortions through its state Medicaid program. But one of their latest efforts is really beyond the pale. Abortion advocates in the state recently became alarmed that the burgeoning number of pro-life Pregnancy Care Centers (they now outnumber abortion facilities nationally 5 to 1) neither offer abortions to their clients, nor refer women for them. To do so would be antithetical to their mission. But in response, groups such as NARAL and Planned Parenthood convinced California to pass AB 775, which requires pregnancy centers to post signs on the walls of their waiting rooms (or by other means) informing clients that California offers “immediate free or low-cost access” to abortion, along with the phone number of the county social services office. In other words, this requirement would force pro-life doctors, nurses, and staff to advertise for free abortions, plain and simple.

More proof that leftists are morally obtuse.

Progressives as the New Confederates

Historian Hanson provides a fascinating contextualization of recent leftist antics.

Apple’s War on Cigars

Another example of misplaced moral enthusiasm. Apple has a problem with cigars but not with marijuana. You say that doesn’t make sense? If it’s from leftists it doesn’t have to make sense.

Is Life Worth Living?

Further Pyrrhonian Ponderings: Are There Two Kinds of Assent?

Michael Frede urges a distinction between two kinds of assent. The one he calls "just having a view," and the other "making a claim, taking a position." ("The Sceptic's Two Kinds of Assent and the Question of the Possibility of Knowledge" in Philosophy in History, eds. Rorty, Schneewind, and Skinner, Cambridge UP, 1984, p. 261.)

Now suppose there are these two kinds of assent. The Skeptic would then have the resources to rebut a fairly obvious criticism, namely, that he himself dogmatizes in a number of ways, that he himself is doxastically committed despite his avowed aim of living adoxastos, without beliefs.

A critic might urge the following:

He who treads the Skeptic Path is committed to the value of ataraxia, and this value-commitment obviously transcends his present impressions. It is the organizing principle behind his therapeutic procedures and his entire way of life, a way of life he recommends to his future self and to others. It is what his quasi-medicinal treatments are for. Ataraxia is the goal, the 'final cause,' of the therapy. So here we have a doxastic-axiological commitment that is part and parcel of the Skeptic Way. The Skeptic would appear to be involved in some form of self-deception were he to say that it only seems to him here and now that ataraxia is a high goal or that it is a high goal only for him. Plainly, he is advocating his way of life for his future self and for other selves. He is a partisan for his way of life and is at odds with the partisans of other ways of life.

This shows that the Skeptic Way is not viable: the Skeptic essays to live without belief, but one cannot live without beliefs and commitments, including beliefs about the supposed defects of alternative ways of life. One needs all sort of beliefs about ataraxia, its nature, its value, its relation to happiness, our capacity to achieve it, the means of achieving it, its superiority to other states thought to be conducive to happiness, and so on.

A similar problem arises with the respect to the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC). Is the Skeptic committed to it or not? Does he accept it or not? It seems he must accept it. After all, he needs it. Ataraxia is supposed to supervene upon the suspension of judgment. Suspension, however, arises from the state of evidential equipoise when it is seen that the arguments for thesis and antithesis balance and cancel out. The background assumption, of course, is that a thesis and its negation cannot both be true. The Skeptic appears committed to the truth of (LNC) as part of his therapeutic procedure.

So our Skeptic appears to have at least this one belief, namely, that (LNC) is true. He cannot live without beliefs. There is a line from Husserl's diary I have long loved: Alle Leben ist Stellungnehmen, "All living is the taking of a position." One cannot live 'positionlessly.' Or so say I.

If Frede is right, however, the Skeptic can plausibly rebut this line of criticism. He thinks one can have a view without making a claim or taking a position. If so, then one can withhold assent from all claims and position-takings while yet assenting in a different sense.

I am afraid I don't buy it. Let me see if I can explain why. The question in one form is whether one can validily move from

1) It seems to me, here and now, that p

to

2) It seems to me, here and now, that p is true.

I say the move is valid: necessarily, if it seems that p, then it seems that p is true. Similarly, to accept (believe, judge, affirm, assert, assent) that p is to accept (believe judge, affirm, assert, assent) that p is true. No doubt my acceptance of p as true is consistent with p's being false, just as its seeming-to be-true that p is consistent with p's being false. The point is that to accept is to accept-as-true. There is no accepting-as-false. Necessarily, if it seems to me here and now to be true that p, then is seems to me here and now that p is true.

So I say there is one one kind of assent, and that no kind of assent is noncommittal.

Belief is oriented toward truth whether or not it attains truth. Knowledge is also oriented toward truth, but in a different way. Necessarily, if S knows that p, then p is true. There is no false knowledge. But there is false belief. But both knowledge and belief aim at truth. It is just that knowledge always, and indeed necessarily, hits the mark, whereas one's being in a belief state with respect to a proposition is no gurantee that the proposition is true.

Communists

Seeking heaven on earth, they gave humanity the gulag, hell on earth.

Spiritual Mountebanks

The world is full of hustlers and charlatans who prey upon spiritual seekers. One ought to be suspicious of anyone who claims enlightenment or special powers. The acid test, perhaps, is whether they demand money or sex for their services. If they do, run away while holding onto your wallet. 'Bhagwan Shree' Rajneesh , now the subject of a Netflix documentary series, is a good example from the '80s.

Recoiling from the mountebanks, some go to the opposite extreme, holding as fraudulent all spiritual teachers.

Some people are gullible and credulous, without a skeptical bone in their bodies. Others are skepticism incarnate, unable to believe anything or admire anything. A strange case of the latter is U. G. Krishnamurti, the anti-guru and 'anti-charlatan.' Please don't confuse him with the much better known J. Krishnamurti.

An obsessive doubter and debunker, U. G. Krishnamurti is a bit like the atheist who can't leave God alone, but must constantly be disproving him. U.G. can't leave the enlightenment quest and 'spirituality' alone. It's all buncombe, he thinks, but he can't be done with it.

Buddha, Jesus, and the rest were all just kidding themselves and misleading others. But U. G. can't just arrive at this conclusion and move on to something he deems worthwhile. For he is an 'anti-quester' tied to what he opposes by his self-defining opposition to it. Curiously perverse, but fascinating. He is a little like the later Wittgenstein who, though convinced that the problems of philosophy arose from linguistic bewitchment, couldn't move on to something worth doing, but instead obsessively scribbled on in any attempt to show a nonexistent fly the way out of a nonexistent fly-bottle.

Thomas Merton on Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

The gullible Merton appears to have been taken in by Trungpa.

The Problem of Consciousness and Galen Strawson’s Non-Solution

The problem can be set forth in a nice neat way as an aporetic triad:

1) Consciousness is real; it is not an illusion.

2) Consciousness is wholly natural, a material process in the brain.

3) It is impossible that conscious states, whether object-directed or merely qualitative, be material in nature.

It is easy to see that the members of this triad are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. Any two of the propositions, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining proposition.

And yet each limb of the triad has brilliant defenders and brilliant opponents. So not only is consciousness itself a mighty goad to inquiry; the wild diversity of opinions about it is as well. (The second goad is an instance of what I call the Moorean motive for doing philosophy: G. E. Moore did not get his problems from the world, but from the strange and mutually contradictory things philosophers said about the world, e.g., that time is unreal (McTaggart) or that nothing is really related (Bradley).)

The above problem is soluble if a compelling case can be made for the rejection of one of the limbs. But which one? Eliminativists reject (1); dualists of all types, and not just substance dualists, reject (2); materialists reject (3).

I agree with Strawson that eliminativism has zero credibility. (1) is self-evident and the attempts to deny it are easily convicted of incoherence. So no solution is to be had by rejecting (1).

As for (2), it is overwhelmingly credible to most at the present time. We live in a secular age. 'Surely' — the secularist will assure us — there is nothing concrete that is supernatural. God and the soul are just comforting fictions from a bygone era. The natural exhausts the real. Materialism about the mind is just logical fallout from naturalism. If all that (concretely) exists is space-time and its contents, then the same goes for minds and their states.

Strawson, accepting both (1) and (2) must reject (3). But the arguments against (3), one of which I will sketch below, are formidable. The upshot of these arguments is that it is unintelligible how either qualia or intentional states of consciousness could be wholly material in nature. Suppose I told you that there is a man who is both fully human and fully divine. You would say that that makes no sense, is unintelligible, and is impossible for that very reason. Well, it is no less unintelligible that a felt sensation such as my present blogger's euphoria be identical to a state of my brain.

What could a materialist such as Strawson say in response? He has to make a mysterian move.

He could say that our understanding of matter at present does not allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature, but that it is nevertheless wholly material in nature! Some matter is sentient and some matter thinks. My euphoria is literally inside my skull and so are my thoughts about Boston.

(Compare the orthodox Chalcedonian incarnationalist who says that the man Jesus of Nazareth is identical to the Second Person of the Trinity. Put him under dialectical pressure and he might say, "Look it is true! We know it by divine revelation. And what is true is true whether or not we can understand how it is possible that it be true. It must remain a mystery to us here below.)

Or a materialist mysterian can say that our understanding of matter will never allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature. Either way, conscious experience, whether intentional or non-intentional, is wholly material in nature, and falls entirely within the subject-matter of physics, whether a future physics achievable by us, or a physics which, though not achievable by us, is perhaps achievable by organisms of a different constitution who study us.

If I understand Galen Strawson's view, it is the first. Conscious experience is fully real but wholly material in nature despite the fact that on current physics we cannot account for its reality: we cannot understand how it is possible for qualia and thoughts to be wholly material. Here is a characteristic passage from Strawson:

Serious materialists have to be outright realists about the experiential. So they are obliged to hold that experiential phenomena just are physical phenomena, although current physics cannot account for them. As an acting materialist, I accept this, and assume that experiential phenomena are "based in" or "realized in" the brain (to stick to the human case). But this assumption does not solve any problems for materialists. Instead it obliges them to admit ignorance of the nature of the physical, to admit that they don't have a fully adequate idea of what the physical is, and hence of what the brain is. ("The Experiential and the Non-Experiential" in Warner and Szubka, p. 77)

Strawson and I agree on two important points. One is that what he calls experiential phenomena are as real as anything and cannot be eliminated or reduced to anything non-experiential. Dennett denied! The other is that there is no accounting for experiential items in terms of current physics.

I disagree on whether his mysterian solution is a genuine solution to the problem. What he is saying is that, given the obvious reality of conscious states, and given the truth of naturalism, experiential phenomena must be material in nature, and that this is so whether or not we are able to understand how it could be so. At present we cannot understand how it could be so. It is at present a mystery. But the mystery will dissipate when we have a better understanding of matter.

This strikes me as bluster.

An experiential item such as a twinge of pain or a rush of elation is essentially subjective; it is something whose appearing just is its reality. For qualia, esse = percipi. If I am told that someday items like this will be exhaustively understood from a third-person point of view as objects of physics, I have no idea what this means. The notion strikes me as absurd. We are being told in effect that what is essentially subjective will one day be exhaustively understood as both essentially subjective and wholly objective. And that makes no sense. If you tell me that understanding in physics need not be objectifying understanding, I don't know what that means either.

As Strawson clearly appreciates, one cannot reduce a twinge of pain to a pattern of neuron firings, for such a reduction eliminates the what-it-is-like-ness of the experience. And so he inflates the concept of the physical to cover both the physical and the mental. But by doing this he drains the physical of definite meaning. His materialism is a vacuous materialism. We no longer have any idea of what 'physical' means if it no longer contrasts with 'mental.'

If we are told that sensations and thoughts are wholly material, we have a definite proposition only if 'material' contrasts with 'mental.' But if we are told that sensations and thoughts are material, but that matter in reality has mental properties and powers, then I say you are talking nonsense. You are creating grammatically correct sentences that do not express a coherent thought.

Besides, if some matter in reality senses and thinks, surely some matter doesn't; hence we are back to dualism.

Why is Strawson's mysterianism any better than Dennett's eliminativism? Both are materialists. And both are keenly aware of the problem that qualia pose. This is known in the trade as the 'hard problem.' (What? The other problems in the vicinity are easy?) The eliminativist simply denies the troublesome data. Qualia don't exist! They are illusory! The mysterian materialist cannot bring himself to say something so manifestly silly. But, unwilling to question his materialism, he says something that is not much better. He tells us that qualia are real, and wholly material, but we don't understand how because we don't know enough about matter. But this 'theological' solution is also worthless because no definite proposition is being advanced.

Strawson frankly confesses, "I am by faith a materialist." (p. 69) Given this faith, experiential items, precisely as experiential, must be wholly material in nature. This faith engenders the hope that future science will unlock the secret. Strawson must pin his hope on future science because of his clear recognition that experiential items are incomprehensible in terms of current physics.

But what do the theological virtues of faith and hope have to do with sober inquiry? It doesn't strike me as particularly intellectually honest to insist that materialism just has to be true and to uphold it by widening the concept of the physical to embrace what is mental. It would be more honest just to admit that the problem of consciousness is insoluble.

And that is my 'solution.' The problem is real, but insoluble by us.

Strawson's latest banging on his mysterian materialist drum is to be found in The Consciousness Deniers in The New York Review of Books.

Bob Dylan and the Devil at the Crossroads

Make of it what you will. Did Dylan sell his soul to the devil for name and fame?

As a Dylan aficionado since the early '60s, I can tell you that Dylan is never quite straight in an interview. He is a story-teller and shape-shifter. He is a legend in his own mind, but unlike most of us who are legends in our own minds, he has made of the legend in his mind a legend of his time.

The man in me will hide sometimes
To keep from being seen.
But that's just because he doesn't want
To turn into some machine.

Could the author of Father of Day, Father of Night have made a pact with the Prince of Darkness?

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia

Mike Bloomfield, Carmelita Skiffle

A bar or two is all it takes recognize the signature sound of Michael Bloomfield, Jew, who exemplifies cultural appropriation at its best. My second guitar hero. My first was Dick Dale who, though not a Jew, gave us a version of Misirlou.

Warren Zevon, Carmelita

Billy Joel, Piano Man

Don MacLean, American Pie

Gordon Lightfoot, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

Arlo Guthrie, The City of New Orleans

And the sons of Pullman porters
And the sons of engineers
Ride their fathers' magic carpets, made of steel.

Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Born in Chicago

I was born in Chicago in nineteen and forty one
I was born in Chicago in nineteen and forty one
Well my father told me
Son you had better get a gun.

True then, truer now. Damn you liberals!

Bob Dylan, Just Like a Woman, Cutting Edge take. I'll let the YouTubers gush for me.

Tommy Johnson, Canned Heat Blues, 1928. Interesting guitar work and an eerie falsetto. Sterno may light your fire but don't drink the stuff. And now you know where Canned Heat got their name.

Hank Williams, I Can't Help it if I'm Still in Love with You. The best rendition is 'undoubtedly' that of the great Patsy Cline.

California Schemin’: Why Democrats Protect Criminal Illegals

Theme music: California Dreamin'

Too bad the dream is dead, killed by destructive leftists. And you are still a Democrat? Why, because you think the rule of law does not matter? You don't value what you have, and you don't realize how easy it is to lose. You will suffer and you will deserve to suffer for your willful self-enstupidation.

Here:

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is suing California for “sanctuary laws” he says protect criminal illegals. True to form, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaff apparently tipped off hundreds of illegals—including one convicted for sodomizing a drugged victim and another convicted for armed robbery—ahead of a recent sweep by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. In these conditions, Californians might want to recall an illegal alien who evaded deportation, and the ensuing costs to the state in money and lives.

[. . .]

California Democrats have made false-documented illegals a privileged, protected class, and by now the reason should be clear. As a State Department investigation recently revealed, Mexican national Gustavo Araujo Lerma stole an American citizen’s identity and for more than two decades voted illegally in federal, state, and local elections.

The Left’s Misplaced Moral Enthusiasm

Among the leftists who profess deep concern over the effect on children of the President's salty talk are leftists who endorse the killing of disabled unborn children. I call that misplaced moral enthusiasm. Which is worse: mocking a disabled reporter as Trump is alleged to have done, or the late-term abortion of the disabled unborn?

The hypocrisy is unbearable. Leftists who have worked tirelessly to normalize crudity and wanton self-expression well beyond the bounds of social responsibility now have the chutzpah to complain that POTUS is crude, obnoxious, and lacking in gravitas?

Leftists are moral idiots.

And you are still a Democrat?

‘Liberals’ Against Free Speech

Here