He is best known for his 1960 crossover hit that made it to the #7 spot on the Billboard Hot 100, Let's Think About Living. How quaint the reference to the fellow with the switchblade knife. It was a tamer time.
The denizens of HollyWeird love the freakish, the 'transgressive,' the grotesque, and the unnatural. And being leftists, they celebrate losers and screw-ups, from the legendary La La Land 'motorist' Rodney King to the shotgun murderer Tookie Williams. A characteristic of libs and lefties is that in their typical knee-jerk (reflexive as opposed to reflective) style, they take the side of losers, criminals, screw-ups and underdogs regardless of what they did to bring on their underdog status. If you don't understand this, you will never understand the Left and how pernicious leftists are.
Don't get me wrong. I believe in equal justice under the law. And I believe in helping those who, through no fault of their own, have fallen on hard times. I practice what I preach. But the attitude of leftists whereby they celebrate transgressives and miscreants is perverse, which is why these destructivos deserve our steadfast opposition and unremitting contempt.
Maybe tomorrow I'll tell you what I really think. For now, I pass the baton to Gilbert T. Sewall:
Hollywood’s A-list is almost all in for transformative social justice, which mixes calculated groupthink and “can I grab the spotlight?” As a result, America’s favorite Hollywood evening has mutated into hours of glossy political hectoring, this year in behalf of female empowerment, support for immigrants, and opposition to the National Rifle Association.
“Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion,” Harvey Weinstein declared in 2009. “We were the people who did the fundraising telethon for the victims of 9/11. We were there for the victims of Katrina and any world catastrophe.” With telethons and global hugs, who needs nature or God?
[. . .]
Hollywood likes freakish [freakishness], and so do its devotees. Criticizing tattoos, hookups, rap music, or trannies — saying the wrong thing on Facebook — might get you into trouble at work or school. Heaven forbid you should offend those who would consider your disapproval “hatred,” which entitles them to destroy your career or good name. Or maybe blow you away.
We’re getting used to that as well. First-person shooter video and computer games allow people to enact murder, not only watch it. That’s part of Hollywood’s multimedia platform too, a franchise worth billions.
Media accountants and publicists raise the specter of censorship and the thought police on their way to the bank. In fact, entertainment capitalists have no illusions what they are stirring up and the thrills they provide. New York- and Los Angeles-based wizards know how to stimulate appetites and points of view, and for a price they can do their magic in Washington, D.C. Privately, they exalt [exult] in their power.
Meanwhile, Hollywood doubles down on identity politics. It insists that depravity and imaginary violence do not lead to sociopathic behavior. It professes the product is mere fiction, that it has no real world effect. If you don’t like it, look the other way. You don’t have to buy it.
Well, it depends on the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem. If you're going from San Francisco to Las Vegas, the rental fee is $2,000. But if you're going to San Francisco from Lost Wages, it will set you back a paltry 100 semolians.
Californication proceeds apace. The once-golden Golden State is bleeding liberals.
As for shitholes, San Francisco has become one, so much so that one now needs a crap map to safely negotiate its streets.
The problem, of course, is the Democrat Party and its leading 'lights,' the benighted Nancy Pelosi and Jerry 'Governor Moonbeam' Brown, that stellar lunar product of Jesuit 'education.'
Cutting against the Enlightenment grain, Kant delivers a resoundingly negative verdict. Suicide is always and everywhere morally wrong. This entry is part of an effort to understand his position. Unfortunately, Kant's treatment is exceedingly murky and one of his arguments is hard to square with what he says elsewhere. In his Lectures on Ethics (tr. Infield, Hackett Publishing, no date), the great champion of autonomy seems to recommend abject heteronomy:
God is our owner; we are His property; His providence works for our good. A bondsman in the case of a beneficent master deserves punishment if he opposes his master's wishes. (154)
It is hard to see how this coheres with Kant's talk of persons as ends in themselves in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (AA 428). For Kant, rational beings, whether biologically human or not, are persons. Persons, unlike things, are ends in themselves. As such, they may not be used as mere means. I may not treat another person as a mere means nor may I so treat myself. For Kant there are duties to oneself and they take precedence over duties to others since "nothing can be expected from a man who dishonours his own person." (118) The highest duty to oneself is that of self-preservation. Suicide is contrary to this highest duty and is therefore morally impermissible in all circumstances. The prohibition against suicide is exceptionless.
But how can a person be an end in itself if finite persons are created by God for his purposes? How can persons be ends in themselves if God owns us and we are his property? Is suicide wrong because it violates God's property rights? If anyone has property rights in my body, it would have to be me wouldn't it? Is man God's slave? So man is both free and enslaved?
Furthermore, if it is morally permissible for God to use finite persons as mere means to his end, self-glorification, say, then how could it be wrong for a person to treat himself as a mere means when he commits suicide?
We can put the underlying puzzle as a aporetic dyad:
1) My dignity, worth, autonomy, freedom, and irreplaceable uniqueness as a person derive from my having been created in the image and likeness of an absolutely unique free being who is the eminently personal source of all Being, truth, and value. My higher origin and destiny elevate me infinitely far above the rest of creation. I am animal, but also a spirit, and thus not merely an animal. I cannot be understood naturalistically as merely a more highly evolved animal.
2) If I am created by God both as a material being and as a person, then I cannot be an end in myself possessing autonomy and the other attributes mentioned. For if God creates and sustains me moment by moment in every aspect of my being, then also in my being a subject, a self-determining person.
Note that the freedom mentioned in (1) is not the compatibilist "freedom of the turnspit" as Kant derisively calls it, but the freedom of a (noumenal) agent who has the power to initiate a causal chain ex nihilo by performing an act that he could have refrained from performing, and is therefore morally responsible for performing. This rich non-compatibilist notion of freedom implies a god-like power in man that no merely natural (phenomenal) being possesses or could possess. This freedom points to a divine origin and is the respect in which we bear the image of God within us. The freedom of the human creature mirrors the freedom of the creator.
But how is this freedom and dignity and personal uniqueness, which we cannot possess except as God's creatures, logically compatible with our creature status? Presupposed is a robust conception of creation as creatio continuans according to which the entire being of the creature is sustained ongoingly by divine power (Any less robust a conception would injure the divine sovereignty.) How can the inviolable interiority of a person maintain itself in the face of God's creative omniscience?
Some will say that the paradox is a contradiction and both limbs cannot be true. Other will say that the paradox is a mystery: both limbs are true, but we cannot in this life understand how they could both be true.
The paradox is at the root of Kant's uncompromising attitude toward the morality of suicide. He prohibits it without exception despite man's freedom and autonomy because of their derivation from God. We are ends in ourselves, which implies that it is wrong for anyone, including God, to treat us as mere means; yet we are God's property and for this reason not morally justified in disposing of ourselves.
Kant's Exceptionless Prohibition of Suicide as Essentially Christian and Unjustifiable Otherwise
Christianity too issues a total and exceptionless prohibition against suicide. The classical (philosophical as opposed to theological) arguments of Augustine and Aquinas against suicide are, however, uncompelling, as the Christian Paul Ludwig Landsberg shows. Thus he maintains that
. . . the total prohibition of suicide can only be justified or even understood in relation to the scandal and the paradox of the cross. It is true that we belong to God, as Christ belonged to God. It is true that we should subordinate our will to His, as Christ did. It is true that we should leave the decision as to our life or death to Him. If we wish to die, we have indeed the right to pray to God to let us die. Yet we must always add: Thy will, not mine, be done. But this God is not our master as if we were slaves. He is our Father. He is the Christian God who loves us with infinite love and infinite wisdom. If He makes us suffer, it is for our salvation and purification. We must recall the spirit in which Christ suffered the most horrible death.
Here, perhaps, is the key to our puzzle. The puzzle, again, is how the Sage of Koenigsberg, the Enlightenment champion of human freedom and autonomy, can maintain that, no matter how horrific the circumstances, one may never justifiably take one's own life. The key is the need to suffer for purification. The fallen world is as it were a penal colony and we must serve our time. Suicide is jailbreak and for that reason never justified.
What I am suggesting is that if we read Kant's suicide doctrine in the light of Christianity it makes a certain amount of (paradoxical) sense, and that if one refuses to do this and reads it in a wholly secular light, then there is no justification for its exceptionless prohibition of suicide. I hope to test this thesis in further posts.
Landsberg again:
All that we can say to the suffering man who is tempted to commit suicide, is this “Remember the suffering of Christ and the martyrs. You must carry your cross, as they did. You will not cease to suffer, but the cross of suffering itself will grow sweet by virtue of an unknown strength proceeding from the heart of divine love. You must not kill yourself, because you must not throw away your cross. You need it. And enquire of your conscience if you are really innocent. You will find that if you are perhaps innocent of one thing for which the world reproaches you, you are guilty in a thousand other ways. You are a sinner. If Christ, who was innocent, suffered for others and, as Pascal said, has also shed a drop of blood for you, how shall you, a sinner, be entitled to refuse suffering? Perhaps it is a form of punishment. But divine punishment has this specific and incomparable quality, that it is not revenge and that its very nature is purification. Whoever revolts against it, revolts in fact against the inner meaning of his own life.”
Paul Ludwig Landsberg, geboren 1901 in Bonn, wurde 1927 Ordinarius für Philosophie und emigrierte 1933 zunächst nach Spanien, dann nach Frankreich. Der Schüler von Max Scheler und Edmund Husserl war während der französischen Emigration eng mit dem Collège de Sociologie verbunden und starb 1944 im Konzentrationslager Oranienburg.
Our contemporary media dreckmeisters apparently think that the purpose of art is to degrade sensibility, impede critical thinking, glorify scumbags, and rub our noses ever deeper into sex and violence. The liberal fetishization of freedom of expression without constraint or sense of responsibility is part of the problem. But I can't let a certain sort of libertarian or economic conservative off the hook. Their lust for profit is also involved.
What is is that characterizes contemporary media dreck? Among other things, the incessant presentation of defective human beings as if there are more of them than there are, and as if there is nothing at all wrong with their ways of life. Deviant behavior is presented as if it is mainstream and acceptable, if not desirable. And then lame justifications are provided for the presentation: 'this is what life is like now; we are simply telling it like it is.' It doesn't occur to the dreckmeisters that art might have an ennobling function.
The tendency of liberals and leftists is to think that any presentation of choice-worthy goals or admirable styles of life could only be hypocritical preaching. And to libs and lefties, nothing is worse than hypocrisy. Indeed, a good indicator of whether someone belongs to this class of the terminally benighted is whether the person obsesses over hypocrisy and thinks it the very worst thing in the world. See my category Hypocrisy for elaboration of this theme.
Leftist scum need to look in the mirror before blaming inanimate objects for violent behavior.
I am a foe of misquotation, misattribution, the retailing of unsourced quotations, the passing off of unchecked second-hand quotations, and sense-altering context suppression. Have I ever done any of these things? Probably. 'Suffering' as I do from cacoethes scribendi, it is a good bet that I have committed one or more of the above. But I try to avoid these 'sins.'
This morning I was reading from Karl Menninger, M.D., Whatever Became of Sin? (Hawthorn Books, 1973). On p. 156, I found this quotation:
Our youth today love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect for older people. Children nowadays are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.
At the bottom of the page there is a footnote that reads: "Socrates, circa 425 B. C. Quoted in Joel Fort, The Pleasure Seekers (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969)."
I was immediately skeptical of this 'quotation.' In part because I had never encountered the passage in the Platonic dialogues I have read, but also because the quotation is second-hand. So I took to the 'Net and found what appears to be a reputable site, Quote Investigator.
. . . was crafted by a student, Kenneth John Freeman, for his Cambridge dissertation published in 1907. Freeman did not claim that the passage under analysis was a direct quotation of anyone; instead, he was presenting his own summary of the complaints directed against young people in ancient times.
Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit appeared in 1955 two years before Jack Kerouac's On the Road. I never finished Gray Flannel, getting only 80 or so pages into it. It's a book as staid as the '50s, a tad boring, conventional, and forgettable in comparison to the hyper-romantic and heart-felt rush of the unforgettable On the Road. Since how 'beat' one is in part has to do with one's attitude towards money, which is not the same as one's possession or non-possession of it, I'll for now just pull some quotations from Horace and Sloan Wilson. The Horace quotations seem not to comport well with each other, but we can worry that bone on another occasion.
Quaerenda pecunia primum est; virtus post nummos. (Horace, Epistles I, 1, 53) Money is to be sought first of all; virtue after wealth. Or, loosely translated, cash before conscience.
Vilius argentum est auro virtutibus aurum. (Horace, Epistles I, 1, 52). Silver is less valuable than gold, gold less valuable than virtue.
The next morning, Tom put on his best suit, a freshly cleaned and pressed gray flannel. On his way to work he stopped in Grand Central Station to buy a clean white handkerchief and to have his shoes shined. During his luncheon hour he set out to visit the United Broadcasting Corporation. As he walked across Rockefeller Plaza, he thought wryly of the days when he and Betsy had assured each other that money didn't matter. They had told each other that when they were married, before the war, and during the war they had repeated it in long letters. "The important thing is to find a kind of work you really like, and something that is useful," Betsy had written him. "The money doesn't matter."
The hell with that, he thought. The real trouble is that up to now we've been kidding ourselves. We might as well admit that what we want is a big house and a new car and trips to Florida in the winter, and plenty of life insurance. When you come right down to it, a man with three children has no damn right to say that money doesn't matter. (The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Simon and Shuster, 1955, pp. 9-10)
I have a little disagreement going with the Dark Ostrich. He asserts, "Relative poverty is all about status." In an earlier entry, I quoted him as maintaining that
We are born with a natural inequality which soon turns into economic inequality. The reason it turns into economic inequality, I believe, is that humans have a natural desire for status.
I replied,
Yes, we are naturally unequal, both as individuals and as groups, and this inequality results in economic inequality. But I wouldn't explain this in terms of the desire for status. Status is relative social standing, and depends on how one appears in the eyes of others. But this is relatively unimportant and has little to do with money and property which are far more important. I can live very well indeed without name and fame, accolades and awards, high social position and the perquisites that come in its train. But I cannot live well without a modicum of material wealth.
It is not desire for status that [primarily] explains economic inequality but the desire for money and property and the sort of material security they provide.
I would guess that no one who reads this weblog is absolutely poor, i.e., bereft of life's necessities, and that every one who reads it is relatively poor, and significantly so. What do I mean by 'significantly so'? Suppose A has a net worth of four billion USD and B a net worth of 3.9 billion. Then B is poor relative to A. I will call this insignificant relative poverty. But the Ostrich and I, though we have far more than we need, are significantly relatively poor as compared to, say, the late Fidel Castro, that man of the people and hero of the Left.
The Ostrich tells us that relative property is all about status. I take that to mean that it is the drive for social status alone that brings about economic inequality and with it relative poverty. That is empirically false. I am the counterexample: I live wisely and frugally and my net worth keeps going up. But I don't care about status, which is relatively unreal, being mainly a matter of what's going on in the heads of others. I carefully husband my resources because I want to be in a position to take care of myself and others when the inevitable disasters occur and not be a burden on others. What others think of me, though of some importance, is of less importance to me than my material well-being.
But let's be charitable. Perhaps what the Ostrich means to say is that it is the lust for status that mainly brings about economic inequality and relative poverty. I concede that that might be so. It is an empirical question and cannot be answered from the arm chair.
But there are a couple of normative questions in the vicinity and these are what really interest me. One is whether it is morally permissible to pursue loot and lucre, property and pelf, for social standing. The other is whether it is rational to pursue these things for social standing. I will leave the moral question for some other time.
As for rationality, it can be understood in two different ways.
An agent is instrumentally rational if he chooses means conducive to the achievement of his ends. A rational agent in Phoenix who intends to travel to Los Angeles by car in eight hours or less will head West on Interstate 10. If he were to head East he would show himself to be irrational, at least in respect of this particular goal or type of goal. This says nothing about the rationality or irrationality of driving to Los Angeles. Indeed, there are those who will say that it makes no sense to speak of ends as either rational or irrational, that such talk is meaningful only in respect of means.
On a second way of thinking about rationality, one can coherently speak of ends themselves as rational or the opposite. Consider social status and material security. Which is a higher value? Which is more choice-worthy? Which would it be more rational for a being of our constitution to pursue? To me the answer is obvious. Material security, which includes wealth well beyond what one needs physically to survive, is a higher value that social status. Modifying slightly what I said above,
I can live very well indeed without name and fame, accolades and awards, high social position and the perquisites that come in its train. But I cannot live well without material wealth in excess of what is needed for necessities.
Given how benighted human beings are, it may well be instrumentally rational to pursue wealth for the sake of status. That's an empirical question. But no reasonable person prefers status to wealth, just as no reasonable person prefers transient sense pleasures to long-term physical health.
So the Ostrich and I may be at cross-purposes. I am making normative claims while he remains at the level of the merely factual.
Now suppose someone asserts that the good is whatever satisfies desire, and that there is no way of ranking desires as objectively higher or lower, and their objects as more or less choice-worthy. Could I refute such a person? I don't think so. Contradict yes, refute no. For it all comes down to whether one has correct value intuitions. Some of us do and some of us don't. Just as some of us are color-blind, some of us are value-blind, wertblind in the terminology of Dietrich von Hildebrand. While color blindness is a defect in the eye of the head, value blindness is a defect in the 'eye' of the soul.
Philosophers have been known to advance extreme theses. David Benatar's signature anti-natalist theses are not only extreme, but extremely unpalatable to almost everyone. This makes him a target of vicious attacks. I don't agree with him, but I admire him and what he exemplifies, the courageous practice of unrestrained philosophical inquiry, inquiry that follows the arguments where they lead, even if they issue in conclusions that make people extremely uncomfortable and are sure to bring obloquy upon the philosopher who proposes them.
I also admire Jordan Peterson. He is doing a world of good for a lot of young people, especially young men, who have been cheated by the liberals who have undermined our educational institutions. He is a voice of sanity in the cacophony of political correctness.
JP [. . .] There’s an anti-natalist you might want to look up. His name is David Benatar. I did a debate with him a while back. He believes that human existence-conscious existence, not just human existence but conscious existence, is so intolerable in its fundamental aspect that we should stop propagating it. We shouldn’t raise animals. We shouldn’t have children. We should just cease to be, because being in itself is a positive evil.
AR: So you think that’s the mentality, the psychology in which these school shooters operate?
JP: Oh, for sure that’s it. Yes, absolutely. But it’s more than that. They take it a step further. Benatar just said, well, we should stop reproducing ourselves. The only possible proper language to describe what’s happening with the school shooter types is that they’re out for revenge against God.
This smacks of a smear. Peterson is suggesting, without plainly stating, that the same "mentality" is operative in deeply disturbed mass murderers and in Benatar. It is just that the school shooters "take it a step further." So the murderous mentality is the same in the philosopher and in the school shooters.
This is rank psychologizing which is not surprising, coming as it does from a psychologist. Why engage in the hard work of evaluating arguments when you can dismiss a man's view as nothing but a product of a diseased mind? Ignored also is the fact that Benatar is against murder and suicide in many instances. He makes very clear that death is no escape from the human predicament. But to know that one has to read his work.
Peterson's slam may be explained by the fact that Benatar got the better of him in their debate.
In a related entry, below, I defend Benatar against a scurrilous New Criterion attack.
POPE FRANCIS HAS EARNED a reputation as a man of the people, making [it] his mission to advocate for the poor, the downtrodden and the persecuted, particularly those of Christian faith. The Vatican's reported deal with China, to effectively abdicate the power of the pope to select bishops to the communist state, has therefore been met with feelings of shock and even betrayal among the faithful, especially those in China itself.
Why shocked? He is just being consistent in his leftism. So I'm beginning to think that defunding the Left involves defunding the Catholic Church until she reforms herself. Something about a pope worthy of the office below.
Of course not. I don't watch garbage like that. Part of my motive, I suspect, is that I do not want to be reminded of how sick we are collectively becoming.
