April 2018 – Page 4 – Maverick Philosopher

Barbara Ehrenreich Gives Up on Preventative Care

Very interesting, and not irrational given her age:

In the last few years I have given up on the many medical measures—cancer screenings, annual exams, Pap smears, for example—expected of a responsible person with health insurance. This was not based on any suicidal impulse.

Younger than Ehrenreich, I will continue to exercise what is called 'due diligence.'

Via Rod Dreher who adds his commentary.

Dreher has become a daily read for me. But I have to wonder: how can so prolific a writer and family man have any time left over for the practices of the Ben Op? I mean meditation, prayer, spiritual reading, and the rest. It's easy to get sucked in, Rod. Be careful. This world's a vanishing quantity, not that you don't believe it.

Those who aspire to live well must learn to curtail their consumption of mass communication media.

Meditation on the Third Commandment

A 1941 article by C. S. Lewis. (HT: Victor Reppert)

The Third Commandment in the ordering preferred by Protestants of Lewis' stripe is the one about taking the Lord's name in vain:

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

Lewis meditates on the difficulties that must beset attempts to form a political party animated by Christian principles.

Christians may be expected to agree on the general ends of good government, but that agreement does not suffice for a political party. What one needs for a political party, which by its very nature is oriented toward concrete actions in the here and now, is the championship of very specific means. But then bitter contention over these means is unavoidable and our incipient Christian party breaks apart into competing factions.

The cynosure of Lewis' disapprobation, I take it, is the invocation of God to justify one's very specific political means. One who does that takes the name of the Lord in vain.

One is put in mind of Dylan's With God On Its Side.

Kevin Williamson and John Derbyshire

The Atlantic's firing of Kevin Williamson elicited howls of protest from National Review writers. But then I remembered Derbyshire's Defenestration of a few years ago.

Methinks there should be less howling and more examination of conscience among the boy-tie boys.

The Left is inimical to free speech and open inquiry. They are deeply and diversely destructive as I document on a daily basis. The pushback of establishment conservatives, however, is a weak and timorous thing.

But who can blame them? They have a good thing going and they are eager to protect their privileges and perquisites. They want to be liked and they want to be respected. So they self-censor. They need to be more manly and martial and less conciliatory.

But courage is the hardest of the virtues. Its display can cost you your friends, your livelihood, and your life.

Thinking about this, I guessed that others have engaged the topic in greater detail than I care to. I guessed right. Here is one such effort.

Fallacious Liberal-Left ‘Reasoning’ about Race

Heather Mac Donald:

The GAO [General Accounting Office] found that black students get suspended at nearly three times the rate of white students nationally, a finding consistent with previous analyses. The Obama Education and Justice Departments viewed that disproportion as proof of teacher and principal bias. Administration officials used litigation and the threatened loss of federal funding to force schools to reduce suspensions and expulsions radically in order to eliminate racial disparities in discipline.

The argument is essentially this:

1) Black students get suspended at a higher rate than white students.

Therefore

2) Teachers and principals are biased against black students.

Clearly, this is a howling non sequitur. (Non sequitur is Latin for it does not follow.) To make the above into a valid argument one would have to add something like the following premise:

0) Black and white students are behaviorally equal: equally well-behaved or equally ill-behaved.

In the presence of (0), the conclusion follows.

But (0) is manifestly false. For support of this claim, see Mac Donald's article:

According to federal data, black male teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at nearly 10 times the rate of white male teenagers of the same age (the category “white” in this homicide data includes most Hispanics; if Hispanics were removed from the white category, the homicide disparity between blacks and whites would be much higher). That higher black homicide rate indicates a failure of socialization; teen murderers of any race lack impulse control and anger-management skills. Lesser types of juvenile crime also show large racial disparities. It is fanciful to think that the lack of socialization that produces such elevated rates of criminal violence would not also affect classroom behavior. While the number of black teens committing murder is relatively small compared with their numbers at large, a very high percentage of black children—71 percent—come from the stressed-out, single-parent homes that result in elevated rates of crime.

The same pattern of invalid argumentation is found across the Left. Leftists regularly assume that different groups are empirically equal. They then incorrectly take the fact that there is no equality of outcome as proof that something nefarious was at work whether racism or sexism or ageism.

But what explains the eagerness of leftists to adopt such an obviously false assumption?

I proffer an explanation in The Secularization of the Judeo-Christian Equality Axiom.

Questioning Bobby Fischer

Good writing, paragraph one:

There is no place on earth more (less?) ideal than Jerusalem for pondering the mysteries of existence, and for a not-insignificant number of people mysteries don’t get more engrossing than the self-exile of chess prodigy Bobby Fischer. The all-time great retreated into obscurity—and, later, derangement—at the age of 32, shortly after refusing to defend his 1972 world championship, which he captured against Soviet grandmaster Boris Spassky. Fischer played tantalizingly little high-level chess after 1972, joined a cult for a time, and then became a full-blown anti-American and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist. Having died in 2008, he is no longer alive to explain himself, but dwelling on the irrevocable and insoluble past is of course part of the reason to come to Jerusalem in the first place.

Ayn Rand on Bobby Fischer

Remembering Robert J. Fischer

Sunday Morning Sermon: Moral Struggle

We must struggle against our moral and other limitations, but we must also accept that we cannot make much headway with them on our own. Fail we will, and often. We shouldn't let this fact bother us too much. Prosecute the moral struggle with equanimity and detachment from the outcome. Learn humility from moral failure.

Buddhism

We are told not to become attached to the usual objects of desire such as name and fame, pleasure and pelf, land and stand. Why not? Because they are impermanent (anicca), insubstantial (anatta), and do not ultimately satisfy (dukkha).

So there is something permanent, substantial, and finally satisfying?

No! Nothing is!

Well then, you have no basis to devalue ordinary objects of desire! If nothing is or can be permanent, then it is no argument against anything to point out its impermanence. And similarly for the other two marks.

Buddhism in its root (radical) Pali form issues in nihilism. If everything bears the three marks, then nothing is worthy of pursuit or avoidance. The quest for Transcendence voids itself.

The mistake is to think that desire as such is the root of woe when it is misdirected desire.

These ideas are presented in rigorous and scholarly fashion in my No Self? A Look at a Buddhist Argument, International Philosophical Quarterly 42 (4):453-466 (2002).

This here is but a bloggity-blog summary.

The Age of Celebrity

The Age of Celebrity helps explain the ascendancy of a political outsider like Donald J. Trump, but also the mindless focus on the man as opposed to his policies.

But it is entertaining to watch the knuckleheaded pseudo-journalists of CNN and MSNBC make fools of themselves as they dig up dirt and avoid ideas. Andrew Klavan is enjoying himself immensely.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Sitting and Chairs

Mississippi Sheiks, Sitting on Top of the World

Phil Upchurch Combo, You Can't Sit Down

Mose Allison, (I'm sittin' over here on) Parchman Farm

Mississippi Fred McDowell, I Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down

George Jones, I Don't Need Your Rockin' Chair. Clever lyrics.

Eric Clapton, Rocking Chair. The old Hoagy Carmichael tune from the '20s.

I've saved the best for last, The Band, Rockin' Chair. Lyrics included. Read 'em.

UPDATE (4/8)

Drawing upon his vast store of musical erudition, London Ed writes:

I enjoyed your Saturday night special as always. (Except for Eric Clapton, but I forgive you).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lH6FgtG8Ck Muskrat Ramble by Benny Goodman and his Boys 1929.

My question to you is whether the chorus beginning at 0:17 sounds familiar. It should be.

Benny Goodman’s boys formed the nucleus for a number of musicians who become famous as Dixieland jazz developed into swing in the 1930s. These included Glenn Miller, though not featured here, Goodman himself, Jimmy Dorsey and (I think) Tommy Dorsey. The less known Wingy Manone was also one of them. He composed Tar Paper Stomp which later transmogrified into the famous but much derided In the Mood.

They also played with Miff Mole in the wonderfully titled ‘Miff Mole and his little Molers’.

Well, as the Preacher saith in Ecclesiastes 1:9 (KJV):

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

The Tar Paper Stomp begat In the Mood, and, to answer Ed's question, the chorus beginning at 0:17 of "Muskrat Ramble" begat Country Joe and Fish's I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag from 1965.

Well, it's one, two, three
What are we fightin' for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn
Next stop is Viet Nam.

Why Clapton rather than Carmichael? Because I like Clapton, and to irritate Ed who, for some reason, has a 'thing' against his countryman.

Private and Public Morality Again

Elliot submits the following and I add comments in blue:

After reading Machiavelli, Arendt, and the Important Difference between Private and Public Morality, I thought you might be interested in J. P. Moreland’s A Biblical Case For Limited Government.

His position seems similar to yours (and mine) is several respects. Here are some relevant quotations.

— “In my view, the more secular a society becomes, the more its citizens turn to government to give them a sense of transcendence.”

I agree. As Schopenhauer said, "Man is a metaphysical animal." He is not content with a merely physical existence and the petty meanings and purposes of ordinary life. Those no longer able to take religion seriously seek a substitute in political activism. They seek transcendence where it cannot be found, in the immanent sphere of the political.

— “As naturalism and postmodernism gain ascendency, [ascendancy] the idea of individual, responsible agency vanishes, and therapeutic justice and a culture of victimization take its place. Now those that advocate free will and responsible agency tend to want government to be small and off people’s backs. By contrast, those who eschew such agency tend to want government to provide care for various victims of the natural lottery.”

Agreed.

— “… the state cannot show compassion. As an individual, a representative of the state can have compassion in his heart as he gives to the poor; but this compassion is exhibited by him qua individual and not qua representative of the state.”

Right.

— “Jesus held that the church and state had separate callings and spheres of authority.”

Render unto Caesar . . . Matthew 22:20-22

— “It is widely agreed that two features are at the core of Jesus’s ethical teaching—virtue ethics and the love commands… I am among a growing number of thinkers who believe that Jesus was primarily a virtue ethicist.”

— “In a biblical ethic, helping the poor by the coercive power of the state is of little ethical value.”

I should think that this holds for any ethic worth its salt.

“Such actions count for very little in God’s eyes because they do not reflect the features of Jesus’s ethic identified above.”

– “…when it comes to caring for the poor, which is clearly a moral duty placed on believers, Jesus never intended such action to be forced on people by the state. Such acts were to be voluntary and from a freely given heart of compassion.”

Some thoughts of mine with which J. P. may or may not agree.

The state is coercive by its very nature. Now either that coercion is morally justifiable or it is not. If it is justifiable, and the state takes money from me for a good cause, then, while I have not been morally violated, my contribution has no moral value.

If, on the other hand, the coercion essential to the state is not morally justifiable, and the state takes money from me for a good cause, then it is the case both that I am been morally violated and that my contribution has no moral value. Money has been stolen from me to benefit someone else. That is not what is going on in the first case. If the state and its coercion are morally justified, and the state takes my money via taxation for a legitimate function of government such as the securing of the nation's borders, then that money has not been stolen from even even though it has been taken by force.

Other questions arise concerning the state's coercive taking of money from citizens to fund what many consider to be evil enterprises such as abortion providers.

Machiavelli, Arendt, and the Important Difference between Private and Public Morality

Reader R. B. writes:

I have been enjoying your posts about immigration because they are insightful. I'm on the border (haha) about the issue for the most part. I work with illegals from Mexico (in a restaurant) so you can imagine how that plays into my thinking. The problem as I see it is this: it is extremely difficult to gain citizenship in America and extremely expensive; most immigrants do not have the money and are trying to escape their shitty situation in Mexico. They are left with a nasty choice of returning to Mexico or purchasing an illegal visa (which the majority of the time is a scam for a large amount of their money). I am a Christian so I think it's important to think about how God treats the other–the outcast, the poor, and the immigrant.

A professor friend has written an interesting paper on the subject, entitled "Love and Borders." If you have time let me know what you think.

My overall view is as follows. Maybe later I'll discuss the details of the paper in question.

Christian precepts such as "Turn the other cheek" and "Welcome the stranger" make sense and are salutary only within communities of the like-minded and morally decent; they make no sense and are positively harmful in the public sphere, and, a fortiori, in the international sphere. The monastery is not the wide world. What is conducive unto salvation in the former will get you killed in the latter. And we know what totalitarians, whether Communists or Islamists, do when they get power: they destroy the churches, synagogues, monasteries, ashrams, and zendos. And with them are destroyed the means of transmitting the dharma, the kerygma, the law and the prophets.

An important but troubling thought is conveyed in a recent NYT op-ed (emphasis added):

Machiavelli teaches that in a world where so many are not good, you must learn to be able to not be good. The virtues taught in our secular and religious schools are incompatible with the virtues one must practice to safeguard those same institutions. The power of the lion and the cleverness of the fox: These are the qualities a leader must harness to preserve the republic.

The problem referenced in the bolded sentence is very serious but may have no solution. That's the aporetician in me speaking.

The problem as I see it is that (i) the pacific virtues the practice of which makes life worth living within families, between friends, and in such institutions of civil society as churches and fraternal organizations are essentially private and cannot be extended outward as if we are all brothers and sisters belonging to a global community. Talk of global community is blather. The institutions of civil society can survive and flourish only if protected by warriors and statesmen whose virtues are of the manly and martial, not of the womanish and pacific, sort. And yet (ii) if no extension beyond the private of the pacific virtues is possible then humanity would seem to be doomed in an age of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Besides, it is unsatisfactory that there be two moralities, one private, the other public.

Consider the Christian virtues preached by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. They include humility, meekness, love of righteousness, mercy, purity of heart, love of peace and of reconciliation. Everyone who must live uncloistered in the world understands that these pacific and essentially womanish virtues have but limited application there. Indeed, their practice can get you killed. (I am not using 'womanish' as a derogatory qualifier.)

You may love peace, but unless you are prepared to make war upon your enemies and show them no mercy, you may not be long for this world. Turning the other cheek makes sense within a loving family, but no sense in the wider world. (Would the Pope turn the other cheek if the Vatican came under attack by Muslim terrorists or would he call upon the armed might of the Italian state?) My point is perfectly obvious in the case of states: they are in the state (condition) of nature with respect to each other. Each state secures by blood and iron a civilized space within which art and music and science and scholarship can flourish and wherein, ideally, blood does not flow; but these states and their civilizations battle each other in the state (condition) of nature red in tooth and claw. Talk of world government or United Nations is globalist blather that hides the will to power of those who would seize control of the world government. United under which umbrella of values and principles and presuppositions?

What values do we share with the Muslim world?

The Allies would not have been long for this world had they not been merciless in their treatment of the Axis Powers.

Israel would have ceased to exist long ago had Israelis not been ruthless in their dealing with Muslim terrorists bent on her destruction.

This is also true of individuals once they move beyond their families and friends and genuine communities and sally forth into the wider world.

The problem is well understood by Hannah Arendt ("Truth and Politics" in Between Past and Future, Penguin 1968, p. 245):

     The disastrous consequences for any community that began in all
     earnest to follow ethical precepts derived from man in the singular
     — be they Socratic or Platonic or Christian — have been
     frequently pointed out. Long before Machiavelli recommended
     protecting the political realm against the undiluted principles of
     the Christian faith (those who refuse to resist evil permit the
     wicked "to do as much evil as they please"), Aristotle warned
     against giving philosophers any say in political matters. (Men who
     for professional reasons must be so unconcerned with "what is good
     for themselves" cannot very well be trusted with what is good for
     others, and least of all with the "common good," the down-to-earth
     interests of the community.) [Arendt cites the Nicomachean Ethics,
     Book VI, and in particular 1140b9 and 1141b4.]

There is a tension between man qua philosopher/Christian and man qua citizen. As a philosopher raised in Christianity, I am concerned with my soul, with its integrity, purity, salvation. I take very seriously indeed the Socratic "Better to suffer wrong than to do it" and the Christian "Resist not the evildoer." But as a citizen I must be concerned not only with my own well-being but also with the public welfare. This is true a fortiori of public officials and people in a position to influence public opinion, people like Catholic bishops many of whom are woefully ignorant of the simple points Arendt makes in the passage quoted. So, as Arendt points out, the Socratic and Christian admonitions are not applicable in the public sphere.

What is applicable to me in the singular, as this existing individual concerned with the welfare of his immortal soul over that of his perishable body, is not applicable to me as citizen. As a citizen, I cannot "welcome the stranger" who violates the laws of my country, a stranger who may be a terrorist or a drug smuggler or a human trafficker or a carrier of a deadly disease or a person who has no respect for the traditions of the country he invades; I cannot aid and abet his law breaking. I must be concerned with public order. This order is among the very conditions that make the philosophical and Christian life possible in the first place. If I were to aid and abet the stranger's law breaking, I would not be "rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" as the New Testament enjoins us to do.

Indeed, the Caesar verse provides a scriptural basis for Church-State separation and indirectly exposes the fallacy of the Catholic bishops and others who confuse private and public morality.

The article referenced above is Thomas M. Crisp, Love and Borders.

The Maoist Left in the U. S.

Here:

Just a few years ago in France, Islamic radicals sympathetic to ISIS stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French satire magazine, and murdered the employees. Thankfully, in this country, the leftwing mob has not made the leap to taking the lives of those they disagree with. For now, at least, they are content just to ruin lives and businesses.

What we are seeing is an American Culture Revolution, unleashed by a narrow-minded group of leftists who have more in common with Mao than Washington. They have become dominant in the American media and have systematically purged conservative voices from the air and print. Conservative thought is more and more relegated to a ghetto and should any prominent conservative try to leave the ghetto, the leftwing mob will take action to destroy them. Liberals like Chris Cuomo can have a show on CNN attacking a variety of conjured conservative straw men under the veneer of objective news, while a conservative like Kevin Williamson cannot even write columns in The Atlantic.

The result will increasingly be that fringe ideas grab hold of people's imagination. The left has continually reduced the window of what topics are acceptable to those they agree with. Those ideas, in turn, change constantly depending on what group wakes up feeling oppressed on a particular day. They have exiled credible conservative voices, claiming that the most mainstream and innocuous are as racist and bigoted as the alt-right fringe. And if there is no difference between the two, more and more will gravitate to the truly extreme through emotional appeal. The left's insistence on determining who is reasonable on the right will only help bolster the most unreasonable voices on both sides.

Kevin Williamson is a NeverTrumper, which is never good, and Nick Gillespie lays into him effectively here, for failing to appreciate the libertarian accomplishments of Trump.

A sound conservatism incorporates some libertarian ideas even if the Libertarian Party is a 'losertarian' joke and the libertarian worldview taken in toto is a disaster. Open borders? Legalize drugs? Ron Johnson and the boys certainly do smoke a lot of dope.

Leftists Love Criminals

You will never understand the Left until you understand that they reliably take the side of losers, underdogs, and criminals, who comprise their clientele and path to power. And with lefties it is always about power, first and forever.

Here we read about a 78-year-old Englishman who, in defending himself against a screwdriver-wielding home invader, caused the miscreant's death and is now facing a murder charge.

Dear old England, the mother country. It is sad to see your mother, senile and decrepit, go down the toilet, having lost all her moral sense and the will to live.

Once again one sees the justification for my political burden of proof:

As contemporary 'liberals' become ever more extreme, they increasingly assume what I call the political burden of proof. The onus is now on them to defeat the presumption that they are so morally and intellectually obtuse as not to be worth talking to.

Actually, that is far too mild a statement. Perhaps tomorrow I will tell you what I really think.

The Greatest Risk We are Taking

Patrick J. Buchanan:

But the greatest risk we are taking, based on utopianism, is the annual importation of well over a million legal and illegal immigrants, many from the failed states of the Third World, in the belief we can create a united, peaceful and harmonious land of 400 million, composed of every race, religion, ethnicity, tribe, creed, culture and language on earth.

Where is the historic evidence for the success of this experiment, the failure of which could mean the end of America as one nation and one people?

There is none. Most people with a bit of life experience know that one can get along and interact productively with only some people. There has to be a broad base of shared agreement on all sorts of things. For example, there ought to be only one language in the U. S. for all public purposes, English. It was a huge mistake when voting forms were allowed to be published in foreign languages. Only legal immigrants should be allowed in, and assimilation must be demanded of them.

No comity without commonality as one of my aphorisms has it.

The Left, however, wants the end of America as she was founded to be, "one nation and one people." That is why leftists support the illegal invasion from the south. But being mendacious leftists they will never openly admit this, but instead speak with Orwellian obfuscation of "comprehensive immigration reform."

The enemy has been identified.

Do not think of leftists and 'progressives' as fellow citizens; they are merely among us as disorderly elements and domestic enemies. There can be no peace with them because they represent an 'existential threat.' Not to our physical existence so much as to our way of life, which is of course more important than our mere physical existence as animals.

But I must add, contra certain of the Alt Right, that "one people" should not be understood racially or ethnically. An enlightened nationalism is not a white nationalism. America is of course 'a proposition nation.' You will find the propositions in the founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence.

I don't give a flying enchilada whether you are Hispanic or Asian. If you immigrated legally, accept the propositions, drop the hyphens, and identify as an American, then I say you are one of us. I'll even celebrate the culinary diversity you contribute.

That being understood, it is also true that whites discovered these America-constitutive propositions and are well-equipped to appreciate and uphold them, and better equipped than some other groups. That is a fact that a sane immigration policy must reflect.

My view is eminently reasonable and balanced, don't you think? It navigates between the Scylla of destructive leftist globalist internationalism and the Charybdis of racist identity-political particularism.

What’s In It for Mexico?

My man Hanson:

Mexico keeps sending its impoverished citizens to the U.S., and they usually enter illegally. That way, Mexico relieves its own social tensions, develops a pro-Mexico expatriate community in the U.S. and gains an estimated $30 billion a year from remittances that undocumented immigrants send back home, often on the premise that American social services can free up cash for them to do so.

Read it all.