April 2018 – Page 5 – Maverick Philosopher

From Agitation to Quiescence

The freshness of morning mind ought to be respected and cultivated. But it is not easy to keep the early hours free and clear of all internal rants and rehearsals, especially in these trying times. This morning I succumbed and when I hit the mat of meditation at 3:45 my mind was far from quiescent.

One might be tempted to write off such sessions as inauspicious, and quit the mat, but this is a mistake. Some of my best meditations have emerged from mental turmoil. The depth of the dive is often in inverse relation to the febrility of the initial ratiocination. But daily persistent practice is essential.

And of course no electronics whatsoever in the early hours: from 2 AM to 5 AM or later everything is off or disconnected: land line, cell phones, modem, radio, television. Wifey is asleep; cats are up but they don't talk. One can taste sweet solitude in one's home as hermitage if one wants it. It helps to live in a quiet neighborhood with neighbors few and far-between, far from the madness of cities which breeds the madness of leftists.

Three Reasons the Left Wants Ever More Immigration

Here:

The first and most obvious reason is political. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, chain migration, sanctuary cities and citizenship for immigrants living in the country illegally will give the left political power. An estimated 70% to 80% of Latin American immigrants will vote Democrat. So, with enough new voters from Latin America alone, the Democrats would essentially be assured the presidency and Congress for decades.

[. . .]

The second reason for the left's support for virtually unlimited immigration is that one of the most enduring tenets of the left — from Karl Marx to the present-day Democratic Party and left-wing parties in Western Europe — is that the nation-state is an anachronism. [. . .] That's why the left opposes a wall at America's southern border. The wall signifies the affirmation of America as a distinct nation.

[ . . .]

The third reason is the power of feeling good about oneself. It would be difficult to overstate the significance of feeling good about oneself as a primary factor in why people adopt left-wing policies.

Those who support bestowing American citizenship on the children of illegal immigrants — the so-called "Dreamers," based on never-passed proposals in Congress called the DREAM Act — feel very good about themselves. They are the compassionate, the progressive, the enlightened.

This is why German Chancellor Angela Merkel brought a million refugees into Germany, a majority of them Middle East Muslims: She wanted to feel good about herself and Germany — especially in light of Germany's evil history — "Look, world. We Germans really are good people."

Why do Democrats support sanctuary cities, and even sanctuary states? Because, in addition to first two reasons, it enables them to feel good about themselves. In their eyes, they are moral heroes protecting the stranger, the oppressed, the marginalized, the destitute.

Lunacy in excelsis at the ‘Universities’

This from a reader:

You might be interested to know that a Canadian university recently had a job ad that might be even worse than the one you mentioned from the University of California at San Diego:

. . . candidates shall demonstrate a capacity for collegial service and a commitment to upholding the values of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion as it pertains to service, teaching, and research activities.

So not only will the successful applicant spit out Far Left idiocies in class but, in addition, he'll make sure that his philosophical research demonstrates his commitment to Far Left idiocies. It's okay to argue that God doesn't exist, or that no one knows that the external world exists, or that Bruce Jenner is a woman. It's not okay to argue that Equity, Diversity and Inclusion are questionable ideals. It's not even okay to hold on to a few shreds of dignity by just ignoring the topic. No. The successful applicant will demonstrate his commitment to these idiotic "values" in published work.

They didn't explain how to do that if you only do research on vagueness or compatibilism, say. I'm guessing it would be enough, for now, to choose the right kinds of examples. Maybe if you wanted to illustrate some point about vagueness you could say this: "Satumbo is counting the pink hairs around Bruce's pierced nipple, in Arabic…" Or if you were writing about compatibilism: "Suppose that Sally is trying to decide whether ze will come out as genderqueer on Facebook. Suppose ze has a higher-order desire not to desire to come out…" I don't know. Just guessing. Maybe in the future it won't be okay to write about these topics at all, since they make it hard to demonstrate one's Far Left commitments.

What Have You Done for Diversity Lately?

Are you thinking of applying for a faculty position at the University of California at San Diego? As part of your application you will be required to submit a statement detailing your work on behalf of diversity and inclusion.

A bit more evidence that the universities of the land have become leftist seminaries.

It is a curious development. The private universities in the United States founded by religious orders have almost all been stripped of their religious character. It survives only as window dressing. But the move has not been in the direction of ideological neutrality, but toward a substitution of leftist indoctrination for religious indoctrination.

The public universities too have become seed beds of leftism, at least in the non-STEM disciplines.

The sad upshot is that indoctrination dominates inquiry in all the institutions of so-called 'higher' education in the land. There are a few holdouts, of course, and again I am speaking of the non-STEM fields, or most of them: climate science has become highly ideologized.

So I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that university is dead. It is dead in its idea, in its classical understanding.

Part of what killed it is the levelling consequent upon the foolish notion that everyone can profit from university studies. But that is a large separate topic.

Hat tip: Rod Dreher

On the Promiscuously Commendatory Overuse of ‘Democracy’

'Democracy' is one of those words that is almost always used in a commendatory and non-pejorative way, even though a little thought should uncover several negative features of the term's referent.

This is a large and important topic. I will just touch on one point this morning.

In today's Washington Examiner we find an opinion piece entitled 'A people without borders' is a people without democracy.

The title is instructively false. If the people north of the Rio Grande, both U. S. citizens and illegal aliens, decide to do away with political borders, then we would have a people without borders that is a people with democracy.

Is that not obvious?

Just give everyone who lives in the U. S. the vote, regardless of citizenship status, and at the same allow all who want to come into the country to come. You will then have achieved, by democratic means, a borderless country and a borderless people.

Isn't this what the Democrat Party wants?

If the people decide, then they can decide to do away with political borders, or their enforcement, which for practical purposes amounts to the same. (A political border that is not enforced is, practically speaking, no border at all. It is like a speed limit that is not enforced. Unenforced speed limits limit no one's speed.)

So why does the above-cited opinion piece have such a moronic title? It is because people foolishly think that democracy is this incredibly wonderful thing about which no on must ever speak a critical word.

But if you can think at all, you must be able to grasp that there are certain principles and values that ought not be up for democratic grabs. One of these is that a nation without enforceable and enforced borders is no nation all, a corollary of which is that there is a distinction between citizen and non-citizen.

The U. S. is not a democracy but a representative republic.

Addendum (4/4)

Here is another example of the fetishization of the word 'democracy' in an otherwise good article:

Nations that don't control their borders cease to exist. Their laws no longer mean anything. Democracy ceases to function. It's a constant lesson from history, one the U.S. would be wise to heed.

It is not democracy that ceases to function but the constitutionally-based representative republic. If the people decide to do away with the rule of law, how is that undemocratic?

If the people decide, then they can decide who the people are. They can decide that the people are those present in a given geographical area, whether citizens or non-citizens. Or they can decide that only 'people of color' are real people and that whites are 'racists.'

Remember how George W. Bush used to go on about bringing democracy to the Middle East? The knucklehead just loved that word 'democracy.' Sounds good until the people decide for Sharia. Does democracy then become undemocratic?

Opposing as I do pure democracy, I am not advocating monarchy or anything like it. I am advocating a return to the principles of the American founding.

Miracles and Resurrection

Thomas Beale writes,

Quoting from your quote of Ian Hutchison:

…Miracles are, by definition, abnormal and non-reproducible, so they cannot be proved by science’s methods.

Today’s widespread materialist view that events contrary to the laws of science just can’t happen is a metaphysical doctrine, not a scientific fact. What’s more, the doctrine that the laws of nature are “inviolable” is not necessary for science to function. Science offers natural explanations of natural events. It has no power or need to assert that only natural events happen.

I think this is pretty hard to swallow from a scientific perspective – the first statement more or less says that miracles are by definition 'abnormal' and thus unprovable, but in fact science does pretty well with all kinds of abnormal. He really means 'law-breaking', and is thus saying that miracles by definition must confound science. But science isn't generally confounded by having its current set of laws broken; its usual way of responding (at least in the modern era) is to try to find new paradigms or at least theories that accommodate the new evidence, just as we had to wait for Einstein to explain the lensing of starlight around heavy bodies. If his statement still holds, then all it means is that completely arbitrary things can happen.

BV: Hutchison may be confusing laws of science with laws of nature.

There is a distinction between a law of nature and a law of science. If there are laws of nature, they have nothing to do with us or our theorizing. They are 'out there in the world.' For example, if we adopt a regularity theory of laws, and I am not saying we should, the regularities, and thus the laws, exist independently of our theorizing. Surely, if there are physical laws at all, and whatever their exact nature, their existence antedates ours. Laws of science, on the other hand, are our attempts at formulating and expressing the laws of nature. They are human creations. Since physics is a human activity, there were no laws of physics before human beings came on the scene; but there were physical laws before we came on the scene. Physics is not the same as nature; physics is the study of nature, our study of nature. It is obvious that physics cannot exist without nature, for it would then have no object, but nature can get on quite well without physics.

The laws of science are subject to qualification, revision, and outright rejection; the laws of nature are not. For example, the Additivity of Velocities was once thought to hold universally, but now the qualification is added: at pre-relativistic speeds. Nature didn't change, but our understanding of nature did.

The concept of miracle is very difficult. Here is a conundrum for you. John Earman, Hume's Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles (Oxford 2000), p. 8:

. . . if a miracle is a violation of a law of nature, then whether or not the violation is due to the intervention of the Deity, a miracle is logically impossible since, whatever else a law of nature is, it is an exceptionless regularity.

Now consider:

1. A miracle is an exception to a law of nature.
2. Every law of nature is an exceptionless regularity (though not conversely).
Therefore
3. A miracle is an exception to an exceptionless regularity.
Therefore
4. Miracles are logically impossible.

This argument seems to show that if miracles are to be logically possible they cannot be understood as violations of laws of nature. How then are they to be understood? Please note that (2) merely states that whatever a law of nature is, it is an exceptionless regularity. Thus (2) does not commit one to a regularity theory of laws according to which laws are identified with exceptionless regularities. The idea is that any theory of (deterministic) laws would include the idea that a law is an exceptionless regularity.

The second part gets into the debate about whether laws are natural, or human inventions. One such law that does appear to be part of the universe's functioning is the second law of thermodynamics, which happens to be the one that ultimately prevents biological cells reversing their death state, and thus dead organisms reviving. For those who believe that God directly created the universe the way it is, i.e. with its law-like behaviours, quarks weighing what they do, the speed of light being what it is, and Planck's constant as we know it, it seems hard to claim that arbitrary abnormalities can occur without disturbing the space-time fabric so to speak, because everything is so strongly interrelated (try changing c …). Reversing the arrow of time in order to resurrect someone is likely to have catastrophic consequences for a patch of the universe around it.

BV: Yes, there is a problem here. Augustine was on to it. See Augustine and the Epistemic Theory of Miracles.

Another way of looking at the whole thing for the scientifically oriented might be to think more in terms of inference to the best explanation (admittedly dodgy territory). If we thought that no natural laws could be broken, we might theorise that Christ had not really died (undoubtedly he looked as if he had), and that therefore he could rise again three days later, with good care. Alternatively we might believe that he really died, and that the person presented as the risen Christ was someone else; from there, numerous variations on a theme become possible.

BV: The first theory is called the Swoon Hypothesis.

I have often wondered if the first theory would really harm Christianity. The idea that a man (at least connected to the divine, if not incarnating it) sacrificed himself for humanity, was crucified by the Romans, nearly died from his injuries and pain, but survived just long enough for friends to take him down in the storm, was cared for and then 'rose' again three days later. That takes nothing away from the heroic act, and perhaps showed that even the Roman empire couldn't kill this man. Would this Christ be any less than the one we are taught today?

BV: Would he be any less? I should think so. No orthodox Christian can gainsay what Saul/Paul of Tarsus writes at 1 Corinthians 15:14: "And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain." (KJV) See Is Christianity Vain if not Historically True?

Ignorant Liberals

NPR writer doesn't understand what Easter celebrates.

Articles of mine urging the defunding of NPR. Should the NRA receive tax monies? Of course not. Then why should organs of leftist propaganda – – and in the case of Planned Parenthood, propaganda and butchery — get them?

But there are too many pussy-wussies among the GOP ever to stop these outrages.

As I have said before, we need the separation of Leftism and State.

UPDATE (4/3):

Mark Steyn weighs in:

You don't publicly flaunt what NPR and Todd wrote because you're an atheist or agnostic; you do it because you're entirely severed from your civilizational inheritance. The old joke is that Nietzsche respected God enough to kill Him. To respect Him enough to kill Him, you have to know something about Him – as nineteenth-century atheists certainly did. Today we have know-nothings, cut off not so much from scripture but from all that derives therefrom . . . .

A Couple of Important Points About the Second Amendment

1) The first is that is that it is not reasonably interpreted as a group right, a right one possesses only as a member of a group such as a militia. This mistaken reading is suggested by the Amendment's unfortunate wording:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

It is obvious, however, that a reason for X needn't be the only reason for X. So if a reason for the right is militia-related, there could be others, and it is obvious that there is another, namely, the right to the means of the defense of one's life, liberty, and property, and that of one's family.

The right to life is in every case an individual's right to life; it is plainly not a group right. Now if you have a right to life, then you have a right to defend your life and the right to the means of defense which, in this day and age, won't be an 18th century musket.

Ask yourself: Is the right to free speech mentioned in the third clause of the First Amendment a group right? Of course not; it is an individual right. And the same goes for the right against "unreasonable searches and seizures" mentioned in the Fourth Amendment. The right to the means of the defense of one's individual right to life is also — wait for it — an individual right.

Even SCOTUS, mirabile dictu, came around to this eminently reasonable view in District of Columbia v. Heller.

2) The second point is adequately made by the following cartoon. It is an indication of how moronic 'liberal' positions are that they are refutable by cartoons.

The Afterlife of Habit Upon the Death of Desire

Desire leads to the gratification of desire, which in turn leads to the repetition of the gratification. Repeated gratification in turn leads to the formation of an intensely pleasurable habit, one that persists even after the desire wanes and disappears, the very desire without whose gratification the habit wouldn't exist in the first place. Memories of pleasure conspire in the maintenance of habit.

The ancient rake, exhausted and infirm, is not up for another round of debauchery, but the memories haunt him, of pleasures past. The memories keep alive the habit after the desire has fled the decrepit body that refuses to serve any longer as an engine of pleasure.

And that puts me in mind of Schopenhauer's advice. "Abandon your vices before they abandon you."

Want to Repeal 2A?

Stop talking and do it.

From the Pretty to the Pedestrian

Philippa Foot's maiden name was 'Bosanquet.' Her grounding of the normative in the natural, however, is decidedly Aristotelian, and thus peripatetic, and therefore pedestrian, in keeping with her married name.

Running with the pun, my Foot notes are accessible here.