The 2018 Big Unplug starts now.
I hope to be back in about three weeks. I will be incommunicado during this period so please don't send me any e-mail or leave any comments.
Bang on the link below for a little of the 'theory' of the Big Unplug.
Sick of politics? Take a gander at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical.
All the best to my readers!
On Buddhism the human (indeed the animalic/sentient) condition is a profoundly unsatisfactory predicament from which we need extrication. The First Noble Truth is that fundamentally all is ill, suffering, unsatisfactory, dukkha. That there is some sukha (joy, happiness) along with the dukkha is undeniable, but the little sukha is fleeting and unsatisfying and leads to dukkha which is primary. Desire breeds desire endlessly with no satisfaction being finally satisfactory. You may satisfy your sexual craving, but the satisfaction is impermanent and gives rise to further desires upon desires and temporary satings upon temporary satings which become increasingly habitual but never finally satisfactory. So not only is frustration of desire unsatisfactory, satisfaction of it is as well. Either way dukkha is the upshot. This is the deep and radical meaning of the First Noble Truth.
Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.
The Second Noble Truth is that suffering has its origin in desire or craving (tanha). The natural pursuit and possession of the ordinary objects of desire such as name and fame, pleasure and pelf, property and progeny, power and position all breed attachment, and this attachment breeds misery. Why? Because the ordinary objects of desire are impermanent (anicca) and insubstantial (anatta). They lack the power to satisfy us. Desire or craving (tanha) drives us to cling to the fleeting and unreal that cannot last and cannot ultimately satisfy. In this sense sukha, which is derivative, leads to dukkha which is primitive and fundamental.
Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving which leads to re-becoming, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there; that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for becoming, craving for disbecoming.
Should we then re-direct desire to what is permanent and possesses self-nature, God for example? You would think so, right?
No!
For on original, radical, Pali Buddhism nothing is permanent and nothing possesses self-nature. All is impermanent and insubstantial. This is the nature of things and cannot be otherwise. The task cannot be to re-direct desire to the Eternal in the manner of a Christian Platonist such as St. Augustine who turns away from this deceitful world of time and change and misery and seeks salvation in God. The problem is desire itself, not mis-directed desire. The task, then, must be to uproot desire. The task is to step off of the wheel of samsara and achieve cessation or nirvana.
Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering: it is the remainderless fading away and cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, non-reliance on it.
How do we extirpate desire and end our delusive attachment to the insubstantial and unreal and unsatisfactory?
Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering: it is this noble eightfold path; that is, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.
Critical Question
How can the entire samsaric realm, including us and the manifold objects of our desire, be devalued relative to a nonexistent and indeed impossible standard? If nothing is permanent and nothing can be permanent how can impermanence be a negative axiological feature of what alone exists? And if nothing is and can be a self or substance, how is it any argument against samsaric items that they are devoid of self-nature?
I am assuming that there cannot be impossible ideals. Either an ideal is realized or it is not. If the former, then it is possible. If the latter then it must be realizable. Ideals must be realizable if they are to be ideals. What is realizable is possible. So if permanence is an ideal, then it must be possible. But it is not possible on early Buddhist principles. So it is not an ideal. Since it is not an ideal, nothing samsaric falls short of it. It follows that ordinary objects of desire cannot, all of them, be unsatisfactory on the ground of their impermanence.
To appreciate my point, suppose God as classically conceived exists. Think of the God of Augustine and Aquinas. He is permanent, a self (in excelsis) and absolutely and finally satisfying to himself and to those who share his life. If such a God exists, then it makes perfect sense to consider of lower or even of no value the objects of ordinary mundane desire such as money and property and the paltry pleasures of the flesh.
The great Spanish mystic, St. Teresa of Avila, is supposed to have said to the nuns in her care, "Sisters, we have but one night to spend in this bad inn."
To liken the world to a bad inn makes sense as a claim purporting to be objectively true only if there is a heavenly home to which it is possible to go. But if there is no God, no soul, and this life is all there is, then this world of time and change cannot be objectively assessed to be of little or no value. Any such assessment could then be subjective only, and if Nietzsche is right, a slandering of life that merely reflects the physiological decadence of the sick slanderers who are too sick to face reality and must in compensation invent hinterworlds.
As Nietzsche remarks in Twilight of the Idols, in the section entitled "The Problem of Socrates," if there is no true world, then there is no merely apparent world either : this world objectively lacks plenary reality and value and is rightly assessed as lacking such only if there is a true world it falls short of.
I spoke to a hermit monk a couple of summers ago. I said, "This world is a vanishing quantity." He agreed wholeheartedly, having abandoned a millionaire's life as a super-successful Wall Street bond trader for the austerities of a monkish, and indeed eremitic, existence with its vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. But my assertion and his agreement could make no sense as an objective negative appraisal of the reality and value of this world except on the assumption that there is an Unseen Order that is not impermanent to its core, but the opposite, the source of all intelligibility, reality, and value, and the summum bonum, the highest good, of human striving. And if the assumption is true, then the negative appraisal is true.
A Similar Pattern in Benatar
One source of David Benatar's anti-natalism is his conviction that human life, on balance, is objectively bad for all despite how well-placed one is. There is some good, of course, but the bad so preponderates that it is morally wrong to perpetuate this life by procreation. But the standards and ideals Benatar invokes to show the objectively bad quality of human life are impossible as I try to show in this preliminary draft. My thought is that to fall short of an impossible standard is not to fall short. Benatar's radical pessimism and anti-natalism do not comport well with his naturalism.
To this extent my critique of Pali Buddhism and of Benatar is 'Nietzschean.' Impossible standards do not permit a devaluation of what actually exists.
But I share Nietzsche's naturalism and atheism as little as I share Benatar's. And of course I reject Nietzsche's psycho-physiological reductionism: the deep sense of philosophers and sages from time immemorial that this life is no good cannot be dismissed as a merely subjective response of the sick and decadent. Thus a No to Nietzsche's reading of Phaedo 118:
Concerning life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is no good. Always and everywhere one has heard the same sound from their mouths — a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness of life, full of resistance to life. Even Socrates said, as he died: "To live — that means to be sick a long time: I owe Asclepius the god of healing a rooster." Even Socrates was tired of it. [. . .] "At least something must be sick here," we retort.
If the appearance of life's low quality is real, because life falls short of the ideal, then the ideal must itself be real — elsewhere, not here below, but in the Unseen Order.
Is there anything about a person that lies beyond his power to self-identify, self-interpret, self-construe? Well, obviously, yes: that one is a person and a self in the first place with the power to identify as this or that is not a matter of self-identification. I cannot identify myself into existence or into selfhood. I cannot increase my powers by any process of self-identification. I may like the idea of being a necessary being, but I cannot slough off my contingent modal status by any self-construction. And of course the same goes for sex and race. Not even God could bring himself into existence by pretending to exist or by identifying as existent. And the same goes for the divine nature, unless you are a radical theological voluntarist who thinks that God is sovereign over his own nature.
And yes, Dolezal has been charged with welfare fraud if you can believe The New York Times.
Related:
Rachel Dolezal, The Black White Woman. I make a mistake at the end of this post that I will now correct. I represent Elizabeth Warren as the author of Pow Wow Chow when in fact she is merely a contributor to that by-now-famous recipe book. Her contribution, however, a recipe for lobster bisque — Cherokees were into haute cuisine? — was plagiarized!
Elizabeth Warren could be called the Rachel Dolezal of American politics. Never forget that Warren is a fraud. It is a known fact that she is not of Cherokee ancestry.
Bob Dylan turns 77 today. Scott Johnson offers two fine columns in celebration.
Thanks, Bob, for all the music and all the memories, and for your wonderfully individual and self-reliant appropriation and celebration of Americana. It wouldn't have been the long strange trip it's been without you. May you die with your boots on.
Not Dark Yet (the 1997 lament)
It is a mistake to confuse 'classical' Marxism with cultural Marxism.
The former is characterized by the labor theory of economic value; the call for the abolition of private property; collective ownership of the means of production, i.e., socialism in the strict sense of the term; historical materialism (HISTOMAT) and dialectical materialism (DIAMAT); belief in objective truth (see V. I. Lenin); the Hegel-inspired belief that history is being driven in a definite direction by an in-built nisus towards a secular eschaton*, in the case of Marx & Co., the dictatorship of the proletariat and the classless society . . . You know the drill.
But as Paul Gottfried points out, cultural Marxism is a horse of a different color. In particular, it is not usefully or reasonably labelled socialist. Gottfried's insights (in this article) need to be taken on board, not that I agree with everything the man says elsewhere.
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*A really deep understanding of secular eschatology such as we find it in Marx requires a critical retrieval of Christian eschatology. Please forgive my 'critical retrieval.' Back in old Boston town, in the early-to-mid-seventies, I was a bit of a Continental philosopher. I sipped a little of the Leftist Kool-Aid, but never got drunk on it, despite all the Habermas, Horkheimer, and Adorno I read. Gott sei dank!
Perhaps I can thank Heidegger for saving me. My intense occupation with his writings and his Seinsfrage drove me back to Aquinas for the onto-theological approach to Being and to Frege and the boys for the logical approach.
The Democrats, under party discipline, circle the wagons.
The Republicans, with their obstructionist 'mavericks,' form a circular firing squad.
The Libertarians, bent on irrelevance, engage in a 'circle jerk.'
Don't be put off by the title.
This essay, which William F. Buckley published in December, 1985 in National Review, is bristling with insights and distinctions essential for clear thinking about political matters. (HT: Malcolm Pollack)
The late Lawrence Auster offers a sympathetic but critical perspective.
I'm very busy now. Commentary on Sobran's dazzling essay will have to wait.
Related: Lawrence Auster on Dylan
The Democrat leadership knows how to enforce party discipline, and their members toe the line and vote as a bloc. The Republicans, however, include mavericks, the most prominent of them being Senator John McCain of Arizona:
It’s become a cliché to label McCain a “maverick” for his dramatic, and increasingly frequent, breaks with the Republican Party line. But it’s a cliché because the label fits: Over nearly four decades in Washington, McCain has given a master class in maverickism, and it is for this he will be most remembered. So it is fitting, perhaps that the inveterate fighter is taking on Trump—another Republican politician who rose by bucking GOP orthodoxy—in his final battle, and bequeathing to the nation a bookful of advice on how to be the right kind of maverick. To Trump, McCain writes in his new memoir, The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights and Other Appreciations, the mere appearance of toughness “seems to matter more than any of our values.” He suggests the president is jeopardizing those values by undermining the free press with regular accusations of “fake news”—a tactic “copied by autocrats,” McCain writes—supporting torture, branding immigrants criminals and opening the door to moral equivalence with Vladimir Putin by saying, “We have a lot of killers too.” That, McCain writes, “was a shameful thing to say, and so unaware of reality.”
The problem congressional mavericks can pose is well-illustrated by McCain's slanderous, ill-considered, and personally-motivated attack on Donald Trump. Trump was elected to push a populist, Jacksonian agenda; instead of getting with the program, McCain plays the obstructionist, objecting like a Democrat, talking like a liberal, while the opposition party maintains a unified front. This is why true conservatives consider it a good thing, not that he is dying, but that will no longer be able to obstruct.
I wonder if the typical liberal can understand the distinction I just invoked. Probably not, in this Age of Feeling.
Suppose someone is a serious impediment to your flourishing. You will want his opposition, interference, harassment to stop. Should the opponent die, then his opposition will stop. If the person dies you can legitimately take satisfaction in the cessation of his wrongful and petty opposition without taking satisfaction in his dying. And that is what you ought to do, difficult as it is to avoid all Schadenfreude on the death of an enemy.
As for McCain's slanders, the worst of the ones mentioned above is the egregious falsehood that Trump "brands immigrants criminals." This is a constantly repeated leftist smear. That McCain would repeat it is appalling. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence and decency would understand Trump to have said that some illegal immigrants are criminals, which is certainly true, and an additional reason why the nation's borders must be secured. But McCain hates the president and his hate blinds him. I understand why the former hates the latter, but the fact remains.
I'll finish this later. It is 4:50 AM. I have already this morning written philosophy in my journal from 2:00 to 3:30; done my spiritual exercises from 3:30 to 4:10, eaten a little breakfast, two rice cakes smeared with jam and almond butter, drunk two cups of seriously strong java, and uploaded this entry to my blog. It is now first light and time to hit the trails before Old Sol becomes too uppity.
The strenuous life is best by test.
It is often said that a human fetus is a potential human life. Not so! A human fetus is an actual human life.
Consider a third-trimester human fetus, alive and well, developing in the normal way in the mother. It is potentially many things: a neonate, a two-year-old, a speaker of some language, an adolescent, an adult, a corpse. And let's be clear that a potential X is not an X. A potential oak tree is not an oak tree. A potential neonate is not a neonate. A potential speaker of Turkish is not a Turkish speaker. But an acorn, though only potentially an oak tree, is an actual acorn, not a potential acorn. And its potentialities are actually possessed by it, not potentially possessed by it.
The typical human fetus is an actual, living, human biological individual that actually possesses various potentialities. So if you accept that there is a general, albeit not exceptionless, prohibition against the taking of innocent human life, then you need to explain why you think a third-trimester fetus does not fall under this prohibition. You need to find a morally relevant difference — not just any old difference, but a difference that makes a moral difference — between the fetus and any born human individual.
Suppose you have a valid argument. Can you render the argument invalid by changing the display order of the premises?
I should think never. The Dark Ostrich, however, offers the following putative counterexample. He says he got it from Sainsbury; I should like to see a reference. And if there is a literature on this, I should like to see a bibliography.
(A) Some Greek is called ‘Mark’, Mark is an evangelist, therefore some Greek is an evangelist. (VALID)
(B) Mark is an evangelist, some Greek is called ‘Mark’, therefore some Greek is an evangelist. (NOT VALID)
(A) is valid and (B) is not. But this is not evidence that premise order affects validity. For while the sentences are the same, the premises of the two arguments are not the same. Made explicit, (A) becomes
(A*) Some Greek is called 'Mark', this same individual called 'Mark is an evangelist, therefore some Greek is an evangelist.
Clearly, (A*) and (B) have different premises. So it is not the different order of the premises in (B) that causes it to be invalid.
We must never forget how vicious and stupid leftists are. Enjoy!
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California Regulators Go After Sriracha Hot Sauce
Pope Francis recently spoke, quite foolishly, of "unfettered capitalism," as if there is any such thing in the world. A more worthy cynosure of disapprobation is the slide toward unfettered regulation and omni-invasive government spearheaded by presumably well-meaning liberal-fascist nanny-staters.
You know things are getting bad when they come after your hot sauce. An Asian restaurant without Sriracha is like, what? A house without a fireplace? Coffee without caffeine? A man without balls?
You see, if these food fascists can go after Sriracha on the ground that it is a raw food, then Tabasco sauce, that marvellous Louisiana condiment from Avery Island, that undisputed king of the hot sauces, recognized as such by true connoisseurs all across this great land, that sine qua non of fine dining, and the criterion that separates, in point of the prandial, the men from the candy-mouthed girly-men, and which is also a raw food — then, I say, Tabasco sauce is in danger, a state of affairs the only appropriate remedy to which would be of the Second Amendment variety, if I may be permitted a bit of holiday hyperbole.
David Tran, founder of Huy Fong Foods, fled communist Viet Nam to come to our shores for freedom and a chance at self-reliance and economic self-determination . Unfortunately, the successors of commies, the leftists of the Democrat Party, may drive Tran out of California into a friendlier environment.
When they came for the soda, you did nothing because you don't drink the stuff. When they came for the Sriracha, you did nothing because you didn't know what the hell it was. But if they come after Tabasco sauce and you do nothing, then you deserve to be shot — figuratively speaking of course.
Story here.
One form conservative resistance takes is insistence on one's right to use standard English and oppose innovations. But it ought to be a tolerant resistance, one that permits the politically correct to speak and write as they wish so along that do not try to impose their foolishness upon us.
Related: Political Correctness and Gender-Neutral Language. Excerpt:
. . . the use of PC jargon aids and abets the Left's tendency to inject politics into everything. The Left is totalitarian by its very nature and so it cannot leave any sphere of human concern unpoliticized. For a conservative to employ PC jargon is therefore very foolish. As I have said dozens of times in these pages, conservatives should not talk like liberals. Battles in the culture war are often fought and won on linguistic ground, and we conservatives should not acquiesce in the Left's acts of linguistic vandalism.
Our 24-7, narcissistic, chit-chat connectivity is like a Faraday cage shielding us from influences from beyond the human horizon. But the comparison breaks down: the influences from beyond are benign unlike the electrostatic and electromagnetic signals that threaten our 'devices.'
Donald Trump baits the so-called journalists of the lamestream media with his largely, but not entirely, true accusations of 'fake news' and what do the 'journalists' do? They bite. They take the bait.
In their TDS-driven rage they verify the accusations by violating their own professional standards. Well, keep it up knuckleheads! You are destroying what is left of your credibility.
By the way, when John McCain and others accuse Trump of attacking the Fourth Estate they are merely flailing about in frustration. Trump is rendering a salutary service by punching back effectively at the patently biased and leftward-leaning mainstream/lamestream media.
Trump's genius is that he knows how so to needle them that they show their true colors. Or as Dan Bongino rather less delicately put it the other night, "He gets them to pull down their pants and show their asses."
Bongino then went on strangely to remark that he didn't mean the comment literally! No?
The only thing wrong with Trump's 'animal' comment is that it is not fair to animals. They don't have free will; MS-13 gangsters do.
It is clear proof that leftists in high positions in the Fourth Estate are moral scum that they could with impunity slander a duly elected president in such a vicious and absurd way.
