Month: November 2018

Populism and Comity

A sane and defensible populism rests on an appreciation of an insight I have aphoristically expressed as follows:

No comity without commonality.

There cannot be comity without a raft of shared assumptions and values, not to mention a shared language.  This is why  unrestricted and unregulated immigration of any and all, no matter what their beliefs and values, can be expected to lead to an increases in social and political disorder. But what is comity?

The Laudator Temporis Acti quotes (HT: Bill Keezer) Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970), The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), page number unknown:

Finally, there is a subtler, more intangible, but vital kind of moral consensus that I would call comity. Comity exists in a society to the degree that those enlisted in its contending interests have a basic minimal regard for each other: one party or interest seeks the defeat of an opposing interest on matters of policy, but at the same time seeks to avoid crushing the opposition, denying the legitimacy of its existence or its values, or inflicting upon it extreme and gratuitous humiliations beyond the substance of the gains that are being sought. The basic humanity of the opposition is not forgotten; civility is not abandoned; the sense that a community life must be carried on after the acerbic issues of the moment have been fought over and won is seldom very far out of mind; an awareness that the opposition will someday be the government is always present.

The present political climate is not one of comity but one of  contention and cold war, one that threatens to become 'hot.'  Although war is irrational and often pointlessly destructive, there is a logic to it. How can one tolerate and show  "a basic minimal regard" for people who represent an existential threat, where such a threat is not primarily to one's life, but to one's way of life and the liberties without which life is not worth living, religious liberty for example, not to  mention the liberty to speak one's mind without fear and the rest of the rights and freedoms enshrined in the first ten amendments to the U. S. Constitution?

An Irrational Attitude for Human Beings?

Is the following attitude irrational for beings of our constitution?

I refuse any truth I cannot know to be true. Hence I refuse any truth that can only be believed, or can only be accepted on the basis of another's testimony. I will not allow into my doxastic network any truth that I cannot validate by my own internal criteria. To believe on insufficient evidence is worse than to lose contact with reality.  My intellectual integrity and epistemic autonomy trump all other epistemic values. What is true must pass muster by me for me to know that it is true. It is worse to be fooled than it is better to accept a truth, even a saving truth, that I cannot by my own lights prove to be true.

Better to languish in the dark than to accept light from an unproven source!

If we were mere spectators, then perhaps the above attitude would be rational.  But although we are transcendental spectators, we are also materially embodied, culturally embedded, and interested.  To be between — inter esse— is our station: to be between angelic spectatorship* and  animalic embodiment. Both blessed and cursed, man is a being-in-between. We are not merely observers of life's parade; we march in it as well, and our ultimate happiness may depend on the acceptance of truths that we cannot know here below.

So I say that it is not practically or prudentially rational for beings of our curious constitution to adopt the stance limned above, except when we are pursuing pure theory.

__________________

*My pretty formulation is marred slightly by the fact that angels are not mere spectators, but free agents. In that respect they are like us. Where they have it over us is in their freedom from bodies.

I don't know enough Thomistic angelology to know whether or not the doctor angelicus would say that it is better to be an angel than to be a man. But I do know enough of his anthropology to know that he would hold it to be man's nature to be a composite of form and matter.  Pace Plato, we are not accidentally embodied. A man is not complete without a body. Thus the disembodied post-mortem state before the resurrection of the body  is a state inferior to the resurrected state wherein man regains a transfigured body. (Would a theologian use 'transfigured' in this context?)

There are various questions here that will tempt the philosopher.  One is this. If the soul (anima) is forma corporis, and if forms are not substances in there own right, and thus not capable of independent existence apart from their material embodiment, how is it that a person can survive his bodily death as a mere soul? This is a bit of Platonism at odds with Aquinas' Aristotelianism.

It has been said, with justice, that Aquinas was an Aristotelian on earth but a Platonist in heaven. After all, God himself, the form of all forms, forma formarum, is yet the absolute substance. A form that is not the form of anything is, in the case of God,  a being in its own right.

The Threat of Populism

What does populism threaten?

It is a threat to a leftist internationalism that rejects national borders and denies to nations the right to preserve their cultures, the right to stop illegal immigration, and the right to select those immigrants who are most likely to prove to be a net asset to the host country, and most likely to assimilate. There needn't be anything white supremacist or white nationalist about populism. (By the way, white supremacism and white nationalism are plainly different: a white nationalist needn't be a white supremacist.)  And of course there needn't be anything racist or xenophobic or bigoted about either nationalism or populism.

Populism in the Trumpian style is not a threat to liberal democracy as the Founders envisioned it, but a threat to the leftist internationalism I have just limned and which contemporary 'liberals' confuse with the liberal democracy of the Founders. It is also quite telling that these 'liberals' constantly use the word 'democracy' as if it is something wonderful indeed, but they almost never mention that the USA is a democratic republic.  Our republic has a stiff backbone of core principles and meta-principles that are not up for democratic grabs, or at least are not up for easy grabs: the Constitution can be amended but it is not easy, nor should it be. 

Those who think that democracy is a wonderful thing ought to realize that Sharia can be installed democratically. This is underway in Belgium. Brussels could be Muslim within 20 years.  Let enough Muslims infiltrate and then they will decide who 'the people' are and who are not 'the people.'  The native Belgians will then have been displaced. Ain't democracy wonderful?

Let enough illegal aliens flood in, give them the vote, and they may decide to do away with the distinction between legal and illegal immigration as well as the one between immigration and emigration. Ever wonder why lefties like the word 'migrant?' It manages to elide both distinctions in one fell swoop.

A sane and defensible populism rests on an appreciation of an insight I have aphoristically expressed as follows:

No comity without commonality.

There cannot be social harmony without a raft of shared assumptions and values, not to mention a shared language. There is need of "cultural coherence." A felicitous phrase, that. Our open, tolerant, Enlightenment culture cannot cohere and survive if Sharia-supporting Muslims are allowed to immigrate. For their ultimate goal is not to assimilate to our ways, but to impose their ways on us, eventually replacing us.

Can you show I'm wrong?

‘Peninsulate’

If 'insulate' is a word, from the Latin insula, insulae, island, then why not 'peninsulate,' v. i. meaning to insulate partially?  Example featuring an adjectival cognate:

His is a peninsular life, a balanced life, neither continental not insular. While connected to the mainland of the traditional, the quotidian, and the commonsensical, a part of him stretches out into the oceanic Apeiron.

Does your mother look askance at your new boyfriend? Perhaps the above sentence will take the edge off her disapprobation.

The Peninsular Man

No man is an island. He can't be. Ought he be a continent? No.

The healthy man is a peninsula. He is connected to the mainland, and nourished by that connection, but he doesn't allow himself to be influenced from all sides. A part of him juts into the oceanic. 

The peninsular life is best.

……………………………….

A long-time reader responds (30 November 2018):

So I read your post just now a) at the outer extremity of a literal peninsula; b) linked to my life-partner only by the narrow isthmus of the telephone; c) suddenly disconnected from the quotidian working world by my recent layoff; d) having spent the last decade or two immersing myself in old books and questioning all that I thought I knew; and e) generally projecting myself further and further outward from the presentist mass-society craton into the "oceanic" of the past, the unknowable future, and the great mystery of creation and human awareness.

In other words: peninsular.

Many are the pleasures of blog. One is the pleasure of giving food for thought. Another is the pleasure of receiving appreciation.

Word of the Day: Dégringolade

Merriam-Webster:  

a rapid decline or deterioration (as in strength, position, or condition) : DOWNFALL

Example from Why I Left by Jim Holt:

I will now confess to the obvious: the foregoing account of my spiritual dégringolade, while true in every detail, is a caricature. My alienation from the Catholic Church was not mainly intellectual. It was moral, even emotional.

More on Tipping: A Server Weighs in with Insights and Advice

Long-time reader R. B. sends us his thoughts:

I appreciated your post. I am on the other side of the coin: I am a server and I depend on tips to help get me through nursing school. So hopefully I can help bring some insight. I agree with your overall point that one ought to tip based on service. Bad service? Bad tip. Excellent service? Excellent tip. The restaurant I work at bases my tip out (my pay out to the bar, bussers, food runners for their help) on my overall sales (4%); suppose I sell $1000 worth of food and beverages on a particular night; this means I dish out $40 of my tips out to those who directly helped me. So when I don’t get tipped (whether justified or not), I am still paying the tip out. I had a table of Europeans last week and the bill was around $400. If I did my job well—and I think I did—then I ought to have earned an $80 tip. Well, they left me zero. It happens. But here I am paying out $16; so I essentially had to pay to wait on this table! It usually evens out because some people are generous and see me busting my ass and tip over 20%. And if mistakes happen—which they do—99% of the time a nice attitude and an apology fix everything and I still get the 20%.
 
Another important point is this: if you are nice to me (which is a low bar: just acknowledge I exist and have feelings), I will do everything within my power to get you free stuff. You asked me how my day was? I won’t charge you for that soda. You say please and thank you (embarrassingly enough you’d be surprised how many people don’t use these words at all)? I’ll get you that free dessert all on company moolah baby. I don’t expect a bigger tip when I do this, but you get my point. 
 
I also notice this a lot: how you treat waitstaff directly correlates to a deep part of your character. It’s a good litmus test for first dates. I went on a date with a girl and she was rude/snippy to the server because our food was late. Guess what? 99% chance it was not the server’s fault. The kitchen is busy and things come out late during a dinner rush. Needless to say we didn’t go out again. How can you be rude to someone who is bringing you food and beverages? It blows my mind. 
 
My personal rule is that I tip whenever and wherever I can. I rationalize it by thinking: how much will me giving this extra $1-2 actually affect me financially (*wink* famine and affluence)? The coffee shop? I tip like I would at a bar. The car wash? You bet. The dishwashers at my work? Certainly; they have the worst job in the entire restaurant and are not part of the tip out. And it’s nice because I know the money is going directly into their pocket and the government doesn’t see it (when it’s cash). Always tip in cash if you can.
 
While there might not be a moral obligation to tip, to me it does show something about your character if the service was excellent and you stiffed them. If you are opposed to tipping at sit down restaurants, then don’t go to them—simple as that. 
 
Some points:
 
It’s dehumanizing when someone doesn’t acknowledge you or even looks at you in the eye. Be a decent person and say please and thank you.
 
Don’t be rude because of mistakes (again: the vast majority of the time, the person you will tip had no control over it).
 
Control your kids (most kids nowadays are sadly glued to phones or tablets so it’s not usually a problem).
 
Don’t be a cheap bastard.
 
Have a Merry Christmas!

On Tipping

Here, in no particular order, are my maxims concerning the practice of tipping.

1. He who is too cheap to leave a tip in a restaurant should cook for himself. That being said, there is no legal obligation to tip, nor should there be. Is there a moral obligation? Perhaps. Rather than argue that there is I will just state that tipping is the morally decent thing to do, ceteris paribus. And it doesn't matter whether you will be returning to the restaurant. No doubt a good part of the motivation for tipping is prudential: if one plans on coming back then it is prudent to establish good relations with the people one is likely to encounter again. But given a social arrangement in which waiters and waitresses depend on tips to earn a decent wage, one ought always to tip for good service. 

2. Tip on the nominal amount of the bill, not the amount less a discount. You got the discount, you skin-flint coupon clipper, don't be so cheap as to demand a discount on the tip as well.

Happy Thanksgiving

To all Stateside readers, and best wishes of the season to the rest of you.  Let's make it a politics-free day, shall we? I'll do my best, and you do yours.

I am indeed grateful for your readership!

If you care to read my Thanksgiving homilies and such, go here.