November 2019 – Page 3 – Maverick Philosopher

‘Quickies’ on Free Speech from my Facebook Page

Dissent is not hate. If I dissent from your VIEWS, it does not follow that I hate YOU.

Can a contemporary 'liberal' distinguish between a person and the proposition he asserts? If he can, but he doesn't, then he ought to be morally condemned.

Don't make Dennis Prager's mistake of saying that the the First Amendment protects 'hate speech.' That formulation is a foolish concession to the Left's notion that conservative speech is hate speech. The First Amendment protects DISSENT. Hate, like love, is in the eye of the beholder.

The trouble with 'liberals' is that they are ruled by their emotions. That is why they hear dissent as hate.

The growing feminarchy within the Democrat Party will only exacerbate the party's governance by emotion. Is that a 'sexist' thing to say? Not if it is true; it is true; ergo, it is not 'sexist.'

Dissent is not hate. But even if dissent is couched in (what someone takes to be) harsh and hurtful or even hateful language, it still must be protected.

I apologize for repeating all of these obvious points. But in these benighted times, they need to be stated time and time again.

THE DEMS NO LONGER SUPPORT FREE SPEECH. And you are STILL a Democrat? Jonathan Turley:

Yet recently, the Democratic Party seems to have abandoned its historic fealty to free speech. Democratic writers and leaders are publicly calling for everything from censorship to the criminalization of free speech. The latest such clarion call appeared in The Washington Post by a column from MSNBC analyst and former Obama official Richard Stengel.

The Fall of the Wall

Thirty years ago, today.

Here we come face to face with the fundamental reason for the collapse of European Communism. For all of the sophisticated “structural” and “materialist” analyses of the Communist world, it comes down to the simple fact that the European Communist rulers—most of them anyway—lost the will to shoot their own people in large numbers. (Not so the Chinese.) This might seem an inevitable consequence of the loss of belief in the Marxist ideology of class struggle, but the will to power of rulers has never been dependent on ideology, and it might have turned out differently.

On the Illicit Use of ‘By Definition’

This is an old entry from 2010. It makes a very important point well worth repeating. The battle against language abusers is never-ending.

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What is wrong with the following sentence: "Excellent health care is by definition redistributional"? It is from a speech by Donald Berwick, President Obama's nominee to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, speaking to a British audience about why he favors government-run health care.

I have no objection to someone arguing that health care ought to be redistributional. Argue away, and good luck! But I object strenuously to an argumentative procedure whereby one proves that X is Y by illicit importation of the predicate Y into the definition of X. But that is exactly what Berwick is doing. Obviously, it is no part of the definition of 'health care' or 'excellent health care' that it should be redistributional. Similarly, it is no part of the definition of 'illegal alien' that illegal aliens are Hispanic. It is true that most of them are, but it does not fall out of the definition.

This is the sort of intellectual slovenliness (or is it mendacity?) that one finds not only in leftists but also in Randians like Leonard Peikoff. In one place, he defines 'existence' in such a way that nothing supernatural exists, and then triumphantly 'proves' that God cannot exist! See here.

This has all the advantages of theft over honest toil as Bertrand Russell remarked in a different connection.

One more example. Bill Maher was arguing with Bill O'Reilly one night on The O'Reilly Factor. O'Reilly came out against wealth redistribution via taxation, to which Maher responded in effect that that is just what taxation is. The benighted Maher apparently believes that taxation by definition is redistributional.

Now that is plainly idiotic: there is nothing in the nature of taxation to require that it redistribute wealth. Taxation is the coercive taking of monies from citizens in order to fund the functions of government. One can of course argue for progressive taxation and wealth redistribution via taxation. But those are further ideas not contained in the very notion of taxation.

Leftists are intellectual cheaters. They will try to bamboozle you. Listen carefully when they bandy about phrases like 'by definition.' Don't let yourself be fooled.

"But are Berwick, Peikoff, and Maher really trying to fool people, or are they merely confused?" I cannot be sure about those specific individuals, but it doesn't much matter. The main thing is not to be taken in by their linguistic sleight-of-hand whether intentional or unintentional.

Minimal Metaphysics for Meditation

There is a certain minimal metaphysics one needs to assume if one is to pursue meditation as a spiritual practice, as opposed to, say, a relaxation technique. You have to assume that mind is not exhausted by 'surface mind,' that there are depths below the surface and that they are accessible here and now. You have to assume something like what St Augustine assumes when he writes,

Noli foras ire, in te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas. Do not wish to go outside, return into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man.

The problem, of course, is that few if any will assume that truth dwells in the inner man unless they have already experienced or sensed the self's interiority. For the intentionality of mind, its outer-directedness, conspires against the experience. Ordinary mind is centri-fugal: in flight towards objects and away from its source and center. This is so much so that it led Jean-Paul Sartre to the view that there is no self as source, that conscious mind just is this "wind blowing towards objects," a wind from nowhere. Seeking itself as an object among objects, centrifugal mind comes up with nothing. The failure of David Hume's quest should come as no surprise. A contemporary re-play of this problematic is found in the work of Panayot Butchvarov. The Bulgarian philosopher takes the side of Hume and Sartre. See my Butchvarov category.

Ordinary mind is fallen mind: it falls against its objects, losing itself in their multiplicity and scattering itself in the process. The unity of mind is lost in the diaspora of sense objects. To recuperate from this self alienation one needs to re-collect and re-member. Anamnesis! The need for remembrance, however, cannot be self-generated: the call to at-one-ment has to come from beyond the horizon of centrifugal mind. One has to have already some sense of the Unseen Order, a natural and innate sense, not an intellectual opinion, a sense of "the existence of a reality superior to that of the senses." (Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts, p. 43.)

My conclusion is that no one is likely to take up, and stick with, serious meditation, meditation as part of a spiritual quest, unless he is the recipient of a certain grace, a certain free granting ab extra. (Here I go beyond Pali Buddhism which leaves no place for grace.) He must be granted a glimpse of the inner depth of the self. But not only this. He must also be granted a willingness to honor and not dismiss this fleeting intimation, but instead center his life around the quest for that which it reveals.

I would say that this also holds for the Buddhist whose official doctrine disallows grace and 'other-power.' Supposedly, the Tathagata's last injunction as he lay dying was that we should be lamps unto ourselves. Unfortunately, we are not the source of our own light.

I conjecture that what Buddha was driving toward in a negative way with his denials of self, permanence, and the possibility of the ultimate satisfaction of desire (anatta, anicca, dukkha) is the same as what Augustine was driving at in a positive way with his affirmations of God and the soul. Doctrinally, there is of course deep difference: doctrines display on the discursive plane where difference and diremption rule. But doctrines are "necessary makeshifts" (F. H. Bradley) that point toward the transdiscursive. Buddhists are famously open to the provisional and makeshift nature of doctrines, likening them to rafts useful for crossing the river of Samsara but useless on the far side. Christians not so much. But even Christians grant that the Word in its ineffable unity is not a verbal formulation. The unity of a sentence without which it would be a mere list of words points us back to the ineffable unity of the Word which, I am suggesting, is somehow mystically one with what the Buddha was striving for.

The depth of Buddha is toto caelo different from the superficiality of Hume and Sartre. For one thing, there was no soteriological/therapeutic intent behind Hume's reduction of the self to a mere bundle of perceptions. Secondly, it is arguable that the denial of a substantial self on the samsaric plane presupposes the Atma of the Upanishads, as Evola convincingly argues. More on this later.

Double Cultural Appropriation!

Before this morning's session on the black mat, I read from the Dhammapada. I own two copies. The copy I read from this morning has the Pali on the left and an English translation by Harischandra Kaviratna on the right. I don't know Pali grammar but I have swotted up plenty of Pali vocabulary over the years.

My point, however, is that I was feasting on insights from a tradition not my own. I am not now, and never have been, Indian. I am of Northern Italian extraction, 100%, and that makes me European. So what am I doing appropriating insights from a foreign tradition? I am feeding my soul and doing no wrong.

To appropriate is to make one's own. To appropriate is not to steal, although stealing is a form of appropriation, an illicit form. If I appropriate what you own by stealing it, then I do wrong. If I appropriate what you own by buying it from you in a mutually consensual transaction, I do no wrong. Libertarians speak of capitalist acts among consenting adults. I am not a libertarian. I merely appropriate their sound insights while rejecting their foolish notions. Critical appropriation is the name of the game. 'Critical' from Gr. krinein, to separate, distinguish, discriminate the true from the false, the prudent from the imprudent, the meaningful from the meaningless, the real from unreal, that which is conducive unto enlightenment from that which is not, and so on.

One can also appropriate, make one's own, what no one owns. I appropriate oxygen with every breath I take. I make it my own; it enters my blood; it fuels my brain; it is part and parcel of the physical substratum of spiritual production. Who owns the air? Who owns the oxygen in the air?

Who owns sunlight? I appropriate some every day. Who owns the sky, "the daily bread of the eyes"? (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Before the session on the black mat and after my reading I walked out into the Arizona early November pre-dawn darkness to gaze with wonder at "the starry skies above me" (Kant). Who owns Orion or Ursus Major?

Who owns truth?

Some races are better at finding it and expressing it, but no one owns it.

There are truths in the Dhammapada and no one owns them. Since no one owns them, they belong to all. Belonging to all, they are no one's property. They cannot be stolen. Their appropriation cannot be illicit.

My appropriation of Asian wisdom — which is Asian in that it is from the East, not Asian in that its essence is Eastern — is made possible by a SECOND form of licit cultural appropriation, namely translation. Translation is cultural appropriation! If done well, it is good.

ONE WAY TO MEDITATE. Start discursively with a verse from some noble scripture from the East or from the West, for example, verse 150 from the Dhammapada:

Here is a citadel built of bones, plastered with flesh and blood, wherein are concealed decay, death, vanity, and deceit.

Run through it, but then whittle it down to one word, death, for example, and than ask yourself; Who dies? Answer: I die! And then inquire: who or what is this 'I'?

‘Knowingly Lied’

'Knowingly lied' is a pleonastic expression. One cannot lie without intending to deceive. And one cannot intend to do X without knowing that one intends to do X. So one cannot lie without lying knowingly: there is no such thing as an unknowing or unwitting lie. It follows that 'knowingly lied' is a pleonastic or redundant expression. Good writers avoid pleonasm.

Good writers also know when to break rules in the service of what they want to say.

Illegal Aliens and Black Reparations

Here is another problem for the ill-starred notion of black reparations. Should those who reside illegally in the U. S. pay them? Why not? Don't they benefit from the putative legacy of slavery like everyone else? On the other hand, if you think that only the descendants of slave-holders should pay reparations, then we citizens who are are not descended from slave-holders are off the hook. And what about the blacks who are descended from blacks who held slaves? Do they get reparations too? And who is black anyway? Rachel Dolezal? If race is just a social construct, can I re-identify as black and get in on the goodies? If I can identify as a girl and then compete in an all-female athletic event, why can't I identify as black?

There will never be black reparations for slavery. The idea is just too incoherent for implementation. And it perpetuates the victim mentality that keeps blacks on the bottom. Nor should there be reparations for slavery. See the following. Trigger warning! They are exercises in reasoned discourse.

David Horowitz on Black Reparations

On Black Reparations

Virile Ascesis

Julius Evola (Doctrine of Awakening, 233) preaches a virile ascesis which is neither renunciation, nor worldflight, nor inaction, nor quietism, nor mortification.

Ascesis requires detachment, but one can be both detached and active in the world. The vita activa is possible without contemptus mundi. One can even be a warrior like Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita whom Lord Krishna commands to do his duty and slay the enemy but with detachment from the fruits of action. Imagine slaughtering a fellow human being with equanimity! An impossible ideal? (An ideal impossible of realization is of course no ideal at all.)

In the world but not of it. In the thick of it, but without anything sticking to you, like the lotus flower that floats on the water without getting wet.

The Trick

The trick is to maintain one's equanimity in the face of the samsaric storm. It's easy to be a monk in a monastery, but difficult ex claustro. The trick is to be in the world, and active in it, but not of it. Not easy, and perhaps impossible. Withdrawal and Weltflucht are perhaps all that some of us can ever achieve.

Which Side Are You On?

It is an appropriate question to ask in politics, though not in philosophy. Politics is warfare. If you call yourself conservative and don't support Trump, then you are helping the enemy. Which side are you on?

In philosophy we strive for objectivity. We take our time; we consider all points of view. We show respect for our interlocutors. We are civil. But one cannot be objective or civil in a fight for one's life and way of life especially if one's way of life includes free speech, open inquiry, and resistance to the Left's totalitarian politicization and ideologization of everything, including pure mathematics! One has to secure, with blood and iron if need be, the space of objective inquiry against the ideologues who, at the present time, are chiefly leftists and Islamists, and who wittingly or unwittingly work together.

You don't like the vulgar Trump? Tough shit. He's all we've got. Face reality and its limitations. Don't let the best become the enemy of the good. The milque-toast McCains haven't done jack and won't do jack, except talk and obstruct. David Horowitz:

The movement galvanized by Trump can stop the progressive juggernaut and change the American future, but only if it emulates the strategy of the campaign: Be on the offense; take no prisoners; stay on the attack. To stop the Democrats and their societal transformation, Republicans must adhere to a strategy that begins with a punch in the mouth. That punch must pack an emotional wallop large enough to throw them off balance and neutralize their assaults. It must be framed as a moral indictment that stigmatizes them in the way their attacks stigmatize Republicans. It must expose them for their hypocrisy. It must hold them accountable for the divisions they sow and the suffering they cause. (Big Agenda, Humanix, 2017, p. 142)

Trump alone, an outsider who doesn't need a job, has the civil courage and is in a position to deliver the needed punches. That's why we like him. That's why we overlook his flaws. He punches back.

Addendum 11/5

Here are ten reasons to like Trump from a female legal immigrant and 'person of color.' Those are sneer quotes, by the way. Do you know the differences among sneer, mention, and quotation quotes?

Epitaph for a Dying Culture

The 'genius' of Donald Trump, if you want to call it that, is that he is able successfully to bait Democrats into showing the most deeply-dyed and color-fast of their true colors, colors that are not typically on display but hidden beneath layers of mendacity and obfuscation. They now stand exposed as the destructive hard-leftists that they are and were. Would it be too much to say that they have become enemies of civilization?

I don't think so, nor would Victor Davis Hanson. He mentions ten insidious assaults on hard-won wisdom and "a new legal and cultural standard in adjudicating future disagreements and disputes, an utterly anti-Western standard quite befitting for our new relativist age":

The veracity of accusations will hinge on the particular identity, emotions, and ideology of the accuser;
Evidence, or lack of it, will be tangential, given the supposed unimpeachable motives of the ideologically correct accuser;
The burden of proof and evidence will rest with the accused to disprove the preordained assumption of guilt;
Hearsay will be a valuable narrative and constitute legitimate evidence;
Truth is not universal, but individualized. Ford’s “truth” is as valid as the “Truth,” given that competing narratives are adjudicated only by access to power. Ford is a victim, therefore her truth trumps “their” truth based on evidence and testimony.
Questionable and inconsistent testimony are proof of trauma and therefore exactitude; recalling an accusation to someone is proof that the action in the accusation took place.
Statutes of limitations do not exist; any allegation of decades prior is as valid as any in the present. All of us are subject at any moment to unsubstantiated accusations from decades past that will destroy lives.
Assertion of an alleged crime is unimpeachable proof. Recall of where, when, why, and how it took place is irrelevant.
Individual accusations will always be subservient to cosmic causes; individuals are irrelevant if they do not serve ideological aims. All accusations fit universal stereotypes whose rules of finding guilt or innocence trump those of individual cases.
The accuser establishes the conditions under which charges are investigated; the accused nods assent.

Dr. Johnson versus Kerouac

Patrick Kurp makes the case against spontaneous bop prosody. And a strong case it is. The Rolling Stones sang that it's only Rock and Roll, but I like it. I'd say something similar about Sweet Gone Jack's hyper-romantic effusions. It's only rush and gush, flow and go, but I like it, like it, yes I do.

(The 'go' alludes to the title of which minor Beat figure's novel?)

Post-Session Fruits of a Formal Session

The fruits of a formal meditation session sometimes come after the sitting. I sat for only about a half-hour this morning, trying with little success to let go of every thought as it arose, in search of the state void of thought at the source of thought. After I arose from the mat, however, unsought unearthly calm descended. Call it Grace. Grace graciously granted ab extra. Its coming is an advent from Elsewhere. Pali Buddhism, magnificent as it is, makes no place for it. A defect, I'd say. A point for Christianity. These are the metaphysically deepest and richest religions. They can and should learn from each other.

Companion entry: Grace

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Days of the Week

Melina Mercouri, Never on Sunday

Mamas and Papas, Monday, Monday

Marianne Faithfull, Ruby Tuesday. Moodier than the Stones' original. She does a great version of Dylan's Visions of Johanna. But nothing touches the original. It moves me as much as it did back in '66. YouTuber comment: "An early morning cup of coffee, smoking a fattie, listening to this insane genius . . . does it get any better? And if so, how?"

Simon and Garfunkel, Wednesday Morning 3 AM

Donovan, Jersey Thursday

Easybeats, Friday on My Mind

Sam Cooke, Another Saturday Night

Saturday night is many a Fool's Paradise. Take a lesson, muchachos.

Tom Waits, The Ghosts of Saturday Night. One of the best by this latter-day quasi-Kerouac.

Bonus cut: Jerry Lee Lewis, Lonely Weekend