Month: September 2022

Free Speech, Censorship, Toleration, and a Lame Libertarian Argument

Your right to free speech entails my duty not to impede your speech; it does not entail a duty on my part to provide you with a platform. "But then you are censoring me!" In a broad and defensible sense, yes. I am tolerant and so I tolerate you and your beliefs. To tolerate, however, is not to approve but to allow, to put up with, to — wait for it — tolerate. Toleration does not extend to an aiding and abetting of views that I, after years of study and due diligence in the formation of my beliefs, consider false or pernicious.

In any case, it is not my censorship you should fear, but that of the State, especially when a regime of anti-constitutional rogues has  seized control thereof. The State has non-state adjuncts and allies in the private sphere that serve as their enablers and propaganda arms. They are to be feared as well, extending as they do the State's reach into the private lives of citizens as they hollow out the space of civil society which traditionally served as a buffer between Leviathan and the naked individual.  Among the enabling adjuncts and allies: Big Tech, Big Pharma, Mainstream Media.

There is no need for an Orwellian Ministry of 'Truth' within the government when CNN, CBS, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and all the rest serve as propaganda arms of governmental distortion and directives.

At this point a libertarian argument needs to be addressed, one that had some probative force decades ago but in the teeth of current developments is becoming increasingly lame.  A libertarian will point out, rightly, that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects the citizen against the government in respect of the following rights: exercise of religion, free speech, peaceable assembly, and the right to petition in redress of grievances. But the amendment says nothing about the protection of the rights of citizens against private-sector entities. The libertarian argument, however, weakens the more the big corporations with enormous economic and cultural clout infiltrate and influence the government thereby merging with it. 

The merging of woke-Left capital with woke-Left government puts paid to the libertarian argument which , once lame, is now totally non-ambulatory. 

Toleration Misunderstood

Some of my conservative Facebook friends applauded the meme below. Such applause is ill-advised. Toleration (tolerance) in a pluralistic society such as the one we live in is essential if we are to live together peaceably, something we are obviously not doing at present. There are two claims below. The first, that tolerance is not Christian is, if not obviously untrue,  not obviously true,  and I would have no trouble showing that tolerance, properly understood, is akin to such Christian virtues  and attitudes as patience, forbearance, forgiveness, and the like. My present interest, however, is solely in the second claim, or rather suggestion, that a commitment to toleration includes a commitment to the toleration of grave and known evil. This is  a mistake that many on the Right make. It shows a failure to understand what toleration is. 'Toleration' is not a dirty word, and that to which it refers is a beautiful thing, the touchstone of the classical liberalism of the Founders.  The Founders knew history and knew of the religious wars in which people literally tore one another apart in conflicts over religious practices and beliefs. Thus they enshrined religious liberty — which includes the liberty to have no religion — as a high value in the First Amendment.

Essential to toleration is a tripartite distinction between (a) beliefs and practices consonant with the prevailing orthodoxy, (b) beliefs and practices at odds with this orthodoxy but tolerable by its adherents, and (c) beliefs and practices that are intolerable.  (See here.) If you understand (c), you understand that toleration has limits, and that Archbishop Chaput has gone off the rails.

For a deeper understanding of this topic see the following two Substack articles: 

On Toleration: With a Little Help from Kolakowski

Toleration Extremism: Notes on John Stuart Mill

 

Toleration not a Christian virtue

Theistic Personalism versus Classical Theism: Response to Roger Pouivet

Professor Roger Pouivet (Université de Lorraine, France) recently subscribed to my Substack series. I wrote to thank him and to request a copy of his Against Theistic Personalism: What Modern Epistemology Does to Classical Theism. He replied promptly and I dove into his article. It proved to be stimulating and I thank him for writing it. Herewith, some comments and questions.

1) Theistic personalism is the view that God is a person and that therefore the relations between God and human creatures are interpersonal. Pouivet argues against this view, taking the classical line of Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Maimonides, and Thomas  according to which God is ontologically simple and thus identical to his attributes. (See my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, Divine Simplicity, for details, motivation, criticisms, and references to current literature.*) The simple God of classical theism is wholly devoid of complexity and composition. The distinctions that apply to creatures do not apply to God. Among them: form-matter, act-potency, essence-existence, and individual-attribute. I would add to the list contingency-necessity as standardly understood.  Aquinas held that some necessary beings have their necessity ab alio, i.e., from God, whereas God has his necessity in se. The former are creatures because they depend on God for their existence.  (A creature is simply anything created by God.) The contingency-necessity ab alio distinction does not apply to God. God is therefore uniquely necessary as he is uniquely unique: he is not a necessary being among necessary beings. This is why, on classical theism, the divine necessity is not properly represented, or fully captured, if you say merely that God exists in all metaphysically possible worlds as theistic personalists such as Alvin Plantinga will say. They think of God as a necessary being among necessary beings.

2) The main question, however, is whether the classical God, the simple God, could be a person. That depends on what a person is taken to be. For Pouivet, no person can be simple: no person is identical to its attributes. It follows straightaway that the simple God cannot be a person.  That's one argument.  Second, no person is immutable: people change mentally and physically. Whatever changes is in time. To put the point precisely, it is metaphysically impossible that anything undergo intrinsic (non-relational) change unless it is in time. (The eternal God, outside of time, could presumably 'undergo' relational change as when I start and stop thinking about him and his attributes.) So persons are mutable and in time and are thus non-eternal). But the simple God is both intrinsically immutable and eternal. It follows that the simple God cannot be a person.

c) For Pouivet, "A person is a being with an essentially mental life made up of mental states such as thoughts (mental representations) or desires." (p. 3) It seems to follow from this definition that if God is not and cannot be a person, then he cannot have a mental life with thoughts, desires and intentions. But then I will ask Professor Pouivet how, on his view, we can makes sense of the divine omniscience. Classical theism does not exclude omniscience as a divine attribute. But to know is to be in a mental state. So it would seem that God must either possess mental states or something analogous to mental states. Granted, the archetypal intellect's knowing is very different from our ectypal knowing: God knows the object by creating it; we do not. There cannot, however, be an equivocation on 'knows' in 'God knows' and 'Socrates knows' even if there is no univocity of sense. But I found no mention of analogy in Pouivet's article.

The problem also arises with respect to the divine will. Pouivet rightly points out that for Aquinas the simplicity doctrine entails that there is nothing potential in God, that God is actus purus.  (7) He then takes aim at Swinburne's view that God is a "superlative person" who is perfectly free, all-powerful, and omniscient. Pouivet objects to Swinburne:

But this has nothing to do with God as pure act . . . . In this [Thomist] tradition, God is not described as a being with intentional power . . . . For theistic personalists, the notion of intentional power is however directly linked to the idea of conscious experience which is also characteristic of human beings. The result is a deeply anthropomorphic account of God. (7-8)

A question for Professor Pouivet: can classical theism do justice to the notion that God freely created the world? It seems to me that there is a tension between divine simplicity (upheld by classical theists) and divine freedom (upheld by theistic personalists) and that Judeo-Christian theism is committed to both. 

1) If God is simple, then he is purely actual (actus purus) and thus devoid of unexercised powers and unrealized potentialities. He is, from all eternity, all that he can be. This is true in every possible world because God exists in every possible world, and is pure act in every possible world.  As a necessary being, God exists in every possible world, and as a simple being, he is devoid of act-potency composition in every world in which he exists. 

2) As it is, God freely created our universe from nothing; but he might have created a different universe, or no universe at all. This implies that any universe God creates contingently exists.

The dyad seems logically inconsistent.   If (1) is true, then there is no possible world in which God has unexercised powers. But if (2) is true, there is at least one possible world in which God has unexercised powers. Had God created no universe, then his power to create would have gone unexercised.  Had God created a different universe than the one he did create, then his power to create our universe would also have gone unexercised. So if God is both simple and (libertarianly) free, then we get a logical contradiction.

In nuce, the problem is to explain how it can be true both that God is simple and that the universe which God created ex nihilo is contingent.  Clearly, the classical theist wants to uphold both. What is unclear, however, is whether he can uphold both.

There are two main ways to solve an aporetic polyad. One is to show that the inconsistency alleged is at best apparent, but not real.  The other way is by rejection of one of the limbs. 

Many if not most theists, and almost all Protestants, will simply (pun intended) deny the divine simplicity.  I myself think there are good reasons for embracing the latter.  But how then avoid modal collapse?

Modal Collapse

We have modal collapse just when the following proposition is true: For any x, x is possible iff x is actual iff x is necessary.  This implies that nothing is merely possible; nothing is contingent; nothing is impossible.  If nothing is merely possible, then there are no merely possible worlds, which implies that there is exactly one possible world, the actual world, which cannot fail to be actual, and is therefore necessary.  Modal collapse ushers in what I call call modal Spinozism. 

(The collapse is on the extensional, not the intensional or notional plane: the modal words retain their distinctive senses.)

Suppose divine simplicity entails modal collapse (modal Spinozism). So what? What is so bad about the latter?  Well, it comports none too well with God's sovereignty. If God is absolutely sovereign, then he cannot be under a metaphysical necessity to create. Connected with this is the fact that if God must create, then his aseity would be compromised. He cannot be wholly from himself, a se, if his existence necessarily requires a realm of creatures.  Finally, creaturely (libertarian) freedom would go by the boards if reality is one big block of Spinozistic necessity.

______________________

*Curiously, just yesterday the SEP editors informed me that an updated version is due from me by the end of February, 2023. Readers apprised of the latest literature are encouraged to contact me with their references.) 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Dark Songs for Dark Times

Buffalo Springfield, For What It's Worth

Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues

Bob Dylan, It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

Barry McGuire, Eve of Destruction

Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bad Moon Rising

The Who, Won't Get Fooled Again

Rolling Stones, Gimme Shelter

Bob Dylan, Masters of War

Bob Dylan, Not Dark Yet. But it's getting there . . .

What is Fascism? Are MAGA Republicans Fascists?

The Left's favorite 'F' word is of course 'fascist.' But of course they don't define it, the better to use it as a verbal cudgel.  But we know that responsible discussion of a topic begins with a definition of terms.

What is a fascist? More to the point, what is fascism? The term expresses what philosophers call a 'thick' concept. Such concepts combine evaluative and descriptive content.  Examples include cruel and cowardly. If I describe an action as cowardly, I am both describing it and expressing a negative moral evaluation of it. Right and wrong, by contrast, are 'thin' concepts inasmuch as they contain no descriptive content.  If I commend you for doing the right thing, my commendation includes no descriptive content. Fascist is clearly thick. If we are called fascists, or 'semi-fascists' in the parlance of our illustrious president Joe Biden, at least some slight descriptive content is implied, even if the lion's share of the semantic load is expressive, not of sober moral judgment, but of blind hatred and contempt.  I now unpack the descriptive content of fascist and fascism, and then go on to argue that no Republican, MAGA or not, can be fairly accused of being a fascist.

Main marks of fascism

According to Anthony Quinton,

It [Fascism] combines an intense nationalism, which is both militarily aggressive and resolved to subdue all aspects of public and private life to the pursuit of national greatness. It asserts that a supreme leader is indispensable, a heroic figure in whom the national spirit is incarnated. It seeks to organize society along military lines, conceiving war as the fullest expression of the national will as brought to consciousness in the leader. It sees the nation not primarily as a cultural entity, defined by a common language, traditional customs, perhaps a shared religion, a history of heroes and great events, but also in questionably biological terms. (Anthony Quinton, "Conservatism," in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, eds. Goodin and Pettit, Blackwell, 1995, p. 264.)

Quinton tells us that there are anticipations of fascism in Fichte, Carlyle, and Nietzsche, and that its main exponents are Mussolini and Hitler. Fascism is further described as "aggressive," "militant," and "totalitarian without qualification." The masses are to have no say in their governance; they are to obey. There are no rules for the orderly transfer of power. "Leaders are presumably to emerge as victors in the struggle for power within the ruling party." (264) Quinton also mentions the 'organicism' of fascism whereby it appeals to those "ready to submerge their individuality" in the national life and to find thereby their whole raison d'etre in "the service of the state," in the way that the function of a particular organ is to contribute to the well-being of the body of which it is a part." (264-265)

Are MAGA Republicans fascists?

I can be brief. Of course they are not.

Start with nationalism. Trump's is an enlightened nationalism and it is certainly not "militarily aggressive." America First does not mean that that the USA ought to be first over other countries, dominating them. It means that every country has the right to prefer itself and its own interests over the interests of other countries. The general principle is that every country has a right to grant preference to itself and its interests over the interests of other countries while respecting their interests and right to self-determination. America First is but an instance of the general principle. The principle, then, is Country First.

And of course enlightened nationalism has nothing to do with white nationalism. We must resist this race-baiting leftist smear.  There is no 'biologism' in Trump's nationalism.

Is Trump at the center of a 'cult of personality'? No more than Obama was. Trump supporters are drawn to the ideas he espouses, which are all classically American; they are in fact most of them critical of the man himself. 

To understand how destructive the Left is, you must understand that they feel no compunction at the Orwellian subversion of language, the brazen telling of lies, and psychological projection: what they accuse us of doing is almost always what they themselves are doing. They project in order to deflect attention from their own malfeasance and dereliction of duty.

Once again, TRUTH IS NOT A LEFTIST VALUE. Part of their trick is to say something so manifestly in conflict with reality that people will think: no one would have the chutzpah to say that unless it were true. That is the psychology of the big lie. And notice the smile. This is part of the psychological ploy. You look into the camera as Joey B did during one of the debates with Trump and you smile — and the pearl-clutching old ladies (of all ages and sexes) melt, and think, "He's such a nice man!"