Author: Bill Vallicella

Declaring War versus Making War

In Article I, section 8 of the U. S. Constitution, Congress is granted the power to declare war. But in Article II, sec. 2,  POTUS is granted the power to make war. This power follows from his being Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. The difference between declaring and making war is the difference between words and actions. POTUS under the Constitution is under no obligation to get congressional approval for a military action. The Constitutional point is reasonably debatable. What decides the matter for me is the following.
A grave threat to the nation, an existential threat, whether strictly imminent, or likely to occur within, say, one year, has to be met by decisive and timely action — it cannot wait on the approval of an indecisive Congress. This ought to be blindingly evident especially when, as at the present time,  roughly half the Congress is populated by reflexive hard-Left Democrats who oppose Trump no matter what he proposes or does. Chuck Schumer, for example, who not long ago was for voter ID is now opposed to it — for no better reason than that Trump is for it. Examples of this knee-jerk reflexivity are easily multiplied beyond all necessity.
Let’s also not forget that the Islamo-theocratic threat of Khameini & Co. to the Little and the Great Satans is both credible and nothing new. Credible, as is proved by a long list of outrages perpetrated against Americans, Israelis, and others. 7 October 2023 is just one item on the list. Nothing new, since dating from 1979.
Michael Liccione in a thoughtful and well-written Facebook post relates his fear that (in my way of putting it) the Islamist monster cannot be slain without American ‘boots on the ground.’ It’s a rational fear. But surely that fear was no good reason for not going forward with Epic Fury. I expect Liccione will agree.

Michael Anton Reviews Laura K. Field’s FURIOUS MINDS

A contribution to the understanding of TDS.

The shock of the 2016 election that first propelled Donald Trump to the White House produced a few good-faith attempts in the prestige press to understand the president’s supporters, especially among the white working class. Those days, fleeting as they were, are far behind us now. Laura K. Field’s Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is less a book than the cornerstone of an information operation. It is intended to do two things: discredit any attempt to find anything rational or worthy in Trump’s political program, and ostracize as racist psychopaths anyone who dares try.

Justifiable Pre-Emption?

Edward Feser writes,

. . . if Iran were actually in the process of preparing an attack against America, we could justifiably preempt it with an attack of our own.  But we cannot justifiably attack any country simply because it might at some point in the future decide to harm us.

Feser obviously has a point: the Iranian regime posed no imminent threat to the USA.  An imminent threat is one that is about to be executed. At the present time, however the regime lacks both the nuclear warheads and the ICBMs needed to deliver death to the Great Satan.

On the other hand, if we wait until the threat becomes imminent, it may be too late.  For despite Trump’s joking about a third term, he will be out of office in three years.  If his successor is a Democrat, then, given the fecklessness and incompetence of the current crop of electable Dems, we can reasonably expect to be ‘toast.’   Can you imagine AOC as Commander-in-Chief? If Trump’s successor is Vance or Rubio, a ‘toasty’ outcome  is much less likely.  But bear in mind that these gentlemen, as outstanding as they are, are professional politicians, unlike Trump. They need the job and cannot be expected to be as bold as he is.

What say you, Vito?

 

The Gutenberg Parenthesis is Closing

This J.A. Westenberg  article  is troubling for writers and bibliophiles like me  but also helps explain the origin of the bad behavior rampant in the online world. I mean unsourced quotations, mis-quotations, mis-attributions, false attributions and outright plagiarism.  Here is a longish excerpt:

The part of me trained in research methodology wants to scream over verification and provenance and the importance of tracing claims to sources. But I also notice that most people don’t seem to mind. The hunger for documentary certainty, for the well-cited argument, for the carefully fact-checked article, was perhaps never as universal as print-culture intellectuals assumed. Through most of history, most people have been comfortable with a more fluid epistemology: “I heard from a guy who knows,” or “everyone’s saying,” or “my cousin’s friend saw it happen.” The post-truth moment we’ve been living through may be a reversion to the mean rather than an aberration.

What we lose when the parenthesis closes

The Gutenberg Parenthesis gave us real gifts, and some of them may not survive its closing.

We may lose linear argument: the book-length treatment of a complex topic, the patient accumulation of evidence toward a conclusion, the scientific paper and the legal brief and the doctoral dissertation and the philosophical treatise. All of these forms assume a reader willing to follow a chain of reasoning through thousands of words without interruption, building toward understanding that’s only possible at the end. That reading is already rare and getting rarer, and it may soon be as exotic as hand-copying manuscripts.

We may lose historical consciousness. When knowledge was fixed in texts, the past remained present. You could read Thucydides and know exactly what he wrote in 431 BCE. You could trace the evolution of ideas across centuries, watching how each generation built on or rejected what came before. Oral culture has a weaker historical memory because each retelling revises the past. The fluid web, where yesterday’s controversy is ancient history and last year’s consensus is forgotten, may produce a similarly compressed temporal consciousness.

We may lose individual authorship. In oral culture, the tribe speaks through every voice. In literate culture, individual thinkers can depart from consensus and have their departures preserved. Copernicus could be wrong in his time and right for eternity. Darwin could write a book that his contemporaries rejected but that later generations would vindicate. The permanence of text allows genius to speak across centuries. What happens when knowledge becomes fluid again, when every idea is instantly remixed into the collective flow, losing its attribution, becoming another element in the soup?

On the Misuse of ‘Conspiracy’ and ‘Conspiracy Theory’

Hillary Clinton spoke of a “vast right wing conspiracy” directed against her husband. That was some years back. Maybe that’s where the linguistic mischief started. How can a conspiracy be vast and composed of half the population?
A CONSPIRACY is a clandestine agreement among a small group of people to achieve a nefarious end, typically by means of treason or treachery. The members of a conspiracy are called conspirators. They meet in secret and in small numbers. Hillary's abuse of English is plain: conservatives do not form a secret organization; they are not few in number; and their opposition to Bill Clinton and his policies was not nefarious, treasonous, or treacherous.
A conspiracy THEORY alleges that a conspiracy is under way or has occurred to bring about some event. An example is the theory that 9/11 was an 'inside job.' Some conspiracy theories are true, and some false; some are well-supported by evidence, others are not. None of the 9/11 conspiracy theories are well- supported in my opinion. But that in not the present point. The present point is that it is a mistake to assume that every conspiracy theory is false or baseless.
It is also a mistake to refer to any theory or any bit of groundless speculation as a conspiracy theory. Not every theory is a conspiracy theory. A conspiracy theory alleges a conspiracy where ‘conspiracy’ is defined as above. Finally, it is a mistake to oppose theories to facts, as if no theory can be true.

Adultery in the Heart: Lustful Thoughts and Levels of Culpability

Matthew 5:27-28 is a powerful verse I learned as a boy and have never forgotten.  It struck me then and I continue to feel its impact.  It is probably the source of my long-held conviction that not only deeds, but also thoughts and words are morally evaluable.  Here is the verse:

27 You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ 28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 

I am not a theologian. What follows is an exercise in moral philosophy, not moral theology.

a) The first point I want to make is that the mere arisal of a lustful thought, whether or not accompanied by physical arousal in the form of an erection, say, is morally neutral.  Spontaneous unbidden  lustful thoughts, with or without physical manifestation, are natural occurrences in healthy human beings.  No moral culpability attaches to such occurrences. This is level 0 of moral culpability.

b) But after the occurrence of the thought, its  suppression is morally obligatory and its entertainment and elaboration morally impermissible.  Thus one ought to practice self-censorship and put the lustful thought out of one’s mind.  Why? Because thoughts and words are the seeds of deeds, and if lustful or otherwise evil, are likely to sprout into evil deeds.  This is level 1.0 of moral culpability.   Depending on the degree of the ‘hospitality’  of the entertainment one might want to distinguish levels 1.1, 1.2, and so on.

c) Thus taking pleasure in the lustful thought is morally impermissible even if no intention is formed to act on the thought either verbally, by saying something to the object of lust, or physically, by doing something to her by touching, fondling, groping, ‘making an advance,’ or something worse. Discharge of lustful thoughts and inclinations via masturbation leads to a separate but related topic which we can discuss later. We are still at level 1.0. This paragraph merely unpacks paragraph (b).

d) Morally worse than (c) is the deliberate decision to act on the lustful thought by forming the intention to commit adultery or rape.  But to decide to do X is not the same as doing X.  I might decide to tell a lie without telling a lie or decide to commit rape without committing rape.  ‘Adultery in the heart’ is not adultery in the flesh. Nevertheless, the decision to commit adultery is morally censurable. We are now at level 2.0.

e) Side issue: How are rape and adultery related? Rape, by definition, is in every case non-consensual, whereas adultery is in most case consensual. In most cases, but not in every case.  Three types of case:  (i) rape without adultery where an unmarried person rapes an unmarried person; (ii) adultery without rape; (iii) rape with adultery where a married person rapes an unmarried or married person or an unmarried person rapes a married person.   I should think that moral culpability is additive. So if an unmarried man rapes a married woman, that is worse than a rape by itself or an adulteration of her marriage by itself.

f) Now suppose I freely decide to commit adultery or freely decide to commit a rape, but ‘come to my senses’ and decide not to do either.  The ‘adultery in the heart’ is and remains morally wrong, and the same goes for the ‘rape in the heart,’ but morally worse would be to follow through on either initial decision.   It seems we are still at level 2.0. Or do I get moral credit for rescinding my decision?

g) A different case is one in which one does not ‘come to one’s senses,’ i.e., freely rescind one’s decision to do an evil deed, but is prevented by external forces or agents from raping or committing adultery or engaging in sex acts with underaged girls. Suppose the “Lolita Express” on which you are riding to Sin Central crashes killing all on board.  Does the NT verse imply that the free decision to commit illicit sex acts will  get one sent to hell as surely as the commission of the deeds would?

In this case one could plausibly claim that the ‘adultery in the heart’ is just as egregious, just as morally culpable, as the ‘adultery in the flesh.’ For although the free decision to commit adultery is not the same as the physical  act of adultery, the physical deed would have followed from the decision were it not for the external prevention. But it is not entirely clear.

There is a distinction between the physical deed, adultery say, and its moral wrongfulness.  Where does the wrongfulness reside? Is it present already in the prior free decision to do the deed whether or not the deed is done?  I say it isn’t. Ed Farrell seems to be saying that it is.  Can I argue my case? Well, the wrongfulness cannot hang in the air. If it is present in the deed, then the deed must exist, i.e., must have occurred.  If. on the other hand, the wrongfulness is already present in the free decision, whether or not the deed is done, then the question is begged.

h) Level 3.0 is reached when on does the evil deed that one intended to do.

 

 

Not Everything in the Bible can be Understood Literally

In a comment, discussing a verse in Matthew,  Ed Farrell writes, “It’s revelation and therefore must be understood literally.” I am not sure that Ed wants to say that everything stated in the Bible is to be taken literally, but I hope not, for it seems clear to me that much of what we read in the Bible must be taken figuratively.  Nothing I am about to say is original with me.

We read in Genesis that light was created before sources of light (sun, moon, stars) were created. The creation of light is reported at Genesis 1:3, but the creation of sources of light occurs later as reported at Genesis 1: 14-17.  Obviously, light cannot exist before sources of light exist.  So what the Bible reports on this head is false, if taken literally.  Furthermore, if the sun does not come into existence until the fourth day, how can there be days before the fourth day?  In one sense of ‘day,’ it is the period of time from the rising of the sun to its setting.  In a second sense of ‘day,’ one that embraces the first, a day is the period of time from the rising of the sun to its next rising.  In either of these senses there cannot be a day without a sun.  So again, these passages cannot be taken literally.

But there is a deeper problem.  The Genesis account implies that the creation of the heavens and the earth took time, six days to be exact. But the creation of the entire system of space-time-matter cannot be something that occurs in time.  And so again Genesis cannot be taken literally, but figuratively as expressing the truth that, as St. Augustine puts it, “the world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time.” (City of God, XI, 6)

And then there is the business about God resting on the seventh day.  What? He got tired after all the heavy lifting and had to take a rest?  As Augustine remarks, that would be a childish way of reading  Genesis 2:3.  The passage must be taken figuratively: “. . . the sacred narrative states that God rested, meaning thereby that those rest who are in Him, and whom He makes to rest.” (City of God, XI, 8)  Whether you agree with Augustine’s figurative reading, you ought to agree that the passage cannot be taken literally.

What is to be taken literally and what figuratively?  “. . . a method of determining whether a locution is literal or figurative must be established.  And generally this method consists in this:  that whatever appears in the divine Word that literally does not pertain to virtuous behavior or to the truth of faith you must take to be figurative.” (Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book Three, Chapter 10)

This method consigns a lot to the figurative.  So it is not literally true that God caused the Red Sea to part, letting the Israelites through, and then caused the waters to come together to drown the Pharaoh’s men?

I’m just asking.

“Turn the Other Cheek” and Other ‘Hard Sayings’

A long-time friend of MavPhil, Ed Farrell, refers us to his Substack article On Turning the Other Cheek, where we read:

The general reaction to turning the other cheek, even in the church, goes something like this: Christ often spoke in hyperboles. He certainly doesn’t mean that this can, or even should, be universally applied in the private and public spheres. This goes for the whole list of Christ’s admonishments in the sermon on the mount, where he also reveals that sins of the flesh are no worse before God than the sins of the mind that preceded them.

  • To be angry and callous with your brother is the same as murdering him
  • To lust after a person is the same as committing adultery.
  • To make any oath or vow is idolatrous since you presume you have the power to fulfill it.
  • To resist your enemy is to dishonor God, whose grace extends to friend and enemy alike.

It’s true that sometimes Christ speaks figuratively or even in parables. But not here. As impossible as this teaching may seem, Christ is speaking literally. He is revealing to his disciples the true nature of the Kingdom of Heaven and its ethic. This is the ethical standard for which God created man, but which became moot with man’s fall. That this ethic has at all times appeared so absurdly radical to fallen man makes it abundantly clear that the barrier of sin that separates our world from Heaven is insurmountable. No matter what good deeds you may think you do, they will never be good enough to allow you entry to God’s kingdom.

Ed’s article challenges what I maintain in my Substack article, Morality Private and Public: On Not Confusing Them. While this is not the time for a full-on Auseinandersetzung of our respective positions, I do want to comment on the above bullet points.

Consider the second  point,  the NT source of which is presumably Matthew 5: 27-28:

27 You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ 28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 

Farrell thinks that “the sins of the flesh are no worse before God than the sins of the mind that preceded them,” that “to lust after a person is the same as committing adultery.”  But surely there is a distinction between thoughts, words, and actions. As I like to say, “Thoughts and words are the seeds of deeds.” The aphorism underscores an obvious tripartite distinction but also makes clear that words ‘out of the mouth’ and deeds ‘in the flesh’ have their source in thoughts ‘in the heart.’ Surely it is obvious that to entertain lustful adulterous thoughts about my neighbor’s wife is not to commit adultery with her, contrary to Farrell’s second bullet point. It should also be clear that to commit adultery ‘in the flesh’ is far worse morally speaking than to entertain the thought of so doing ‘in the heart.’ 

One thing Farrell and I will agree on is that  merely thinking about (entertaining with hospitality the thought of) committing adultery is morally wrong, even if the deed is never done.   Surprisingly (to me anyway) there are people who deny this. They  hold that there is nothing at all morally wrong with thinking in detail about how one might bring about an adulterous sexual liaison or even a rape if one does not actually do the deed.  These people think that overt actions are morally evaluable but mere thoughts are not. I deny this. If I hit you over the head with a lead pipe just for the fun of it, I do something morally wrong; but my planning to hit you over head for fun is also morally wrong, but much less wrong than the actual physical deed.

There is a further distinction that needs to be made. Suppose the thought occurs to one: I could overpower this girl and rape her. I’m not maintaining that the mere arisal or occurrence of the thought is morally wrong; I am maintaining that the elaboration and entertaining of the thought, the forming of an intention to act on it, is what is morally wrong – – even if I do not act on it.  The difference is that the mere arisal is involuntary: the thought just popped into my head, unbidden. But the elaboration and entertaining of the thought is voluntary. And  the more hospitable the entertainment, the more morally evil it is. What  one must do when an evil thought arises is to suppress it by exercising moral self-censorship.

For a deeper elaboration of these ideas see my article, Can Mere Thoughts be Morally Wrong?

If you agree with my critique of the second of Farrell’s bullet points, you should be able to see that a similar critique applies to the first.

I reject the third as well, but to explain what I would have to present my view of idolatry, a task for another occasion.

As for resisting the enemy, Farrell tells us that to do so is “to dishonor God, whose grace extends to friend and enemy alike.”   But here is a weighty counter-consideration. A while back I had a conversation with a hermit monk at a remote Benedictine monastery in the high desert of New Mexico.  I pointed out to him that the monastery was wide open to jihadis or any group bent on invasion and slaughter. (There was a Muslim center down the road a piece.) He told me that if someone came to kill him, he would let himself be slaughtered. A clear case of “Resist not the evil-doer.” Matthew 5:39: “But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.”

The counter-consideration is that if the monk allows himself to be slaughtered, then he is party to the assailant’s commission of a mortal sin!  What the monk should do is elude the assailant or otherwise prevent him from committing the mortal sin of murder.   Making this point, I presuppose that there is a difference between the mere intention to murder and its actual accomplishment.   Since Farrell  denies this obvious distinction, mistakenly in my view, he might accuse me of begging the question against him.

The Evil of Ignorance: A Response to a Reader

From the mail:

Thanks for the kind advice re: the dark. I’m 50 later this year, so my mood could be something to do with that. I do find it wearisome that paradoxically the only reasonably secure epistemic conclusion is that we will never garner any sure knowledge re the Big Questions this side of the Mortality paywall. I do consider this an evil and was gratified to see you say so in a blog post a while back. We are doomed to aporia! How frustrating! And in a world where so many seem so sure –leftists, rightists, revolutionaries, conservatives, secularists, believers, et al. ad infinitum.
Your “this side of the Mortality Paywall” was a stroke of stylistic brilliance.  And surely  no one could say that the price of admission to the ‘content’ on the Far Side is cheap even if said ‘content’ is priceless.
“We are doomed to aporia.” Yes. There is no way (ἄπορος , á-poros) forward by knowledge this side of the Paywall.  Epistemically, we are at an impasse. I  am glad we agree that in this life we are and will remain ignorant about the ultimate whence, whither, and wherefore, and that this ignorance is evil.  There are of course dogmatists of various stripes  who insist that we are not ignorant.  You and I hold that their seeming surety, whether by dogmatic affirmations of God and the soul, the inerrancy of Scripture, the infallibility of the Roman Catholic  magisterium, etc., or dogmatic denials thereof is a mere seeming. Their convictions simply reflect their overpowering doxastic security needs. Unable to face objective uncertainty, they manufacture subjective certainty. Their critical faculties are swamped by their need for security in their beliefs.  That they are subjectively certain cannot be denied.  What can be doubted, however, is whether their subjective certainty connects them to reality.
The intellectually mature learn to live with doxastic insecurity. A salutary upshot of  acknowledged doxastic insecurity is that it makes people tolerant.  (Toleration is the touchstone of classical liberalism.) Although toleration has limits, without it there is no high civilization: what you get instead is, for example, the repressive inanition of Islamist theocracies such as the one that has been stifling the people of Iran  since 1979.
There is no way forward by knowledge this side of death.  This leaves faith as a mode of reality-contact.   Although I cannot know that I will survive my bodily death, I can reasonably believe (have faith that) I will.  (Similarly and mutatis mutandis for the rest of the Big Questions.) Suppose I do survive. Then my faith will have given me contact with reality.  And if I don’t survive, it won’t matter that I held a false belief.  I can’t be in error if I am not there to be in error.   I can’t be pained for having been wrong if I don’t exist.
Besides,  I will live better in the here and now  if I do believe I will survive than if I don’t believe I will, or believe the opposite. So that’s my answer to my correspondent  in a nutshell.  The way forward re: ultimates is by faith.  Of course a number of things I have stated or presupposed above, such as that faith is inferior to knowledge,  can and ought to be questioned.  Disagreement and contention, even unto bitterness and bloodshed, may ensue. There is no avoiding these additional  evils born of ignorance.  But they can be mitigated if we can learn to be tolerant.  The space of tolerance and civilization, however,  is defended by blood and iron.

What is Left to Do?

Nothing much.

Put  my affairs in order, complete my projects as best I can, prepare for death, and die. I have done my best. I have lived the life I wanted to live. I have been my own man. I have succeeded at what I set out to do when I was 20. In the words of my journal from those days: “to live a philosophical life in a tumultuous uncertain world is my goal.” I pulled it off, and am pulling it off. Favored by Fortuna‘s smile, I gratefully acknowledge the role of luck and the role of others in every success. I did it my way, but I got lucky and my way was partially paved by others.

How much time do I have left? Maybe 15 years, maybe 15 hours.  The clock is running and the format is sudden death. When the flag falls it falls for the last time. You can’t file for an extension or take an incomplete. I keep in mind an old aphorism of mine:

How should we look at things? As if for the first time — and the last.

 

 

Could an Advanced AI System be Conscious?

My Substack uploads continue. You can read them without subscribing simply by heading over there. Here is the latest. Perhaps David Brightly can poke a hole or two in it.

Speaking of Brightly, here is a post of his in which he engages me on the topic of the irreducibility of intentionality.  Mr. Brightly is a model of clarity, precision, and gentlemanliness.

Political Psychology: Chris Hedges

The leftist mentality fascinates me and I’ve been trying to figure it out.  A most interesting case is that of the estimable Chris Hedges.  I’ll begin by repeating  some good things I said about him in 2012, and then refer you to his recent Substack articles. You tell me what’s going on in his head.

Hedges on Pornography

There are some half-way decent leftists.  Having listened to a good chunk of a three-hour C-SPAN 2 interview of Chris Hedges on 7 January 2012, I would say he is a good example of one.  On some issues he agrees with conservatives, pornography being one of them.  Both leftists and libertarians have to lot to answer for on this score.  That the freedom of speech clause of the First Amendment could be so tortured as to justify pornography shows their lack of common sense and basic moral sense.  This is made worse by the absurd interpretation they put upon the Establishment Clause of the same amendment which they take as sanctioning the complete expulsion of religion from the public square when it is religion that delivers in popular form the morality the absence of which allows the spread of soul-destroying pornography. If it weren’t for religion would ‘the people’ be able to think in moral categories at all?  Would they have any moral sense?  You can’t make a person moral by giving him courses in ethics at age 20. He must already be (unreflectively) moral for those courses to do him any good, just as he must already be (unreflectively) logical for courses in logic to do him any good.

Hedges has the good sense, uncommon on the Left, to understand that the spread of pornography  is a major factor in our decline as a nation. The Victims of Pornography is a an excerpt from his book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.  (What a great title!)

And if leftists care about women, how can they defend pornography?  Apparently they care only up to the point where it would cost them some agreement with conservatives whom they hate more than they love women.  Similarly, leftists are all for women, so long as they are not conservative women, as witness the unspeakably vicious attacks on Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann.  Ed Schultz the other night was mocking Michelle Bachmann and gloating over her withdrawal from the presidential race.  If he had an ounce of decency he would have praised her for being in the arena and participating courageously in the grueling process while respectfully disagreeing with her positions.  But respect and decency are what you cannot expect from his ilk.  [The link I supplied documenting the Schultz’s viciousness has gone bad.]

For a taste of Hedges today, take a gander at his Substack article Imperial Boomerang, which I reproduce in full:

The murders of unarmed civilians on the streets of Minneapolis, including the killing today of the intensive-care nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti, would not come as a shock to Iraqis in Fallujah or Afghans in Helmand province. They were terrorized by heavily armed American execution squads for decades. It would not come as a shock to any of the students I teach in prison. Militarized police in poor urban neighborhoods kick down doors without warrants and kill with the same impunity and lack of accountability. What the rest of us are facing now, is what Aimé Césaire called imperial boomerang. Empires, when they decay, employ the savage forms of control on those they subjugate abroad, or those demonized by the wider society in the name of law and order, on the homeland. The tyranny Athens imposed on others, Thucydides noted, it finally, with the collapse of Athenian democracy, imposed on itself. But before we became the victims of state terror, we were accomplices. Before we expressed moral outrage at the indiscriminate taking of innocent lives, we tolerated, and often celebrated, the same Gestapo tactics, as long as they were directed at those who lived in the nations we occupied or poor people of color. We sowed the wind, now we will reap the whirlwind. The machinery of terror, perfected on those we abandoned and betrayed, including the Palestinians in Gaza, is ready for us.

I have time for only one response. Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed but not murdered. They brought about their own deaths by their illegal and imprudent behavior. Their killing was both morally and legally justified as self-defense.   The ICE agent who shot Renee Good reasonably believed that she was about to commit vehicular homicide.

Interior Locutions: Criteria of Genuineness in Teresa of Avila

This article sets forth three signs or criteria for the evaluation of  interior locutions according to the great Spanish mystic, Teresa of Avila (1515-1582),  as found in her Interior Castle, Sixth Mansion, Chapter Three, pp. 138-148 in the E. Allison Peers translation.  Such locutions are variously called inner, interior, spiritual, and  intellectual.   I will call them interior.  They are to be distinguished both from exterior locutions heard by the ears and from exterior locutions imagined to be heard by the ears. All locutions, whether exterior or interior, are verbal, not visual: they are words or composed of words. Etymology of ‘locution’ here.  Interior locutions are sometimes called interior words. They convey a message that appears to come from without, and in many if not most cases, one that appears to come from God.

Teresa gives “Be not troubled” as an example of an interior locution that appears to come from God.  But how does one know that this locution does in fact come from God, either directly or via one of his appointed messengers such as an angel? What are the criteria whereby we judge the source, and thereby the veridicality, of the message conveyed?

The first and truest [sign] is the sense of power and authority which they bear with them, both in themselves and in the actions which follow them. I will explain myself further. A soul is experiencing all the interior disturbances and tribulations which have been described, and all the aridity and darkness of the understanding. A single word of this kind — just a “Be not troubled” — is sufficient to calm it. No other word need be spoken; a great light comes to it; and all its trouble is lifted from it, although it had been thinking that, if the whole world, and all the learned men in the world, were to combine to give it reasons for not being troubled, they could not relieve it from its distress, however hard they might strive to do so. (141) [. . .]

The second sign is that a great tranquillity dwells in the soul, which becomes peacefully and devoutly recollected, and ready to sing praises to God. (141) [. . .]

The third sign is that these words do not vanish from the memory for a very long time: some, indeed, never vanish at all. Words which we hear on earth — I mean, from men, however weighty and learned they may be — we do not bear so deeply engraven upon our memory, nor, if they refer to the future, do we give credence to them as we do to these locutions. For these last impress us by their complete certainty, in such a way that, although sometimes they seem quite impossible of fulfilment, and we cannot help wondering if they will come true or not, and although our understanding may hesitate about it, yet within the soul itself there is a certainty which cannot be overcome. (142) [. . .]

Suppose a putative message ab extra passes these tests. Does it follow that the message is from God either directly or indirectly via a divinely appointed emissary?  No.  But by the same token it does not follow from  the visual and tactile perceptions as of a cat on my lap, that there is a cat on my lap.  And yet the evidence of the senses in normal to optimal conditions, good light for example, is pretty good evidence!  It is evident, though not self-evident (in the way it is self-evident that I seem to see and feel  a cat on my lap) that there is a cat on my lap.  What is evident needn’t be self-evident.  One could question this distinction, but it is one  that lays strong claim on our acceptance.

Now if the evidence of the outer senses is good enough to render reasonable  our belief in the reality of material things, is the evidence of interior locutions good enough to render reasonable the belief that some of these locutions have a divine source?  I answer in the affirmative.

There are, however,  important differences between outer perception (via the five outer senses) and the inner perception of the Interior Word. They need to be considered. One difference is that the outer perception of material particulars and events is repeatable ad libitum.  I see a mountain, and the sun setting behind it, turn away, then look at both again.  I see the same mountain and the  same event.  This repeatability  confirms my belief that the material objects of outer perception are ‘really there.’

A second difference is that one and same material thing can be seen from many different angles.

A third is that my perceptions as of mountains and cats are easily corroborated by my companions.  Intersubjective agreement is  a major source of support of trust in the outer senses.

A fourth difference is that the occasional misperception is correctable by further perception.  “See that cat? It’s a bobcat!” “No it isn’t. Look more closely. It’s just a big ornery domestic cat.  Bobcats in the wild don’t wear collars.”

Ad (1). By contrast with outer sense perceptions, mystical deliverances are not repeatable ad libitum:  I cannot bring them about by my own effort.  They are not under the control of my will. Their phenomenological quality is that of something  gratuitous, granted, gifted.   And only rarely are they granted.  The rarity  of mystical deliverances aids and abets the thought that they are illusory.  Whereas material objects confront us every waking moment,  messages from the Unseen Order arrive only a few times in a lifetime. And when these putative messages do arrive, they don’t last long. This makes them easy to discount and dismiss.

Be not troubled! The message is vouchsafed and then it is over. I cannot request the messenger to repeat himself, let alone display his credentials.  The messenger does not appear, only his message.  The tests of outer perception (repeatability, corroborability by others, correctability) are not applicable.

Ad (2).  I can walk around a tree and see it from different sides.  The Interior Word cannot be ‘heard’ from different positions in space.

Ad (3).  You and I and indefinitely many others can view one and the same tree. Our perceptions are mutually corroborative.  But your Interior Word experience is numerically different from mine even if the content is the same, such as Be not troubled!

Ad(4) The transiency of the experience of the Interior Word renders irrelevant any correctability by further perception.

The question is now: are these undeniable differences reasons to discount or even dismiss interior locutions as divine revelations? I say No. The differences are what we should expect given the nature of mystical deliverances as compared to the nature of ordinary perceptual deliverances.  The fact that interior locutions are unrepeatable at will, had by few and by these few only rarely,  is no argument against their veridicality. To think otherwise is to judge them by an inappropriate standard, one that is ruled out by their very nature.

To conclude. Interior locutions that pass Teresa’s tests are evidence of God’s existence and his concern for us. Coercive evidence? Proof? No. But evidence sufficient to render reasonable our taking of such mystical deliverances as revelatory.  So go ahead, believe! What harm can it do? (Wittgenstein)  There is light enough for those who wish to see, and darkness enough for the contrary-minded. (Pascal)  Evidence enough for those who are disposed to believe, but not enough for those who are disposed to disbelieve.

There is a story told about Bertrand Russell.  Russell dies and enters the divine presence. God says, “Why didn’t you believe in me?” “Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence!”

I’d say that Lord Russell was constitutionally indisposed to believe.  Some of us, however, are so disposed. It is a further question whether this disposition to believe is itself a divine gift.  Whether or not it is, you are within your epistemic/doxastic rights to believe that it is.

Political Posts and Substack Articles

For my polemical offerings, mainly on political topics,  go to my Facebook  page.  Essays of a calmer and more philosophical sort on a wider range of topics can be found at my Substack site.  Here is my latest Substack upload, which is less calm and detached than most.  Things are heating up here and elsewhere in the world.   Who could be bored?

This, the mother site, MavPhil Gen IV, will feature more technical writing.  But, per usual, there will be overlap, repetition, and some cross-posting. As for repetition, repetitio est mater studiorum.