Author: Bill Vallicella

The Role of Politics in the Life of a Leftist

A  friend of mine is the principal partner in an  accounting firm.  He told me that when Trump won in 2024, one of the female CPAs in the firm, a Democrat but very good at her job, was so distraught that she had to take leave time.   We both found this passing strange*: had Trump lost, my conservative friend and I would not have been pleased, but we would have taken it in stride.  The CPA’s behavior is not atypical. We all know lefties who reacted similarly. Why is this? Here’s my theory.

Although leftism is not a religion, pace Dennis Prager and others who do not share my concern for precision in the use of words,  it substitutes for religion in the wholly secular psychic economy of leftists.  Because leftist politics is the most important thing in their lives, their “ultimate concern” to borrow a phrase from Paul Tillich, in the way that religion is the most important thing in the lives of the truly religious, leftists freak out when their candidates lose. The feel that they are losing everything, or at least the most important thing.  If the very meaning of your life is wrapped up in ‘progressive’ politics, and an uncouth America-first braggart of a billionaire,  a crude unclubbable gate-crasher, a crass self-promoter, a man with no class, wins all seven swing states and the popular vote to boot, your world comes crashing down. The degree of freak-out and world-collapse will of course vary from individual to individual. An extreme case is that of Rosie O’Donnell who self-deported to the Emerald Isle where she spends her days obsessing over the Orange Man. Poor Rosie thought the grass would be greener there; it turns out, however, that the legal weed she enjoyed in LaLaLand (Los Angeles)  was not to be had in Ireland.  “In 2008, O’Donnell said that she was not an alcoholic, and had temporarily given up alcohol to lose weight. She wrote on her blog: “‘Cause I was drinking too much, ’cause I didn’t want to any more, ’cause it is hard to lose weight when drinking, ’cause I can never have only one.”[177] She started drinking again following President Trump’s first election victory in 2016, revealing, “I was very, very depressed. I was overeating. I was overdrinking … I was so depressed.”[178]

My theory also helps explain why leftists are so vehement and unhinged (as witness Robert de Niro’s shameless histrionics) in their blind hatred of  Trump.  If politics is (or rather functions as) your religion, then, since religion presents to us saintly and divine beings such as Jesus Christ meek and mild*** for emulation, lefties thoughtlessly suppose that political figures should satisfy a similar need: they should be polite, conventionally nice people that our sons and daughter should be able to admire and look up to.  Leftists, most of then anyway,  want a POTUS who plays a quasi-religious role, something like a Sunday school teacher.  (And not just leftists; Never-Trumpers do as well.) Now the last such Sunday-school POTUS was James Earl Carter, and you recall what a disaster he was. A good man, a nice man, but a lousy POTUS. Wasn’t he involved hands-on with Habitat for Humanity?  Can you imagine Trump being so involved? He’s a builder, but not that kind of builder.

In sum, two main interconnected points:

A. For the secular left — and most leftists are secularists — politics plays in their lives the all-important roles that religion plays in the lives of the truly religious.  This explains why they get so excited about politics and why they are so crushed when their ‘progressivism’ suffers setbacks.

B.  And because progressive politics is (or rather functions as) their religion, lefties look to politics to satisfy their need for people to look up to and emulate.  Since Trump doesn’t fill the bill, they hate him mindlessly and won’t give him credit for the numerous great things he has done for the USA and indeed the whole world, where Midnight Hammer is an example of the latter.   He’s not a ‘nice man’ by cat lady standards.  He doesn’t look into the camera and smile like the fraudulent and phony Joey B or clown around like Kamala. He scowls. I call it the Scowl of Minerva.

__________________

* It’s an ersatz or substitute religion, where ‘ersatz’ and ‘substitute’ function as alienans adjectives. See here for more on such adjectives.

** The phrase “passing strange” originates from William Shakespeare’s Othello, where Desdemona describes Othello’s dramatic war stories as “strange, passing strange,” meaning extremely strange or very unusual.  In Early Modern English, “passing” functioned as an intensifier, equivalent to “exceedingly.” [AI-generated]

*** Agnus dei qui tollit peccata mundi. The lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.  Lambs are meek and mild.

Pray for Light or Pray for Faith?

I

One day in the ’90s, standing in my kitchen, I suddenly prayed, “Lord, give me light!” The ‘reply’ came just as suddenly, “The light comes later.” This is an example of an inner or interior locution. Grokipedia:

Interior locution is a concept in Christian mysticism, particularly within Catholic theology, referring to a supernatural form of private revelation in which a divine message or communication is received directly in the intellect or soul, without audible words, external sounds, or sensory involvement. This inner “voice” or infusion of knowledge is distinct from exterior locutions, which may be heard aloud by others, and from visions, which involve imaginative or corporeal imagery; instead, it operates purely on a spiritual level, often providing guidance, reassurance, or enlightenment during prayer or spiritual trials.

The above definition is accurate. How do I know? I have read the great mystics (Juan de la Cruz, Teresa de Avila et al., and the best of the commentators Augustin Poulain and Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, to mention just two. An article of mine on Poulain here.)

I hasten to point out that while the experiencing of an inner locution cannot be doubted, at least while it is occurring, one reasonably can and perhaps ought to doubt the source of the experience. I petitioned the Lord for light (knowledge, enlightenment, understanding),  and I ‘received’ an ‘answer.’ But from whom? From the Lord?  Which lord? Lord Krishna? Lord Jesus Christ? That it was Jesus  cannot be read off from the experience itself.  Such a reading goes beyond the phenomenology of the experience.  On another occasion, while in deep meditation, I ‘heard’ the locution, “I want to tear you apart.” Presumably that was not from Jesus Christ or any good denizen of the Unseen Order.  But neither does it follow that it was from a demonic agent. The experience qua experience is neutral on the question whether there are any demonic agents.  On a third occasion, during a solitary desert hike, pondering a certain course of action, the ‘message’ was: I am with you. As far as the phenomenology shows, that ‘message’ could have been from Christ or it could have been from a demon impersonating Christ or from the depths of my own psyche.

II

The above is preliminary to my title question. Spelled out, what I am asking myself is whether I should be praying for light (infused contemplation, verification of faith contents, objective certainty) or praying instead for a deepening of faith, and a strengthening of the will to go forward by faith,  That I pray at all shows that I have some faith. (Can you imagine Richard Dawkins or Galen Strawson or Daniel Dennett or David Stove  praying while they are or were healthy?  When Stove got sick and near death, his stridently cocksure atheistic convictions began to totter.)  Pondering the question of whether I should be praying for infused contemplation or for a deepening of faith while remaining (relatively speaking) ‘in the dark,’ I imagined a conversation between me and God.  What follows is of course not a report of an inner locution, but a made-up story.

I pray, “Give me light, Lord!” The Lord replies:

Look man, I’ve given you enough light in the form of what you call glimpses, vouchsafings, peeks behind the veil, intimations of Elsewhere. I’ve given you enough light on which to go forward.  The human predicament is probationary and penal.  You want it to be full of light. But part of your probation is to see if you can hold out in the dark. The light comes later!

Plato saw the world  for what it is: a speluncular chiaroscuro of light and dark, a shadowland in which substance is rarely descried but easily denied.  So now your test is to live by faith. To quote one of your favorite philosophers, “There is light enough for those who wish to see and darkness enough for the contrary-minded.” (Pascal)  Even men of far higher spiritual rank than you such as Augustine and Aquinas were permitted the visio mystica on rare occasions only. You yourself have written about the mysticism à deux of Augustine and his mother Monica when they shared the vision at Ostia.

And you know that monks in monasteries have spent long lives without experiencing infused contemplation. So settle down in the dark, listen, wait, and stop asking me for light. 

 

 

Life’s Fugacity

As we age, the passage of time seems to accelerate. This is a mere seeming since, if time passes at all, which itself may be a mere seeming, time presumably passes at a constant rate. When we are young, the evanescence of our lives does not strike us. But to us on the far side of middle age the fluxious fugacity of this life is all too apparent.

Why does time’s tempo seem to speed up as the years roll on?

Part of the explanation must be that there is less change and more stasis from decade to decade. Dramatic changes in body and mind and environment occur in the first two decades of life. You go from womb to world, and from helpless infant to cocky youth. Your horizon expands from the family circle to the wide world.

In the third decade, biological growth over with, one typically finishes one’s education and gets settled in a career. But there are still plenty of changes. From ages 20 to 30, I lived in about 15 different places in California, Massachusetts, Ohio, Austria, and Germany, studied at half a dozen universities, and worked as a guitar player, logger, tree planter, furniture mover, factory worker, mailman, taxi driver, exterminator, grave digger, and philosophy professor.

But from 30 to 40, I lived in only five different places with exactly one job, and from 40 to 50 in three places, and from age 50 to the present I have had exactly one permanent address. And it won’t be long before I have exactly one address that is permanent in the absolute as opposed to the relative sense.

Tempus? Fugit!

For the New Year

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book Four, #276, tr. Kaufmann:
For the new year. — I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought: hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year — which thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn to see more and more as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all and all and on the whole: someday I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.
Nietzsche found it very difficult to let looking away be his only negation.  And so will I.

The Infirmity of Reason versus the Certitude of Faith

Substack latest. Some thoughts on Pierre Bayle.

Reason is infirm in that it cannot establish anything definitively as regards the ultimate questions that most concern us. It cannot even prove that doubting is the way to truth, “that it is certain that we ought to be in doubt.” (Pyrrho entry, Bayle’s Dictionary, tr. Popkin, p. 205) But, pace Pierre Bayle, the merely subjective certitude of faith is no solution either! Recoiling from the labyrinth into which unaided human reason loses itself, Bayle writes:

The Mark of a Weakling

Plato puts the following words into the mouth of Simmias in The Phaedo:

It seems to me, Socrates . . . that to know anything certain about such things [as the immortality of the soul]  in this life is either impossible or exceedingly difficult, but to give up without completely testing the views on the subject and before you’re totally exhausted from examining them on every side is the mark of a weakling.

For we must accomplish one of the following: either learn the truth about this from someone else or find it out for ourselves, or if that’s impossible, at least catch the best most irrefutable human argument we can find and ride on it like a raft, sailing through life taking our chances on it, unless we can get safer, less dangerous passage on a securer vessel in the form of some divine explanation. (85c-85e, tr. Raymond Larson)

On Suspending Judgment Regarding the Big Questions

Does God exist? You can reasonably argue it both ways. The same goes for such other ‘big questions’ as whether there is personal survival of bodily death.  Now on many other issues where the arguments and evidential considerations  pro et contra are equally good and cancel out, it is reasonable to suspend judgment and unreasonable not to.  But not with respect to the big or ultimate questions. Or so I shall argue.   But first some terminological regimentation.

There are four different types of attitude one can take with respect to a proposition:  Accept, Reject, Suspend, Bracket.

To accept a proposition is to affirm it.  To reject a proposition is to deny it. One cannot on pain of embracing a contradiction accept and reject one and the same proposition.   LNC rules the discursive plane.

To suspend a proposition is to take no stance with respect to its truth or falsity, its ‘truth-value’ as the philosophers say.  It is neither to affirm it nor to deny it. One suspends judgment as to its truth-value. There is no doxastic commitment either by way of belief or disbelief.

What I am calling ‘bracketing’ is something different still. Consider the Trinitarian dogma,  “There is one God in three divine persons.”  Some will affirm, some deny, others suspend the proposition they take it to express; there is, however, a fourth possibility.

Here is a little speech someone might give.

“The Trinitarian sentence you uttered makes no sense; it is unintelligible, if not in itself then at least for me.  It strikes me as self-contradictory and thus expresses no definite thought or proposition. I cannot accept or reject since I do not know what I would be accepting or rejecting. For the same reason I cannot suspend: with respect to what proposition would I be suspending judgment?”

The fourth stance, bracketing, is a sort of suspension, but not with respect to truth-value but with respect to propositional sense. The sense of a declarative sentence (a sentence in the indicative mood) is the proposition it is used to express. And so the bracketing stance or attitude amounts to a suspension of commitment to there being a proposition the sentence expresses.

“I cannot evaluate a thought unless there is a thought to evaluate, and the Trinitarian sentence does not seem to me to express a thought.  The sentence, being self-contradictory, lacks a determinate propositional sense and therefore is unintelligible to me.”

That is surely a stance one can, and some do, take. Note that I mentioned the Trinity doctrine only as an example in order to explain bracketing.  The topic is not the Trinity. So please no comments on the coherence or incoherence of that doctrine.

With the above as background, I advance to my thesis.

THESIS: With respect to many propositions, both the theoretically rational  and the practically rational course is to suspend judgment; with respect to some propositions, however, it would be practically irrational to suspend judgment. It would be imprudent or pragmatically ill-advised. Among the latter: there is a God; the soul is immortal; we will be judged, rewarded and punished in the hereafter for some of what we have done and left undone here below. (I am presupposing a distinction between theoretical and practical (pragmatic, prudential) rationality.)

My point is that for beings  of our constitution it would be practically irrational and highly imprudent to suspend judgment on the questions of God and personal immortality. For if one did so one would not be likely to live here and now in such a way as to assure a positive post-mortem outcome.  After all, we do not know that the soul is immortal nor do we know that it is not. The questions are theoretically undecidable.

But man does not live by theory alone. We are not mere transcendental spectators but interested free agents, interested in the sense of embedded in real being. (inter esse) We have interests in this life and beyond it: we are concerned with our ultimate felicity, well-being, and continuance in being.

If we had no interests beyond this life, if we were pure spectators, we should suspend judgment on the ultimate questions and go back to the everyday and its proximate concerns.    That would be the reasonable thing to do — if we were pure spectators and the big questions were of merely theoretical interest.   Whether God and the soul are real or unreal would then be on a par with  whether the number of electrons in the universe is odd or even.  Since the latter question is theoretically undecidable, it would be practically irrational to waste any time on it.

This is essentially the attitude of the worldling when it comes to God and soul and the like. “Who knows?” “People say different things.” “The supposedly wisest among us have contradicted one another since time immemorial.” “Why waste time on this philosophy nonsense when you could be living to human scale by pursuing a profession useful to others, making money, buying a house, founding a family?” Remain true to the earth; make friends with the finite; don’t hanker after a hinter world; this world is all there is.

My thesis, however, is that while is is both theoretically and practically rational to suspend judgment on many questions, this does not hold for those  questions pertaining to our ultimate felicity and well-being. My thesis presupposes the real possibility of ultimate felicity and well-being.  And so, to appreciate my thesis you cannot have the mentality of a worldling. You have to have had the experience of the ultimate nullity  of the proximate concerns I mentioned. You must have the sense that this world and this life are ‘vanishing quantities.’ You have to have been struck and troubled by the transience of life and the impermanence of things. You have to take that troubling impermanence as an indicator of the relative (not absolute) unreality of this life.  You have to possess the Platonic sensibility.

Now I can’t argue you into that sensibility any more than you can argue me out of it. Argument comes too late. Or rather it comes too soon. What I mean is that argument and counter-argument disport upon the discursive plane which is foreground to the ultimate background, the Unseen Order.  What breaks the standoff for some of us is a glimpse into the  Transdiscursive, a peek behind the veil.  But only some have had the Glimpse. It is  a divine gift, a gratuitous granting ab extra.  Others will say that the Glimpse experience has zero noetic quality; it is something on the order of a Spinozistic  experientia vaga, or a random neuronal swerve, a ‘brain fart.’  There is no resolution to this dispute over noetic quality on the plane of theoretical reason. You will have to decide what you will believe and how you will live.

In sum:

You are violating no canon of theoretical or practical rationality if you decide to live as if God and the soul are real.  And since the questions are theoretically undecidable, you will decide either by an explicit act of will or willy-nilly (nolens volens) how you will live. The will comes into it. Why do I say you will decide? Because if you don’t decide, that non-decision amounts practically to a decision for the other side of the question.

The atheist and the mortalist who abstain from taking a stand  cannot help but take a stand, practically, though not theoretically, for atheism and mortalism.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia

I have only recently come to appreciate what a great song this Jackson Browne number from 1976 is. After the ‘sixties faded, I gave myself an education in classical and jazz and lost touch with the rock scene. The video presents the thoughtful lyrics.   The Gary U. S. Bonds cover from 1981 is also unbelievably good.

The Weight. Robertson sat down one day to write a song and peering into his Martin guitar read, “Martin Guitars, Nazareth, Pennslylvania.” This inspired the line, “I pulled into Nazareth, feelin’ about half-past dead.”

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. Nothing hippy-trippy or psychedelic about these ’60s musicians. Pure Americana served up by Canadians. Rooted, autochthonic.

I Shall Be Released. Their synergy benefited both the Bard and the Band. They helped him move farther from the mind and closer to the earth.

I post what I like, and I like what I post. It’s a nostalgia trip, and a generational thing. There’s no point in disputing taste or sensibility, or much of anything else. It’s Saturday night, punch the clock, pour yourself a stiff one, stop thinking, and FEEL!

Traveling Wilburys, End of Line, Extended Version

Who, Won’t Get Fooled Again. Lyrics!

Gary U. S. Bonds, From a Buick Six. Sorry, Bob, but not even you can touch this version.

Bob Dylan, It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes  a Train to Cry.  Cutting Edge Bootleg version.

Bob Dylan, Just Like a Woman.  This Cutting Edge take may be the best version, even with the mistakes.

Bob Dylan, Cold Irons Bound. The Bard never loses his touch. May he die with his boots on.

Bob Dylan, Corrina, Corrina. And you say he can’t sing in a conventional way?

Bob Seger, Old-Time Rock and Roll

But does it really “soothe the soul”? Is it supposed to?  For soul-soothing, I recommend the Adagio movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Adagio molto e cantabile.

The Flying Burrito Brothers, To Ramona.  A beautiful cover of a song from Dylan’s fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan.

YouTuber comment: “I’d hate to think where we would be without Mr. Zimmerman’s songwriting. So many covers done by so many great artists.” And I say that if it weren’t for Zimmi, the Great American Boomer Soundtrack would have a huge, gaping hole in it.

John Fogerty and the Blue Ridge Rangers, You’re the Reason

An able cover of the Bobby Edwards cross-over hit from 1961.

The Springfields, Silver Threads and Golden Needles

Dusty Springfield before she was Dusty Springfield.

Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Roving Gambler.  “Ramblin’ Charles Adnopoz” lacking the requisite resonance for a follower of Woody Guthrie, this Jewish son of a New York M.D. wisely changed his name.

Joan Baez, Rock Salt and Nails

The best rendition of the Utah Philips song..

On the banks of the river where the willows hang down
And the wild birds all warble with a low moaning sound
Down in the hollow where the waters run cold
It was there I first listened to the lies that you told

Now I lie on my bed and I see your sweet face
The past I remember time cannot erase
The letter you wrote me it was written in shame
And I know that your conscience still echos my name

Now the nights are so long, Lord sorrow runs deep
And nothing is worse than a night without sleep
I’ll walk out alone and look at the sky
Too empty to sing, too lonesome to cry

If the ladies was blackbirds and the ladies was thrushes
I’d lie there for hours in the chilly cold marshes
If the ladies was squirrel’s with high bushy tails
I’d fill up my shotgun with rock salt and nails

Patsy Cline, She’s Got You

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?”

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

Marlene Dietrich, Die Fesche Lola. ‘Fesche’ means something like smart, snazzy.

Ich bin die fesche Lola, der Liebling der Saison!
Ich hab’ ein Pianola zu Haus’ in mein’ Salon
Ich bin die fesche Lola, mich liebt ein jeder Mann
doch an mein Pianola, da laß ich keinen ran!

Kinks, Lola. From the days when ‘tranny’ meant transmission.

Marlene Dietrich, Muss I Denn

Elvis Presley, Wooden Heart 

Lotte Lenya, September Song

Lotte Lenya, Moon of Alabama

Doors, Alabama Song

Bette Midler, Mambo Italiano.  Video of Sophia Loren.

Does the ‘Fixity of Death’ Extend to Thinking?

I cannot repent after death, or make moral progress; can I make intellectual progress post-mortem?  Maybe Ed Feser can answer this question along Thomistic lines, assuming the question has a sense clear enough to answer. Aquinas takes no position on it, at least not in the sections of Summa Contra Gentiles where he discusses the will‘s fixity after death. See SCG, Book Four, sections 92-95.

Notes on Conscience

How explain conscience if the soul is a mere life-principle? To be alive is not the same as to have a conscience. There are plenty of living things that do not and cannot have a conscience, and there may be dead souls with a conscience.  But even if the property of being alive and the property of having a conscience were co-extensional they would not be the same property.

Each living thing has its own life that it naturally affirms and protects. Although life is ceaseless self-assertion and self-protection, conscience may demand self-denial to the point of sacrificing one’s life for others or for one’s cause. A curious life-principle it would be that would preside over the death of the soul-body composite of which it is the animating principle.

Conscience reveals the discrepancy between what I am and what I ought to be. The awareness of this gap and its concomitants such as regret, remorse, desire to do better, and so on, is not reasonably ascribed to a mere life-principle. Thought, too, like moral evaluation, goes well beyond what a mere life-principle could deliver.

Animation, cogitation, evaluation. A soul worth its salt ought to be adept at all three. Whether one and the same item or ‘principle’ can fill the bill is a topic that needs careful thought with deep attention to the researches of the twin titans of our tradition.

In the Interests of Prandial Harmony

Some of you will be at table with relatives today. Experientia docet: Occasions of putative conviviality can easily degenerate into nastiness. A prophylactic to consider is the avoidance of all talk of politics and religion. But to paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, What else is there to talk about? An exaggeration, no doubt, but God and Man in relation to the State does cover a lot of ground.

And so I cannot recommend that you bring up the recent behavior of Arizona senator Mark Kelly unless you and your relatives and friends are all of the same mind.

Random Jottings on the Day before Thanksgiving

Sehnsucht.  The far-off in time or space can arouse our longing for the  metaphysical Elsewhere. A lonely saguaro standing sentinel on a distant ridge . . . .

When I met him, I was young and he was younger. Now I am old and he is dead.  This life is too dream-like to be real, and too real to be a dream.

He died in a hospital bed, not with his boots on. “This is funny,” are said to have been Doc Holliday’s last words.

A race is not run all at once, but step by step. So too in life: it is lived day by day, hour by hour. This is a comforting truth.  Can you get through the next hour?

For my kind of life, she’s been the right kind of wife: tamquam alter idem.

It takes a spiritual being to affirm that spirit is nothing but an efflux of brain chemistry and that what is ultimately real is matter alone.

Can there be moral seriousness without some doctrine of immortality?  Yes? Are you serious?

Given that we are ineluctably both truth-seekers and moral strivers, could the world in itself be ultimately unintelligible and purposeless? If it is then man is no microcosm but a cosmic joke.

The ultimate joke would a joke without a teller.

If might makes right, then there is no right. To say that might makes right is to say that the notion of right is illusory.

If it won’t matter tomorrow, how much does it matter today? If it won’t exist tomorrow, how much does it exist today? Does existence come in degrees?

Is salvation of individuality or from individuality?  Christian versus Hindu views. If the former, it ought to  involve a transformation into a higher individuality and not a mere perpetuation of the petty earthly self.

Some friendships ought to be left in the boneyard of memory where they belong. “Let sleeping dogs lie.” But if the friendship was rooted in something deep, fruitful re-awakening may be possible.