Author: Bill Vallicella

Third Parties: Discussion Societies in Political Drag

A so-called 'third party' is any party in U. S. politics other than the Democrats and the Republicans.  There are many third parties. My thesis is that third parties are discussion societies in political drag.  Corollary to that is my claim that anyone who has anything to do with a third party thereby demonstrates ignorance as to the nature of the political. (Recent possible exception: the Reform Party when it backed Ross Perot.)

Politics is not theoretical; it is practical. There is political theory, of course, and it divides into political science (empirical and non-normative) and political philosophy (normative). But politics is neither of the two. It is praxis, not theoria. The political life is a form of the vita activa, not of the vita contemplativa. Here is a working definition of 'political activity.'  

Political activity is human activity in concert with like-minded others in pursuit of governmental power for the purpose of implementing programs and policies contributory to the common worldly good or the worldly good of those the party represents.

Now the vast majority of third parties have no chance of coming to power. It follows that those who vote for third-party candidates are almost in every instance wasting their vote.  These voters don't understand the nature of the political as above defined.

Some vote third-party to 'make a statement' or to 'lodge a protest.' But these gestures are futile. No one gives a damn about Joe Blow's 'statement' or 'protest' or would even be aware of them.  Consider the American Solidarity Party: 

Writing for First Things in July 2016, David McPherson, assistant professor of philosophy at Creighton University, urged voting for the ASP ticket as “a protest vote against a system that presents us with such poor choices.” Moreover, by supporting the ASP, he argued, “‘a man [sets] an example,’ so that the idea of human solidarity, based on the equal dignity of all human beings, may not die away.”

The sentiment is noble, but the proposed course is impractical. Politics is a practical game! It is not about having the right views. That does no good unless one can implement them. And only a fool lets the best become the enemy of the good. Politics is a matter of better or worse, not perfect or imperfect.  It is about accomplishing something in the extant suboptimal circumstances.

So what should you do if you are a Libertarian, or rather 'Losertarian'?  Do what Ron Paul did: become a Republican and try to push that stodgy bunch in a more libertarian direction.  Similarly with ASP members. Stop wasting your time and become Republicans. Try to inject some subsidiarist ideas into the mix.

In 2020, ASP members ought to vote for Trump, and not abstain. It is folly to believe in 'political equivalentism' as between Left and Right in the present constellation of circumstances  here in the States.

Don't confuse a discussion society with a political party!

Neither Angel nor Beast

Blaise Pascal, Pensées #329:

Man is neither angel nor beast; and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the beast.

The first half of the thought is unexceptionable: man is indeed neither angel nor beast, but, amphibious as he is between matter and spirit, a hybrid and a riddle to himself.

The second half of Pascal's thought, however, is unfair to the beasts. No beast can act the beast the way a man can. No beast is bestial in the way a man can be bestial. The difference is that while the beast acts according to his nature, man freely degrades himself contrary to his nature. Having done so, he allows his freely indulged passions to suborn his intellect: he constructs elaborate rationalizations for his self-degradation.

It is not our animality that corrupts us but our free misuse of our animality, a misuse that derives from our spirituality.

Only a spiritual being can be bestial.

Pascal wth dates

If it is all just a tale told by an idiot . . .

. . .why begrudge ordinary folk their retreat into the warm bosom of  average everydayness (Heidegger's durchschnittliche Alltaeglichkeit) with its vapid socializing?  I do not begrudge them, nor do I try to change them. But there is something base and contemptible about a life without questioning and seeking, a life sunk in divertissement.

Here is something Pascal and Nietzsche can agree on — despite their wildly different conclusions.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book One, Section Two (tr. Kaufmann):

. . . to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors [discordant concord of things: Horace, Epistles, I.12.19] and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing — this is what I feel to be contemptible . . . .

An Unarmed Man

An unarmed man is a defensively naked man.

Now I defend your right to go around (defensively) naked, but only on condition that you defend, or at least not interfere with, my right to go around 'clothed.'

……………………….

Facebook comment:

Paraphrasing Machiavelli: Why should a man who is wrong pay any attention at all to a man who is right, and not armed?

Just so. In the world as it is, appeals to what is right carry no weight unless backed by might.  Suppose you are hiking in the wild. You come across a girl being raped by some brute. If you are unarmed, all you can do is appeal to the brute's conscience. "Sir, don't you see that what you are doing is both morally and legally impermissible? Please stop!" If, on the other hand, you are armed, then then you have the means to intervene effectively should you decide to do so. Whether you should intervene is a difficult decision that depends on the exact circumstances. I am making just one very simple and indisputable point: an unarmed man lacks the means to defend himself or anyone else.

Leftists Regularly Abuse Language: ‘Gun Buy Back’

The expression 'gun buy-back' as used by Kamala Harris and other leftists makes no sense. If I sell you something, I am free to attempt to buy it back from you, and you are free to refuse to sell it to me. But I didn't buy my guns from the government, but from reputable gun dealers in compliance with all the Federal and state and local regulations. So the government can't buy them back from me. That is ruled out by the very sense of 'gun buy back.'

Furthermore, if the dealer wants to buy back my gun, I am free to say No. But I am not free (in the same sense) to say No to the government when they try to confiscate my firearms. 

'Federal gun buy-back' is an obfuscatory phrase designed to confuse and trick the populace. In plain English, it amounts to COERCIVE CONFISCATION with monetary compensation.

When I call leftists moral scum, part of what I mean is that they misuse language to trick and confuse people. Decent folk don't do that. They say what they mean, and they mean what they say.

Leftists are stealth ideologues. They don't say what they mean, and what they mean is not what they say.

If they were intellectually honest, that would be one fewer reason for people to buy guns.

Beware of Cranks

It starts like this:

The four impossible “problems of antiquity”—trisecting an angle, doubling the cube, constructing every regular polygon, and squaring the circle—are catnip for mathematical cranks. Every mathematician who has email has received letters from crackpots claiming to have solved these problems. They are so elementary to state that nonmathematicians are unable to resist. Unfortunately, some think they have succeeded—and refuse to listen to arguments that they are wrong.

Mathematics is not unique in drawing out charlatans and kooks, of course. Physicists have their perpetual-motion inventors, historians their Holocaust deniers, physicians their homeopathic medicine proponents, public health officials their anti-vaccinators, and so on. We have had hundreds of years of alchemists, flat earthers, seekers of the elixir of life, proponents of ESP, and conspiracy theorists who have doubted the moon landing and questioned the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Troost_mathematicians

Would Naturalism Make Life Easier?

If only naturalism were unmistakably and irrefutably true! A burden would be lifted: no God, no soul, no personal survival of death, an assured exit from the wheel of becoming, no fear of being judged for one’s actions. One could have a good time with a good conscience, Hefner-style. (Or one could have a murderous time like a Saddam or a Stalin.) There would be no nagging sense that one’s self-indulgent behavior might exclude one from a greater good and a higher life. If this is all there is, one could rest easy like Nietzsche’s Last Man who has "his little pleasure for the day and his little pleasure for the night."

If one knew that one were just a complex physical system, one could blow one’s brains out, fully assured that that would be the end, thus implementing an idiosyncratic understanding of "When the going gets tough, the tough get going."

Some atheists psychologize theists thusly: "You believe out of a need for comforting illusions, illusions that pander to your petty ego by promising its perpetuation." But that table can be turned: "You atheists believe as you do so as to rest easy in this life with no demands upon you except the ones that you yourself impose." Psychologizers can be psychologized just as bullshitters can be bullshat – whence it follows that not much is to be expected from either procedure.

Am I perhaps falsely assuming that a naturalist must be a moral slacker, beholden to no moral demand? Does it follow that the naturalist cannot be an idealist, cannot live and sacrifice for high and choice-worthy ideals? Well, he can try to be an idealist, and many naturalists are idealists, and as a matter of plain fact many naturalists are morally decent people, and indeed some of them are morally better people than some anti-naturalists (some theists, for example) — but what justification could these naturalists have for maintaining the ideals and holding the values that they do maintain and hold?

Where do these ideals come from and what validates them if, at ontological bottom, it is all just "atoms in the void"? And why ought we live up to them? Where does the oughtness, the deontic pull, if you will, come from? If ideals are mere projections, whether individually or collectively, then they have precisely no ontological backing that we are bound to take seriously.

The truth may be this. People who hold a naturalistic view and deny any purpose beyond the purposes that we individually and collectively project, and yet experience their lives as meaningful and purposeful, may simply not appreciate the practical consequences of their own theory. It may be that they have not existentially appropriated or properly internalized their theory. They don't appreciate that their doctrine implies that their lives are objectively meaningless, that their moral seriousness is misguided, that their values are without backing.  They are running on the fumes of a moral tradition whose theoretical underpinning they have rejected.

If that is right, then their theory contradicts their practice, but since they either do not fully understand their theory, or do not try to live it, the contradiction remains hidden from them. If they became transparent to themselves, they would become nihilists, not necessarily in the raging punk sort of way, but in the happy-faced manner of Nietzsche's Last Man.

Unconditional Forgiveness

Is there such a thing as unconditional forgiveness? I doubt it. But perhaps someone can supply a clear example of it. 

Suppose you take money from my wallet without my permission. I catch you at it and express my moral objection. You give me back my money and apologize for having taken it. I forgive you. I forgive you, but only because you have made restitution and have apologized. For I might not have forgiven you: I might have told you to go to hell and get out of my life for good.

By forgiving you, I freely abandon the justified negative attitude toward you that resulted from your bad behavior. This works a salutary change in me, but it also does you good, for now you are restored to my good graces and our mutual relations become once again amicable.

The example just given suggests two things about forgiveness.

First, it suggests that forgiveness is conditional in nature. It suggests that a necessary condition of an act's being an act of forgiveness is that the malefactor admit wrongdoing, show some remorse, and make amends in some way or other, by restitution, paying a fine, serving time in jail, or in some other way. There is forgiveness only if there is sincere admission of guilt and/or an evening of the scales of justice.

Second, it suggests that forgiveness is morally permissible only if the malefactor sincerely admits guilt and makes amends in some way or another. That is, one ought not forgive those who refuse to admit guilt, etc. For it is an offense against justice if I let you get away with your wrongdoing and award you the benefit of my forgiveness for nothing. When Bill Clinton, exercising his presidential power of pardon, pardoned Marc Rich, that was an affront to justice and in a two-fold way. Rich got away with his wrongdoing, and it was unfair to similar others who did not get away with their similar wrongdoing. Of course, what Clinton did was LEGAL, but the legal and the moral are two and not one.

My thesis, then, is that genuine forgiveness is conditional in its being and in its justifiability.

Leftist Omni-Politicization

For the Left, everything is either political or to be politicized, including that which is non-political. Take this to its logical extreme and you end up with 'woke' mathematics. This reductio ad absurdum will cause a sane person to reject the premise. The sane will point out that some things, by their very nature, cannot be politicized. There is nothing political about the Poisson distribution or Rolle's theorem.

Will the leftist back off? Hell no, he will deny that anything has a nature, and affirm that everything is subject to social construction. For example, a typical leftist will state that a conservative black is a traitor to his race. Now that makes no sense. 'Traitor' is a political notion; 'race' is not. Race is not like political affiliation. You can quit your party, and if you are a Democrat you should; you can't, however, quit your race. Not even Rachel Dolezal could pull it off.

Being a leftist, however, means that you don't have to make sense. Herewith, a case of 'leftist privilege',' to give it a name.

The Differences between Me and You

I'm sensitive, you're touchy.  I'm firm,  you are pigheaded.  Frugality in me is cheapness in you.  I am open-minded, you are empty-headed.  I am careful, you are obsessive.  I am courageous while you are as reckless as a Kennedy.  I am polite but you are obsequious.  My speech is soothing, yours is unctuous.  I am earthy and brimming with vitality while you are crude and bestial.  I'm alive to necessary distinctions; you are a bloody hairsplitter.  I'm conservative, you're reactionary.  I know the human heart, but you are a misanthrope.  I love and honor my wife while you are uxorious.  I am focused; you are monomaniacal.

In me there is commitment, in you fanaticism.  I'm a peacemaker, you're an appeaser.  I'm spontaneous, you're just undisciplined.  I'm neat and clean; you are fastidious.  In me there is wit and style, in you mere preciosity.  I know the value of a dollar while you are just a miser.  I cross the Rubicons of life with resoluteness while you are a fool who burns his bridges behind him.  I do not hide my masculinity, but you flaunt yours.  I save, you hoard.  I am reserved, you are shy.  I invest, you gamble.  I am a lover of solitude, you are a recluse.

I have a hearty appetite; you are a glutton.  A civilized man, I enjoy an occasional drink; you, however, must teetotal to avoid becoming a drunkard.  I'm witty and urbane, you are precious.  I am bucolic, you are rustic.  I'm original, you are idiosyncratic. I am principled, you are doctrinaire.  I am precise, you are pedantic.

And those are just some of the differences between me and you.