Is there any question Haiti is a s***hole? Who’s offended by that? If it wasn’t a s***hole it wouldn’t be one of the most prominent recipients of American charity aid on Planet Earth. And it isn’t like this country has ignored Haiti — we’ve been trying to lift it out of s***hole status for more than a century, with absolutely no result whatever. In 1910, President William Howard Taft granted Haiti a large loan in hopes that Haiti could pay off its staggering international debt and therefore achieve a larger measure of independence from Europe. The result? Haiti defaulted and U.S. tax dollars were poured into a bottomless pit.
[. . .]
The open-borders crowd doesn’t want to talk about that, though, and it wants to call you racist if you’re opposed to a deluge of immigrants from the worst places on earth. That’s why Trump’s “s***holes” objection is big news rather than the fact there are so-called political leaders who can’t agree to reorient our immigration policy toward taking people who can successfully assimilate here.
Between the two, the crude man who tells the truth and looks out for his own citizens is preferable to the genteel man who sells us out for cheap labor or ballot-box fuel for a political machine. If Trump is the former, so be it.
Exactly right. The career politician is concerned primarily about his career and the power, perquisites, and pelf it provides. Despite what he says, the typical Republican is not primarily concerned about the welfare of the country. So he talks and talks, but never gets anything done, as if politics is endless gentlemanly discourse and nothing more. Well, talk is cheap and it allows the evasion of hard decisions.
Relevant is the following quotation from Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, tr. George Schwab, University of Chicago Press, 1985:
According to Donoso Cortés, it was characteristic of bourgeois liberalism not to decide in this battle but to begin a discussion. He straightforwardly defined the bourgeoisie as a “discussing class,” una clasa discutidora. It has thus been sentenced. This definition contains the class characteristic of wanting to evade the decision. A class that shifts all political activity onto the plane of conversation in the press and in parliament is no match for social conflict. (59)
Trump is rude, crude, devoid of gravitas, self-absorbed, and given to exaggeration. He has orange hair. A statement he once made suggests that he is tolerant of pussy-grabbing. But so what given that he understands and threatens to act upon the following:
1) There is no right to immigrate.
2) Immigration must be to the benefit of the host country.
3) There is a distinction between legal and illegal immigration, and the latter must be severely curtailed if it cannot be stopped entirely.
4) Potential immigrants must share the values of the host country and respect its culture.
5) Potential immigrants must be assimilable and willing to assimilate.
6) With respect to immigration to the USA, preference ought to be given to potential immigrants from Ireland and Norway, say, rather than from Haiti, say.
No Democrat really believes (as opposed to insincerely giving verbal assent to) all or even most of the above, and few Republicans would be willing to act upon these propositions.
This is why Trump is our last chance. If he caves, then it's all over.
This is the sixth in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). We are now in Chapter 5. I will need to proceed slowly through this rich and detailed chapter. There is a lot to learn from it. The entry covers pp. 92-101.
Does Death Release Us From the Human Predicament?
Logically prior questions: Is the human condition a predicament? And what does this mean?
Benatar holds that the human condition is a predicament. I agree. But it depends on what exactly a predicament is. I would define a predicament as an unsatisfactory state of affairs that calls for some sort of solution or amelioration or redemption or salvation or escape. I would add, however, that the solution cannot be easy or trivial, but also not impossible. Thus I do not build insolubility into my definition of 'predicament.' Call mine the weak sense of 'predicament.' This seems at first to accord with Benatar's understanding of the term. He tells us that "Real predicaments . . . are those in which there is no easy solution." (94, emphasis added.) 'No easy solution' conversationally implies that there might be a hard solution.
But he also speaks of 'the intractability of real predicaments, of which the human predicament may well be the paradigmatic example." (94) If our predicament is intractable, then it is insoluble. I suspect that this is what Benatar really holds. Call this the strong sense of 'predicament.' Accordingly, he holds, not that our predicament is difficult of solution, but that it is insoluble, and thus that a solution is impossible.
If so, then death, which he takes to be total annihilation of the person, is no solution and "only deepens the predicament." (94) This is a curiously counter-intuitive claim. If life is as objectively bad as Benatar says it is, then one might naturally see death not as a Grim Reaper, but as a Benign Releaser. One might think that if life is bad, then death must be at least instrumentally good insofar as it puts an end to suffering. Benatar's view, however, is that "death is no deliverance from the human predicament, but a further feature of it." (96)
How is that for a deeply pessimistic view? We are caught in an existential vise, squeezed between life which is bad and death which is also bad. Everyone alive will die. While alive we are in a bad way. When dead we are also in a bad way. There is no escape for those who have had the misfortune of being born. So being born is bad twice over: because life is bad and being dead is as well.
Benatar versus Silenus
Some confuse Benatar's attitude toward death with that of Silenus.
Silenus holds that death is not an evil. Death is not an evil because it removes us from a condition which on balance is not good, a condition which on balance is worse than nonexistence. This, the wisdom of Silenus, if wisdom it is, is reported by Sophocles (Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 1244 ff.) and quoted by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, section 3:
There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: "O wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is — to die soon."
Benatar agrees with the first sentence, but not the second. For if dying and being dead are bad, then there is nothing good about dying sooner rather than later.
But Is Death Bad?
To be precise, the question is whether death is bad for the person who dies. If your child dies, then that is bad for you; the question, however, is whether it is bad for the child. And note that by 'death' we mean the 'state' of being dead, not the process of dying. There is no question but that dying, with its miseries and indignities, is bad for many. The real question, however, is whether you are in a bad way after you have finished dying. And to reiterate the obvious, Benatar is a mortalist who assumes that physical death is the annihilation of the person.
The Epicurean Challenge in its Hedonistic Form
Benatar maintains that death does not release us from the objectively bad human predicament because "death is an evil [a bad thing] and thus part of the human predicament." (110) Death is no escape, but part of the problem. But then he faces the arguments of Epicurus and his followers according to which death is not bad. If Epicurus and Co. are right, then, even if life is objectively bad for all, there is a Way Out, there is a solution to our predicament. The first Epicureasn argument to consider invokes a hedonistic premise.
When I am dead I won't be conscious of anything: I won't sense or feel anything. I won't feel pleasure or pain or be aware of being dead. So how can being dead be bad? This assumes that conscious states alone, or what Benatar calls "feelings," are intrinsically good or bad. The argument, which is close to what the historical Epicurus maintains, is this:
Hedonism: Only conscious states are intrinsically either good or bad states. Mortalism: No dead person is in a conscious state. Therefore No dead person is in an intrinsically bad state.
The soundness of the argument may be doubted since the hedonistic premise is not self-evident. It implies that nothing is bad for a person of which he is not aware. Suppose your spouse cheats on you but you never find out. Intuitively, you have been wronged even if you remain forever in the dark about it and thus never have any negative feelings about it. Benatar:
It seems that your spouse's dalliances are bad for you even though they do not lead to any bad feelings in you. If that is so, then perhaps death can be bad for the person who dies even though it leads to no bad feelings. (99)
The hedonist might respond by saying that one could become aware of one's spouse's infidelity and come to feel negatively about it but one could not come to feel negatively about being dead. Or the hedonist might just insist on his premise. But suppose you do become aware of your spouse's infidelity and come to feel negatively about it. Do you have negative feelings because it is bad to be betrayed? Or is it bad to be betrayed because of the negative feelings?
Intuitively, what makes the betrayal bad is not the negative feeling elicited when and if the betrayal is discovered. The betrayal is intrinsically bad in and of itself. What justified the bad feelings is the underlying fact of the betrayal which is bad in itself whether or not it causes bad feeling when discovered.
If this is right, then hedonism is not the correct account of good/bad. If so, "negative feelings are not the the only things that are intrinsically bad." (100) And if this is right, then the Epicurean argument in its hedonist form is no refutation of Benatar. I think we should agree that the argument in its hedonist form is not compelling.
A bum knee sent me to the hot tub yesterday afternoon for a long soak. There I struck up a conversation with a 20-year-old grandson of a neighbor. He hails from Minnesota like seemingly half of the people I meet here this time of year. "Which town?," I asked. "Red Wing" was the reply. And then I remembered the old Dylan tune, "The Walls of Red Wing," from his topical/protest period, about a boys' reform school. The kid knew about the correctional facility at Red Wing, and he had heard of Bob Dylan. But I knew that Dylan could not be a profitable topic of conversation, popular music appreciation being a generational thing.
So we turned to hiking. He wanted to climb The Flatiron but his grandmother said, "not on my watch." The wiry, fit kid could easily have negotiated it. So I recommended Hieroglyphic Canyon and Fremont Saddle, hikes to which his overly protective granny could have no rational objection.
Music is a generational thing, or at least popular music is. But such pursuits as hiking, backpacking, hunting, and rafting bring the men of different generations together. The old philosopher and the young adventurer came away from their encounter satisfied.
Here is Joan Baez' angel-throated rendition, and here is that of the man himself. Here I am in Peralta Canyon on the descent from Fremont Saddle:
“Rape is a crime, but trying to seduce someone, even persistently or cack-handedly, is not – nor is men being gentlemanly a macho attack,” said the letter published in the newspaper Le Monde.
I'm with Catherine Deneuve and Christina Hoff Sommers on this one. Real women know how to handle obnoxious men: with a stern warning or a slap across the face. They don't go crying to their feminist mommies. And real men accept the rebuke.
The Left has lost its collective mind (hive mind?) on this as on so many other issues. You are one stupid and/or vile leftist if you cannot or will not distinguish among: a bit of old-fashioned gallantry, a risqué joke, the use of an offensive term such as 'broad,' a pat on the derriere, a Frankenian ass grab, a Weinsteinian manipulation, a full-on Clintonian sexual assault, and rape.
To conflate all of these behaviors under the umbrella 'sexually inappriopriate' shows the typical liberal/left incapacity to draw necessary distinctions as well as an inappropriate use of 'inappropriate.'
Good people are even better in small doses. Enjoy their quality in moderation for best results. If familiarity breeds contempt, reserve builds respect.
"Study everything, join nothing." I am sometimes asked for examples. Here are some from Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary under the entry Regalia. (Borrowed from Gilleland the Erudite):
. . . Knights of Adam; Visionaries of Detectable Bosh; the Ancient Order of Modern Troglodytes; the League of Holy Humbug; the Golden Phalanx of Phalangers; the Genteel Society of Expurgated Hoodlums; the Mystic Alliances of Gorgeous Regalians; Knights and Ladies of the Yellow Dog; the Oriental Order of Sons of the West; the Blatherhood of Insufferable Stuff; Warriors of the Long Bow; Guardians of the Great Horn Spoon; the Band of Brutes; the Impenitent Order of Wife-Beaters; the Sublime Legion of Flamboyant Conspicuants; Worshipers at the Electroplated Shrine; Shining Inaccessibles; Fee-Faw-Fummers of the Inimitable Grip; Jannissaries of the Broad-Blown Peacock; Plumed Increscencies of the Magic Temple; the Grand Cabal of Able-Bodied Sedentarians; Associated Deities of the Butter Trade; the Garden of Galoots; the Affectionate Fraternity of Men Similarly Warted; the Flashing Astonishers; Ladies of Horror; Cooperative Association for Breaking into the Spotlight; Dukes of Eden; Disciples Militant of the Hidden Faith; Knights-Champions of the Domestic Dog; the Holy Gregarians; the Resolute Optimists; the Ancient Sodality of Inhospitable Hogs; Associated Sovereigns of Mendacity; Dukes-Guardian of the Mystic Cess-Pool; the Society for Prevention of Prevalence; Kings of Drink; Polite Federation of Gents-Consequential; the Mysterious Order of the Undecipherable Scroll; Uniformed Rank of Lousy Cats; Monarchs of Worth and Hunger; Sons of the South Star; Prelates of the Tub-and-Sword.
I hereby nominate Hillary Clinton for membership in Associated Sovereigns of Mendacity and Harvey Weinstein for The Ancient Sodality of Inhospitable Hogs.
As for myself, I would not join any club that would have me as a member, to cop a line from Groucho Marx.
A lengthy podcast. (HTs: Paolo Juarez, Paul Craddick, Karl White, et al.)
I haven't listened to the whole thing, but I have heard enough to know that Professor Peterson is out beyond his depth and no match for the super-sharp Benatar.
My ongoing series on Benatar's latest book is here.
By a defense of Benatar, I do not mean a defense of his deeply pessimistic and anti-natalist views, views to which I do not subscribe. I mean a defense of the courageous practice of unrestrained philosophical inquiry, inquiry that follows the arguments where they lead, even if they issue in conclusions that make people extremely uncomfortable and are sure to bring obloquy upon the philosopher who proposes them.
The hit piece is entitled The 'Wisdom' of Silenus. It bears no author's name and looks to be something like an editorial. The view of Silenus is easily summarized:
Best of all for humans is never to have been born; second best is to die soon.
We should first note that while Benatar subscribes to the first independent clause, he does not embrace the second. One might think that if life is bad, then death must be at least instrumentally good insofar as it puts an end to suffering. Benatar's view, however, is that "death is no deliverance from the human predicament, but a further feature of it." (The Human Predicament, Oxford UP, 2017, 96)
Benatar outdoes Silenus in pessimism. We are caught in an existential vise, squeezed between life which is bad and death which is also bad. Everyone alive will die. While alive we are in a bad way. When dead we are also in a bad way, Epicurus notwithstanding. There is no escape for those who have had the misfortune of being born. So being born is a misfortune twice over: because life is bad and because being dead is bad.
My first point, then, is that the NC author wrongly assimilates Benatar to Silenus. But why should that bother someone who thinks it acceptable to criticize a book he has not read? I have no problem with someone who dismisses a book unread. My problem is with someone who publishes an article attacking a book he hasn't read.
. . . apart from professional pessimists like Nietzsche’s mentor Arthur Schopenhauer, most people are rightly repelled by this so-called wisdom of Silenus. They understand that life is an inestimable gift, the denial of which is part folly, part obscenity. We said “most people.” There are exceptions. Suicide bombers, disturbed teenagers, and of course certain grandstanding academics. Take Professor David Benatar, head of the department of philosophy at the University of Cape Town. In 2006, Oxford University Press . . . published Professor Benatar’s Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. [. . .] “The central idea of this book,” we read on the first page of its introduction, “is that coming into existence is always a serious harm.”
Understandably repelled, but "rightly repelled"? How does the author know that? How does he know that "life is an inestimable gift"? If life is a gift,then it has to have a donor, and who might that be, God? I'm a theist myself, but surely the existence of God is not self-evident to one whose critical faculties are in good working order. If life is a gift of an all-good God, why is life so horrible for so many in so many ways? Of course there is goodness and beauty in the world as well.
I should think that an intellectually honest person would admit that it is just not clear whether life is an "inestimable gift" or "a business that doesn't cover its costs." (Schopenhauer) Such a person would admit that it is an open question and if he were inquisitive he would want to examine the arguments on either side. But not our NC author who is content to psychologize and ridicule and dogmatize in a manner depressingly ideological but most unphilosophical.
One of the comments on this book at Amazon.com complains that people have been rejecting the book without reading it or arguing against Professor Benatar’s position. Doubtless there is plenty to argue with, not to say ridicule, in Better Never to Have Been. One might start by meditating on what words like “harm” and “better” might mean in the world according to Benatar. It is sobering to contemplate what logical and existential armageddon had to have occurred in order for something like this book to have been written. Still, we believe people are right to take that high road and reject the book without engaging its argument. To quote Nietzsche again, you do not refute a disease: you might cure it, quarantine it, or in some cases ignore it altogether. You don’t argue with it. Reason is profitably employed only among the reasonable. (Emphasis added.)
The irony here is that the NC author is using Nietzsche of all people to clobber Benatar. Assuming one thinks it acceptable to engage in quarantine and prohibition, is there any Western philosopher more deserving of quarantine and inclusion on the index librorum prohibitorum? Has our author ever read Nietzsche's The Anti-Christ? If you do not refute a disease, you also do not invoke the product of a diseased mind to dismiss as diseased the work of some other thinker.
As for rationality, Benatar is a paragon of rationality compared to Nietzsche who rants and raves and forwards incoherent views. For example, his perspectivism about truth collapses into an elimination of truth.
Dr. Johnson had the right idea when he employed the pedal expedient against Bishop Berkeley’s doctrine of universal hallucination. Something similar should be employed in the case of Professor Benatar’s Lemmings First doctrine of human fatuousness.
This is the worst kind of pseudo-philosophical journalistic cleverness and name-dropping. It shows a thorough lack of understanding of Berkeley's idealism. Berkeley was not an eliminativist about material objects. He did not maintain that rocks and trees do not exist; he did not question WHETHER they are; he offered an unusual ontological account of WHAT they are, namely ideas in the divine mind. If you know your Berkeley you know that what I just wrote is true and that the good bishop cannot be refuted by kicking a stone.
The gross facts, the Moorean facts, are not in dispute and philosophers are not in the business of denying them. I would have no trouble showing that even with respect to the characteristic theses of Zeno of Elea, F. H. Bradley, and J. E. M. McTaggart.
I do not deny that there are claims that are beneath refutation. It is not always wrong to dismiss a statement as false or even absurd without proof. Some claims are refutable by "the pedal expedient." Suppose you maintain that there are no pains, that no one ever feels pain. Without saying anything, I kick you in the shins with steel-tipped boots, or perhaps I kick you higher up. I will have brought home to you the plain falsehood of your claim. Or suppose sophomore Sam says that there is no truth. I would be fully within my epistemic rights to respond, 'Is that so?' and then walk away.
But Berkeley is not denying the self-evident. Neither is Benatar. It is not self-evident that human life is an "inestimable gift." That's not a datum but a theory. Maybe it's true. But maybe it isn't. Inquiry is therefore not only appropriate but necessary for those who seek rational justification for what they believe.
When James Burnham published The Suicide of the West in 1964, what he chiefly feared was the West’s lack of resolve to stand up to encroaching Communism. Quite right, too. Burnham was well endowed with what Henry James called the “imagination of disaster.” But we think that even Burnham might have been nonplussed by a Western intellectual who went beyond political capitulation to total existential surrender and whose proclamation of that gospel found a home at one of our greatest university presses. Even as we were absorbing Professor Benatar’s repackaging of Silenus, we stumbled upon an article revealing that sun-drenched, life-loving Italy had become “the least happy” country in Europe. “It’s a country,” said Walter Veltroni, the mayor of Rome, “that has lost a little of its will for the future.” It’s also a country that has eagerly adopted the philosophy of Professor Benatar and Ms. Vernelli: Italy’s birth rate is an astonishing 1.23, among the lowest in Europe. This is “anti-natalism” with a vengeance.
This is disgusting tabloid stuff. First of all, Benatar is not repackaging Silenus. He is saying something different from Silenus, as we have already seen, and his books are chock-full of challenging arguments and distinctions. There is a lot to be learned from his discussions. I don't find his arguments compelling, but then no arguments in philosophy for substantive theses are compelling.
Second, our journalist subordinates the search for truth to ideology. I don't doubt that the West is under demographic threat. Anti-natalist doctrines, if taken seriously by enough people, will tend to weaken us overagainst the Muslims and others that aim to displace us. But the philosopher seeks the truth, whatever it is, whether it promotes our flourishing or not.
Finally, if one is going to urge the ignoring of Benatar because of the possible consequences of his views, then one should do the same with others including Herr Nietzsche. His views were input to the destructive ideology of National Socialism. (See Nietzsche and National Socialism) And then there is Karl Marx . . . .
This just in from Julien Combray who writes in reference to How Cold Is It?
So cold that exhibitionists were actually describing themselves!
Thanks for your mix of commentary, Bill. Your cogent thinking on a range of topics has served me well for a number of years. Happy New Year to you! Amor Fati!
Sincerely,
Julien Combray
A little Internet pokey-wokey reveals that Mr. Combray has published Sins of Judgment (October 2017) in New English Review. I recommend it to you.
Julien Combray works reluctantly for a French investment bank. He was educated in America and briefly considered a career in academia before abandoning the idea for no apparent reason. He writes on subjects of philosophy and western culture and can often be found taking two hour lunch breaks in cafes throughout London.
When I travelled in China, I saw not one pussy cat. But I had a Chinese student at CWRU who said that the Chinese eat anything with four legs except the kitchen table. And now I recall eating something in Wuhan that tasted like chicken but a tad gamier. Now North Korea is not China. But I understand there's a lot of hungry people in the Land of Little Rocket Man. That suggests that the following image is fake:
Answer here. Trigger Warning! Do not (Melissa) click on this link if you are a snowflake or otherwise p.c-whipped. Seriously politically incorrect content!
Weather is not the same as climate. We all know that. But some seem to think that any sort of weather is evidence for one sort of climate. Here. Just as all roads lead to Rome, all weathers lead to Global Warming.
Whittaker Chambers on the Third Movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony:
. . . that music was the moment at which Beethoven finally passed beyond the suffering of his life on earth and reached for the hand of God, as God reaches for the hand of Adam in Michaelangelo's vision of the creation. (Witness, p. 19)
Well, either the adagio movement of the 9th or the late piano sonatas, in particular, Opus 109, Opus 110, and Opus 111. To my ear, these late compositions are unsurpassed in depth and beauty.
Here is Alfred Brendel performing the Second Movement of Opus 111.
In these and a few other compositions of the great composers we are granted a glimpse of what music is capable of. Just as one will never appreciate the possibilities of genuine philosophy by reading positivist philistines such as David Stove, one will never appreciate the possibilities of great music and its power of speaking to what is deepest in us if one listens only to contemporary popular music.
