Our contemporary media dreckmeisters apparently think that the purpose of art is to degrade sensibility, impede critical thinking, glorify scumbags, and rub our noses ever deeper into sex and violence. The liberal fetishization of freedom of expression without constraint or sense of responsibility is part of the problem. But I can't let a certain sort of libertarian or economic conservative off the hook. Their lust for profit is also involved.
What is is that characterizes contemporary media dreck? Among other things, the incessant presentation of defective human beings as if there are more of them than there are, and as if there is nothing at all wrong with their ways of life. Deviant behavior is presented as if it is mainstream and acceptable, if not desirable. And then lame justifications are provided for the presentation: 'this is what life is like now; we are simply telling it like it is.' It doesn't occur to the dreckmeisters that art might have an ennobling function.
The tendency of liberals and leftists is to think that any presentation of choice-worthy goals or admirable styles of life could only be hypocritical preaching. And to libs and lefties, nothing is worse than hypocrisy. Indeed, a good indicator of whether someone belongs to this class of the terminally benighted is whether the person obsesses over hypocrisy and thinks it the very worst thing in the world. See my category Hypocrisy for elaboration of this theme.
Leftist scum need to look in the mirror before blaming inanimate objects for violent behavior.
I am a foe of misquotation, misattribution, the retailing of unsourced quotations, the passing off of unchecked second-hand quotations, and sense-altering context suppression. Have I ever done any of these things? Probably. 'Suffering' as I do from cacoethes scribendi, it is a good bet that I have committed one or more of the above. But I try to avoid these 'sins.'
This morning I was reading from Karl Menninger, M.D., Whatever Became of Sin? (Hawthorn Books, 1973). On p. 156, I found this quotation:
Our youth today love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect for older people. Children nowadays are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.
At the bottom of the page there is a footnote that reads: "Socrates, circa 425 B. C. Quoted in Joel Fort, The Pleasure Seekers (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969)."
I was immediately skeptical of this 'quotation.' In part because I had never encountered the passage in the Platonic dialogues I have read, but also because the quotation is second-hand. So I took to the 'Net and found what appears to be a reputable site, Quote Investigator.
. . . was crafted by a student, Kenneth John Freeman, for his Cambridge dissertation published in 1907. Freeman did not claim that the passage under analysis was a direct quotation of anyone; instead, he was presenting his own summary of the complaints directed against young people in ancient times.
Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit appeared in 1955 two years before Jack Kerouac's On the Road. I never finished Gray Flannel, getting only 80 or so pages into it. It's a book as staid as the '50s, a tad boring, conventional, and forgettable in comparison to the hyper-romantic and heart-felt rush of the unforgettable On the Road. Since how 'beat' one is in part has to do with one's attitude towards money, which is not the same as one's possession or non-possession of it, I'll for now just pull some quotations from Horace and Sloan Wilson. The Horace quotations seem not to comport well with each other, but we can worry that bone on another occasion.
Quaerenda pecunia primum est; virtus post nummos. (Horace, Epistles I, 1, 53) Money is to be sought first of all; virtue after wealth. Or, loosely translated, cash before conscience.
Vilius argentum est auro virtutibus aurum. (Horace, Epistles I, 1, 52). Silver is less valuable than gold, gold less valuable than virtue.
The next morning, Tom put on his best suit, a freshly cleaned and pressed gray flannel. On his way to work he stopped in Grand Central Station to buy a clean white handkerchief and to have his shoes shined. During his luncheon hour he set out to visit the United Broadcasting Corporation. As he walked across Rockefeller Plaza, he thought wryly of the days when he and Betsy had assured each other that money didn't matter. They had told each other that when they were married, before the war, and during the war they had repeated it in long letters. "The important thing is to find a kind of work you really like, and something that is useful," Betsy had written him. "The money doesn't matter."
The hell with that, he thought. The real trouble is that up to now we've been kidding ourselves. We might as well admit that what we want is a big house and a new car and trips to Florida in the winter, and plenty of life insurance. When you come right down to it, a man with three children has no damn right to say that money doesn't matter. (The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Simon and Shuster, 1955, pp. 9-10)
I have a little disagreement going with the Dark Ostrich. He asserts, "Relative poverty is all about status." In an earlier entry, I quoted him as maintaining that
We are born with a natural inequality which soon turns into economic inequality. The reason it turns into economic inequality, I believe, is that humans have a natural desire for status.
I replied,
Yes, we are naturally unequal, both as individuals and as groups, and this inequality results in economic inequality. But I wouldn't explain this in terms of the desire for status. Status is relative social standing, and depends on how one appears in the eyes of others. But this is relatively unimportant and has little to do with money and property which are far more important. I can live very well indeed without name and fame, accolades and awards, high social position and the perquisites that come in its train. But I cannot live well without a modicum of material wealth.
It is not desire for status that [primarily] explains economic inequality but the desire for money and property and the sort of material security they provide.
I would guess that no one who reads this weblog is absolutely poor, i.e., bereft of life's necessities, and that every one who reads it is relatively poor, and significantly so. What do I mean by 'significantly so'? Suppose A has a net worth of four billion USD and B a net worth of 3.9 billion. Then B is poor relative to A. I will call this insignificant relative poverty. But the Ostrich and I, though we have far more than we need, are significantly relatively poor as compared to, say, the late Fidel Castro, that man of the people and hero of the Left.
The Ostrich tells us that relative property is all about status. I take that to mean that it is the drive for social status alone that brings about economic inequality and with it relative poverty. That is empirically false. I am the counterexample: I live wisely and frugally and my net worth keeps going up. But I don't care about status, which is relatively unreal, being mainly a matter of what's going on in the heads of others. I carefully husband my resources because I want to be in a position to take care of myself and others when the inevitable disasters occur and not be a burden on others. What others think of me, though of some importance, is of less importance to me than my material well-being.
But let's be charitable. Perhaps what the Ostrich means to say is that it is the lust for status that mainly brings about economic inequality and relative poverty. I concede that that might be so. It is an empirical question and cannot be answered from the arm chair.
But there are a couple of normative questions in the vicinity and these are what really interest me. One is whether it is morally permissible to pursue loot and lucre, property and pelf, for social standing. The other is whether it is rational to pursue these things for social standing. I will leave the moral question for some other time.
As for rationality, it can be understood in two different ways.
An agent is instrumentally rational if he chooses means conducive to the achievement of his ends. A rational agent in Phoenix who intends to travel to Los Angeles by car in eight hours or less will head West on Interstate 10. If he were to head East he would show himself to be irrational, at least in respect of this particular goal or type of goal. This says nothing about the rationality or irrationality of driving to Los Angeles. Indeed, there are those who will say that it makes no sense to speak of ends as either rational or irrational, that such talk is meaningful only in respect of means.
On a second way of thinking about rationality, one can coherently speak of ends themselves as rational or the opposite. Consider social status and material security. Which is a higher value? Which is more choice-worthy? Which would it be more rational for a being of our constitution to pursue? To me the answer is obvious. Material security, which includes wealth well beyond what one needs physically to survive, is a higher value that social status. Modifying slightly what I said above,
I can live very well indeed without name and fame, accolades and awards, high social position and the perquisites that come in its train. But I cannot live well without material wealth in excess of what is needed for necessities.
Given how benighted human beings are, it may well be instrumentally rational to pursue wealth for the sake of status. That's an empirical question. But no reasonable person prefers status to wealth, just as no reasonable person prefers transient sense pleasures to long-term physical health.
So the Ostrich and I may be at cross-purposes. I am making normative claims while he remains at the level of the merely factual.
Now suppose someone asserts that the good is whatever satisfies desire, and that there is no way of ranking desires as objectively higher or lower, and their objects as more or less choice-worthy. Could I refute such a person? I don't think so. Contradict yes, refute no. For it all comes down to whether one has correct value intuitions. Some of us do and some of us don't. Just as some of us are color-blind, some of us are value-blind, wertblind in the terminology of Dietrich von Hildebrand. While color blindness is a defect in the eye of the head, value blindness is a defect in the 'eye' of the soul.
Philosophers have been known to advance extreme theses. David Benatar's signature anti-natalist theses are not only extreme, but extremely unpalatable to almost everyone. This makes him a target of vicious attacks. I don't agree with him, but I admire him and what he exemplifies, 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.
I also admire Jordan Peterson. He is doing a world of good for a lot of young people, especially young men, who have been cheated by the liberals who have undermined our educational institutions. He is a voice of sanity in the cacophony of political correctness.
JP [. . .] There’s an anti-natalist you might want to look up. His name is David Benatar. I did a debate with him a while back. He believes that human existence-conscious existence, not just human existence but conscious existence, is so intolerable in its fundamental aspect that we should stop propagating it. We shouldn’t raise animals. We shouldn’t have children. We should just cease to be, because being in itself is a positive evil.
AR: So you think that’s the mentality, the psychology in which these school shooters operate?
JP: Oh, for sure that’s it. Yes, absolutely. But it’s more than that. They take it a step further. Benatar just said, well, we should stop reproducing ourselves. The only possible proper language to describe what’s happening with the school shooter types is that they’re out for revenge against God.
This smacks of a smear. Peterson is suggesting, without plainly stating, that the same "mentality" is operative in deeply disturbed mass murderers and in Benatar. It is just that the school shooters "take it a step further." So the murderous mentality is the same in the philosopher and in the school shooters.
This is rank psychologizing which is not surprising, coming as it does from a psychologist. Why engage in the hard work of evaluating arguments when you can dismiss a man's view as nothing but a product of a diseased mind? Ignored also is the fact that Benatar is against murder and suicide in many instances. He makes very clear that death is no escape from the human predicament. But to know that one has to read his work.
Peterson's slam may be explained by the fact that Benatar got the better of him in their debate.
In a related entry, below, I defend Benatar against a scurrilous New Criterion attack.
POPE FRANCIS HAS EARNED a reputation as a man of the people, making [it] his mission to advocate for the poor, the downtrodden and the persecuted, particularly those of Christian faith. The Vatican's reported deal with China, to effectively abdicate the power of the pope to select bishops to the communist state, has therefore been met with feelings of shock and even betrayal among the faithful, especially those in China itself.
Why shocked? He is just being consistent in his leftism. So I'm beginning to think that defunding the Left involves defunding the Catholic Church until she reforms herself. Something about a pope worthy of the office below.
Of course not. I don't watch garbage like that. Part of my motive, I suspect, is that I do not want to be reminded of how sick we are collectively becoming.
'Liberals' seem to think it is. The rule of law fades as one approaches the southern border, fading out entirely at the border. And then there are those pockets where it holds selectively. These are known as sanctuary jurisdictions. Some are as large as California. But to whom do they provide sanctuary?
I love the high-minded Mona Charen, I applaud the civil courage it took for her to make her CPAC speech, and I condemn any thugs who may have threatened her physically for speaking her mind and heart. (According to reports, she was quickly escorted from the venue.) But people like her have no effect on what actually happens and are useless when it comes to defeating the Left. She doesn't understand the nature of politics. It is war, not gentlewomanly debate. I wish it were the latter, and it could be if we all agreed on fundamentals; but we manifestly don't.
You don't like the vulgar Trump? Too bad. He's all we've got. Face reality and its limitations. Don't let the best become the enemy of the good. The milque-toast McCains haven't done jack and won't do jack, except talk and obstruct. David Horowitz:
The movement galvanized by Trump can stop the progressive juggernaut and change the American future, but only if it emulates the strategy of the campaign: Be on the offense; take no prisoners; stay on the attack. To stop the Democrats and their societal transformation, Republicans must adhere to a strategy that begins with a punch in the mouth. That punch must pack an emotional wallop large enough to throw them off balance and neutralize their assaults. It must be framed as a moral indictment that stigmatizes them in the way their attacks stigmatize Republicans. It must expose them for their hypocrisy. It must hold them accountable for the divisions they sow and the suffering they cause. (Big Agenda, Humanix, 2017, p. 142)
Trump alone, an outsider who doesn't need a job, has the civil courage and is in a position to deliver the needed punches. That's why we like him. That's why we overlook his flaws, just as the Dems overlook the flaws of their candidates. He punches back. And for other reasons given here.
I predict that in a year or two we will hear no more about or from the Never Trumpers. They all will have changed their tune or slunk away. Kesler:
As for the Right’s reassessments, every conservative publication has been forced to admit, however grudgingly, that President Trump had significant accomplishments in his first year. The Weekly Standard called his record “reasonably impressive.” But this bombshell appears alongside their default position: “Trump’s character and temperament made him unfit for office.” How to reconcile these?
Partly through wishful counterfactuals. “[S]imilar ends,” the editors assure us, “would have come from almost any Republican president given a Republican Congress.” Really? That seems far from inevitable.
Here is the counterfactual conditional I accept:
If anyone other than Trump had received the Republican nomination, he would not have beaten Hillary.
I have functioning smoke detectors in my house and two, count 'em, two well-maintained fire extinguishers in my kitchen. One's a backup in case the other fails. But of course I don't need any of this stuff since if a fire broke out in the middle of the night I would certainly wake up in time to call the fire department.
a. Socrates is mortal. b. Socrates is dead. c. A man is mortal only if there is a future time at which he dies. d. A man cannot die twice.
If all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal. But Socrates is dead. Now a man is mortal only if there is a future time at which he dies. But a man cannot die twice, and so there is no future time at which Socrates dies.
The limbs of the tetrad cannot all be true, yet each seems true.
Should we conclude that the dead are not mortal?
First question: Is the tetrad a genuine aporia, or is it soluble?
Second question: If soluble, what is the most plausible solution?
Innumeracy is the mathematical counterpart of illiteracy. Here is an example that caught my eye this morning:
Curiously, there is little attempt by the GHSA to grapple with the very obvious and long-term problem—the conflict that occurs when one attempts to combine pedestrian accessibility with roads that support highway speeds. Even with smartphones locked away and all drivers drug free, there are bound to be incidents in which the operator of a two-ton object barrelling down the road does incredible damage to a defenseless human being of one-tenth the weight.
A U. S. ton = 2,000 lbs. So a two-ton vehicle weighs 2 x 2,000 = 4,000 lbs. One-tenth of 4,000 lbs = 400 lbs. Now while Americans are among the fattest hombres on the planet, weighing in at around 181 lbs on average, that's a far cry from 400 lbs.
It is always a good idea to be skeptical and run the numbers.
Ideologues love to engage in numerical inflation. A good recent example is the bogus claim that there have been 18 school shootings so far this year.
Do you remember Mitch Snyder the homeless advocate? He would make wild claims about the number of homeless in the U.S. One day he spouted some figure, I divided it into the population of the U. S. and 'learned' that something like 20% of the U. S. was homeless. Then I knew he was a bullshitter.
Innumerate people are suckers for fake statistics.
"Every year since 1950, the number of American children gunned down has doubled." Did you know that? It is just as well if you did not, because it is not true.
It takes no research to prove that it is not true. If there had been just two children in America gunned down in 1950, then doubling that number every year would have meant that, by 1980, there would have been one billion American children gunned down — more than four times the total population of the United States at that time.
Yet the claim that was quoted did not come from some supermarket tabloid. It appeared in a reputable academic journal. It is one of innumerable erroneous statistical claims generated by advocates of one cause or another. Too often, those in the media who are sympathetic to these causes repeat such claims uncritically until they become "well-known facts" by sheer repetition.
