Author: Bill Vallicella

Random Political-Polemical Observations

Hanoi Jane.  Jane Fonda recently opined that being 'woke' means that you care about people. Now how stupid is that? But I'll give her this much: she looks damned good after all these years (to an old man, leastways.) All style and no substance, just like pretty-boy Gavin Newsom of California, an unctuous opportunist if ever there was one. Dems demonstrate their stupidity by their inability to see through poseurs like him.  

The Democrats. Knee-jerk oppositionalism and blind obstructionism  are all they have these days, as witness the In-Lieu-of-SOTU spectacle. 

John Fetterman.  When a guy such as this piece of atavism is the wise man of the Dems, and, horribile dictu,  a Senator to boot, you know that the Dems have become a pack of fools, and that any ship of state with them in control is headed for troubled waters. That being said, my estimation of Fetterman has gone up a notch since he 'beat' Dr. Oz.  The well-fed Futter/Fetterman actually possesses a soupçon of sense, and a grain of gravitas, with which he surpasses Kamala the Clown and the overgrown adolescent, AOC.

Sartorial slack-off and the demise of decorum. That charismatic and stylish trend-setter, JFK, rid men of their Fedoras.  Now we have baseball caps and Senator Fetterman in cargo shorts. Decorum on the decline.  "Weird Al" Green, who is black, and sports a pony (horse?) tail, was rightly censured for his recent outburst by the Speaker of the House. He complained about being made to "sit in the back of the bus."  It will always be the 'fifties for these people.  And they say we want to 'turn back the clock'?

Let's not leave out Adam Schiff, a leaky vessel if ever there was one, issuing his "Screw you and the horse you rode in on" to Trump & Co.   Not to mention the 'shit' mantra dutifully repeated by the Dem lemmings. My friendly advice to them: You'd better get your shit together or you'll never lift your sorry asses out of the dreck.  As for the 'Ragin Cajun,' he seems to have reversed himself on his 'Play possum" advice.  Back to the bayou with you, pal.

Why We Are Winning

Roland Fryer, WSJ, The Economics of DEI and MEI. (Merit, Excellence, and Intelligence)

Victor Davis Hanson, Five Ukrainian Fables

James Piereson, New Criterion, Too Many Democrats

Kimberly Strassel, WSJ, Trump's School Choice

Paul Craig Roberts, Every Vote for a Democrat is an Attack on America.  HT: Tony Flood who writes, "Salient line (for me): 'And still, American citizens vote for Democrats. How can a population this stupid be made great again?' "

We are winning, but it will remain a nasty slugfest for the foreseeable future, as my man Hanson fully appreciates. We need to get tough with our political enemies, as they reveal, day by day, the full depth of their depravity.

Victor Davis Hanson, New Criterion, MAGA agonistes. Excerpt:

Trump has now inherited an almost bankrupt country. The ratio of debt to annual gdp has reached a record high of nearly 125 percent—exceeding the worst years of World War II. The nation remains sharply divided over the southern border, which for most of Biden’s term was nonexistent. Trump’s own base demands that he address an estimated twelve million additional unvetted illegal aliens, diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates and racial quotas, and an array of enemies abroad who are no longer deterred by or content with the global status quo. The eight-year Obama revolution in retrospect did not change American institutions and policies nearly as much as the more radical four-year Biden tenure. And so often, when drastic remedies are proposed, their implementation may appear to the inured public—at least initially—as a cure worse than the disease.

Take the example of illegal immigration. Since Trump left office in January 2021, two major and unexpected developments have followed during the Biden years. First, the border did not just become porous but virtually disappeared. Indeed, Biden in his first hours of governance stopped further construction of the Trump wall, restored catch-and-release policies, and allowed illegal immigrants to cross the border without first applying for refugee status.

Given the magnitude of what followed—as many as twelve million illegal aliens crossed the border during the Biden tenure—the remedy of deportation would now necessitate a massive, indeed unprecedented, effort. The public has been increasingly hectored by the Left to fear the supposedly authoritarian measures Trump had in mind when he called for “massive deportations.” Left unsaid was that such deportations would only be a response to the prior four years of lawless and equally “massive” importations of foreign nationals. And yet, while the twelve million illegal entrances over four years were an insidious process, the expulsion of most of those entrants will be seen as abrupt, dramatic, and harsh. In addition, it was much easier for felons and criminals to blend into the daily influx of thousands than it will be to find them now amid a population of 335 million.

On Swimming the Tiber: Reasons for Leaving Protestantism

I had put the question to Russell B, "What were your reasons for becoming a Protestant in the first place and then leaving Protestantism, apart from acceptance of DDS? [The doctrine of Divine Simplicity?] And what sect did you leave? Here is his response; I have intercalated some comments of my own.
 
1) The reason I became a Protestant was due to poor catechesis, unfortunately. I went to Biola as an undergrad where I attended an Anglo-Catholic church in Newport Beach (Still a great and lively one). Unsurprisingly, my metaphysics class (which was actually labeled as an ontology class) just presupposed the thin theory of existence. 
Then you probably did not take that class from J. P. Moreland, who very favorably reviewed my A Paradigm Theory of Existence. 
My primary reasons for leaving Protestantism: 
 
A) One has to admit the Church was fundamentally wrong for 1500 years until Luther came around (an impossible pill to swallow) 
 
B) Unification of the church: you need a ‘head’ to settle disputes (much like a Supreme Court). I think orthodoxy struggles with this as well: they are seemingly split too. 
 
C) I am a big-time social conservative (I would say I am slightly ‘left’ leaning economically) and couldn’t square most Protestant churches caving to the cultural winds of secularism. The Catholic Church has problems, of course, but not compromising on things like abortion and homosexuality, for example, struck me as very attractive. I also read portions of Alex Pruss’ One Body which sealed the deal. 
 
D) The lives of the Saints especially Aquinas, Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena, Anselm, Francis and St John of the Cross. 
 
Now, I don’t want to knock Protestantism too hard. Of course one can be a Protestant and subscribe to DDS and endorse a thick conception of Existence.  
2) The two upward paths, that of religion and that of philosophy, come together as one at the apex of the ascent in the divine simplicity.  The ascent to the Absolute is thus onto-theological.
 
Beautifully written. I also want to thank you for your clear prose. I love Barry Miller and his work but at points he was a little sloppy and difficult to understand. I didn’t encounter that with your work. 
 
PS:
 
1) I was recently listening to your episode on Dale Tuggy’s podcast. I hate recommending podcasts but I think my friend Pat Flynn—podcast called Philosophy for the People—reached out to you. If you have time, you should definitely consider going on it. His podcast is the only one that I am aware of that consistently talks about DDS, thin/thick existence, analytic philosophy’s dismissal of existence, etc.—basically everything that would appear on your blog. (Feser, Koons, Dolezal have all had appearances)
Russell's (B) above raises questions about the pros and cons of a teaching authority to unify doctrine and settle disputes.
 
One who refuses to accept, or questions, a teaching of the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) may be accused of reliance upon private judgment and failure to submit to the Magisterium or teaching authority of the Church.  Two observations on this accusation.

First, for many of us private judgment is not merely private, based as it is on consultation with many, many public sources.  It is as public as private. Everything I've read over the years from Parmenides on down in the West, the Bible on down in the Near East, and the Upanishads on down in the Far East feeds into my 'private' judgment.  So my 'private' judgment is not merely mine as to content inasmuch as it is a collective cultural upshot, albeit processed through my admittedly fallible and limited pate. Though collective as to content, its acceptance by me is of course my sole responsibility.  My first point, then, is that we ought to distinguish wider and narrower senses of 'private' and realize that a 'private' judgment might not be merely private.

Second, the party line or official doctrine of any institution is profoundly influenced by the private judgments of individuals. Think of the profound role that St. Augustine played in the development of Roman Catholic doctrine.  He was a man of powerful will, penetrating intellect, and great personal presence.  He was trained in rhetoric in Carthage and in Rome. Imagine going up against him at a theological conference or council!   

Summing up the two points, the private is not merely private, and the official is not merely official.

Of course, part of the official doctrine of the Roman church is that its pronunciamenti anent faith and morals are guided and directed by the Holy Ghost. (Use of the old phrase, besides chiming nicely with der Heilige Geist, is a way for this conservative to thumb his nose at Vatican II-type innovations which, though some of them may have had some sense, tended to be deleterious in the long run.  A meatier question which I ought to take up at some time is the one concerning the upsurge of priestly paederasty after Vatican II: post hoc ergo propter hoc? That should give pause to any one thinking of swimming the Tiber. Rod Dreher, who took the plunge, kept swimming, eastward. We could say he swam the Tiber first, and then the Bosporus, when, disgusted by priestly paedophilia, and the RCC's mafia-like protection of their own, he embraced Eastern Orthodoxy.)

What I have just written may sound as if I am hostile to the Roman Church. I am not. Nor have I ever had any negative experiences with priests, except, perhaps to have been bored by their sermons. All of the ones I have known have been upright, and some exemplars of the virtues they profess.  In the main they were manly and admirable men.  But then I'm an old man, and I am thinking mainly of the pre-Vatican II priests of my youth. 

I have no time now to discuss the Church's guidance by the third person of the Trinity, except to express some skepticism: if that is so, how could the estimable Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) be followed by the benighted Bergoglio? (Yes, I am aware that there were far, far worse popes than the current one, and I am aware of  the theme of Satan's grip on the sublunary.)

Of course, I have just, once again, delivered my private judgment. But, once again, it is not merely private inasmuch as it is based on evidence and argument: I am not merely emoting in the manner of a 'liberal' such as Bergoglio when he emoted, in response to the proposed Great Wall of Trump, that nations need bridges, not walls. What an unspeakably stupid thing to say! Well, then, Vatican City needs bridges not walls the better to allow jihadis easy access for their destructive purposes. Mercy and appeasement must be granted even unto those who would wipe Christianity from the face of the earth, and are in process of doing so.

But how can my judgment, even if not merely private, carry any weight, even for me, when it contradicts the Magisterium, the Church's teaching authority, when we understand the source and nature of this authority? ('Magisterium' from L. magister, teacher, master.)

By the Magisterium we mean the teaching office of the Church. It consists of the Pope and Bishops. Christ promised to protect the teaching of the Church : "He who hears you, hears me; he who rejects you rejects me, he who rejects me, rejects Him who sent me" (Luke 10. 16). Now of course the promise of Christ cannot fail: hence when the Church presents some doctrine as definitive or final, it comes under this protection, it cannot be in error; in other words, it is infallible. 

In a nutshell: God in Christ founded the Roman church upon St. Peter, the first pope, as upon a rock. The legitimate succession culminates in Pope Francis. The Roman church as the one true holy catholic and apostolic church therefore teaches with divine authority and thus infallibly. Hence its teaching on indulgences not only cannot be incorrect, it cannot even be reasonably questioned. So who am I to — in effect — question God himself?

Well, it is obvious that if I disagree with God, then I am wrong.  But if a human being, or a group of human beings, no matter how learned, no matter how saintly, claims to be speaking with divine authority, and thus infallibly, then I have excellent reason to be skeptical. How do I know that they are not, in a minor or major way, schismatics diverging from the true teaching, the one Christ promised to protect?  Maybe it was some version of Eastern Orthodoxy that Christ had in mind as warranting his protection.

These and other questions legitimately arise in the vicinity of what Josiah Royce calls the Religious Paradox. 

In-Lieu-of-SOTU: Trump’s Congressional Address

Fabulous address by Trump to both houses of Congress last night. It kept me up beyond my monkish bedtime. So I got up 'late' this morning at two a.m.

How good was it? The boneheads of The Bulwark are going bonkers. 

Can I say anything bad about it? Well, our boy spoke of two genders instead of two sexes. And he needs to learn  that the correct phrase is 'rare earth minerals,' not 'rare earths.'

Roger Kimball:

Many commentators have said that Trump 2.0 has accomplished more in six weeks than other administrations accomplished in four, six or even eight years. It is true.

Tonight, the president provided a detailed inventory of his initiatives. Within hours of taking office, he designated illegal immigration a national emergency. Trump noted that Democrats kept saying that new legislation was needed to fix the border. But in fact, he said, “all we really needed was a new president.” Trump declared war on inflation and took steps to undermine the deep state and its racist DEI initiatives, thus restoring merit and race- and colorblind justice to their proper place in the economy of American values. He also took a page from the Book of Genesis, and articulated the non-woke, matter-of-fact truth that there are only two sexes: male and female. The crowd (but not the Democrats) cheered at that bit of common sense. 

The president presented a bracing tour d’horizon in his opening sally. He ordered federal workers back to work: “They will either show up for work, in person, or be removed from their job.” As I write, the Trump administration is ending “weaponized government,” restoring free speech, underwriting English as the official language of the United States and pursuing a policy of “drill, baby, drill” to exploit America’s energy resources.

 

Biblical Inerrancy and Verbal Plenary Inspiration

Recent discussions with Calvinist friends led to the topic of Biblical inerrancy.  I've always looked askance at it, but one of the friends, Brian, assures me that Scripture is inerrant in every particular, and nor merely with respect to faith and morals. How is that possible? 

I tend to think about inerrancy and related topics under the umbrella of the following assumptions. 

A1) The triune God of the Christian Bible exists.

A2) Said God reveals himself to man.

A3) One of the ways he reveals himself to man is via Scripture. 

A4) Scripture exists in the form of different texts written at different times by different ancient human authors.

A5) Scripture does not pre-exist its being written down, but comes into existence in time and over time when the various human authors write down their texts in human languages, Hebrew for example.

A6) These authors write under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit such that the content or gist (spirit) of what they write derives from the Holy Spirit (der Heilige Geist) and is not merely excogitated (thought up or made up) by the authors. (I am not suggesting an etymological connection between the English 'gist' and the German 'Geist' or the English 'ghost.' There is no such connection as far as I know.) Thus these ancient human authors, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, mediate God's message to man. Without their mediation, no message would get through from God to the rest of us who merely read (and understand) the scriptural texts either in their original form or in translations and transcriptions, but did not write (author)  these texts.  The authors of these texts are conduits of the divine message. They are the receivers of the divine transmission which the rest of us receive at a second remove. 

Being finite and fallible mortals, limited by their languages and cultures and tribal affiliations, these 'receivers,' despite their operation under the Spirit's inspiration, add human 'noise' to the divine 'signal.'   It is to be expected that the signal-to-noise ratio will vary from author to author and thus from text to text, and that the over-all signal-to-noise ratio in the New Testament will be more favorable than that in the Old.

(A7) Scripture is not the same as the Word (Logos) of God (verbum dei) referred to in the prologue to the Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . ." The Word or Logos is co-eternal with the Father; Scripture is not. They cannot be the same because the former is metaphysically necessary while the latter is metaphysically contingent.  Scripture might never have come into existence. And as I said, it came to exist in time over time. Scriptural revelation is revelation to humanity; humanity consists of human creatures; there is no necessity that God, being a se and wholly self-sufficient, create anything; hence there is no necessity that humanity exist and that scriptural revelation exist.  God cannot reveal himself to man if there is no man to reveal himself to.

The Bible, therefore, cannot be identical to the Word of God, if 'Word of God' refers to the Second Person of the Trinity. For again, the Second Person is co-eternal with the First Person, but the Bible, i.e., Scripture, is not co-eternal with any of the Persons. It is not eternal at all.  It exists in time, but not at every time.  Scripture does not eternally exist, nor does it always exist. So we can't even say that the Scripture is omnitemporal, i.e., sempiternal.  

Some will bristle at the above at insist that the Bible is [stamp the foot, pound the podium] the Word of God!  You may say that but then you are using 'Word of God' in an altered sense to refer to the Scripture which, inspired by the Holy Spirit and expressive of the divine Logos, is written down by men who, finite and fallible and culture-bound as they are, not to mention suffering from the noetic consequences of sin, add their 'noise' and filtration and limitation to the divine 'signal,' so that the end result is at best derivative from, but not identical to, the divine Logos, or Word of God in the original sense.  

Finally, would it not be absurd to suppose that He Who Is, He whose name is Being itself,  (Exodus 3:14) thinks in Hebrew from all eternity and composed Scripture in Hebrew from all eternity and handed a bit of it to Moses on Mount Sinai? Hebrew is a human language; no Hebrews, no Hebrew language; the existence of the latter presupposes the existence of the former.  There is no necessity that humans, or any creatures at all, exist and so no necessity that human languages exist; God, however, is from all eternity noesis noeseos, thought thinking itself without need of any human language.

Now if we think about scriptural revelation along the above lines, then one cannot reasonably expect Scripture to be inerrant in every particular, as my Calvinist friend  Brian says it is.  Why not? Well, the 'receivers' are crappy so that, even if the divine Transmitter and his transmission are pure and impeccable, distortion and noise will be introduced by the lousy 'receivers.' The ancient authors each received a truly divine message, but then each had to express it in his own way with his own words as he understood the words of his native human tongue.  Cultural and tribal biases may be expected to creep in, not to mention distortions and limitations of a syntactic and semantic type: human languages are not equal in their expressive capacities.  A Calvinist should have no trouble adding to the mix by chalking up some of the noise and distortion to the "noetic consequences of sin."  

Verbal Plenary Inspiration?

So I am wondering whether Brian, who tells me that Scripture is inerrant in every particular, and thus in every historical detail it reports, subscribes to the doctrine of verbal plenary inspiration. Five Views of Biblical Inerrancy, Zondervan, 2013:

Verbal plenary inspiration means that the text we have is verbatim the text God inspired, down to the very terminology and syntax. It is not that God gave human authors a general impression or message that they then communicated in their own words and according to their own understanding. Rather God accommodated his message to each author's style and understanding, even as such did not interfere with the content. (p. 19)

According to Norman Geisler, " . . . the locus of meaning (and truth)  for an evangelical is in the text, not in the mind of the author behind the text. It is the graphai that are inspired,  not the author's intentions behind them." (18-19)

If that is Brian's view, then I understand how he could could hold that view that Scripture is inerrant in every particular.  If not, how would he reply to my sketch above of the mechanics of  Scriptural revelation?

Your move, Brian.

Wrong to Believe on Insufficient Evidence? Contra Clifford

Is it wrong always and everywhere for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence? (W. K. Clifford) If so, the young would never be right to believe in the realization of their potentials. But they are right so to believe. If they didn't, none of them would ever have 'made it.' But many of us did.  We made it, but only  by believing in ourselves well beyond the evidence available. Give it your best shot, but don't piss and moan if it comes to nought.  Take another shot, a different one.

For a development of this theme, see Is it Sometimes Rational to Believe on Insufficient Evidence?

On the Death of a Neighbor

My neighbor Ted across the street, 85 years old, died the other day. Last I spoke with him, two weeks ago, he seemed as hale and hearty as ever. Ted and I enjoyed 26 trouble-free years of neighborly, if superficial, acquaintanceship.  In this world of surfaces, relationships kept conventional and superficial are often best. Not one harsh word passed between us.  Nothing was ever said in seriousness or in jest to sully the serenity that made the living easy. I will remember him fondly, with nary a negative thought.

There is a lot to be said for mere acquaintanceship and for cleaving to the conventional.  Go deep with people and you may see things you would like to forget. In a world of seemings, surfaces are safe.  You say conventional usages are phony? They mainly are, but what did you expect in a world fleeting and phenomenal? Grow up, Holden!

Don't look for depth where it cannot be found. But look for depth. Where? First within, and then in a kindred spirit or two.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Quantifiers

Quantifiers are words that indicate logical quantity. 'All,' 'Some,' and 'No' are examples. Here are some songs featuring them from my memory with no reliance on A. I.

Chuck Berry, No Particular Place to Go.  

Bob Dylan, Only a Hobo

Rod Stewart, Only a Hobo. But is 'only' functioning as a quantifier in this title? 

Jackson Browne, Somebody's Baby

Jefferson Airplane, Somebody to Love

B. B. King, Nobody Knows You When You are Down and Out

Louis Armstrong, I Ain't Got Nobody

Byrds, All I Really Want to Do

Jimi Hendrix, All Along the Watchtower

Beatles, Something

Beatles, Any Time At All

Roy Orbison, Only the Lonely

Bob Dylan, Most Likely You'll Go Your Way (and I'll Go Mine)

Here are some comments of mine on the video which accompanies this touched-up Blonde on Blonde track.  The video is very cleverly constructed, providing a synopsis of milestones in Dylan's career.  The first girl the guy with the acoustic guitar case is walking with is a stand-in for Suze Rotolo, the girl 'immortalized' on the Freewheelin' Bob Dylan album cover.  But now we see the pair from the back instead of from the front.  She is replaced by a second girl representing Joan Baez.  (Dylan's affair with Baez helped destroy his relationship with Rotolo.) Then the guy gets into a car and emerges on the other side with an electric guitar case.  This signifies Dylan's going electric in '65 at the Newport Folk Festival, a change  which enraged the die-hard folkies and doctrinaire leftists who thought they owned Dylan as a mouthpiece for their views.   

A quick shot of a newspaper in a trash can with the headline "Dylan Goes Electric" appears just in case you missed the subtlety of the auto entry-exit sequence.  After that we see a downed motorcycle representing Dylan's motorcycle accident, an event that brings to a close  the existentialist-absurdist-surrealist phase of the mid-60s trilogy, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde.  After the accident Dylan is further from the mind and closer to the earth.  Dylan the psychedelically deracinated returns to his roots in the Bible and Americana with John Wesley Harding. The girl in the brass bed is an allusion to "Lay Lady Lay" ("lay across my big brass bed") from the Nashville Skyline album.  Dylan then colaesces with the man in black (Johnny Cash), and steps over and through the detritus of what remains of the hippy-trippy 60's and into the disco era, his Christian period, marked by the 1979 Slow Train Coming and a couple of subsequent albums, his marriage to a black back-up singer, and on into the later phases of the life of this protean bard on never-ending tour.

Here is what Auster has to say about the song:

By the way, that’s the first time I’ve seen “judge” rhymed with “grudge” since Bob Dylan’s “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine),” from Blonde on Blonde. Here’s the recording.

Dylan’s lyric (not for the first time) is pretty appropriate to our situation:

Well the judge
He holds a grudge
He’s gonna call on you.
But he’s badly built
And he walks on stilts
Watch out he don’t fall on you.

There is now on the U.S. Supreme Court an intellectually sub-par Puerto Rican woman whose entire career has been essentially founded on a grudge against whites, a judge who makes her pro-Hispanic, anti-white agenda an explicit element in her judging. “The judge, she holds a grudge.”

Sotomayor is not the first of that kind, however. Another Supreme Court sub-competent, Thurgood Marshall, openly stated to one of his colleagues that the philosophy behind his judging was that “It’s our [blacks’] turn now.”

Well, I can't call it a night without the schmaltzy

Dean Martin, Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime

Zelenskyy’s Performance in the Oval: Two Views

We live in times of extreme social and political polarization. (We are so polarized that we are polarized over the nature, extent, and causes of polarization! But I will resist the temptation to meta-level digress.)

Cathy Young, A Shameful, Appalling Spectacle

Philip Wegmann, How Zelensky Miscalculated Trump