Try to guess when the following was written, and by whom. Answer below the fold:
Ever increasing frenzy, tension, explosiveness of this country. You feel it in the monastery with people like Raymond. In the priesthood with so many upset, one way or another, and so many leaving. So many just cracking up, falling apart. People in Detroit buying guns. Groups of vigilantes being formed to shoot Negroes. Louisville is a violent place, too. Letters in U. S. Catholic about the war article. — some of the shrillest came from Louisville. This is a really mad country, and an explosion of the madness is inevitable. The only question — can it somehow be less bad than one anticipates? Total chaos is quite possible, though I don't anticipate that. But the fears, frustrations, hatreds, irrationalities, hysterias, are all there and all powerful enough to blow everything wide open. One feels that they want violence. It is preferable to the uncertainty of 'waiting.'
Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 202:
Algerians. They live in the richness and warmth of friendship and family. The body as the center, and its virtues — and its [sic] profound sadness as soon as it declines — life without a view other than the immediate one, than the physical circle. Proud of their virility, of their capacity for eating and drinking, of their strength and their courage. Vulnerable.
The long views of philosophy are not to everyone's taste. If not bored, many are depressed by the contemplation of death and pain, God and the soul, the meaning or meaninglessness of our lives. They prefer not to think of such things and consider it best to take short views. If as Thomas Nagel maintains, the contemplation sub specie aeternitatis of one's daily doings drains them of seriousness, one is under no obligation to take the view from nowhere.
Is it best to take short views? To live in immediacy, immersed in the quotidian and not questioning it?
Sometimes it is. When the going gets tough, it is best to pull in one’s horns, hunker down, and just try to get through the next week, the next day, the next hour. One can always meet the challenge of the next hour. Be here now and deal with what is on your plate at the moment. Most likely you will find a way forward.
But, speaking for myself, a life without long views would not be worth living. I thrill at the passage in Plato’s Republic, Book Six (486a), where the philosopher is described as a "spectator of all time and existence." And then there is this beautiful formulation by William James:
The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man. (Pragmatism, Harvard UP, 1975, p. 56)
I wrote above, "speaking for myself." The expression was not used redundantly inasmuch as it conveys that my philosopher’s preference for the long view is not one that I would want to or try to urge on anyone else. In my experience, one cannot argue with another man’s sensibility. And much of life comes down to precisely that — sensibility. If people share a sensibility, then argument is useful for its articulation and refinement. But I am none too sanguine about the possibility of arguing someone into, or out of, a sensibility.
How argue the atheist out of his abiding sense that the universe is godless, or the radical out of his conviction of human perfectibility? How argue me out of my deep conviction that the pursuit of name and fame, land and loot, is base and pointless?
If the passages I cited from Plato and James leave you cold, how could I change your mind? If you sneer at my being thrilled, what then? Argument comes too late. Or if you prefer, sensibility comes too early.
One might also speak of a person’s sense of life, view of what is important, or ‘feel for the real.’ James’ phrase, "feel seriously," is apt. To the superior mind, ultimate questions "feel real," whereas to the shallow mind they appear pointless, unimportant, silly. It is equally true that the superior mind is made such by its wrestling with these questions.
Maximae res, cum parvis quaeruntur, magnos eos solent efficere.
Matters of the greatest importance, when they are investigated by little men, tend to make those men great. (Augustine,Contra Academicos 1. 2. 6.)
Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 177:
The Revolution is good. But why? One must have an idea of the civilization one wishes to create. The abolition of property is not an end. It is a means.
This is foolish. Private property is the foundation of individual liberty. The problem is not private property, but too few people owning property, property they have worked for, and thus value and care about. I include among private property the means for the defense of property against assorted malefactors from unorganized criminals to rogue elements in the government.
Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 163:
Venice in August and the swarms of tourists, who flock to St. Mark's Square at the same time as the pigeons, peck at impressions, and give themselves vacations and ugliness.
Perhaps you think I go too far when I liken politics to warfare. Well then, will you admit that it is adversarial?
The defense attorney in a court of law fails to do his job if he strives for objectivity: he is paid to argue on behalf of his client. He is paid to be one-sided. This is why he is called in many languages an advocate, in Turkish, for example, Avokat. His sole task is to make the strongest case he can for his client while, of course, observing all the appropriate protocols and ethical guidelines. Advocacy is his duty, not ajudication. Ajudication is in the hands of judge and jury. If your attorney were to say, "You know, the prosecution does make some good points," you would fire him on the spot.
Paul Ryan and other Republicans fail to understand the adversarial nature of politics. Instead of defending the presumptive nominee, Donald Trump, the people's choice, who alone can defeat Hillary, they attack him, as if their job is to arrive at an objective assessment of his strengths and weaknesses. In so doing, they aid and abet Hillary.
Now that is stupid.
But it is worse than stupid. Sometimes Republicans attack Trump in utterly mindless ways, as when Paul Ryan came out with the nonsensical phrase "textbook definition of racism." There is no textbook definition, or any definition, as I have been arguing for years. The word is used as a semantic bludgeon in different ways depending on context. For example, you may be called a racist for urging that Muslims entering the country be properly vetted, even though everyone knows that Islam is not a race but a religion, or rather a religious-political ideology. You can be called a racist for simply citing a fact about race. Or for pointing out that 'nigger' is disyllabic, or often applied by blacks to one another. You are a racist if you serve watermelon at a party at which blacks are in attendance. You are a racist if you try to get beyond race, and also if you don't. If you enjoy 'soul food' then you are a racist for 'culturally appropriating' the vittles of the 'oppressed.' And also a racist if you don't like the stuff. Black pride is not racist, but white pride is.
Ryan's playing of the race card against Trump is exactly what one expects from a leftist. So what's going on? Is Ryan stupid or a quisling, or what? Doesn't he understand that behavior like his is what gave Trump traction in the first place? If Republicans were conservatives, and also knew how to fight, there would be no need for Trump. He says what they are afraid to say.
Gonzalo Curiel of La Raza
Trump had questioned whether federal judge Gonzalo Curiel would be able to give his Trump University case a fair hearing. A reasonable question given that, according to Wikipedia, "Curiel is a member of the San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association, a nonprofit professional association of Latino lawyers that is affiliated with a statewide organization, the La Raza Lawyers of California." 'La Raza' means The Race, which ought to raise eyebrows of not chill one to the bone. One suspects that this Curiel fellow identifies as Hispanic first and as American second. So it is a reasonable surmise that Curiel will not be able to be objective in hearing a case in which the defendant advocates building a wall to keep illegal aliens, who are mostly Mexican, from entering the United States.
Victor Davis Hanson is on target re: the Trump-Curiel affair (empasis added):
Trump dismissively characterized Judge Gonzalo Curiel as a “Mexican” (the absence of hyphenation could be charitably interpreted as following the slang convention in which Americans are routinely called “Irish,” “Swedish,” “Greek,” or “Portuguese,” with these words used simply as abbreviated identifiers rather than as pejoratives). Trump’s point was that Curiel could not grant Trump a fair trial, given Trump’s well-publicized closed-borders advocacy.
Most of America was understandably outraged: Trump had belittled a sitting federal judge. Trump had impugned his Mexican ancestry. Trump had offered a dangerous vision of jurisprudence in which ethnic ancestry necessarily manifests itself in chauvinism and prejudice against the Other.
Trump was certainly crude, but on closer analysis of his disparagements he had blundered into at least a few legitimate issues. Was it not the Left that had always made Trump’s point about ethnicity being inseparable from ideology (most infamously Justice Sotomayor in her ruminations about how a “wise Latina” would reach better conclusions than intrinsically less capable white males, and how ethnic heritage necessarily must affect the vantage point of jurists — racialist themes Sotomayor returned to this week in her Utah v. Strieff dissent, which has been characterized as a “Black Lives Matter” manifesto)? Had not Barack Obama himself apologized (“Yeah, he’s a white guy . . . sorry.”) for nominating a white male judge to the Supreme Court, as if Merrick Garland’s appearance were something logically inseparable from his thought?
What exactly was the otherwise apparently sober and judicious Judge Curiel doing in publicizing his membership in a group known as the San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association? Raza — a term that will likely soon disappear from American parlance once belated public attention focuses on its 1960s separatist origins and its deeper racist Francoist and Mussolinian roots — is by intent racially charged. Certainly, an illegal-immigration advocate could not expect a fair trial from any federal judge who belonged to a group commensurately designated “the San Diego Race Lawyers Association.” From this tawdry incident, we will remember Trump, the racial incendiary — but perhaps in the aftermath we will also question why any organization with Raza in its name should earn a pass from charges of polarizing racial chauvinism. The present tribalism is unsustainable in a pluralistic society. I wish the antidote for “typical white person,” “punish our enemies,” “my people,” (only) Black Lives Matter, and “la Raza” were not Donald Trump, but let us be clear on the fact that his is a crude reaction to a smooth and unquestioned racialism that, in bankrupt fashion, has been tolerated by the establishments of both parties.
My view as pithy as I can make. The right to life generates the right to self-defense. Derivable therefrom: the right to appropriate means. Among the latter, guns.
As an addendum to The Incompatibility of Islam and the West, let me add that the case against Muslim immigration is political not religious. It is because Muslims are politically subversive that their immigration must be curtailed or eliminated, not because they have a different religion.
The U. S. Constitution in its First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion: one is free to practice the religion of one's choice, or refrain from the practice of any religion.
Now if Islam were a religion like Buddhism or Christianity or Judaism, there would be no problem. But Islam is unique. On an extreme view which I do not endorse, Islam is a political ideology masquerading as a religion; on a moderate view, which I do endorse, it is a hybrid ideology: at once both a religion and a political ideology. Either way is not a pure religion.
Qua political ideology, Islam is incompatible with Western values, or at least U. S. values. One reason for this is that Islam is not tolerant of religious diversity. It cannot be since it blends the religious and the secular and does not recognize the separation of church/mosque and state. Secular law is driven by Islamic law, or rather secular law just is Islamic law. So the 'infidel,' whether Buddhist, Christian, Jew, or whatever, must either convert or accept dhimmitude.
It's hot and dry in these parts this time of year, the candy-assed snowbirds have all flown back to their humid nests, and we desert rats like it plenty. That's why we live here. It takes a special breed of cat to be a desert rat.
You Californians stay put in your gun-grabbing, liberty-bashing, People's Republic of Political Correctness. Give my disregards to Governor Moonbeam. And that goes double for you effete and epicene residents of such Eastern states as the Commonwealth of Taxachusetts. Isn't that where Elizabeth 'Fauxcahontas' Warren spouts her nonsense?
Yesterday afternoon I was out and about in my Jeep Wrangler. The onboard thermometer reported the outside temperature as 116 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale.
Malcolm Pollack inquires, "Meanwhile, how do you manage in such heat? Do you just stay indoors? I suppose it's like living in Minneapolis in the winter."
It is no problem at all. We love the desert and deserts are typically hot in the summer. But there is often a 30 degree differential between the high and the low. 'Surely' it is better to live in a place where it is dry and hot in the afternoon but cool in the mornings rather in a flat and boring Eastern or Midwestern place where it is a humid 90 around the clock. Surely. (Might there be a bit of geographical chauvinism in play here?)
Do we just stay indoors? Of course not. This morning around 5:30 I hiked down to the swimming pool where I swam and did water aerobics for about an hour, chatting up the ladies and satisfying my social needs for the day. Then I went into the hot tub (sic!) for 15 minutes where I did stretching exercises. Then back into the pool for a cool-down, followed by a shower and a walk home. Other days I ride my mountain bike to the pool, swim, then go for a good ride while wet: with the soaked bandanna around my neck I'm as cool as a cucumber.
This afternoon I will go out around 3:30 to do some pro bono chess coaching at a local library for all comers, young and old. (I'm a strong coffee-house player; highest USCF rating in the 1700s.) Getting into a locked hot car that has been in the sun for an hour or two takes some getting used to, but one finds that steering a car requires less contact with the steering wheel than you might think.
From 1991 to 2009 I drove a 1988 Jeep Cherokee out here with no A.C. I'm not lying! I'm frugal. (Bought it in Ohio at T-giving in '87.) One summer I drove in one shot from Bishop, California in the High Sierra across the Mojave and Sonoran deserts to Phoenix. Stopping for gas in Blythe, California, just shy of the Colorado River and the Arizona border the temp. was 115. You drive open-windowed with an ice-cold wet bandanna around your neck. The only other motorists with their windows down were Mexicans. I felt a certain 'solidarity' with them. Does that make me a racist? Am I guilty of 'cultural appropriation'?
Tomorrow morning I pick up a guy at 5:30 and we head East into the desert for a little target practice, arriving at my favorite spot at 6. After expending 200-300 rounds between us, we head back around 8.
So no, we don't stay indoors.
I would say that Arizona is absolutely the best place to live year-round in the U.S. for all sorts of reasons.
There's a rattlesnake-infested wilderness right outside my door. Up for a hike? We leave in the dark, commence hiking at first light, and are done around ten A. M.
This is an outstanding five-minute video by Peter Kreeft of Boston College. (HT: J. I. Odegaard) It presents the theistic worldview and its naturalistic alternative about as clearly as is possible within a few minutes. It doesn't argue for or against, but it does present the benefits of theism.
It is in the Prager U series.
As the universities of the land, including so-called Catholic universities, abdicate their authority and collapse under the weight of their own political correctness, substituting trendy nonsense and decadent junk for genuine learning, we need to build alternative centers to carry on the great traditions.
There is some discussion of Kreeft in the entries referenced infra.
London Karl, an Irish resident of London, checks in with this update:
I'm just back from my first ever trip to America. Only New York, which I am reliably informed is representative of nothing other than itself, but I was touched and impressed by the civility and friendliness I encountered. People there are way friendlier than the Brits. You may despair over your country, but you have that at least!
This is funny. New Yorkers are generally regarded as rude and obnoxious. Donald Trump, for example, is a New Yorker, as is Brian Leiter. No, I am not hastily generalizing from two examples, I am illustrating with two examples an antecedently established general proposition.
It is too bad that London Karl did not have the time or the wherewithal to travel deep into Real America where he would have found much better examples of civility and friendliness.
Some years back I read a paper at Tulane University in New Orleans. Wandering around one afternoon on my own, not in the French Quarter, but in some rather nondescript part of town, I walked into a restaurant for lunch. There I was greeted by a woman who displayed a level of hospitality and friendliness and warmth I had never encountered before. This, I thought to myself, is what must be meant by Southern hospitality. There was, of course, a commercial motivation behind the display; but it was also deeply genuine. That was back in '87 and I have never forgotten the experience.
During that same trip, however, I ran into chess master Jude Acers in the French Quarter. Stationed on the street in his red beret, he plays (or played) all comers at $5 a game. Nothing particularly civil or friendly about him, rather the opposite. But then he is a chess player, one, and not from the South, two. After five games, I paid him his $25 and he made sure that I understood that he had played me for a chump and 'taken me' for 25 semolians. Me, I was happy to part with the money for chess lessons on Bourbon Street in the romantic city of the great Paul Morphy.
He said one thing that has stuck with me. Near the end of a game, he pointed to one of his pawns which had an unobstructed path to the queening square. I couldn't stop it, but it still had a long way to go. He announced, "This pawn has already queened."
A deeply Platonic comment. A timeless use of 'already.' Sub specie aeternitatis, the pawn had queened, or rather IS (timelessly) queened.
"Before Abraham was, I am." (John 8:58)
UPDATE. London Karl responds:
Trust me, I had the desire and the wherewithal to go into the real America; I just didn't have the time. I preferred the edgy friendliness of the New Yorkers to the passive aggression that passes for English 'politeness'.
Everybody profiles. Liberals are no exception. Liberals reveal their prejudices by where they live, shop, send their kids to school, and with whom they associate.
The word 'prejudice' needs analysis.
It could refer to blind prejudice: unreasoning, reflexive (as opposed to reflective) aversion to what is other just because it is other, or to an unreasoning pro-attitude toward the familiar just because it is familiar. We should all condemn blind prejudice. It is execrable to hate a person just because he is of a different color, for example. No doubt, but how many people do that? How many people who are averse to blacks are averse because of their skin color as opposed to their behavior patterns? Racial prejudice is not, in the main, prejudice based on skin color, but on behavior.
'Prejudice' could also mean 'prejudgment.' Although blind prejudice is bad, prejudgment is generally good. We cannot begin our cognitive lives anew at every instant. We rely upon the 'sedimentation' of past experience. Changing the metaphor, we can think of prejudgments as distillations from experience. The first time I 'serve' my cats whisky they are curious. After that, they cannot be tempted to come near a shot glass of Jim Beam. They distill from their unpleasant olfactory experiences a well-grounded prejudice against the products of the distillery.
My prejudgments about rattlesnakes are in place and have been for a long time. I don't need to learn about them afresh at each new encounter with one. I do not treat each new one encountered as a 'unique individual,' whatever that might mean. Prejudgments are not blind, but experience-based, and they are mostly true. The adult mind is not a tabula rasa. What experience has written, she retains, and that's all to the good.
So there is good prejudice and there is bad prejudice. The teenager thinks his father prejudiced in the bad sense when he warns the son not to go into certain parts of town after dark. Later the son learns that the old man was not such a bigot after all: the father's prejudice was not blind but had a fundamentum in re. The old man was justified in his prejudgment.
But if you stay away from certain parts of town are you not 'discriminating' against them? Well of course, but not all discrimination is bad. Everybody discriminates. Liberals are especially discriminating. The typical Scottsdale liberal would not be caught dead supping in some of the Apache Junction dives I have been found in. Liberals discriminate in all sorts of ways. That's why Scottsdale is Scottsdale and not Apache Junction.
Is the refusal to recognize same-sex 'marriage' as marriage discriminatory? Of course! But not all discrimination is bad. Indeed, some is morally obligatory. We discriminate against felons when we disallow their possession of firearms. Will you argue against that on the ground that it is discriminatory? If not, then you cannot cogently argue against the refusal to recognize same-sex 'marriage' on the ground that it is discriminatory. You need a better argument. And what would that be?
'Profiling,' like 'prejudice' and 'discrimination,' has come to acquire a wholly negative connotation. Unjustly. What's wrong with profiling? We all do it, and we are justified in doing it. Consider criminal profiling.
It is obvious that only certain kinds of people commit certain kinds of crimes. Suppose a rape has occurred at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth. Two males are moving away from the crime scene. One, the slower moving of the two, is a Jewish gentleman, 80 years of age, with a chess set under one arm and a copy of Maimonides'Guide for the Perplexed under the other. The other fellow, a vigorous twenty-year-old, is running from the scene.
Who is more likely to have committed the rape? If you can't answer this question, then you lack common sense. But just to spell it out for you liberals: octogenarians are not known for their sexual prowess: the geezer is lucky if he can get it up for a two-minute romp with a very cooperative partner. Add chess playing and an interest in Maimonides and you have one harmless dude.
Or let's say you are walking down a street in Mesa, Arizona. On one side of the street you spy some fresh-faced Mormon youths, dressed in their 1950s attire, looking like little Romneys, exiting a Bible studies class. On the other side of the street, Hells (no apostrophe!) Angels are coming out of their club house. Which side of the street would you feel safer on? On which side will your concealed semi-auto .45 be more likely to see some use?
The problem is not so much that liberals are stupid, as that they have allowed themselves to be stupefied by that cognitive aberration known as political correctness.
Their brains are addled by the equality fetish: everybody is equal, they think, in every way. So the vigorous 20-year-old is not more likely than the old man to have committed the rape. The Mormon and the Hells Angel are equally law-abiding. And the twenty-something Egyptian Muslim is no more likely to be a terrorist than the Mormon matron from Salt Lake City.
Clearly, what we need are more profiling, more prejudgment, and more discrimination (in the good sense). And fewer liberals.
A note on the above image. Suppose all you know about the two individuals is what you see. The point is that the likelihood of the old white lady's being a terrorist is much, much less than the likelihood of the man's being a terrorist. This is what justifies profiling and why it is insane to subject both individuals to the same level of scrutiny. For that would be to assume something obviously false, namely, that both individuals are equally likely to be terrorists.
Again we face the question why liberals are so preternaturally stupid. And again, the answer is that they have enstupidated themselves with their political correctness and their fetishization of equality.
With all the mindless hyperventilation of dumb-assed liberals over gun control in the wake of Orlando, we need some comic relief. Herewith, a repost from 27 February 2013.
…………………
What the hell's going on in Florida? The other day an oven shot a woman, and now a dog has shot a man, with an 'unloaded' gun no less. Tragedies like these show the need for Dog Control. Members of the Dog Lobby such as Duane LaRufus of the National Hound Association will scream in protest, but moral cretins like him and Leroy Pooch of Dog Owners of America are nothing but greedy shills for the Canine Industrial Complex. They routinely oppose all sensible Dog Control measures. Follow the money!
Reason dictates that all dogs must be kept muzzled at all times, and when transported in a vehicle containing a gun, must be kept securely locked in the trunk. Assault dogs, whose only purpose is to kill and maim, such as Doberman Ass Biters and Pit Bulls, must be banned. Such breeds are inherently evil and no one outside of law enforcement and the military has any business owning them. Food magazines for all breeds must be kept strictly limited lest any dog become too rambunctious. Dog owners should be 'outed' and their names published in the paper. Special taxes must be levied on all things canine to offset the expenses incurred by society at large in the wake of the rising tide of dog violence.
Such reasonable measures will strike extremists as draconian, but if even one life can be saved, then they are justified. We must do something and we must do it now so that tragedies like the one in Florida never happen again.
Passionate presentation does not add to the cogency of one's arguments. But neither does it detract. One's audience, however, will likely mistake the presence of passion for the absence of reason. So the best policy in most circumstances is to present one's arguments in an emotionally neutral way. Or at least that used to be the best policy. In this age of the short attention span things may be different.
I subscribe to the now tiny but, I believe, some-day-to-be prevalent Separationist School of Western-Islamic Relations. We separationists affirm the following:
Islam is a mortal threat to our civilization.
But we cannot destroy Islam.
Nor can we democratize Islam.
Nor can we assimilate Islam.
Therefore the only way to make ourselves safe from Islam is to separate ourselves from Islam.
(An earlier version of the above statement, along with a key excerpt from my article “The Search for Moderate Islam,” is posted here.)
Auster wrote this ten years ago. Mildly prophetic.
Definition: A hostile raid for purposes of conquest, plunder, and capture of slaves, especially one carried out by Moors in North Africa.
Origin: Mid 19th century: via French from Algerian Arabic ġāziya 'raid'.
Example: "So by way of repetition, and in the face of paralyzing ennui, we affirm that this act of despicable treachery, this razzia in Orlando, arises out of the Islamic religion."
