All sins are of the spirit even those that are of the flesh.
Author: Bill Vallicella
Dubious Compensation
In compensation for hearing loss nature gives the old man bigger ears.
Is There Such a Thing as Racial Profiling?
One of the tactics of leftists is to manipulate and misuse language for their own purposes. Thus they make up words and phrases and hijack existing ones. 'Islamophobe' is an example of the former, 'disenfranchise' an example of the latter. 'Racial profiling' is a second example of the former. It is a meaningless phrase apart from its use as a semantic bludgeon. Race is an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile. A profile cannot consist of just one characteristic. I can profile you, but it makes no sense racially to profile you. Apparel is an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile. I can profile you, but it makes no sense sartorially to profile you.
Let's think about this.
I profile you if I subsume you under a profile. A profile is a list of several descriptors. You fit the profile if you satisfy all or most of the descriptors. Here is an example of a profile:
1. Race: black
2. Age: 16-21 years
3. Sex: male
4. Apparel: wearing a hoodie, with the hood pulled up over the head
5. Demeanor: sullen, alienated
6. Behavior: walking aimlessly, trespassing, cutting across yards, looking into windows and garages, hostile and disrespectful when questioned; uses racial epithets such as 'creepy-assed cracker.'
7. Physical condition: robust, muscular
8. Location: place where numerous burglaries and home invasions had occurred, the perpetrators being black
9. Resident status: not a resident.
Now suppose I spot someone who fits the above profile. Would I have reason to be suspicious of him? Of course. As suspicious as if the fellow were of Italian extraction but fit the profile mutatis mutandis. But that's not my point. My point is that I have not racially profiled the individual; I have profiled him, with race being one element in the profile.
Blacks are more criminally prone than whites.* But that fact means little by itself. It becomes important only in conjunction with the other characteristics. An 80-year-old black female is no threat to anyone. But someone who fits all or most of the above descriptors is someone I am justified in being suspicious of.
There is no such thing as racial profiling. The phrase is pure obfuscation manufactured by liberals to forward their destructive agenda. The leftist script requires that race be injected into everything. Hence 'profiling' becomes 'racial profiling.' If you are a conservative and you use the phrase, you are foolish, as foolish as if you were to use the phrase 'social justice.' Social justice is not justice. But that's a separate post.
I wrote and posted the above in July of last year. This morning I find in The New Yorker a piece entitled No Such Thing as Racial Profiling. It is just awful and shows the level to which our elite publications are sinking. It is not worth my time to rebut, but I will direct my readers to the author's comments on the R. Giuliani quotation. Get out your logical scalpels.
Addendum. There is also the liberal-left tendency to drop qualifiers. Thus 'male' in 'male chauvinism' is dropped, and 'chauvinism' comes to mean male chauvinism, which is precisely what it doesn't mean. So one can expect the following to happen. 'Racial' in 'racial profiling' will be dropped, and 'profiling' will come to mean racial profiling, which, in reality, means nothing.
___________________
* See here:
Any candid debate on race and criminality in this country would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes. African-Americans constitute about 13% of the population, yet between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the U.S. The black arrest rate for most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes—is typically two to three times their representation in the population. [. . .]
"High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination," wrote the late Harvard Law professor William Stuntz in "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice." "The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control of city governments."
Safe Speech
"No man speaketh safely but he that is glad to hold his peace. " (Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Chapter XX.)
Excellent advice for Christian and non-Christian alike. Much misery and misfortune can be avoided by simply keeping one's mouth shut. That playful banter with your female student that you could not resist indulging in – she construed it as sexual harrassment. You were sitting on top of the world, but now you are in a world of trouble. In this Age of Political Correctness examples are legion. To be on the safe side, a good rule of thumb is: If your speech can be misconstrued, it will be. Did you really need to make that comment, or fire off that e-mail, or send that picture of your marvellous nether endowment to a woman not your wife?
Part of the problem is Political Correctness, but another part is that people are not brought up to exercise self-control in thought, word, and deed. Both problems can be plausibly blamed on liberals. Paradoxically enough, the contemporary liberal promotes speech codes and taboos while at the same time promoting an absurd tolerance of every sort of bad behavior. The liberal 'educator' dare not tell the black kid to pull his pants up lest he be accused of a racist 'dissing' of the punk's 'culture.'
You need to give your children moral lessons and send them to schools where they will receive them. My mind drifts back to the fourth or fifth grade and the time a nun planted an image in my mind that remains. She likened the tongue to a sword capable of great damage, positioned behind two 'gates,' the teeth and the lips. Those gates are there for a reason, she explained, and the sword should come out only when it can be well deployed.
The good nun did not extend the image to the sword of flesh hanging between a man's legs. But I will. Keep your 'sword' behind the 'gates' of your pants and your undershorts until such time as it can be brought out for a good purpose.
Companion post: Idle Talk
Imagine No ‘Imagine’
Imagine no 'Imagine'
It's easy if you try
No more lefty lyrics
Above us more than sky.
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And Lennon's song'll go unsung.
No Truth, No Justice!
Rioters, looters, and their enablers on the Left love to chant, "No justice, no peace!" In one sense of these words, I completely agree. There can be no durable and genuine peace without justice. But there can be no administration of justice without respect for truth. In the Ferguson affair, did justice demand the indictment of Officer Darren Wilson? No, because the evidence presented to the grand jury, which is as close as we are likely to come to the truth of what happened in the altercation between Wilson and Michael Brown, did not warrant Wilson's indictment.
But leftists, true to form, have chosen to ignore the truth. They value truth only if it fits their 'narrative.' According to the 'narrative,' white cops driven by racial animus routinely gun down unarmed blacks. That's a lie and a slander, and leftists know it. But playing the race card works for them politically which is why they play it. So their calls for justice are hollow and indeed absurd. There can be no justice without truth.
No truth, no justice!
Are There Possible Worlds in which the Human Nature of Christ Exists Unassumed?
This entry continues the conversation with Tim Pawl about Chalcedonian Christology.
I set forth the following antilogism:
3. The individual human nature of the Logos is a substance.
4. Every substance is metaphysically capable of independent existence.
5. The individual human nature of the Logos is not metaphysically capable of independent existence.
I expected Tim to question (4), but he instead questioned (5). That turned the dialectic away from the general-ontological Aristotelian framework, which I was claiming does not allow the coherent conceivability of the Chalcedonian formulation, toward the exact sense of the Chalcedonian theological doctrine of the Incarnation.
As I see it, we are now discussing the following question. Is it metaphysically possible that the individual human being who is the Son of God — and is thus identical to the Second Person of the Trinity — exist as an individual human being but without being the Son of God? I thought I was being orthodox in returning a negative answer. As I understand it, the individual human being who is the Son of God in the actual world, our world, is the Son of God in every possible world in which he exists. This is equivalent to saying that Jesus of Nazareth is essentially (as opposed to accidentally) the Son of God. (X is essentially F =df x is F in every possible world in which x exists.)
If I understand what Tim Pawl is saying, his view is that there are possible worlds in which Jesus of Nazareth exists but is not the Son of God. So the issue between us is as follows:
BV: Every metaphysically possible world in which Jesus exists is a world in which he is identical to the Son (the Logos, the Word, the Second Person).
TP: Some metaphysically possible worlds in which Jesus exists are worlds in which he is not identical to the Son (the Logos, the Word, the Second Person).
In his latest comment, Tim writes,
I do think that there is a merely possible world in which CHN [Christ's human nature] exists as unassumed. In such a world, it fulfills the conditions for being a supposit. And so it fulfills the conditions for being a supposit with a rational nature. So it is a person in that world, [call it W] even though it is not a person in this world [call it A].
I am afraid I find this incoherent. If Jesus is (identical to) the Son of God, then Jesus is (identically) the Son of God in every world in which he exists. To spell out the argument:
1. 'Jesus' and 'Son' are Kripkean rigid designators: they designate the same item in every possible world in which that item exists.
2. Necessity of Identity. For any x, y, if x = y, then necessarily x = y.
3. Jesus = Son.
Therefore,
4. Necessarily, Jesus = Son. (from 2, 3 by Universal Instantiation and Modus Ponens)
Therefore,
5. It is not possible that Jesus not be identical to the Son. (from 4 by the standard modal principle that Nec p is logically equivalent to ~Poss~p.)
The Deep Meaning of Ferguson: The End of the Rule of Law
Ferguson is of course just one instance. But it is emblematic. As usual, Victor Davis Hanson gets it right:
In the Ferguson disaster, the law was the greatest casualty. Civilization cannot long work if youths strong-arm shop owners and take what they want. Or walk down the middle of highways high on illicit drugs. Or attack police officers and seek to grab their weapons. Or fail to obey an officer’s command to halt. Or deliberately give false testimonies to authorities. Or riot, burn, and loot. Or, in the more abstract sense, simply ignore the legal findings of a grand jury; or, in critical legal theory fashion, seek to dismiss the authority of the law because it is not deemed useful to some preconceived theory of social justice. Do that and society crumbles.
In our cynicism we accept, to avoid further unrest, that no government agency will in six months prosecute the looters and burners, or charge with perjury those who brazenly lied in their depositions to authorities, or charge the companion of Michael Brown with an accessory role in strong-arm robbery, or charge the stepfather of Michael Brown for using a bullhorn to incite a crowd to riot and loot and burn. We accept that because legality is becoming an abstraction, as it is in most parts of the world outside the U.S. where politics makes the law fluid and transient.
Nor can a government maintain legitimacy when it presides over lawlessness. The president of the United States on over 20 occasions insisted that it would be illegal, dictatorial, and unconstitutional to contravene federal immigration law — at least when to do so was politically inexpedient. When it was not, he did just that. Now we enter the Orwellian world of a videotaped president repeatedly warning that what he would soon do would be in fact illegal. Has a U.S. president ever so frequently and fervently warned the country about the likes of himself?
The Retreat into the Private Life
When the world and its hopelessness are too much with us, one can and must beat a retreat into the private life. Body culture, mind culture, hobbies, family life, the various escapes (which are not necessarily escapes from reality) into chess, fiction, religion, meditation, history, pure mathematics and science, one's own biography and the pleasant particulars of one's past, music, gardening, homemaking . . . .
I pity the poor activist for whom the real is exhausted by the political. But I detest these totalitarians as well since they seek to elide the boundary between the private and the public.
So we need to battle the bastards in the very sphere they think exhausts the real. But it is and must be a part-time fight, lest we become like them. Most of life for us conservatives must be given over to the enjoyment and appreciation, in private, of the apolitical: nature, for example, and nature's God.
Sick of Political Acrimony, Reader Goes on ‘News Fast’
This from reader K. W. with my comments in blue:
I am taking a break from all news and social media. I will be keeping up with your blog, however, as your most recent treatment on the Incarnation is intriguing. I'm taking a break because I'm tired of all of the vehemence being spewed out there. It's not all from the liberals; conservatives have a role to play too. However, much of it is from the liberals.
I agree that conservatives are a part of the problem, but most of the trouble is from the Left. No surprise here. Civility is a conservative virtue. Why should a leftist be civil? He is out to oppose, disrupt, subvert, and bring about radical change. Radical change: not improvement of a system that works well by comparison with other systems elsewhere and elsewhen. The leftist is a nowhere man, a u-topian. He does not stand, like the conservative, upon the the terra firma of a reality antecedent to his wishes, desires, and impossible dreams.
This puts conservatives in a tough spot. For the Left, politics is war. And war cannot be conducted in a civil manner. One has to employ the same tactics as the aggressor or else lose.
The temptation to retreat into one's private life is very strong. But if you give in and let the Left have free reign you may wake up one day with no private life left. Not that 'news fasts' from time to time are not a good idea. We should all consume less media dreck. But there is no final retreat from totalitarians. They won't allow it. At some point one has to stand and fight in defense, not only of the individual, but also of the mediating structures of civil society.
The hypocrisy is just too much. They decry potential violence in the form of the Second Amendment, but think that the rioting is justified and acceptable. They rightly cry out that "Black Lives Matter!" and yet only do so when a white officer shoots an unarmed black man. Where were they when black men are attacking one another? Black lives matter . . . of course they do. So then why raze businesses in their communities, businesses that provide paying jobs which would help those black lives make ends meet? Even if Officer Wilson was guilty, why repay injustice by perpetuating injustice? What did those businesses have to do with any of it? Why burn down police cruisers and confirm in the minds of those white police officers what you think they think of you all. I just don't understand this madness and it depresses me that the majority opinion (or at least the most vocal opinion) is that this is all appropriate and good.
You are talking sense, of course. But there is no common sense on the Left, no wisdom, and worst of all, no concern for truth.
What matters to a leftist is not truth, but the 'narrative.' A narrative is a story, and stories needn't be true to be useful in promoting an 'agenda.'
Officer Darren Wilson was not indicted for a very good reason: there was simply no case again him. He was assaulted by the thuggish Michael Brown who had just robbed a convenience store and roughed up its proprietor. Brown then proceeded to walk in the middle of the road, which of course is illegal. Wilson, doing his job, ordered him out of the road and then Brown went on the attack, initiating a physical altercation with the cop and trying to wrest his weapon from him. Outside the car, a bit later, Brown rushed the cop and the cop had no choice but to shoot him dead. The cop did it by the book. Everything he did was legal. And morally permissible.
But leftists do not care what the actual facts are, because, again, they do not care about truth. What actually happened in Ferguson is ignored because it does not comport with the 'narrative' according to which racist white cops shoot down "unarmed black teenagers."
For a leftist, the narrative is everything and truth be damned. Leftists claim to want justice, but without truth there can be no justice.
Was Brown unarmed? Yes, but by the same token Rodney King was a motorist and Trayvon Martin was a child. There is a form of mendacity whereby one deceives by telling truths.
Note the linguistic mischief liberals make. If you say that a person is unarmed, you imply that he is harmless. But an unarmed man who attacks a cop and tries to arm himself with the cop's weapon is not harmless, although, technically, he is unarmed until the moment he succeeds in arming himself.
And of course race doesn't come into this at all except insofar as blacks are more criminally prone than whites.
Nor should this be a liberal-conservative issue, unless liberals are opposed to the rule of law. I fear that here in fact is the salient point: contemporary liberals have no respect for the rule of law, from Obama and Holder on down. (Turkish saying: Balık baştan kokar: "The fish stinks from the head.") Examples are legion: Obamacare, illegal immigration, et cetera ad nauseam.
The truth is that Michael Brown by his preternaturally imprudent, immoral, and illegal behavior brought about his own demise. Had he been brought up properly to respect the law and its legitimate enforcers, he would be alive today. All he had to do was get out of the street! But no! He started a fight with a cop, taunted him, called him 'a pussy,' threw the cigarillos he had stolen at him, as if to say, "What are you going to do about it, pig?" (Was Brown suicidal?)
You could say that I am blaming the victim. But unless one is profoundly stupid one must agree with me that this is a clear case in which blaming the victim is perfectly justified.
It's crunch time with term papers and grading and guest lectures for my supervisor, so I have to retain an aggressive posture from this point until December 15th. Hence my fast from media. And I need time to emotionally process all of this. I have appreciated your blog and the perspective you offer. It is a voice crying out in the wilderness.
Vox clamantis in deserto!
On Relevance in Education
From the mail bag:
I have taught high school and college-aged kids for many years, and am very often lobbed the relevance question. The logical coherence of the concept of God. Theories of space and time. Classic questions in epistemology and metaphysics. "How is this relevant," they ask. It annoys me. I make an impotent gesture toward the intrinsic value of knowledge, but am always left frustrated by having to defend what is so obvious to me –and to everyone else prior to the mid twentieth century–the indelible importance of these topics. Maybe you can help me out?
I don't know how much help I can be, but here are some thoughts.
1. The philosophy teacher has a problem the calculus instructor, say, does not. The latter does not have to show the relevance of his subject or motivate an interest in it. Perhaps two thirds of the students before him are engineering majors who need no convincing of the relevance of higher mathematics to their career goals. They are interested in mathematics, if not for its own sake, then for the sake of its use. The philosophy teacher, however, has not only to teach his subject but also, unlike the mathematics professor, to argue its relevance and motivate interest.
2. At this point lame justifications of philosophy come thick and fast. It teaches critical thinking; it is good preparation for law school, etc. I knock the crutches out from under these lame justifications in Should One Stoop to a Defense of Philosophy and the Humanities? As I say there:
Philosophy is an end in itself. This is why it is foolish to try to convince philistines that it is good for something. It is not primarily good for something. It is a good in itself. Otherwise you are acquiescing in the philistinism you ought to be combating. [. . .]
To the philistine's "Philosophy bakes no bread" you should not respond "Yes it does," for such responses are patently lame. You should say, "Man does not live by bread alone," or "Not everything is pursued as a means to something else," or "A university is not a trade school." You should not acquiesce in the philistine's values and assumptions, but go on the attack and question his values and assumptions. Put him on the spot. Play the Socratic gadfly. If a philistine wants to know how much you got paid for writing an article for a professional journal, say, "Do you really think that only what one is paid to do is worth doing?"
3. "I make an impotent gesture toward the intrinsic value of knowledge, but am always left frustrated by having to defend what is so obvious to me . . ." Most of the people who need to have this explained to them are not equipped to appreciate any explanation. So we humanists are in a tough spot. One of the conclusions I came too early on was that philosophy simply cannot be a mass consumption item at the college level. Although I didn't mind, and actually enjoyed, teaching logic courses, which can be of some use to the masses, I loathed teaching Intro to Philosophy and other philosophy courses designed to satisfy breadth requirements.
Part of the problem is that college level is so low nowadays that it has become a joke to speak of 'higher education.' People are not there to become educated human beings but to garner credentials that they believe will help them get ahead economically and socially. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but then why waste time on the pursuit of truth for its own sake? The average person has no intellectual eros; what he wants and needs is job training.
4. There is an irony here. People like you and me and thousands of others would never have had the opportunity to make a living from teaching philosophy if the level had not sunk so low, not so much because our level is low, but because there would simply have been no jobs for us if 'higher' education had not metastazised in the 1960s and beyond. So while we complain about the low level of our students, we ought to bear in mind that we have students in the first place and are not selling insurance or writing code because of the democratization of 'higher' ed.
5. I am an elitist, but not in a social or economic or racial sense. Everyone who has what it takes to profit from it ought to have the opportunity to pursue real education — which is not to be confused with indoctrination in leftist seminaries — in institutions of higher — no 'sneer' quotes — education. Equality of opportunity! But of course there will never be equality of outcome or result because people are not equal.
Philosophy — the real thing, not some dumbed-down ersatz — cannot be a mass consumption item. It is for the few. But who those few are cannot be decided by criteria of race or sex or age or religion or national origin. High culture is universal and belongs to all of us, even though we individually and as members of groups are not equal in our ability to contribute to it.
Reason with Liberals?
One cannot reason with those who are permanently in a state of self-colonoscopy.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Songs of Gratitude
In keeping with the Thanksgiving theme, some songs of gratitude.
Kris Krisofferson, Thank You for a Life
Beatles, Thank You Girl
Led Zepellin, Thank You
Merle Haggard, Thanking the Good Lord
Roy Clark, Thank God and Greyhound You're Gone
Alanis Morissette, Thank You
Joan Baez, Gracias a la Vida
Hank Williams, Thank God. Compare Lost Highway
And now, stretching a bit:
Grateful Dead, Truckin'
What Did You Do With Your Life, God?
Thanksgiving evening, the post-prandial conversation was very good. Christian Marty K. raised the question of what one would say were one to meet God after death and God asked, "What did you do with your life?"
Atheist Peter L. shot back, "What did you do with your life, God?"
In my judgment, and it is not just mine, the fact of evil is the main stumbling block to theistic belief. While none of the arguments from evil are compelling, some of them render atheism rationally acceptable. This has long been my view. Atheism and theism are both rationally acceptable and intellectually respectable, though of course they cannot both be true.
This puts me at odds with the Pauline passage at Romans 1: 18-20. I'll summarize it. Men are godless and wicked and suppress the truth. What may be known about God is plain to them because God has made it plain to them. Human beings have no excuse for their unbelief. "For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made . . . ."
Paul's claim here is that the existence and nature of God are evident from creation and that unbelief is a result of a willful turning away from the manifest truth. There is no excuse for unbelief because it is a plain fact that the natural world is divine handiwork. Now I am a theist and I am sympathetic to Christianity. But although I have one foot in Jerusalem, the other is planted firmly in Athens (philosophy, the autonomy of reason). And so I must point out that to characterize the natural world as 'made' or 'created' begs the question in favor of theism. As begging the question, the Pauline claim about the evidentness of the world's being created offers no support for theism. It is an analytic proposition that there is no creation without a creator. So if the heavens and the earth are a creation, then it follows straightaway that a creator exists.
But is the world a divine creation? This is the question, and the answer is not obvious. That the natural world is a divine artifact is not evident to the senses, or to the heart, or to reason. Of course, one can argue for the existence of God from the existence and order of the natural world. I have done it myself. But those who reject theistic arguments, and construct anti-theistic arguments, have their reasons too, and it cannot fairly be said that what animates the best of them is a stubborn and prideful refusal to submit to a truth that is evident. It is not evident to the senses that the natural world is a divine artifact.
I may be moved to marvel at "the starry skies above me" (Kant). But seeing is not seeing as. If you see the starry skies as divine handiwork, then this is an interpretation from within a theistic framework. But the datum seen can just as easily be given a nontheistic interpretation.
At the end of the day you must decide which of these interpretations to accept. You will not find some plain fact that will decide it for you. There is no fact you can point to, or argument you can give, that definitively rules out theism or rules it in.
If the atheism of some has its origin in pride, stubborness and a willful refusal to recognize any power or authority beyond oneself, or beyond the human, as may well be the case with such luminaries as Russell and Sartre, it does not follow that the atheism of all has this origin.
By the way, here we have the makings of an argument for hell. If someone, post-mortem, in the divine presence, and now fully cognizant of the ultimate metaphysical 'lay of the land,' were to persist in a pride Luciferian, and refuse to acknowledge and worship the ultimate Source of truth, goodness, beauty, and reality, a Source itself ultimately true, good, beautiful, and real, then the only fitting place for someone who freely chose to assert his miserable ego in defiance of its Source would be hell. It would be deeply unjust and unreasonable to permit such a person the visio beata.
Do You Think Your Views Will Ever Change?
The question was put to atheist A. C. Grayling. His response:
No, my views will not change; I am confident in the rationalist tradition which has evaluated the metaphysical and ethical claims of non-naturalistic theories, and definitively shown them to be vacuous in all respects other than the psychological effect they have on those credulous enough to accept them.
Should we perhaps speak here of the faith of a rationalist? And isn't there something unphilosophical about Grayling's stance? He is sure that his views will not change and confident in the rationalist tradition. He is not open to having his views changed by further thought or argument or evidence. Not very philosophical, not very Socratic. Socrates knew only that he did not know. Grayling knows.
He blusters when he speaks of what has been "definitely shown." Nothing of a substantive nature has ever been definitively shown in philosophy, and certainly not the "vacuousness" of the metaphysical and ethical claims of non-naturalism. Besides, it is simply false to say that these claims are "vacuous." Though they may be false, for all we know, they are quite definite and meaningful claims. 'Vacuous' means 'empty.' In this context it means empty of sense or significance.
What you have to understand about Grayling and his New Atheist ilk is that they are ideologues, no different in this respect from their anti-naturalist, religious counterparts. (Compare the Thomist view that it has been definitely shown that God exists, that the existence of God is knowable with certainty by unaided human reason.) Grayling and Co. are not philosophers who love the truth and seek it because they don't have it; they fancy themselves possessors of the truth and its guardians against the benighted.
So if unshakable confidence in the definitive truth of one's position can lead to violence and oppression, why is this a danger only on the religious side of the ideological divide and not on the anti-religious side? That is a question that ought not be evaded. Don't forget what the communists did to the religious people, instituitions, monuments, and sites in the lands where they gained control.
Grayling posts of mine. They are polemical. He polemicizes; I polemicize right back. Meet polemics with polemics, civil truth-seeking dialog with civil truth-seeking dialog.
As one of my aphorisms has it: Be kind, but be prepared to reply in kind.