It is time to trot out my old gun posts to counteract the tsunami of leftist Unsinn washing over us because of the recent massacres in Oregon and Connecticut. Here is one from December of 2010, slightly revised.
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How should we deal with offensive speech? As a first resort, with more speech, better, truer, more responsible speech. Censorship cannot be ruled out, but it must be a last resort. We should respond similarly to the misuse of firearms. Banning firearms is no solution since (i) bans have no effect on criminals who, in virtue of being criminals, have no respect for law, and (ii) bans violate the liberty of the law-abiding. To punish the law-abiding while failing vigorously to pursue scofflaws is the way of the contemporary liberal. The problem is not guns, but guns in criminal hands. Ted Kennedy's car killed more people than my gun. The solution, or part of it, is guns in law-abiding hands.
Would an armed citizen in the vicinity of the Virginia Polytechnic shooter have been able to reduce his carnage? It is likely. Don't ask me how likely. Of course, there is the chance that an armed citizen in the confusion of the moment would have made things worse. Who knows?
But if you value liberty then you will be willing to take the risk. As I understand it, the Commonwealth of Virginia already has a concealed carry law. Now if you trust a citizen to carry a concelaed weapon off campus, why not trust him to carry it on campus? After all, on campus there is far less likelihood of a situation arising where the weapon would be needed. Conservatives place a high value on self-reliance, individual liberty, and individual responsibility. Valuing self-reliance and liberty, a conservative will oppose any attempt to limit his self-reliance by infringing his right to defend himself, a right from which one may infer the right to own a handgun. (As I argue elsewhere; see the category Alcohol,Tobacco and Firearms.) And appreciating as he does the reality and importance of individual responsibility, he will oppose liberal efforts to blame guns for the crimes committed by people using guns.
Nothing I have written will convince a committed liberal. As I have argued elsewhere, Left-Right differences are rooted in value-differences that cannot be rationally adjudicated. But my intention is not to try to enlighten the terminally benighted; my intention is to clarify the issue.
Persuasion and agreement are well-nigh impossible to attain; clarification, however, is a goal well within reach. We must be clear about what we believe and why we believe it and how it differs from the beliefs of the benighted. And in the light of that clarity we must carry the fight to our enemies.
Nevertheless, no one could read this book [Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust by Jan Tomasz Gross] without being, yet again, horrified by man’s inhumanity to man. Indeed, the term inhumanity seems almost an odd one in the circumstances, assuming as it does that Man’s default setting is to decency and kindness, whereas the evidence presented in this book is that, once legal and social restraints are removed, Man becomes an utter savage.
Exactly right. One of the most pernicious illusions of the Left is that human beings are basically good and decent, and that society has corrupted them.
According to Gross, people of all social strata in Poland gladly, even joyfully, plundered their Jewish neighbours; if so, they were not unique in having done so, for it happened across Europe during Nazi occupation, while in Rwanda, in 1994, ordinary Hutus happily and without conscience appropriated the property of their erstwhile but now massacred Tutsi neighbours.
You recently mentioned your being very happy, given what's wrong with the world, to be 62 rather than 26; I am 26. Although, sadly, I think liberalism will run until it destroys itself as a parasite that destroys its host, this metaphysical fact of evil's being self-destructive is reason enough for hope. People have always sensed that the world is falling apart, because in a sense it always has been, but even greater than the mystery of evil is the mystery of goodness. Rather than regretting my being 26 rather than 62, I remember, in my Mavphil-inspired gratitude exercises, that the cruelest regime in the history of mankind fell during my lifetime.
I have always believed that Good and Evil are not opposites on a par, but that somehow Good is more fundamental and that Evil is somehow derivative or interstitial or parasitic or privative. The Thomist doctrine of evil as privatio boni is one way of explaining this relation, though that doctrine is open to objections.
So I agree with my correspondent that, in the end, Good triumphs. Unfortunately, it is a long way to the end, a long march along a via dolorosa with many stations of suffering. I don't relish making that journey. Hence my satisfaction at the thought that my life is, most likely, three-quarters over. As I said in that post-election post,
One can hope to be dead before it all comes apart. Fortunately or unfortunately, I am in the habit of taking care of myself and could be facing another 25 years entangled in the mortal coil. When barbarism descends this will be no country for old men.
I too am grateful that the Evil Empire fell during my lifetime. But now we have an incompetent jackass in the White House, a hard-core leftist, who was given four more years by a foolish electorate for whom panem et circenses are the supreme desiderata. Innocent of the ways of world, trapped in leftist fantasy land, he is the polar opposite of Ronald Reagan. We are in deep trouble.
But I do not counsel despair. We live by hope, within this life and beyond it. We shall hope on and fight on.
1. Why did the Japanese so foolishly attack Pearl Harbor?
2. Why did the Germans attack the Soviet Union so recklessly at a time when they had all but won the war?
3. Why did the United States stop after spring 1951 at the 38th Parallel, thereby ensuring a subsequent sixty-year Cold War and resulting in chronic worries about a North Korea armed with nuclear weapons and poised to invade its neighbor to the south?
I asked commenter John whether he thought that temporal parts — assuming that there are temporal parts — would count as ontological constituents of an ordinary particular such as an avocado. Here is what he said:
. . . I believe that I would say that the temporal parts of an avocado are ontological constituents of it. A thing's temporal parts are much more like a thing's material parts than any other putative constituent of that object, so I would say that if a thing's material parts are ontological constituents of it, then so too are a thing's temporal parts.
But I don't think I would say that this commits perdurantists to constituent ontology in any interesting sense. I have always understood the contrast between constituent and relational ontologies to be primarily a matter of how a thing relates to its properties: does a thing have properties by standing in some external relation to those properties, or instead by having those properties somehow 'immanent' in it? Perhaps this is wrong. But if it's right, then I would say that perdurantists believe that the temporal parts of a thing are among its ontological constituents, but that this does not commit them to any interesting version of constituent ontology.
John's response is a reasonable one, but it does highlight some of the difficulties in clarifying the difference between constituent ontology (C-ontology) and relational ontology (R-ontology).
One of the difficulties is to specify what exactly is meant by 'ontological constituent.' John takes the material parts of a thing to be ontological constituents of it. I don't. Material parts are ordinary mereological parts. For me, ontological constituents are quasi-mereological metaphysical parts to be contrasted with physical (material) parts. Ontological parts are those parts that contribute to an entity's ontological structure. R-ontologists deny that ordinary concrete particulars have any ontological structure. This is not to deny that they have mereological structure. So R-ontologists have no use for ontological parts (constituents). But they have plenty of use for material parts as we all do. 'Ontological' and 'metaphysical' are interchangeable adjectives in this context.
An avocado is an improper physical part of itself. Among its proper physical parts are the skin, the meat, and the pit. Of course, each of these has proper physical parts, and the parts have parts. All of these parts are parts in the strict mereological sense of 'part.' Now consider the dark green (or greenness) of the skin. It is not a physical or material or spatial part of the skin. I can't peel it off the skin or cut it up or eat it. If it is a part at all, it is a metaphysical part of the skin. And the same goes for every other property of the skin: if is is a part at all, it is a metaphysical part. These metaphysical property-parts together perhaps with some other metaphysical parts (bare or thin particulars, various sorts of nexus, Castanedan ontological operators. . .) make up what we can call the ontological structure of an ordinary particular. This quasi-mereological ontological structure is distinct from the strictly mereological structure of the object in question.
Everyone agrees that things like avocados and aardvarks and asteroids have physical parts. But not all agree that they have in addition metaphysical parts. As I see it, the issue that divides C-ontologists from R-ontologists is the question whether concrete particulars have metaphysical parts in addition to their physical parts where the thing's properties are among its metaphysical parts. C-ontologists say yes; R-ontologists, no.
This is a broader understanding of the difference between C- and R-ontology than John's above. For John the difference is between how concrete particulars have properties. For a C-ontologist, a thing has a property by having it as an ontological constituent. For an R-ontologist, a thing has a property, not by having it as a constituent, but by standing in an external relation to it. That is not wrong, but I think it is too narrow.
John seems to be suggesting that the only ontological constituents there are are properties, and that the only items that have such constituents are ordinary concrete particulars. My understanding is broader. I maintain that among ontological constituents there are or could be other items such as bare or thin particulars, various type of nexus, ontological operators, and perhaps others, in addition to properties (whether taken to be universals or taken to be tropes). I am also open to the possibility that entities other than ordinary concrete particulars could have ontological constituents.
Take God. God is presumably a concrete particular, concrete because causally active, particular because not universal; but surely God is not an ordinary concrete particular, especially if 'ordinary' implies being material. Arguably, God is not related to his attributes; if he were his aseity would be compromised. So I say he has his attributes as constituents. If he is identical to them, as on the doctrine of divine simplicity, then a fortiori he has them as constitutuents, improper constituents.
Return to the humble avocado. Our avocado is green, ripe, soft, etc. So it has properties. This simple observation gives rise to three philosophical questions:
Q1. What are properties?
Q2. What is the item that has the properties?
Q3. What is property-possession? (What is it for an item to have properties?)
I will now contrast one R-ontological answer with one C-ontological answer. What follows are very rough sketches.
One R-ontological answer is this. Properties are abstract objects in a realm apart. They are causally inert, atemporal, nonspatial, not sense-perceivable. Not only do properties not enter into causal relations, they do not induce causal powers in the things that have them. They are what is expressed by such open sentences as '____ is green' analogously as propositions are expressed by such closed sentences as 'Ava is green.' If, per impossibile, God were to annihilate all of these abstract objects, nothing would change in our humble avocado. I say per impossibile because the abstract objects in question are necessary beings. My point is that they do no work here below. They are as irrelevant to what is really going on in the avocado as the predicates 'ripe' and 'green' are.
The item that has properties is just the ordinary concrete thing, the avocado in our example, not a propertyless substratum or any other exotic item. The having is a relation or nonrelational tie that connects the concrete thing to the abstract property.
Now for a C-ontological answer. Properties are universals. Whether or not they can exist unexemplified, when they are exemplified, they enter into the ontological structure of ordinary particulars as metaphysical parts thereof. Thus the greenness of the avocado is 'in' it as a metaphysical part. Same holds for the ripeness, the softness, etc. These universals are empirically detectable and induce causal powers. The thing that has these universals is the avocado viewed as a complex, indeed, as a concrete fact. What makes it particular is a further constituent, the thin particular, which is nonrelationally tied to the universals and unifies them into one thick particular.
What would the soundtrack of the '60s have been without Shankar's sitar? Here is the Shankar I heard at the Monterey Pop Festival in '67. Here is an extended performance at the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh.
Recalling our miserably indigent origin in the wombs of our mothers and the subsequent helplessness of infancy, how did we get to be so arrogant and self-important?
In a line often (mis)attributed to St. Augustine, but apparently from Bernard of Clairvaux, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: "We are born between feces and urine."
So inauspicious a beginning for so proud a strut upon life's stage.
Perhaps we are here to be taught humility. Some indications that this could be so:
1. War is endless and ubiquitous at every level and there is nothing much we can do about it. A 'war to end all wars" in Woodrow Wilson's claptrap phrase would be a war that put an end to humanity. It is an excellent bet that there will be wars as long as there are human beings. There are wars within families and between tribes and nations and gangs and interest groups. There is class warfare and racial hatred and the battle of the sexes. There are inter-generational tensions ("Don't trust anyone over 30!") and intrapsychic conflicts. There is inter-species predation. Not only is man a wolf to man, wolves are wolves to men, and men to wolves. If extraterrestrials should show up it is a good bet that a 'war of the worlds' would ensue. If they came to serve man, it would be to serve him for dinner, as in the famous Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve Man."
Some warn of the militarization of space as if it has not already been militarized. It has been, and for a long time now. How long depending on how high up you deem space begins. Are they who warn unaware of spy satellites? Of Gary Powers and the U-2 incident? Of the V-2s that crashed down on London? Of the crude Luftwaffen, air-weapons, of the First World War? The Roman catapults? The first javelin thrown by some Neanderthal spear chucker? It travelled through space to pierce the heart of some poor effer and was an early weaponization of the space between chucker and effer.
"I will not weaponize space," said Obama while a candidate in 2008. That empty promise came too late, and is irresponsible to boot: if our weapons are not there, theirs will be.
The very notion that outer space could be reserved for wholly peaceful purposes shows a deep lack of understanding of the human condition. Show me a space with human beings in it and I will show you a space that potentially if not actually is militarized and weaponized. Man is, was, and will be a bellicose son of a bitch. If you doubt this, study history, with particular attention to the 20th century. You can bet that the future will resemble the past in this respect. Note that the turn of the millenium has not brought anything new in this regard. And whatever happened to the Age of Aquarius?
Older is not wiser. All spaces, near, far, inner, outer, are potential scenes of contention, which is why I subscribe to the Latin saying:
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
If you want peace, prepare for war.
2. At the level of ideas there is unending controversy, often acrimonious, in almost every field. There is the strife of systems, not to mention the strife of the systematic with the anti-systematic. (Hegel versus Kierkegaard, for example.) Despite invincible ignorance ignorant of itself as ignorance, contentious humans proudly proclaim their 'knowledge' — and are contradicted by fools of opposing stripes.
3. My third point is subsumable under my first, but so important that it deserves separate mention. Homo homini lupus. Never eradicated, man's inhumanity to man is seemingly ineradicable. As we speak, people are being poisoned, shot, stabbed for the flimsiest of reasons or no reason at all. Girls are being raped and sold into slavery. The abortion 'doctors' are slaughtering innocent human beings while apologists whose intellects have been suborned by their lusts cook up justifications. The Iranian head of state calls for the destruction of Israel and its inhabitants. Meanwhile benighted leftists ignore the threat of radical Islam and label 'islamophobic' those who see straight. Every hour of every day extends the litany of the 'lupine.' And there is not much we can do about it.
4. And then there is the eventual if not present corruption of all the institutions that are supposed to ameliorate the human condition: the churches, the criminal justice system, the U. N., governments. The reformers reform until they too become corrupted. And there is little we can do about it.
5. Let's not leave out our animal nature that insures fragility, sickness, death and untold miseries. Transhumanist fantasies aside, there is not much we can do about it. (We can do something, and we have, and that is good; but sickness, old age, and death are as much with us as in the days of the Buddha.)
Meditating on such points as these one might hazard the inference that this world is a vale of soul-making wherein a chief virtue to be learned is that of humility. Our minds are dark, our wills weak, our hearts foul. What is to be so proud about?
Since the past is no longer, to let go of the past is to let go of thoughts of the past. But these thoughts, like all thoughts, are in the present. So we are brought back again to the importance of cultivating the ability to let go of thoughts here and now. Mind control in the present automatically takes care of the two nonpresent temporal modes.
He who avoids socializing avoids pointless conversations, some of which are worse than pointless. For example, chatting with a stranger can turn ugly very quickly if it happens that you differ politically. Still, socializing is not all bad. Like whisky, a little is good now and again. But more is not better.
