Long ago I was told the following story by a nun. One day St. Augustine was walking along the seashore, thinking about the Trinity. He came upon a child who had dug a hole in the sand and was busy filling it with buckets of seawater.
Augustine: "What are you doing?"
Child: "I am trying to empty the ocean into this hole."
Augustine: "But that’s impossible!"
Child: "No more impossible than your comprehending the Trinity."
What holds for the Trinity holds for the great problems of philosophy: we can no more solve them than the child could empty the sea into a hole on the seashore. Our minds are not large enough for these problems, not strong enough, not free enough from distorting, distracting, suborning factors. We know that from experience.
Philosophy teaches us humility. This is one of its most important uses. And this despite the fact that too many paid professors of it are the exact opposite of humble truth-seekers. But worse still are the scientistic scientists whose arrogance is fueled by profound ignorance of the questions and traditions that made their own enterprise possible.
I have been searching various databases such as JSTOR without success for a good article on deus ex machina objections in philosophy. What exactly is a deus ex machina (DEM)? When one taxes a theory or an explanatory posit with DEM, what exactly is one alleging? How does a DEM differ from a legitimate philosophical explanation that invokes divine or some other nonnaturalistic agency? Since it is presumably the case that not every recourse to divine agency in philosophical theories is a DEM, what exactly distinguishes legitimate recourse to divine agency from DEM? Herewith, some preliminary exploratory notes on deus ex machina.
This question is personally very interesting to me because Arianna Betti here (third paragraph) accuses my theory of facts of deus ex machina, a theory I initially sketched in my 2000 Nous article "Three Conceptions of States of Affairs" and then presented more fully in my 2002 Existence book.
1. Deus ex machina is Latin for 'God out of a machine.' Let us begin by making a distinction between DEM objections in literary criticism and in philosophy. A DEM objection can be brought against a play or a novel if the behavior of a character is not "necessary or probable" (as Aristotle puts it at Poetics 1454a37) given the way the character has already been depicted, or if an incident is not a "necessary or probable" consequence of earlier incidents. From a lit-crit point of view, then, a playwright or a novelist can be taxed with a DEM if he allows something to irrupt into the scene from outside it which doesn't fit with the characters and action so far depicted. As I understand it, the literal meaning of 'DEM' comes from the lowering of a god via stage machinery into the setting of an ancient Greek play. See, for example, Plato, Cratylus 425d where Plato has Socrates speak of "the tragic poets who, in any perplexity have their gods waiting in the air . . . ." If any novelist or playwright is reading this, he is invited to supply some examples of DEM and explain what is wrong with them.
2. My interest, however, is less literary and aesthetic than philosophical. In the context of philosophical and perhaps also scientific explanations, a DEM objection would be to the effect that illegitimate recourse has been had to an explanatory posit that belongs to an order radically other than the order of the explananda. I put it so abstractly because I want to leave open the possibility of DEM objections to explanations that invoke agents or powers other than God. We now consider two putative examples of DEM. The first is Leibniz's recourse to God in his solution of the mind-body problem and in his theory of causation generally, and the second is Malebranche's invocation of God for a similar purpose. What is particularly interesting is that Leibniz accuses Malebranche of deus ex machina, but does not consider himself liable to the same objection.
3. Leibniz,Psychophysical Parallelism, and Pre-Established Harmony. There are reasons to believe that psychophysical interaction is impossible. Indeed, Leibniz has reasons for denying intersubstantial causal influx quite generally, even between two material substances. And there are reasons to believe that (i) there are both mental events and physical events as modifications of mental and physical substances respectively and (ii) these events are mutually irreducible. Suppose you accept both sets of reasons. And suppose you want to explain the apparent law-like correlation and covariation of mental and physical events, e.g., how a desire for a cup of coffee, which is mental, is correlated with the physical events that eventuate in your bringing a cup of coffee to your lips. Or, proceeding in the other direction, you want an explanation of why a hammer blow to a finger causes pain. Given that psychophysical interaction is impossible and that there are mutually irreducible mental and physical events, how explain the 'constant conjunction' of the two sorts of event?
One might be tempted by a theory along the lines of Leibniz's pre-established harmony. Roughly, on such a theory there is no intersubstantial causal interaction: the states of one substance cannot act upon the states of another. But there is intrasubstantial causation: the states of a substance cause later states of the same substance. So physical events in a body are caused by earlier physical events in the same body, and mental events in a mind are caused by earlier mental events in the same mind. Mental-physical correlation is explained in terms of pre-established harmony: "each created substance is programmed at creation such that all its natural states and actions are carried out in conformity with all the natural states and actions of every other created substance."(link) The explanation thus invokes God as the agent who establishes the harmony when he creates finite substances.
A standard analogy for the parallelism is in terms of two perfectly synchronized clocks. Whenever clock A shows 12, clock B strikes 12. There is an Humean 'constant conjunction' of striking and showing, but no showing causes a striking if 'causes' means produces or brings into existence. What accounts for the constant conjunction is the pre-synchronization by an agent external to the two clocks. Similarly with all apparent causal interactions: there are in reality no intersubstantial causal interactions, given the windowlessness of Leibnizian monads, but there are law-like correlations which constitute causation a phenomenon bene fundata. But these law-like correlations are grounded in the harmony among the internal states of the monads established when God first created the entire system of finite monads.
4. Now here is my question: Can one dismiss this Leibnizian scheme by saying it is a deus ex machina? Note that on Leibniz's scheme God plays an explanatory role not only with respect to the mind-body problem, but also with respect to the phenomenon of secondary or natural causation in general. For without the monadic harmony pre-established by God when he created the system of finite monads, there would be no law-like regularity such as constitutes causation in the phenomenal world.
Is the Leibnizian proposal a deus ex machina or is it a legitimate form of philosophical explanation? The logically prior question is: What exactly is a DEM? I can think of five answers.
Answer One:Any appeal to a supernatural agent in a theory of natural phenomena is a DEM. On this latitudinarian understanding of DEM, any reference to God in a theory of causation or a theory of truth or a theory of objective value would be a DEM. If this is what is meant by a DEM, then of course Leibnizian parallelism is a DEM. But surely this understanding of DEM is entirely too broad and ought to be rejected. For it allows that any explanation of anything that invokes God is a DEM. But then the problem is not primarily that Leibniz brings God into the theory of mind and body, or the theory of secondary causes, but that he invokes God to explain the existence of things. To give a cosmological argument for the existence of God would be to commit a DEM. But surely a sophisticated cosmological argument for the existence of God cannot be dismissed by slapping the 'DEM' label on it.
It is different if one is seeking a scientific explanation of the very existence of things. The rules of the scientific game preclude the invocation of anything beyond the natural order, beyond the realm of space-time-matter. My concern, however, is DEM as a philosophical objection. That being understood, we can safely set aside Answer One.
Answer Two: An appeal to a supernatural agent in a theory of natural phenomena is a DEM if and only if no independent reasons are given for the existence of the supernatural agent. This is a much better answer. But then one will not be able to tax Leibniz with a DEM since he gives various arguments for the existence of God. The same goes for other philosophers such as Descartes and Berkeley who 'put God to work' in their systems. If one can supply reasons for the existence of God that are independent of the natural phenomenon to be explained, then it is legitimate to invoke God for explanatory purposes.
But this second answer seems to have a flaw. Why would the reasons for the supernatural agent have to be independent, i.e., independent of the job the agent is supposed to do? Suppose the appeal to a divine agent takes the form of an inference to the best or the only possible explanation of the natural explananda. Then the appeal to the divine agent would be rationally justified despite the fact that the agent is posited to do a specific job. Accordingly, Leibnizian pre-established harmony could be interpreted as an argument for God as the best explanation of the phenomena of natural causation.
Answer Three: An appeal to a supernatural agent in a theory of natural phenomena is a DEM iff no reasons are supplied for the existence of the divine agent. This is an improvement over Answer Two, but a problem remains. Suppose a philosopher gives arguments for the existence of God, and then puts God to work in the phenomenal world. If the work he does involves the violation of natural laws, then his workings here below are miraculous in one sense of the term and for this reason philosophically objectionable. So we advance to
Answer Four: An appeal to a supernatural agent in a theory of natural phenomena is a DEM iff EITHER no reasons are supplied for the existence of the divine agent, OR the working of the agent violates natural laws. But in Malebranche's system, neither disjunct is satisfied, and yet Leibniz accuses Malebranche of DEM. For Malebranche there is only one genuine cause and that is God, the causa prima. All so-called secondary causes are but occasions for the exercise of divine causality. Thus the occurrence of event e1 is not what makes e2 occur; God creates e1 and then e2 in such a way as to satisfy the Humean requirements of temporal precedence of cause over effect; spatiotemporal contiguity of cause and effect, and constant conjunction, which is the notion that whenever events of the first type occur they are contiguously succeeded by events of the second type. On this scheme, no causal power is exercised except divine causal power, which involves God in every causal transaction in the natural world. Leibniz objects that this is a DEM because it makes of each cause a miracle. (See Kenneth Clatterbaugh, The Causation Debate in Modern Philosophy, 1637-1739, p. 122.)
But it is not a miracle in the sense of the violation of a natural law. It is a miracle in the sense that the work that should be done by a finite substance is being done by God. A miracle for Leibniz need not be an unusual event; an event that surpasses the power of a natural substance can also be a miracle. Thus Malebranche's denial of causal efficacy to finite substances makes God's involvement in nature miraculous, which amounts to saying that the appeal to God is a DEM.
Answer Five: An appeal to a supernatural agent in a theory of natural phenomena is a DEM iff EITHER no reasons are supplied for the existence of the divine agent, OR the working of the agent violates natural laws, OR the agent's intervention in nature is miraculous in the sense in that it takes over a job that ought to be done by a natural entity. But if this answer be adopted, then Leibniz himself can be accused of DEM! Arguably, the job of grounding mental-physical correlations ought to be done by the terms of theose correlations and not by God.
5. The foregoing remarks are highly tentative and inadequate, but at least they show that a lot of work needs to be done in this area of metaphilosophy.
The short, triumphant, tragic career of Phil Ochs illustrates one of the harder lessons of American popular culture: that audiences are moved far more by mystery than by commitment. Of all the artists of the 1960s folk-music boom, only Bob Dylan understood that in his bones, and only Dylan became a superstar. Ochs, by contrast, was the bright class president of the Greenwich Village scene, reeling off powerful, didactic protest songs in an earnest tenor. He was direct and defiantly uncool, and it doomed him.
This is proving to be a fascinating topic. Let's push on a bit further.
Aquinas says that any given nature can be considered in three ways: in respect of the esse it has in concrete singulars; in respect of the esse it has in minds; absolutely, in the abstract, without reference to either mode of esse. The two modes are esse naturale (esse reale) and esse intentionale. We can speak of these in English as real existence and intentional existence.
According to Schopenhauer, the medievals employed but three examples: Socrates, Plato, and an ass. Who am I to deviate from a tradition at once so hoary and noble? So take Socrates. Socrates is human. The nature humanity exists really in him, and in Plato, but not in the ass. The same nature exists intentionally in a mind that thinks about or knows Socrates. For Aquinas, there are no epistemic deputies standing between mind and thing: thought reaches right up to and grasps the thing itself. There is an isomorphism between knowing mind and thing known. The ground of this isomorphism is the natura absoluta, the nature considered absolutely. Call it the common nature (CN). It is so-called because it is common to both the knower and the known, informing both, albeit in different ways. It is also common to all the singulars of the same nature and all the thoughts directed to the same sort of thing. So caninity is common to all doggy thoughts, to all dogs, besides linking the doggy thoughts to the dogs.
My concern over the last few days has been the exact ontological status of the CN.
This morning, with the help of Anthony Kenny, I realized that there are four possible views, not three as I stated earlier:
A. The CN really exists as a separate, self-subsistent item.
B. The CN exists only intentionally in the mind of one who abstracts it from concrete singulars and mental acts.
C. The CN has Meinongian Aussersein status: it has no mode of being whatsoever, and yet is is something, not nothing. It actually has properties, but is property-incomplete (and therefore in violation of LEM) in that it is neither one nor many, neither universal nor particular, neither intentionally existent nor really existent.
D. The CN exists intentionally in the mind of God, the creator.
(A) is a nonstarter and is rejected by both me and Lukas Novak. (B) appears to be Novak's view. (C) is the interpretation I was tentatively suggesting. My thesis was that the CN must have Aussersein status, but then it inherits — to put it anachronistically — all the problems of Meinongianism. The doctor angelicus ends up with Meinongian monkey on his back.
Let me now try to explain why I reject (B), Novak's view, and incline toward (C), given that (A) cannot possibly be what Aquinas had in mind.
Consider a time t before there were any human animals and any finite minds, and ask yourself: did the nature humanity exist at t? The answer has to be in the negative if there are only two modes of existence, real existence in concrete singulars and intentional existence in finite (creaturely) minds. For at t there were no humans and no finite minds. But surely it is true at t that man is rational, that humanity includes rationality. This implies that humanity at t cannot be just nothing at all. For if it were nothing at all at t, then 'Man is rational'' at t would lack a truth-maker. Furthermore, we surely don't want to say that 'Man is rational' first becomes true when the first human being exists. In some sense, the common nature must be prior to its existential realization in concrete singulars and in minds. The common nature cannot depend on these modes of realization. Kenny quotes Aquinas (Aquinas on Being, Oxford 2002, p. 73):
Socrates is rational, because man is rational, and not vice versa; so that even if Socrates and Plato did not exist, rationality would still be a characteristic of human nature.
Socrates est rationalis, quia home est rationalis, et no e converso; unde dato quod Socrates et Plato non essent, adhuc humanae naturae rationalitas competeret. (Quodl. VIII, I, c, 108-110)
Aquinas' point could be put like this. (i) At times and in possible worlds in which humans do not exist, it is nevertheless the case that rationality is included in humanity, and (ii) the metaphysical ground of humans' being rational is the circumstance that rationality is included in humanity, and not vice versa.
Now this obviously implies that the CN humanity has some sort of status independent of real and intentional existence. So we either go the Meioningian route or we say that CNs exist in the mind of God. Kenny:
Aquinas' solution is to invoke the divine mind. There are really four, not three ways of considering natures: first, as they are in the mind of the creator; second, as they are in the abstract; theitrs, as they are in individuals; and finally, as they are in the human mind. (p. 74)
This may seem to solve the problem I raised. CNs are not nothing because they are divine accusatives. And they are not nothing in virtue of being ausserseiend. This solution avoids the three options of Platonism, subjectivism (according to which CNs exist only as products of abstraction), and Meinongianism.
The problem with the solution is that it smacks of deus ex machina: God is brought in to solve the problem similarly as Descartes had recourse to the divine veracity to solve the problem of the external world. One ought to be forgiven for thinking that solutions to the problems of universals, predication, and intentionality ought to be possible without bringing God into the picture. But this is a separate can of worms.
The following is a comment by Dr. Novak on an earlier post about Stanislav Sousedik's Thomist theory of predication. That post has scrolled off into archival oblivion, so I reproduce the comment here and add some comments in blue.
………………….
What is, for me, most striking about Bill's troubles with Sousedík's elaboration of the Thomistic theory of predication is first, that he seems to spell out precisely the questions that I regard as the most fundamental ones in all this business, and second, that these are precisely the questions that had stirred the development of the more and more elaborate late-scholastic theories of universals (or predication, for this is one and the same problem for the scholastics). In this comment, I will try just to sketch the direction in which I think the answers can be found; perhaps to elaborate on some points later.
BV: I am encouraged by LN's judgment that I have stumbled upon the most fundamental questions despite my lack of deep familiarity with late Scholasticism.
Now the core problem of course is the problem of common natures. I am afraid that there is a slight misunderstanding about the meaning of this term, and Sousedík's choice of his term – "absolute subject" – just makes it worse. It is common to talk of a common or "absolute" nature as though it were an entity or item beside universals and individuals, indeed, "jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein". Truly it seems absurd to postulate such an entity which clearly violates the principle of excluded middle.
However, despite the manner of talk of the scholastics and of Sousedík, one must resist considering an "absolute nature" as an item or entity. There is no such entity called "absolute nature". There are particulars which exist really, and there are universals which exist intentionally. And they have something in common — the "objective content" which exists both really, as individualised and identified with the particular(s), and intentionally, as abstracted and universalised, as a universal. This "something in common" is called the "common nature", but it is not something over and above the universal or the particular. We should not say – and we do not say, properly – that there is some "absolute nature". The nature can only be absolutely considered, that is, considered under a kind of "second order abstraction" – viz. under abstraction from the fact whether it is or is not considered under abstraction from individuality.
BV: I note that LN uses 'item' and 'entity' interchangeably. That is not the way I use the terms. For me, an entity is anything that has being or existence, anything that has esse. 'Nonexisting entity' is therefore a contradiction in terms. My use of 'item,' however, is ontologically noncommital. Accordingly, 'nonexisting item' is not a contradiction in terms. I am pleased to find that I use the term in exactly the same way that Daniel D. Novotny does in his paper, "Scholastic Debates About Beings of Reason" in Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic (Ontos Verlag, 2012), p. 26. 'Item' as I use it is the most inclusive term in the philosophical lexicon. Anything to which one can refer, anything that one can single out in thought, anything that can be counted as one, whether it exists or not, is an item. Nonexistent objects, impossible objects, incomplete objects — all are items.
Now the common nature, the nature considered absolutely, i.e., considered apart from both real existence and intentional existence and from the accidents that accrue to it when it exists either really (in things) or intentionally (in the mind), is clearly not an entity, but it is an item. Or so I maintain. It is not an entity because it has neither esse naturale nor esse intentionale. Here LN and I agree. But it is an item because we have singled it out in thought and are talking about it. After all, the common nature is not nothing. It is a definite item. Take felinity considered absolutely. It is distinct from humanity considered absolutely. It is not the felinity in my cat, nor the felinity in my mind when I think about the cat. It is a selfsame item that can exist in either way, or in both ways. And is is a different selfsame item than the common nature humanity that can exist either in particular humans or in minds or both.
LN says that the common nature " is not something over and above the universal or the particular." If this means that the common nature felinity is not an entity in addition to really existing particular cats and the intentionally existing universal, then I agree. It is not an entity because it has no mode of being. But surely the selfsame felinity that is in my cat and in my mind when I think about the cat, precisely because it is common, cannot be identical to the felinity really existing in cats or the felinity intentionally existing in minds thinking about cats. So in that sense it is indeed an item (not an entity) "over and above the universals or the particular."
The intended meaning of the saying that this "absolute nature" is neither one nor many, neither real nor intentional etc. is not that there is in fact some primitive constituent item out there devoid of all these properties. That would indeed be absurd. The meaning is that the nature – which in factis both many [namely according to its real existence in particulars] and one [according to its intentional existence in a universal] (note that this is not a contradiction!) — this very nature does not possess any of these two modes of being and the consequent properties "of itself", that is, necessarily, i.e. it can be consistently grasped without them or "absolutely"; and only insofar as it is thus grasped, we can say that it is neither this nor that. Just like a chemist can grasp water as water, that is, according to the properties that belong to water on the basis of its chemical constitution, and disregard whether it is for example cold or hot. He would say that water as water is neither hot nor cold, even neither hot nor not-hot – without thereby necessarily postulating some item called "absolute water" over and above the individual instances of water of various temperatures.
BV: What the foregoing implies, however, is that the common nature exists only in the mind of one who abstracts both from real existence and from intentional existence. The crucial phrase is, "only insofar as it is thus grasped, we can say that it is neither this nor that." This implies that the common nature is only as grasped by a mind. That in turn implies that common natures have esse after all — in contradiction to the theory. It also implies that common natures are universals — again in contradiction to the theory.
In this connection it is important to note that Jacques Maritain, no slouch of a Thomist, speaks of THREE esse's. (Degrees of Knowledge, p. 129, n. 115) He calls them esse naturae [sic], esse intentionale, and esse cognitum seu objectivum. The latter mode of being is the mode of being of common natures.
My cat exists outside the mind as a concrete singular. Its mode of existence is esse naturae, or esse naturale. Now my mind, in knowing the cat, does not become a cat. So the felinity in my mind when I know the thing before me as a cat cannot exist in my mind in the same way that it exists in the cat outside my mind. Rather, it exists in the mode of esse intentionale which implies that it is abstract and universal as opposed to concrete and singular. Now suppose I abstract from both of these modes of existence. So abstracting, I focus upon the common nature. About this common nature, Maritain says that it too is "abstract and universal." (Ibid.)
The fact that Maritain speaks of a third mode of esse points up the problem I am having with common natures. What Maritain says strikes as reasonable. But it contradicts what LN says is the Thomist doctrine. The official doctrine is that the common nature is neither universal nor particular. Maritain, however, quite reasonably says that the common nature is abstract and universal.
In other words: you cannot start with "absolute natures" as some elementary items and then try to build the common-sense particulars out of them. Quite the other way around: you take the familiar particulars, then you become aware that you are able to grasp them by means of universal concepts, and then you proceed to identify what the universal concept has "taken" from the particular (its "objective content") and what not (the properties of concepts /like being universal/ as opposed to their notes). That which the universal concept has captured of the particular is the "common nature"; it is something existing as really identified to the particular (or else it could not have been abstracted from there) – therefore it cannot, of itself, require universality. But it is also something capable of existing as identified to a universal concept; therefore it cannot, of itself, be incompatible with universality.
So, a common nature is not some elementary ontological item, a philosophical "atom"; it is an abstraction of an abstraction.
BV: LN's phrase 'objective content' is a felicitous one. The common nature is the objective content of my subjective concept of a cat, say, but it is also to be found in the cat existing in the mode of esse naturale. Now the dispute, as I see it, is about the exact status of these objective contents or common natures. I can think of three possibilities:
A. The common nature really exists. B. The common nature does not exist, really or intentionally, but has Meinongian Aussersein status. (This seems to be Novotny's view. See p. 34 of his article cited above.) C. The common nature exists intentionally, not really, as an object of a double abstraction.
Now both LN and I reject (A). I opt for (B). Accordingly, my thesis is that the doctrine of common natures inherits — to put it anachronistically! — all of the problems of Meinong's doctrine of Aussersein. LN seems to be opting for (C). The trouble with(C) is that it contradicts Thomist doctrine according to which the common nature is neither universal nor particular, neither one nor many, and neither really nor intentionally existent. For on (C), the common nature, as Maritain said, is "abstract and universal." It is also one not neither one nor many, and intentionally existent, not neither really nor intentionally existent.
There is more to LN's comment, but the rest will have to be addressed in a separate post or posts.
We need spiritual exercises just as we need physical, mental, and moral exercises. A good spiritual exercise, and easy to boot, is daily recollection of just how good one has it, just how rich and full one's life is, just how much is going right despite annoyances and setbacks which for the most part are so petty as not to merit consideration.
Start with the physical side of your life. You slept well, and a beautiful new day is dawning. Your breath comes easy, your intestines are in order. Your mind is clear, and so are your eyes. Move every moving part of your body and note how wonderfully it works, without any pain to speak of.
Brew up some java and enjoy its rich taste, all the while rejoicing over the regularity of nature that allows the water to boil one more time, at the same temperature, and the caffeine to be absorbed once more by those greedy intercranial receptors that activate the adrenalin that makes you eager to grab a notebook and jot down all the new ideas that are beginning to percolate up from who knows where.
Finished with your body, move to your mind and its wonderful workings. Then to the house and its appliances including your trusty old computer that reliably, day after day, connects you to the sphere of Nous, the noosphere, to hijack a term of Teilhard de Chardin. And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.
A quotidian enactment of something like the foregoing meditation should do wonders for you.
The attitude of gratitude conduces to beatitude. Can it be said in plain Anglo-Saxon? Grateful thoughts lead one to happiness. However you say it, it is true. The miserable make themselves miserable by their bad thinking; the happy happy by their correct mental hygiene.
Broad generalizations, these. They admit of exceptions, as goes without saying. He who is afflicted with Weilian malheur or clinical depression cannot think his way out of his misery. Don't get hung up on the exceptions. Meditate on the broad practical truth. On Thanksgiving, and every day.
Liberals will complain that I am 'preaching.' But that only reinforces my point: they complain and they think, strangely, that any form of exhortation just has to be hypocritical. Besides not knowing what hypocrisy is, they don't know how to appreciate what actually exists and provably works. Appreciation is conservative. Scratch a liberal and likely as not you'll find a nihilist, a denier of the value of what is, a hankerer after what is not, and in too many cases, what is impossible.
Even the existence of liberals is something to be grateful for. They mark out paths not to be trodden. And their foibles provide plenty of blog fodder. For example, there is the curious phenomenon of hypocrisy-in-reverse.
John F. Kennedy was assassinated 49 years ago today. Here is The Byrds' tribute to the slain leader. They took a traditional song and redid the lyrics. The young Bob Dylan here offers an outstanding interpretation of the old song.
I was in the eighth grade when Kennedy was gunned down. We were assembled in an auditorium for some reason when the principal came in and announced that the president had been shot. The date was November 22, 1963. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was seated behind my quondam inamorata, Christine W. My love for her was from afar, like that of Don Quixote for the fair Dulcinea, but at that moment I was in close physical proximity to her, studying the back of her blouse through which I could make out the strap of her training bra . . . .
It was a tale of two nonentities, Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. Both were little men who wanted to be big men. Oswald, acting alone, shot Kennedy. Ruby, acting alone, shot Oswald. That is the long and the short of it. For details, I refer you to Bugliosi.
One of my darker thoughts is that in the end tribal allegiances trump whatever people piously imagine unites us. For a time the great American experiment worked. People assimilated under the aegis of e pluribus unum. People valued liberty over material equality. But now talk of these ideals seems quaint to a growing number. Books like Dennis Prager's latest that celebrate them may have come too late. We may have passed the tipping point toward the descent into tribalism. We shall see.
Blut und Boden shouldn't matter but it does to leftists. Here is an excerpt from my The Hyphenated American (link below):
The liberal-left emphasis on blood and ethnicity and origins and social class is dangerous and divisive. Suppose you come from Croatia. Is that something to be proud of? You had to be born somewhere of some set of parents. It wasn't your doing. It is an element of your facticity. Be proud of the accomplishments that individuate you, that make you an individual, as opposed to a member of a tribe. Celebrate your freedom, not your facticity.
If you must celebrate diversity, celebrate a diversity of ideas and a diversity of individuals, not a diversity of races and ethnicities and groups. Celebrate individual thinking, not 'group-think.' The Left in its perversity has it backwards. They emphasize the wrong sort of diversity while ignoring the right kind. They go to crazy lengths to promote the wrong kind while squelching diversity of thought and expression with their speech codes and political correctness.
This old entry, from about a year and half ago, has gained in relevance after Obama's reelection. Here it is again re-titled and revised.
………………………
Another fit topic of rumination on this Independence Day 2011 is the question of voluntary segregation or balkanization. Herewith, a few very preliminary remarks.
I have been inclining toward the view that voluntary segregation, in conjunction with a return to federalism, might be a way to ease tensions and prevent conflict in a country increasingly riven by deep-going differences. We need to face the fact that we do not agree on a large number of divisive, passion-inspiring issues. Among these are abortion, gun rights, capital punishment, affirmative action, legal and illegal immigration, taxation, the need for fiscal responsibility in government, the legitimacy of public-sector unions, wealth redistribution, the role of the federal government in education, the purpose of government, the limits, if any, on governmental power, and numerous others.
We need also to face the fact that we will never agree on them. These are not merely 'academic' issues since they directly affect the lives and livelihoods and liberties of people. And they are not easily resolved because they are deeply rooted in fundamental worldview differences, in a "conflict of visions," to borrow a phrase from Thomas Sowell. When you violate a man's liberty, or mock his moral sense, or threaten to destroy his way of life, you are spoiling for a fight and you will get it.
We ought also to realize that calls for civility and comity and social cohesion are pretty much empty. Comity (social harmony) in whose terms? On what common ground? Peace is always possible if one side just gives in. If conservatives all converted to leftism, or vice versa, then harmony would reign. But to think such a thing will happen is just silly, as silly as the silly hope that Obama, a leftist, could 'bring us together.' We can come together only on common ground, only under the umbrella of shared principles. And what would these be?
There is no point in papering over very real differences.
Consider religion. Is it a value or not? Conservatives, even those who are atheistic and irreligious, tend to view religion as a value, asa good thing, as conducive to human flourishing. Liberals and leftists tend to view it as a disvalue, as something that impedes human flourishing. Some go so far as to consider it "the greatest social evil." The question is not whether religion, or rather some particular religion, is true. Nor is the question whether religion, or some particular religion, is rationally defensible. The question is whether the teaching and learning and practice of a religion contributes to our well-being, not just as individuals, but in our relations with others. For example, would we be better off as a society if every vestige of religion were removed from the public square? Does Bible study tend to make us better people?
The conservative will answer no and yes respectively and will feel sure that he is right. For example, as a conservative, I find it utterly absurd that there has been any fight at all over the Mojave cross, and I have utter contempt for the ACLU shysters who brought the original law suit. Of course, I wholeheartedly endorse the initial clause of the First Amendment, to wit, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ." But it is hate-America leftist extremism on stilts to think that the presence of that very old memorial cross on a hill in the middle nowhere does anything to establish Christianity as the state religion. I consider anyone who believes that to be intellectually obtuse and morally repellent.
As for whether sincere Bible study makes us better, isn't that obvious? Will you be so bold as to maintain that someone who has taken to heart the Ten Commandments will not have been improved thereby? If you do maintain this, then you are precisely the sort of person contact with whom would be pointless or worse, precisely the sort of person right thinking people need to segregate themselves from, for the sake of peace.
The leftist will give opposite answers to the two questions with equal confidence. There is no possibility of mediation here. That is a fact that can't be blinked while mouthing the squishy, bien-pensant, feel-good rhetoric of 'coming together.' Again, on what common ground? Under the aegis of which set of shared principles? There can be no 'coming together' with those whose views one believes are pernicious. A man like A. C Grayling holds views that are not merely false, but pernicious. He of course would return the 'compliment.'
If we want peace, therefore, we need to give each other space by adopting federalism and limiting government interference in our lives, and by voluntary segregation: by simply having nothing to do with people with whom there is no point in interacting given unbridgeable differences.
Unfortunately, the Left, with its characteristic totalitarian tendency, will not allow federalism. But we still have the right of free association and voluntary segregation. At least for the time being.
No doubt there are disadvantages to segregation/balkanization. Exclusive association with the like-minded increases polarization and fosters extremism. See here. The linked piece ends with the following suggestion:
Bishop cites research suggesting that, contrary to the standard goo-goo exhortations, the surer route to political comity may be less civic engagement, less passionate conviction. So let’s hear it for the indifferent and unsure, whose passivity may provide the national glue we need.
Now that is the sort of preternatural idiocy one expects from the NYT. Less civic engagement! The reason there is more civic engagement and more contention is because there is more government interference! The Tea Party movement is a prime example. The solution is less government. As I have said more than once, the bigger the government the more to fight over. The solution is for government to back off, not for the citizenry to acquiesce like sheep in the curtailment of their liberties.
You may have noticed the paradox: Civic engagement is needed to get to the point where we don't need to engage civically with people we find repellent.
I was cruising the booze aisle in the local supermarket yesterday in search of wines for Thursday's Thanksgiving feast. I got into conversation with a friendly twenty-something dude who worked there. I said I was looking for sweet vermouth. He thought it was used to make martinis and so I explained that martinis call for dry vermouth while the sweet stuff is an ingredient in manhattans. He then enthused about some whisky he had been drinking. I asked whether it was a scotch or a bourbon. He replied, "It's whisky." I then explained that whisky is to scotch, bourbon, rye, etc. as genus to species and that one couldn't drink whisky unless one drank scotch or bourbon, or . . . . This didn't seem to register.
But it did remind me of another twenty-something dude whose comment about the church he attended prompted me to ask what Protestant denomination he belonged to. He said. "I am a Presbyterian, not a Protestant."
These two incidents then put me in mind of a story Hegel tells somewhere, perhaps it's in the Lesser Logic. A man goes to the grocer to buy fruit. The grocer shows him apples, oranges, pears, cherries . . . . Our man rejects each suggestion, insisting that he wants fruit. He learns that fruit as such is not to be had.
Glenn Reynolds talks sense. My rather more academically worded federalism post. And here is a short federalism post of mine with a link to a post by Jonah Goldberg.
Another problem is that scientists like me are intimidated by philosophical jargon, and hence didn’t interrupt the monologues to ask for clarification for fear of looking stupid. I therefore spent a fair amount of time Googling stuff like “epistemology” and “ontology” (I can never get those terms straight since I rarely use them).
This is an amazing confession. It shows that the man is abysmally ignorant outside his specialty. He is not wondering about the distinction between de dicto and de re, but about a Philosophy 101 distinction. It would be as if a philosopher couldn't distinguish between velocity and acceleration, or mass and weight, or a scalar and a vector, or thought that a light-year was a measure of time.
Despite his ignorance of the simplest distinctions, Coyne is not bashful about spouting off on topics he knows nothing about such as free will. Lawrence Krauss is another of this scientistic crew. And Dawkins. And Hawking and Mlodinow. And . . . . Their arrogance stands in inverse relation to their ignorance. A whole generation of culturally-backward and half-educated scientists does not bode well for the future.
