Author: Bill Vallicella

Left, Right, and Debt

A reader writes, " I enjoy your philosophical and theological views, but unfortunately disagree with your political and economic views.  I recommend large doses of Paul Krugman, beginning with Nobody Understands Debt. "

I got a kick out of that because I should think that the febrile Krugman  is absolutely the last person to convince me of anything.  I tend to see him as living proof that the Nobel Prize, except perhaps in the hard sciences, is a meaningless accolade bestowed by the politically correct upon their own.   I consider the man a fool on the level of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Joe Biden.

The column cited is one I read when it first appeared.  Now, thanks to the reader,  I have an opportunity to comment on it.  But first we need to back up a step for a wide-angle view.  Why is the national debt such a big deal to conservatives, but of relatively little concern to leftists?  Dennis Prager provides a cogent answer in his new book, Still the Best Hope (Broadside 2012, p. 29, emphasis in original):

The Left's great fight is with material inequality, not with evil as normally understood.  Thus, the Left has always been less interested in fighting tyranny than in fighting inequality.  That is why Leftist dictators — from Lenin to Mao to Pol Pot to Ho Chi Minh to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez — have had so much support from Leftists around the world . . . .

This explains the Left's relative disinterest in creating wealth.  The enormous and unsustainable debts facing the individual American states and the United States as a country from 2009 on have disturbed the American Right far more than the American Left [. . .] The reason is that the Left is not nearly as interested in creating wealth as it is in erasing inequality.

Prager's explanation fits Krugman well.  The latter thinks that the focus on deficit and debt reduction is "misplaced."  I disagree vehemently.  Not only is this a very serious matter if we want to survive as a nation, but also one on which we all ought to agree.  Left and Right will never agree about abortion, capital punishment, gun control,  and a host of other issues, but one would think that when "money talks, ideology walks." Unfortunately our leftist pals will hold to their ideology even unto fiscal doom.

Krugman's 'argument,' if you want to call it that, consists in an attack on an analogy between individual and government debt:


Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.       

This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.

Krugman's first reason is that families have to pay off their mortgages, but governments don't have to pay back what they borrow.  First of all, it is false that mortgage holders have to pay back their loans.  One can easily structure a mortgage in such a way that it is held indefinitely and passed on to heirs.  One pays interest month by month without reducing the principal.  There are also negative amortization loans in which the borrower digs his hole deeper month by month.

Ready for Krugman's second reason?  It's a real winner: "Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves."

That's bullshit, which is presumably why nobody gets it except him of the simian countenance. It makes no clear sense to say that the debt  is money we owe ourselves.  So each of us owes a portion of the debt to every other one of us? 

Suppose I decide to invest in treasuries, T-bills, say.  I buy 10 at $10,000 a pop.  What I have done  is loaned the government  $100 K.  In return I get two things; a safe haven for my money and a bit of interest.  There is probably no safer place to park your cash since it is, as they say, "backed up by the full faith and credit of the U. S. government," a phrase that means rather less than it used to, but still means something.

It is the government that owes me the money I lent it.  The government, which is not to be confused with the citizenry.  Furthermore it owes these debts only to those who loaned the government money by buying T-bills and T-bonds and such.  It is simply not the case that we owe that money to ourselves.  The government owes it to some of us.  Only some of us get a return on that investment, and only some of us help the government out by loaning it money.

Now the interest paid by the government to foreign and domestic bond holders is money that is pissed away and can't be used for constructive purposes.  The analogy with the homeowner is apt: money one spends on mortgage interest can't be used for constructive purposes.  The truly foolish home buyer overextends himself and ends up losing his house to foreclosure.  The U. S. does not of course face foreclosure, but it faces something analogously dire: turning into Greece — or California.

The homeowner analogy is pretty good.

No analogy is perfect, of course.  A perfect analogy would be an identity, and you can't compare a thing to itself –except vacuously.

Krugman is a hate-America leftist whose fetishization of material equality blinds him to obvious realities.

Sufficiently Deficient

This world is sufficiently deficient  in reality, intelligibility, beauty, and goodness to keep one from the error of taking it as ultimate.  But it also exhibits enough of these features to keep one from the opposite errors of nihilism and illusionism and to point us beyond it to its Source.

Psychotropic Drugs, Veridicality, Criteria

It is gratifying to know that I am getting through to some people as is evidenced by the fact that they recall my old posts; and also that I am helping them think critically as is evidenced by the fact that they test my different posts on  a given topic for mutual consistency.  This from a Pakistani reader:

Continue reading “Psychotropic Drugs, Veridicality, Criteria”

Is Heaven Real? A Neurosurgeon’s Near-Death Experience

Excerpt:

There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.

But that dimension—in rough outline, the same one described by countless subjects of near-death experiences and other mystical states—is there. It exists, and what I saw and learned there has placed me quite literally in a new world: a world where we are much more than our brains and bodies, and where death is not the end of consciousness but rather a chapter in a vast, and incalculably positive, journey.

Two questions arise.  Were Dr. Eben Alexander's experiences while in the coma state veridical?  This question must be asked since the mere having of an experience is no guarantee of the reality of its object.  The second question is whether the experiences, veridical or not, occurred wholly independently of brain functioning.  The two questions are connected.  If it could be shown that the experiences were generated by a minimally (mal)functioning brain, then then this would be  a reason to doubt the veridicality of the experiences.  (Analogy: if I know that my unusual experiences are the result of the ingesting of LSD-25, then I have reason to doubt the veridicality of the experiences.)  The author deals with these connected worries in the following passage:

All the chief arguments against near-death experiences suggest that these experiences are the results of minimal, transient, or partial malfunctioning of the cortex. My near-death experience, however, took place not while my cortex was malfunctioning, but while it was simply off. This is clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations. According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.

Although I reject materialism about the mind and consider it reasonable to believe that conscious experiences do not require a physical substratum, and that it is possible to have such experiences in a disembodied state, I don't think the the author has proven that the possibility was actual in his case.  For how does he know that his cortex was "simply off"? Failure to detect the functioning of the cortex does not entail that the cortex was not functioning.  It might have been functioning below the detectability of the instruments and might have been generating the experiences all along.

A second concern of mine is this.  How does Dr Alexander know that his wonderful experiences didn't suddenly arise just as the cortex was coming back into action  just before his eyes popped open?  So even if his cortex was for a long time completely nonfunctional, the experience he remembers could have been simply a dream that arose while the cortex was coming back 'on line.'

My point is not the the doctor has not given us evidence that mental functioning occurs in the absence of brain activity; I believe he has.  My point is that the evidence is not compelling.

Our predicament in this life is such that we cannot prove such things as that God exists, that life has meaning, that the will is free, that morality is not an illusion, and that we survive our bodily deaths.  But we cannot prove the opposites either.  It is reasonable to maintain each of these views.  Many arguments and considerations can be adduced.  Among the evidence is a wide range of religious, mystical and paranormsl experiences including near-death and out-of-body experiences.  The cumulative case is impressive but not conclusive.  It rationalizes, but does not establish.  Philosophers. of course, are ever in quest of 'knock-down' arguments.  This is because you are no philosopher if you don't crave certainty.  Ohne Gewissheit kann ich eben  nicht leben! Husserl once exclaimed.  But so far no 'knock-down' arguments have been found.

In the final analysis, lacking proof one way or the other,  you must decide what you will believe and how you will live. 

I would add that the 'living' is more important than the 'believing.'  It is far better to live in a manner to deserve immortality than to hold beliefs and give arguments about the matter.

Whittaker Chambers on Beethoven

Whittaker Chambers (Witness, p. 19) on the Third Movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony:

. . . that music was the moment at which Beethoven finally passed beyond the suffering of his life on earth and reached for the hand of God, as God reaches for the hand of Adam in Michaelangelo's vison of the creation.

Well, either the adagio movement of the 9th or the late piano sonatas, in particular, Opus 109, Opus 110, and Opus 111. To my ear, those late compositions are unsurpassed in depth and beauty.

In these and a few other compositions of the great composers we achieve a glimpse of what music is capable of.  Just as one will never appreciate the possibilities of genuine philosophy by reading hacks such as Ayn Rand or positivist philistines (philosophistines?) such as David Stove, one will never appreciate the possibilities of great music and its power of speaking to what is deepest in us if one listens only to contemporary popular music.

Ron Radosh on George McGovern

A  balanced assessment.  The piece concludes (emphases added):

Years later, I heard McGovern at the PEN International Writers Conference in New York City, where he spoke on a panel with Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and Bruno Kreisky, the former chancellor of Austria who was virulently anti-Israel. At that meeting, McGovern said that had he been elected president, the first thing he would have done to deal with the Middle East would have been to go to ask Kreisky for advice. Kreisky, with McGovern’s support at the panel, also called for recognition by the West of Communist East Germany, and rejected  any policy that would have sought to isolate the regime. It was clear then, listening to McGovern at that event, what a disaster he would have been for his country had he been elected.

McGovern, it is true, opposed the war in Vietnam before it was popular to do so, and showed rare political courage, taking a position he thought was right although it could not help his political career. He was a straight-shooter, honest, and principled, and one could reject his policies and still respect him as a person of honor who thought what he fought for was in the nation’s best interest. A war hero, he did not ever mention his war record to try and show that he had fought valiantly for America, even though Nixon was condemning him for weakness and for having no concern for America’s position in the world. He simply did not feel to raise his own war record was the right thing to do, especially since he had become anti-war.

His defeat revealed to most people that standing for national office on a platform of extreme leftism, if openly proclaimed, could lead only to political destruction. Future leftist candidates learned from the outcome in 1972 that a more stealth approach to a move to the left was the way to operate if one wanted to achieve, as Barack Obama put it in 2008, a “fundamental transformation” of the United States based on redistribution of wealth and attainment of a social-democratic model for a future America.

A good and decent man who advocated policies that were both dangerous and wrong, he passed away living into his 90th year. R.I.P.

A good part of Obama's deep mendacity is his use of the stealth approach.  He won't say plainly what he is really for, and he will say he is for things he isn't.  For example, did you notice that in the third debate he came out in favor of American exceptionalism?  He was lying, of course.

Why Can’t Reason Be a Fluke? Intelligibility and the Existence of Rational Animals

This is the fifth in a series of posts, collected here, on Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos.  The question that concerns me in this entry is whether we can forge a link between the intelligibility of nature and the existence of rational beings. 


For Nagel, the existence of rational animals is not a brute fact or fluke or cosmic accident.  Nagel's somewhat sketchy argument (see p. 86) is along these lines:

1. There are organisms capable of reason.
2. The possibility of such beings must have been there from the beginning.
3. This possibility, however, must be grounded in and explained by the nature of the cosmos.
4. What's more, the nature of the cosmos must explain not only the possibiity but also the actuality of rational animals: their occurrence cannot be a brute fact or cosmic accident.

I take Nagel to be maintaining that the eventual existence of some rational beings or other is no accident but is included in the nature of things from the beginning — which is consistent with maintaining that there is an element of chance involved in the appearance of any particular instance of reason such as Beethoven.  So eventually nature must produce beings capable of understanding it.  We are such beings. "Each of our lives is part of the lengthy process of the universe waking up and becoming aware of itself." (85)

Nagel's thesis is not obvious.   Why can't reason be a fluke?  Even if we grant Nagel that the intelligibility of nature could not have been a fluke or brute fact, how does it follow that the actual existence of some rational beings or other, beings capable of 'glomming onto' the world's intelligible structure, is not a fluke?  Nagel's argument needs some 'beefing up'  so that it can meet this demand.

1. Let's start with the idea that nature is intelligible.  Why?  That the world is intelligible is a presupposition of all inquiry.  The quest for understanding rests on the assumption that the world is understandable, and indeed by us.  The most successful form of this quest is natural science.  The success of the scientific quest is evidence that the presupposition holds and is not merely a presupposition we make.  The scientific enterprise reveals to us an underlying intelligible order of things not open to perception alone, although of course the confirmation of scientific theories requires perception and the various instruments that extend it.

2.  Now what explains this underlying rational order? Two possibilities.  One is that nothing does: it's a brute fact.  It just happens to be the case that the world is understandable by us, but it might not have been.  The rational order of things underpins every explanation but  itself has no explanation.  The other possibility is that the rational order has an explanation, in which case it has an explanation by something distinct from it, or else is self-explanatory.  On theism, the world's  rational order is grounded in the divine intellect and is therefore explained by God.  On what I take to be Nagel's view, the rational order is self-explanatory, a necessary feature of anything that could count as a cosmos.

Nagel views the intelligibility of the world as "itself part of the deepest explanation why things are as they are." (17).  Now part of the way things are is that they are understandable by us.  Given that the way things are is intelligible, it follows that the intelligibility of the world is self-explanatory or self-grounding.

Our second premise, then, is that the intelligibilty of the world is self-explanatory, hence a necessary feature of anything that could count as a cosmos.

3.  Our third premise is that intelligibility is an an inherently mind-involving notion.  Necessarily, if x is intelligible, then x is intelligible to some actual or possible mind.  Nothing is understandable unless it is at least possible that there exist  some being with the power of understanding. 

The conjunction of these three premises entails the possibility of rational beings, but not the actuality of them. There would seem to be a gap in Nagel's reasoning.  The world is intelligible, and its intelligibility is a necessary feature of it.  From this we can infer that, necessarily, if the cosmos exists, then it is possible that there be rational beings.  But that is as far as we can get with these three premises.

4.  What Nagel seems to need is a principle of plenitude that allows us to pass from the possibility of rational beings to their actual existence.  J. Hintikka has ascribed to Aristotle a form of the principle according to which every genuine possibility must at some time become actual.  This would do the trick, but to my knowledge Nagel make no mention of any such principle.

5.  I suggest that theism is in a better position when it comes to explaining how both intelligibility and mind  are non-accidental.  Intelligibility is grounded in the divine intellect which necessarily exists.  So there must be at least one rational being.  We exist contingently, but the reason in us derives from a noncontingent source. 

 

On Applauding While Being Applauded

At the beginning of last night's debate, both the president and the governor received the applause of the audience.  But Obama did something Romney did not do: he began applauding.  I've seen Hillary do this sort of thing too.  Maybe it's a liberal behavior.  Who was Obama applauding, and for what reason?  Was he applauding the audience for applauding him?  I hope not.  Was he applauding the audience for some other reason?  But what did they do to deserve applause?  Was he joining in the applause directed at himself?  Or at Romney?

It is a ridiculous innovation, but then liberals are big on ridiculous innovations.

Humble acknowledgement is the correct response to applause.  Take a bow, nod your head, say 'thank you,' but don't start applauding in the manner of 'monkey see, monkey do.'

And another thing.  The correct response to 'thank you' is 'you're welcome,' not 'thank you.'  Humbly accept the thanks of the one who wants to thank you.

Addendum 10/24.  A reader claims that Stalin, Mao, and Saddam Hussein used to applaud themselves.  So maybe this is another case where PC derives from the CP.  A little poking around turned up  this: "Zizek is also known to call himself a 'good Stalinist,' and there is reason to believe that he fancies himself a petty Stalin, going so far as he sometimes does to adopt Stalin's habit of clapping for himself with an audience."

I seem to recall having written a couple of posts about Slavoj Zizek.  I should bring them over from the old blog. 

Chris Mathews, Unhinged, Shamelessly Plays Race Card

Does Mathews really believe what he says here?  If he does then he is mentally unhinged.  I'll assume he's unhinged just to be charitable.  If he doesn't believe what he says,  then he is a scumbag.  But he seems like a nice guy!

Note also the psychological projection.  Unwilling or unable to face the hatred that animates him, he projects it into his opponents.  It is also projection when he claims, absurdly, that conservatives are more political than liberals.  That's delusional.  For libs and lefties politics is their religion, which is certainly not the case for conservatives.  Conservatives don't  seek their meaning in the political sphere; they enter it mainly to counteract and undo the mischief of liberals.

In fact, we conservatives are at a considerable disadvantage because we are not 24/7 political activists.  'Conservative activist' borders on an oxymoron.  There are a few, though, David Horowitz being one.  But don't forget that he was a red diaper baby who imbibed activism with his mother's milk.

Liberty Forever?

Liberty stampHow many Americans care about liberty?  The depressing fact that Obama may well win the election shows that vast numbers of Americans care more about panem et circenses, bread and circuses, than about liberty.

We're running on fumes.  The stamp is border-line Orwellian.

Time was, when liberty was a state.  Now it's a stamp.

Dorothy Rabinowitz

Victor Davis Hanson

 

 

 

An Evolved Animal With a Higher Origin? Some Theological Speculation

I just remembered this old post from the Powerblogs site, a post relevant to present concerns.  Written February 2008.

…………….

I raised the question whether divine revelation is miraculous. I answered tentatively that it is not. Though revelation  may be accompanied by miraculous events such as the burning bush of  Exodus 3:2, I floated the suggestion that there need be nothing miraculous about revelation as such. So I was pleased to find some  support for this notion from another quarter. The following is from an   essay by Leo Strauss on Hermann Cohen's Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism:

   
     Revelation is the continuation of creation since man as the
     rational and moral being comes into being, i.e., is constituted, by
     revelation. Revelation is as little miraculous as creation. (Leo
     Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, U. of Chicago
     Press, 1983, p. 237.)

This is an extremely interesting suggestion in that it may offer us a way to make sense of the notion that God creates man in his image and  likeness but without interfering in the evolutionary processes most of us believe are responsible for man's existence as an animal.

Man as an animal is one thing, man as a spiritual, rational, and moral being is another. The origin of man as an animal came about not through any special divine acts but through the evolutionary processes  common to the origination of all animal species. But man as spirit, as a self-conscious, rational being who distinguishes between good and evil cannot be accounted for in naturalistic terms.

As animals, we are descended from lower forms. As animals, we are part of the natural world and have the same general type of origin as any other animal species. Hence there was no Adam and Eve as first biological parents of the human race who came into existence directly by divine fiat  without animal progenitors. But although we are animals, we are also spiritual beings, spiritual selves. I am an I, an ego, and this I-ness or egoity cannot be explained naturalistically. I am a person possessing free will and conscience neither of which can be explained naturalistically.

I suggest that what 'Adam' refers to is not a man qua member of a zoological species, but the first man to become a spiritual self. This spiritual selfhood came into existence through an encounter with the divine self. In this I-Thou encounter, the divine self elicited or triggered man's latent spiritual self. This spiritual self did not emerge naturally; what emerged naturally was the potentiality to hear a divine call which called man to his vocation, his higher destiny, namely, a sharing in the divine life. The divine call is from beyond the human horizon.

But in the encounter with the divine self which first triggered man's personhood or spiritual selfhood, there arose man's freedom and his sense of being a separate self, an ego distinct from God and from other egos. Thus was born pride and self-assertion and egotism. Sensing his quasi-divine status, man asserted himself against the One who had revealed himself, the One who simultaneously called him to a Higher Life but also imposed restrictions and made demands. Man in his pride then made a fateful choice, drunk with the sense of his own power: he decided to go it alone. This rebellion was the Fall of man, which has nothing to do with being expelled from a physical garden located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Original Sin was a spiritual event, and its transmission was not by semen,  but by some spiritual (socio-cultural) means.

If we take some such tack as the above, then we can reconcile what we know to be true from natural science with the Biblical message. Religion and science needn't compete; they can complement each other — but only if each sticks to its own province. In this way we can avoid both the extremes of the fundamentalists and the extremes of the 'Dawkins gang' (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris, et al.)

Returning to Hermann Cohen's suggestion above, as mediated by Leo Strauss, we can say that the divine-human encounter whereby the animal man becomes spirit is God's revelation to man. God's revealing himself is at the same time a creation of man as a spiritual being. In Heideggerian terms, at the moment of encounter moment man becomes Dasein, the Da of Sein, the site where Being (Sein) achieves finite self-understanding. But there is nothing ontically miraculous in this, no contravention of any law of nature.

Revealing himself to man as Being itself — Exodus 3:14 "I am who am" — God creates man as understandor of Being.