Author: Bill Vallicella

Derbyshire’s ‘Racism’

I got wind of Derb's defenestration, and the concomitant crapstorm of Internet commentary, a little late, but I've been making up for lost time.  I found this curious passage over at RedState, a self-professedly conservative website (emphasis added):

Derbyshire likes to pepper his racist rants with “facts” that generally consist of social studies that are subject to numerous interpretational biases. To me, the question as to whether these studies are accurate or correct is uninteresting and irrelevant – a central tenet of decency demands that every human being is entitled to be evaluated on his or her own merits regardless of what social science may say about any group (racial, cultural, religious or otherwise) to which he or she might belong. It is this very basis which Derbyshire rejects, and that is what makes him (and has always made him) a racist. He is not, as his defenders at the execrable Taki mag say, confronting the world with uncomfortable truths, he is proudly declaring himself to be a racist and arguing that it is correct to be racist. This, I submit, is something that all decent people should reject.

This is exceedingly curious because the author seems to be saying that Derb is a racist whether or not the facts he adduces in support of the advice he gives to his children are indeed facts. But surely there are no racist facts.  A racial fact is not a racist fact.  So if the facts Derb adduces are facts, then his adducing them cannot be racist.  It therefore cannot be irrelevant whether what Derb calls facts are indeed facts: that is rather the nub of issue.

Here is one of the facts he adduces:  Blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery. Here is another: Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.

Now suppose that these are indeed facts.  Do they justify the advice he gives his kids?  Part of the advice is:

(10) Thus, while always attentive to the particular qualities of individuals, on the many occasions where you have nothing to guide you but knowledge of those mean differences, use statistical common sense:

(10a) Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.

It should be obvious that the facts do justify the advice.  Derb is a father and he is talking to his children.  Being children, they lack experience of the world and the degree of good judgment that comes from protracted encounter with the world and its ways. Caring about his children, he advises: If all you have to go on is knowledge of the mean differences, then avoid situations where there is a large number of blacks unknown to you.

There is nothing racist about this.  It is excellent paternal advice.  To be racist, the facts Derb adduces would have to be non-facts. It silly in excelsis to suppose that it is irrelevant whther the sociological facts Derb cites are indeed facts.  (Please avoid the pleonastic 'true facts.')

The author above speaks of a "central tenet of decency" according to which every human being is entitled to be evaluated on his own merits regardless of group affiliation and regardless of what we know about the group.  That too is silly.  Consider the Hells [no apostrophe!] Angels.  We know quite a lot about this motorcycle gang.  If we were to follow the "central tenet of decency" we would have to leave out of consideration this knowledge in our encounters with members of the gang.  But this would be very foolish indeed.  For example, suppose all I know about Tiny is that he is a Hells Angel and what I can know by observing him at the end of the bar. (E.g., he is covered with tattoos, muscular, about 220 lbs, 6' 2" in height, and about 35 years of age.)  Knowing just this, I know enough to avoid (eye or other) contact with him.  For I know that if an altercation should ensue, his fellow Angels would join in the fight (that's part of their code) and I would be lucky to escape with my life.

Now unless you are a very stupid liberal you will not misunderstand what I am saying.  I am not saying that blacks as a group are as criminally prone as Hells Angels as a group.  I'm showing that the above decency principle  is incoherent.  One cannot abstract from group characteristics when all you have to go on are group characteristics and immediate sensory data.

Racism?  What racism?  And what do you mean by 'racist' anyway?  Derb adduces some facts that bear upon race and you call him a racist?  Then please tell us what you mean by the term. 

 

Deserving Immortality

I lately aphorized:

Which is better: to inquire whether there is immortality, or to live in such a way as to deserve it? Both are good, but the second is better.

A childhood friend and committed Christian offers this well-crafted comment:

You are meant for immortality but cannot live in such a way as to deserve it. The only thing you can “do” in this regard is step aside and let the only person so qualified for this task (of deserving a living survival from death) substitute for you. Your willingness to step aside to let this uniquely qualified individual do the thing that only he can do will change you. Until that change you are incompletely made as it were and are qualified for going from death to death. God sees our unfitness to be fully in his presence. When the substitution takes place, God sees the substitute’s fitness as an attribute of our soul and we are accepted into God’s presence. This is immortal life. This is possible for any man.

The substitute is qualified and ready. The transition event pivots on our willingness to either use our free will as though its purpose is to allow us to be established as independent from the presence of God or to accept God’s purpose in equipping us with this free will which is to accept freely this offer of substitution, admit our inability to make ourselves fit to be fully in God’s presence, and submit to the process of substitution and be born again.

Note first that the comment is consistent with the truth of my aphorism.  I asked which is better: to examine the question of personal immortality or to live in such a way as to deserve it.  It should be obvious that while both are good — the first as an instance of the Socratic principle that the examined life is better than the unexamined life –  the second is better.  The second is better even if nothing we do or could do suffices to secure for us personal immortality.  In other words, the second disjunct does not presuppose the possibility of attaining immortality 'on our own power' and as our just desert.  One can live so as to deserve immortality even if one does not, in the end, deserve it.

Nevertheless, it is a very important question whether, if there is personal immortality, we can secure it by our own efforts.  The Christian answer is in the negative.  As a result of the Fall, we are so out of right relation to God that nothing we could do could restore us to right relation.  Adam's sin condemned him and his descendants to death.  The Platonic notion that man is naturally immortal, in virtue of the immortality of his soul, is foreign to Christianity.  Immortality was a supernatural gift in our prelapsarian state, and, after the Fall, it became a gift again only because of the substitutionary sacrifice of the God-Man, Jesus Christ, agnus dei qui tollit peccatum mundi. 

My old friend is suggesting that all we can do is confess our impotence in bringing about our own salvation and accept exogenic assistance, substituting for our own vain efforts the Savior's efficacious efforts.  One comment is that, while my friend was brought up Catholic, he now seems perilously close to the Protestant sola fide, a a doctrine I have never understood.  How could faith alone suffice?  Works don't count at all? Nothing we do makes any difference?  As I understand the Catholic doctrine — which strikes me as balanced where the Protestant one is unbalanced — there is no soteriological bootstrapping: one cannot save oneself by one's own efforts alone; still, works play some role, however exiguous that role may be.

As a philosopher, however, my problems lie far deeper than this intramural theological dispute, having to do with the exact meaning of the Fall, and the sense and possibility of Trinity and Incarnation. My friend is presupposing the truth of Christianity.  But for a philosopher, the truth of Christianity is a problem, not a presupposition.

And so once again we are brought back to the fruitful tension between Athens and Jerusalem, the tension between the need for autonomous understanding and the need to accept, faithfully and obediently, Biblical revelation.  The Bible-based believer has his truth and so sees no need to inquire; the philosopher, however, well disposed as he may be to the claims of revelation, cannot help, on pain of violating his own nature and integrity, inquiring whether what the believer calls truth really is truth.

Conservatism, Religion, and Money-Grubbing

This from a reader in Scotland:

I'm a first year undergraduate philosophy student with some very muddled political views. My father has always been a staunch supporter of the Left to the point of being prejudiced against all things on the conservative or Right side as 'religious' and 'money grubbing' . I never questioned any of his beliefs until perhaps a year or two ago. Now that I have began studying philosophy I cannot ignore this lazy neglect and the time has come to develop my own political views.

The next time you talk to your father point out to him that there is nothing in the nature of conservatism to require that a conservative be religious. There are conservative theists, but also plenty of conservative atheists. (I am blurring the distinction between religion and theism, but for present purposes this is not a problem.) Below you mention David Horowitz. The Left hates him for being an apostate, but his conversion to conservatism did not make a theist of him. He is an agnostic. Conservatism at one end shades off into libertarianism, one of the main influences on which is Ayn Rand. She was a strident atheist.

Opposition to conservatism is often fueled by opposition to religion. But surely one can be conservative without being religious just as one can be religious without being conservative. There is a religious Right, but there is also a religious Left, despite the fact that 'religious Left' is a phrase rarely heard. Here in the States a lot of liberal/left mischief originates from the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. (One may well doubt whether these gentlemen are worthy of the 'R' honorific, not to mention the 'G' honorific.)

As for 'money-grubbing,' you might point out to your father that there are money-grubbers on both the Right and the Left, and that there is nothing in the nature of conservatism to require that a conservative be a money-grubber. In fact, studies have shown that conservatives are much more charitable and generous than liberals/leftists. See Conservatives are More Liberal Givers. It is sometimes said that capitalism has its origin in greed. But this is no more true than that socialism has its origin in envy.

To feel envy is to feel diminished by the success or well-being of others. Now suppose someone were to claim that socialism is nothing be a reflection of envy: a socialist is one who cannot stand that others have things that he lacks. Driven by envy alone, he advocates a socio-political arrangment in which the government controls everything from the top, levelling all differences of money and status, so that all are equal. Surely it would be unfair to make such a claim. Socialism does not have its origin in envy, but in a particular understanding of justice and what justice demands. Roughly, the idea is that justice demands an equal distribution of money, status and other social goods. Conservatives of course disagree with this understanding of justice. What we have are competing theories of justice. Just as it is a cheap shot to reduce socialism to envy, it is a cheap shot to reduce a free market approach to greed.

It was namely for the philosophical content that I started reading your blog but I gradually became enthralled with your conservative views . They have uprooted many of my fickle Left-leaning political ideas . Now I am left increasingly uncertain about many political questions that I commonly held as beautifully obvious. I have began noticing the phenomenon of 'political correctness ' at University and am not entirely sure what to think of it.

 

Are there specific books you recommend for anyone who wants to find some sense in this Liberal climate ? I have been considering picking up some of Horowitz' writings.

I am glad that my writing has had the effect of opening new perspectives for you. Unfortunately, universities have become hotbeds of political correctness and indoctrination when they should be places where ideas of all sorts are critically and openly examined. I would recommend Horowitz to you, in particular, Destructive Generation, Left Illusions, Radical Son, and Unholy Alliance. He has also written a couple of books on the politicization of the universities. Among academic philosophers, I recommend the works of John Kekes.

Derbyshire’s Defenestration

In case you are not familiar with the word, 'defenestration' is from the Latin fenestra, window.  Defenestration is thus the act of literally or figuratively throwing something or someone out of a window, or the state of having been ejected through such an aperture.  In plain English, John Derbyshire, 'Derb,' got the boot from NRO's Rich Lowry.    Derb's  free-lance contributions are no longer wanted there.  And all because of Derb's The Talk: Nonblack Version.

Go ahead, click on the link and read the piece.  If nothing else, it will hold your interest.  It is also a good litmus test of your political affiliation.  If it enrages you and strikes you as a racist screed, then you are a (contemporary) liberal.  If you accept its advice as sound, though perhaps in need of minor qualification or correction here and there, then you are a person as sane and reasonable and moderate as your humble correspondent.  If you think Derb didn't go far enough, then chances are you are an extreme right-wing crazy. 

I have just read Derb's talk, very carefully,  a second time.  What is so offensive about it?  Facts are facts.  What's true is true.  The criterion of truth is not agreement with liberal ideology.  Consider this piece of advice:

(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.

That could use some qualification.  If a well-dressed black, alone, were in automotive distress, I might stop to render aid.  But if it were a carload of teenaged gangsta rapper types, I'd accelerate. I wouldn't want to catch a stray round in what could be termed an inverse drive-by shooting.   But if you are giving advice to your kids, you might say something like the above  sans qualification, in the same way you would advise them to avoid biker bars at midnight in bad parts of town wihout feeling the need to point out the obvious, e.g., that not every biker is a brute out to rape and pillage.

So what's to take offense at?

The Trayvon Martin Case and the Growing Racial Divide

Utterly outstanding analysis by Victor Davis Hanson.  I have but one quibble.  Hanson writes,

Millions of so-called whites are now adults who grew up in the age of affirmative action, and have no memory of systemic discrimination. To the degree some avoid certain schools, neighborhoods, or environments, they do so only on the basis of statistics, not profiling, that suggest a higher incidence of inner-city violence and crime.

My quibble concerns Hanson's use of 'profiling.'  He is suggesting a distinction between avoidant behavior based on statistics and such behavior based on profiling.  But there is no difference.  To profile is to predict the likelihood of a person's behavior based on statistical information.  A fiftyish Mormon matron from Salt Lake City does not fit the terrorist profile, but a twenty-something Egyptian Muslim from Cairo does.  To screen the two equally at an airport is therefore unreasonable, and to take a more careful look at the Egyptian is entirely reasonable. 

Who fits the heart attack profile?  Is it the obese and sedentary fiftyish smoker who has bacon and eggs for breakfast every morning,  or the nonsmoking, vegetarian, twenty-something marathoner?  The former, obviously.  Of course, it doesn't follow that the marathoner will not have a heart attack in the near future or that the fat man will.  It is a question of likelihood.  Similarly with the Mormon matron.  She may have a bomb secreted in her 1950's skirt, but I wouldn't bet on it.  If the Muslim is stripped-searched this is not because of some irrational hatred of Muslims but because of the FACT that twenty-something Muslim males  are more likely to be terrorists than fiftyish Mormon matrons.

What I am objecting to is the use of 'profiling' to refer to blind, unreasonable, hateful characterizing on the basis of skin color or ethnicity.  All decent people are opposed to the latter.  But that is not what profiling is. Profiling is neither blind, nor unreasonable, nor hateful.

What Mr. Hanson is doing is acquiescing in the liberal misuse of 'profiling.' It is not a pejorative term.  Liberals want to make it a pejorative term, but we must resist them. 

Language matters. 

If Boston is Athens, Hopkinton is Marathon

It is Patriot's Day in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the day of the 116th running of the Boston Marathon.  It'll be a hot one with a predicted high of 84.  The 26.2 miles exact a terrible toll on the mortal coil.  Remember Pheidippides! who collapsed at the Athenian end of his run.  It may have been Frank Shorter who quipped, at the 20-mile mark, "Why couldn't Pheidippides have died now?"

Will Boston Billy be running today?

Helmuth James von Moltke

I  sometimes express skepticism about the value of the study of history. If history has lessons, they don't seem applicable to the present in any useful way. But there is no denying that history is a rich source of exemplary lives. These exemplary lives show what is humanly possible and furnish existential ideals. Helmuth James von Moltke was a key figure in the German resistance to Hitler. The Nazis executed him in 1945. Here is his story.  Here is an obituary of his wife, Freya.

Should We Abandon the Deep Problems for Problems Amenable to Solution?

UPDATE: London Ed does an excellent job of misunderstanding the following post.  Bad comments incline me to keep my ComBox closed.  But his is open.

Fred Sommers' "Intellectual Autobiography" begins as follows:

I did an undergraduate major in mathematics at Yeshiva College and went on to graduate studies in philosophy at Columbia University in the 1950s.  There I found that classical philosophical problems were studied as intellectual history and not as problems to be solved.  That was disappointing but did not strike me as unreasonable; it seemed to me that tackling something like "the problem of free will" or "the problem of knowledge" could take up one's whole life and yield little of permanent value.  I duly did a dissertation on Whitehead's process philosophy and was offered a teaching position at Columbia College.  Thereafter I was free to do philosophical research of my own choosing. My instinct was to avoid the seductive, deep problems and to focus on finite projects that looked amenable to solution. (The Old New Logic: Essays on the Philosophy of Fred Sommers, ed. Oderberg, MIT Press, 2005, p. 1)

 Sommers says something similar in the preface to his  The Logic of Natural Language (Oxford, 1982), p. xii:

My interest in Ryle's 'category mistakes' turned me away from the study of Whitehead's metaphysical writings (on which I had written a doctoral thesis at Columbia University) to the study of problems that could be arranged for possible solution.

What interests me in these two passages is the reason that Sommers gives for turning away from the big 'existential' questions of philosophy (God, freedom, immortality, and the like) to the problems of logical theory.  I cannot see that it is a good reason. (And he does seem to be giving a reason and not merely recording a turn in his career.)

The reason is that the problems of logic, but not those of metaphysics, can be "arranged for possible solution." Although I sympathize with Sommers' sentiment, he must surely have noticed that his attempt to rehabilitate pre-Fregean logical theory issues in results that are controversial, and indeed just as controversial as the claims of metaphysicians. Or do all his colleagues in logic agree with him?

The problems that Sommers tackles in his magisterial The Logic of Natural Language  are no more amenable to solution than the "deep, seductive" ones that could lead a philosopher astray for a lifetime.  The best evidence of  this is that Sommers has not convinced his MPL (modern predicate logic) colleagues. At the very most, Sommers has shown that TFL (traditional formal logic) is a defensible rival system.

If by 'pulling in our horns' and confining ourselves to problems of language and logic we were able to attain sure and incontrovertible results, then there might well be justification for setting metaphysics aside and working on problems amenable to solution. But if it turns out that logical, linguistic, phenomenological, epistemological and all other such preliminary inquiries arrive at results that are also widely and vigorously contested, then the advantage of 'pulling in our horns' is lost and we may as well concentrate on the questions that really matter, which are most assuredly not questions of logic and language — fascinating as these may be.

Given that the "deep, seductive" problems and those of logical theory are in the same boat as regards solubility, Sommer's' reason for devoting himself to logic over the big questions is not a good one.  The fact that philosophy of logic is often  more rigorous than 'big question' philosophy is not to the point.  The distinction between the rigorous and the unrigorous cuts perpendicular to that between the soluble and the insoluble.  And in any case, any philosophical problem can be tackled as rigorously as you please.

Sommers' is a rich and fascinating book. But, at the end of the day, how important is it to prove that the inference embedded in 'Some girl is loved by every boy so every boy loves a girl' really is capturable, pace the dogmatic partisans of modern predicate logic, by a refurbished traditional term logic? (See pp. 144-145) As one draws one's last breath, which is more salutary: to be worried about a silly b agatelle such as the one just mentioned, or to be contemplating God and the soul?

And shouldn't we philosophers who are still a ways from our last breaths devote our main energies to such questions as God and the soul over the trifles  of logic?

It would be nice if we could set philosophy on the "sure path of science" (Kant) by abandoning metaphysics and focusing on logic (or phenomenology or whatever one considers foundational).   But so far, this narrowing of focus and 'pulling in of one's horns' has availed nothing.  Philosophical investigation has simply become more technical, labyrinthine, and specialized.  All philosophical problems are in the same boat with respect to solubility.  A definitive answer to 'Are there atomic propositions?' (LNL, ch. 1) is no more in the offing than a definitive answer to 'Does God exist?' or 'Is the will libertarianly free?'

Ask yourself: what would be more worth knowing if it could be known?

Federalism and Governmental Competition

Conservatives understand that competition is good.  It breeds excellence.  And contrary to what some liberals think, competition that breeds excellence is not opposed to cooperation but presupposes it.  We need more competition, not less, and we need it at the level of government not just in the business world and in our private lives.

How is governmental competition possible?  Via federalism.  See Competition is Healthy for Governments, Too.

Obama and his ilk oppose federalism.  Obama must go.  And with him his ilk.