Author: Bill Vallicella

Why Must the Left be Totalitarian?

A reader inquires,

I was wondering if you could expand on a statement you made in Political Correctness and Gender Neutral Language . . . . The statement is as follows: "The Left is totalitarian by its very nature and so it cannot leave any sphere of human concern unpoliticized." I wholeheartedly agree with your statement, but I was wondering if you would explain why the Left must be totalitarian. All I know right now is that it is, and has been from at least the days of Woodrow Wilson and especially FDR.

A huge and daunting topic, but I'll hazard a little sketch.

My statement telescopes two subclaims and an inference. The first subclaim is that the Left is totalitarian, while the second is that it totalitarian by its very nature (as opposed to accidentally). From these two subclaims the conclusion is drawn that the Left cannot (as opposed to does not) leave any sphere of human concern unpoliticized. 

1. Is the Left totalitarian? The answer to this depends on what is meant by 'totalitarian.' The word is derived from the Italian totalitario, meaning complete or absolute. The original connection is with Benito Mussolini and Italian fascism. Mussolini referred to his regime as lo stato totalitario, the totalitarian state. But the term 'totalitarian' came also to be applied to Hitler's National Socialism and to Communism. Roughly, 'totalitarian' characterizes those systems of political organization in which the state recognizes no limits to its authority and aims to regulate every aspect of public and private life. By extension, the term applies to political movements and ideologies.

When I say that the Left is totalitarian, I mean that it is a political movement that moves us away from individual liberty and the unregulated pluralism of civil society toward state control of every aspect of our public and private lives, including state control of the economy. This totalitarian drift is readily discernible in the policies of the Obama administration. For example, the Obama health care initiative, with its so-called 'individual mandate,' will increase government interference in health care delivery and reduce individual options. Individuals will be forced by law to carry medical and dental insurance whether they want it or not, whether they need it or not.   The government, which is not subject to market discipline, will be pitted against private sector health insurers driving up their premiums and driving many of them out of business. The rest of us will be stuck with rationing and inferior care provided by a demoralized corps of doctors who will have no incentive to work hard and long because of government interference with their pay schedules and every other aspect of their professional lives. The drift is toward socialized medicine, i.e., total state control of health care delivery.

Another example is the threat of the reinstatement the Fairness Doctrine or something like it, the aim of which is to squelch dissent in the name of 'fairness.' Examples can be multiplied.

2. But must the Left be totalitarian? Well, what does the Left stand for, and against?

A. It is against religion as against an opiate that promises 'pie in the sky' when 'pie in the future' is attainable, they falsely maintain, by collective human effort orchestrated by a vanguard that sets itself apart from, and above, the masses. Being against religion, the Left is against something that eludes totalitarian control. Religion belongs to private life and so must be opposed as one of the factors that prevent the Left from gaining total control. Leftists in the USA battle religion by way of extermist interpretations of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, and in other ways.

B. The Left is against free enterprise and private property, which are the foundations of individual liberty.

C. The Left is against the family as the fundamental building-block of society.

D. The Left is for uniform indoctrination of the population. E.g., it opposes school vouchers and home schooling.

E. The Left is for central planning 'from the top' by an elite that seeks to equalize by, among other things, redistributing wealth via the tax code. The irony, of course, is that to implement their egalitarian schemes, the elite must be unequal in power and privileges to those beneath them whom they seek to make equal.  Their pursuit of the pseudo-ideal, material equality, is predicated upon an inequality which, of course, will no more 'wither away' than Lenin's Communist state, but will instead become ever more entrenched until it collapses under the weight of its own internal contradictions — which is what  happened to that 'workers' paradise' and hope of humanity, the USSR.

This is a very rough and incomplete sketch. Reams could be written on each of these subtopics.

Words Banned From Tests in NYC Schools

Feel-good liberalism at its best worst:

Divorce. Dinosaurs, Birthdays. Religion. Halloween. Christmas. Television. These are a few of the 50-plus words and references the New York City Department of Education is hoping to ban from the city’s standardized tests.

My astute readers do not need to have it explained to them what is wrong with this.  But it is one more example of the triumph of feelings-based Unsinn over thought and sense on the Left and another reason why you should never vote  for a Democrat.

Of course, there are a few Dems who are not completely unhinged .  But unless you know who they are, it is best to be on the safe side and vote for Republicans and Libertarians.

Seize the Day

Horace advises that we seize the day. "Life ebbs as I speak: so seize each day, and grant the next no credit."  The trouble with this advice is that what we are told to grab is so deficient in entity as to be barely seizable.  The admonition comes almost to this: seize the unseizable, fix the flux, stay the surge, catch the wind. 

I do indeed try to seize the day, and its offerings, day by day, moment by moment.  Walking along the trail I stab my staff into the ground saying "This is it, this is your life, right here, right now, and it is good." Living in tune with this mantram, without wanting to be elsewhere or elsewhen, is obviously better than standing on tiptoes trying to make out the future or looking through memory's rear-view mirror. 

There is no full living  without presence to the present, without mindfulness to the moment.  But mindfulness is ultimately no solution since what one is minding is ultimately empty.

The passing moment is more real than the past and the future, but it is precisely passing and so, ultimately, unreal.  The problem is not that our time is short, but that we are in time at all.  The alternative, however, is present to us only as this blank sense of time's deficiency.

So, with unseeing eyes, we stand on tiptoes after all.

Philosophy: Who Doesn’t Need It?

Who doesn't need philosophy?

People who have the world figured out don't need it.  If you know what's up when it comes to God and the soul, the meaning of life, the content and basis of morality, the role of state, and so on, then you certainly don't need philosophy.  If you are a Scientologist or a Mormon or a Roman Catholic or an adherent of any other religious or quasi-religious worldview then you have your answers and philosophy as inquiry (as opposed to philosophy as worldview) is strictly unnecessary.  And same goes for the adherents of such nonreligious worldviews as leftism and scientism and evangelical atheism. 

He who has the truth needn't seek it.  And those  who are in firm possession of the truth are well-advised to stay clear of philosophy with its tendency to sow the seeds of doubt  and confusion.

Those who are secure in their beliefs are also well-advised to turn a blind eye to the fact of the multiplicity of conflicting worldviews.  Taking that fact into cognizance may cause them to doubt whether their 'firm possession of the truth' really is such.

Desert Light Draws Us into the Mystical

Cathedral RockJust as the eyes are the most spiritual of the bodily organs, light is the most spiritual of physical phenomena. And there is no light like the lambent light of the desert. The low humidity, the sparseness of vegetation that even in its arboreal forms hugs the ground, the long, long vistas that draw the eye out to shimmering buttes and mesas — all of these contribute to the illusion that the light is alive.

 
Light as phenomenon, as appearance, is not something merely physical. It is as much mind as matter. Without its appearance to mind it would not be what it phenomenologically is. But the light that allows rocks and coyotes to appear, itself appears. This seen light is seen within a clearing, eine Lichtung (Heidegger), which is light in a transcendental sense. But this transcendental light in whose light both illuminated objects and physical light appear, points back to the onto-theological Source of this transcendental light. Heidegger would not approve of my last move, but so be it.

Augustine claims to have glimpsed this eternal Source Light upon entering into his "inmost being." Entering there, he saw with his soul's eye, "above that same eye of my soul, above my mind, an
unchangeable light." He continues:

     It was not this common light, plain to all flesh, nor a greater
     light of the same kind . . . Not such was that light, but
     different, far different from all other lights. Nor was it above my
     mind, as oil is above water, or sky above earth. It was above my
     mind, because it made me, and I was beneath it, because I was made
     by it. He who knows the truth, knows that light, and he who knows
     it knows eternity. (Confessions, Book VII, Chapter 10)

Red Mountain'Light,' then, has several senses. There is the light of physics. There is physical light as we see it, whether in the form of illuminated things such as yonder mesa, or sources of illumination such as the sun, or the lambent space between them. There is the transcendental light of mind without which nothing at all would appear. There is, above this transcendental light, its Source.

A Universe From Nothing? Krauss Reviewed

I had fun back in January pilloring the scientistic  nonsense  Lawrence M. Krauss propagates in his recent book, A Universe From Nothing.  Meanwhile the book has shown up at the local library and tomorrow I will borrow it.  I would never buy a piece of crap like this, though, to be fair, I will first have to read it to be sure that it is crap.  That it is crap is an excellent bet, however, given what I quoted Krauss as saying and given David Albert's New York Times review of a couple days ago.

I won't quote from Albert's review.  Study it carefully and you will see why Krauss' book is junk. 

One mistake many people make is to think that any opposition to scientistic nonsense of the sort that Krauss spouts can only be religiously motivated. Carefully pointing  out the confusions to which Krauss and Co. succumb gets one labeled an 'apologist for religion.'   Now an affirmative answer to the question whether contemporary physics has the resources to explain why the physical universe exists does of course have negative implications for those forms of theism that posit a transcendent divine creator.  But the question itself is not a religious question but a metaphysical question.  Every clear-thinking atheist should reject Krauss's specious reasoning.  Rejecting it would not make our atheist an apologist for religion. 

People sometimes question what philosophy is good for.  Well, one thing it is good for is to debunk bad philosophy, Krauss' scientistic nonsense being a particular egregious example of bad philosophy.

Philosophize we must and philosophize we will.  The only question is whether we will do it well.

Regalia

Regalia, as its etymology suggests (from L. rex, regis), are the king's insignia. By a natural extension, anyone's insignia, colors, banners. We like to fly the colors to the point of identifying with them. We identify with flags and labels and logos and certain words. There is a stupid satisfaction one gets from flaunting logos like 'Trek' and 'Jeep.' See? Me ride Trek bike. Just like Lance Armstrong.

The name of my Bell bicycle helmet model is 'Paradox.' That clinched the purchase for me.

Philosophers hate a contradiction but love a paradox.

Things Not Worth Knowing

One's own genealogy, for example. What does it matter who begat whom in one's line?  Most of us will discover the names and dates of insignificant people who have left nothing behind but their names
and dates.

Or is it just a philosopher's prejudice to be concerned more with timeless universals than with temporal particulars? To thrill to the Thoreauvian admonition, "Read not The Times, read the eternities"?

Would Ortega Have Been a Blogger?

Julian Marias on his master, Ortega y Gasset:

Throughout his life he wrote circumstantial, occasional, studies, in which he went straight to the point, to say something, to  communicate to the reader — a very particular reader, whose figure  gradually changed over the course of time — certain truths, certain warnings, certain very concrete exhortations. To do so he had to put into play the totality of his philosophical thought . .  . . (Julian Marias, Jose Ortega y Gasset: Circumstance and Vocation, tr. Lopez-Marillas, University of Oklahoma Press, 1970, p. 235.)

Saturday Night at the Oldies: ‘Strange’ Songs

In three categories:  Rock, Religion, Romanticism.

Cream, Strange Brew
Doors, People are Strange
Doors, Strange Days
Mickey and Sylvia, Love is Strange

Stanley Bros., Rank Strangers
Emmy Lou Harris, Wayfaring Stranger

Frank Sinatra, Strangers in the Night  To be is to do (Socrates).  To do is to be (Sartre). Do be do be do (Sinatra).
Barbara Lewis, Hello Stranger
Acker Bilk, Stranger on the Shore