Author: Bill Vallicella

Some Aphorisms of E. M. Cioran with Commentary

Cioran How to disentangle profundity from puffery in any obscure formulation? Clear thought stops short, a victim of its own probity; the other kind, vague and indecisive, extends into the distance and escapes by its suspect but unassailable mystery.

(131)

 

Excellent except perhaps for ‘victim,’ which betrays Cioran’s mannered negativism. Substitute ‘beneficiary’ and the thought’s expression approaches perfection.

Indolence saves us from prolixity and thereby from the shamelessness inherent in production. (133)

An exaggeration, but something for bloggers to consider.

To be is to be cornered. (93)

Striking, and certainly no worse than W. V. Quine’s “To be is to be the value of a variable.”

Nothing makes us modest, not even the sight of a corpse. (87)

Cioran hits the mark here: the plain truth is set before us without exaggeration in a concise and striking manner.

Conversation is fruitful only between minds given to consolidating their perplexities. (163)

Brilliant. Philosophy, as Plato remarks (Theaetetus St. 155) and Aristotle repeats (Metaphysics 982b10), originates in wonder or perplexity.  Fruitful philosophical conversation, rare as it is and must be given the woeful state of humanity, is therefore a consolidation and appreciation of problems and aporiai, much more than an attempt to convince one’s interlocutor of something. Herein lies a key difference between philosophy and ideology. The ideologue has answers, or thinks he has.  And so his conversation is either apologetics or polemics, but not dialog.  The philosopher has questions and so with him dialog is possible.

Time, accomplice of exterminators, disposes of morality. Who, today, bears a grudge against Nebuchadnezzar? (178)

This is quite bad, and not become of its literary form, but because the thought is false. If enough time passes, people forget about past injustices. True. But how does it follow that morality is abrogated? Cioran is confusing two distinct propositions. One is that the passage of time disposes of moral memories, memories of acts just and unjust. The other is that the passage of time disposes of morality itself, rightness and wrongness themselves, so that unjust acts eventually become neither just not unjust. The fact that Cioran’s aphorism conflates these two propositions is enough to condemn it, quite apart from the fact that the second proposition is arguably false. A good aphorism cannot merely be clever; it must also express an insight. An insight, of course, is an insight only if it is true. Nor is an aphorism good if it merely betrays a mental quirk of its author. For then it would be of merely psychological or biographical interest.

There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both. (134)

A statement of Cioran’s nihilism. Unfortunately for him, but fortunately for us, it is self-contradictory. It cannot be true both that nothing exists and that an inner smile, a bemused realization that nothing exists, exists. So what is he trying to tell us? If you say that he is not trying to tell us anything, then what is he doing? If you say that he is merely playing at being clever, then I say to hell with him: he stands condemned by the very probity that he himself invokes in the first aphorism quoted supra.

Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing. (144)

An even more pithy statement of Cioran’s nihilism. But if the consciousness of nothing is nothing, then there is no consciousness of nothing, which implies that the nihilist of Cioran’s type cannot be aware of himself as a nihilist. Thus Cioran’s thought undermines the very possibility of its own expression. That can’t be good.

Will you accuse me of applying logic to Cioran’s aphorism? But what exempts nihilists from logic? Note that his language is not imperative, interrogative, or optative, but declarative. He is purporting to state a fact, in a broad sense of ‘fact.’ He is saying: this is the way it is. But if there is a way things are, then it cannot be true that everything is nothing. The way things are is not nothing.

“It is of no importance to know who I am since some day I shall no longer be” – that is what each of us should answer those who bother about our identity and desire at any price to coop us up in a category or a definition. (144)

This presupposes that only the absolutely permanent is real and important. It is this (Platonic) assumption that drives Cioran’s nihilism: this world is nothing since it fails to satisfy the Platonic criterion of reality and importance. Now if Cioran were consistently sceptical, he would call this criterion into question, and with it, his nihilism. He would learn to embrace the finite as finite and cheerfully abandon his mannered negativism. If, on the other hand, he really believes in the Platonic criterion – as he must if he is to use it to affirm, by contrast, the nullity of the experienced world – then he ought to ask whence derives its validity. This might lead him away from nihilism to an affirmation of the ens realissimum.

X, who instead of looking at things directly has spent his life juggling with concepts and abusing abstract terms, now that he must envisage his own death, is in desperate straits. Fortunately for him, he flings himself, as is his custom, into abstractions, into commonplaces illustrated by jargon. A glamorous hocus-pocus, such is philosophy. But ultimately, everything is hocus-pocus, except for this very assertion that participates in an order of propositions one dares not question because they emanate from an unverifiable certitude, one somehow anterior to the brain’s career. (153)

A statement of Cioran’s scepticism. But his scepticism is half-hearted since he insulates his central claim from sceptical corrosion. To asseverate that his central claim issues from “an unverifiable certitude” is sheer dogmatism since there is no way that this certitude can become a self-certitude luminous to itself. Compare the Cartesian cogito. In the cogito situation, a self’s indubitability is revealed to itself, and thus grounds itself. But Cioran invokes something anterior to the mind, something which, precisely because of it anteriority, cannot be known by any mind. Why then should we not consider his central claim – according to which everything is a vain and empty posturing – to be itself a vain and empty posturing?

Indeed, is this not the way we must interpret it given Cioran’s two statements of nihilism cited above
? If everything is nothing, then surely there cannot be “an unverifiable certitude” anterior to the mind that is impervious to sceptical assault.

Again, one may protest that I am applying logic in that I am comparing different aphorisms with an eye towards evaluating their mutual consistency. It might be suggested that our man is imply not trying to be consistent. But then I say that he is an unserious literary scribbler with no claim on our attention. But the truth of the matter lies a bit deeper: he is trying have it both ways at once. He is trying to say something true but without satisfying the canons satisfaction of which is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of anything’s being true.

My interim judgement, then, is this. What we have before us is a form of cognitive malfunction brought about by hypertrophy of the sceptical faculty. Doubt is the engine of inquiry. Thus there is a healthy form of scepticism. But Cioran’s extreme scepticism is a disease of cognition rather than a means to it.   The writing, though, is brilliant.

The quotations are from E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered (New York: Seaver Books, 1983), translated from the French by Richard Howard.

Vanity and Shamelessness?

 From the pen of E. M. Cioran:

     Indolence saves us from prolixity and thereby from the shamelessness inherent in production.

The aphorism is from Drawn and Quartered. 

Is all production vain and shameless? Perhaps not if one keeps one's productions to oneself. But writing books, articles and blog posts is not just production, but publishing, making public. Is publishing mere vanity and self-promotion?

In given cases it can be. And whether one of those cases is my case is not for me to decide. But surely it would be absurd to claim that all publishing by anyone is mere vanity and shameless self-promotion. Take the books of John Searle. He thinks he has solved the mind-body problem. He has done no such thing. Yet his books are enormously rich and stimulating despite some error and confusion. I am glad he has written his many books and made his contribution to our common ongoing philosophical quest. He has given me many hours of pleasure and elevated thought.

All living is self-asserting. But there is self-assertion and there is self-assertion. Personal assertion in the service of the impersonal truth is more than mere personal assertion. Thereby is vanity   substantiated and shamelessness redeemed.

A Brilliancy from Cioran

Quoted here.

The eminent cleric was poking fun at original sin. ‘That sin is your meal ticket. Without it, you’d die of hunger, for your ministry would then no longer have any meaning. If man is not fallen from the very beginning, why did Christ come? to redeem whom and what?’ To my objections, his only response was a condescending smile. 

A religion is finished when only its adversaries try to preserve its integrity.

Why Typos Don’t Matter and the Musical Watershed That Was the ‘Fifties

An old friend from college, who has a Masters in English, regularly sends me stuff like this which I have no trouble understanding:

I trust that you ahve emelreis of going pacles with your presnts in cars before the days when the shapr devide came and deliniated clearly the music that our presnts like and the stuff that was aethetically unreachabable to many of thier generation. That was a haunting melody, The Waywared Wind, and it spoke of an experiencethat was really more coon to a ahlf generation away from the WWII generation. It was actually a toad bod for its time. Same year bourght us Fale Storms come Donw From YOur Ivorty Towe, the great pretender, and other romantic and innocent songs. But it also brought Hound Dog, which shocked the blazes out of my parents and all of their peers. It was even sexual. It was just animal. And, no it was not specificailly Negrol; it was worse it was p;oor white trash with side burns on a motocycle. It woldn't matterif the B Side of every platter ahd been one of those great gospel tunes those guys did; that stuff was not urban, mainline, Protestant stuff, but anekly backwoods stuff where there are stills and 13-year-olf brides, that the Northern boys had heard about in the WWII barracks and hoped that they would never have hear about again as they went back to either their Main Line P:rotestant or Catholic urban llive, whether they belonged to a country het or not or woudl have to wait a while, say until their GI Bill college educations started enabling them to play golf. But that was still a good summer of rthe last of the sweet songs that memebers of several gneratons could enjoy together

Talk about spontaneous prose! No grammatical hang-ups here.  My friend is an old Keroauc aficionado too, and this is one of the more entertaining of his missives.   Is it the approach of October that frees and inspires his pen?  My friend's a strange bird, and the above just came straight out of his febrile pate; he didn't compose it that way to prove that typographical errors are compatible with transmission of sense.

A curious watershed era it was in which  the sweet & tender was found cheek-by-jowl with the explicitly referenced raw hydraulics of sexual intercourse.  Take Little Richard, perhaps the chief exponent, worse than old Swivel Hips, of the devil's music.  "Good Golly Miss Molly," he screamed, "she sure likes to ball/When you're rockin' and a rollin' can't you hear yo mama call."  That was actually played on the radio in the '50s.  To ball is to have sex, and 'rock and roll' means the same thing.  And so there were Southern rednecks who wanted the stuff banned claiming that R & R music was "was bringing the white man down to the level of the nigger."

I maintain that the best R & R manages to marry the Dionysian thrust with the tender embrace, the animalic with the sweetly romantic.  The prime example?  Roy Orbison's Pretty Woman.  One thing I love about Orbison is that instead of saying 'Fuck!,' like some crude rap punk, he says, 'Mercy!'  Another little indicator of how right my friend is in his analysis above.

The Emersonian Travel Passage in Seneca

In a previous complaint about the travails of travel, I quoted a line from Emerson's "Self-Reliance": "Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places." I claimed that the thought was Seneca's before it was Emerson's. In the meantime the passage has been located in my hardcopy of the Loeb Classical Library, no. 75 (Seneca IV, Epistle XXVIII ad Lucilium, trans. R. M. Gummere, p. 199):

     Though you may cross vast spaces of sea, and though, as our Vergil
     (Aeneid, iii. 72) remarks, "Lands and cities are left astern, your
     faults will follow you whithersoever you travel." Socrates made the
     same remark to one who complained; he said: "Why do you wonder that
     globe-trotting does not help you, seeing that you always take
     yourself with you? The reason that set you wandering is ever at
     your heels."

     Licet vastum traieceris mare, licet, ut ait Vergilius noster,
     "Terraeque urbesque recedant, sequentur te, quocumque perveneris,
     vitia." Hoc videm quaerenti cuidam Socrates ait: "Quid miraris
     nihil tibi peregrinationes prodesse, cum te circumferas? Premit te
     eadem causa, quae expulit."

Three Reasons to Stay Home

These days I have money to travel, time, and opportunities.  In close communion with my 'inner Kantian,' however, I resist the blandishments and with them the vexations of spatial translation. By my present count, there are three chief reasons to keep to my Southwestern Koenigsberg, the Emersonian, the Pascalian, and the Vallicellan. The first is that travel does not  deliver what it promises; the second is that it delivers us into temptation and vexation; the third is that it knocks us out of our natural orbit, to return to which wastes time.

The first reason is from Ralph Waldo Emerson's wonderful essay, "Self-Reliance," wherein he writes, "Travelling is a fool's  paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places." (Selected Essays, ed. Ziff, p. 198) This notion of the indifference of places is one I believe Emerson borrowed from the Roman Stoic Seneca (4 B.C. – 65 A.D.), though I can't remember where Seneca says this. The idea is simple and sound.

Wherever we are, we see the world through the same pair of eyeballs, and filter its deliverances through the same set of conceptions, preconceptions, anxieties, aversions, and what-not. If I travel to Naples, thinking to get away from myself, what I find when I wake up there is "…the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from." (Ibid.) Shift your spatial horizon as you will, you may not effect any change in your mental horizon. If you can't find enlightenment in Buffalo, where the water is potable and mosquitoes are rare, what makes you think you will find it in Benares where mosquitoes are ubiquitous and the water will give you dysentery?

Forty years ago I had a conversation with a young Austrian at the train station in Salzburg, Austria. He told me he was headed for Istanbul "to make holiness." But could he not have made holiness in Salzburg? Could he not have found a Pauline 'closet' somewhere in that beautiful city of Mozart wherein to shut himself away from the world and pray to his Father in secret?

But to the young and romantic the lure of foreign destinations is well-nigh irresistible.

The second reason is from Blaise Pascal who sees "the sole cause of man's unhappiness" in the fact that "he does not know how to stay quietly in his room." (Pensees, trans. Krailsheimer, p. 67.) Sallying forth from his monastery, the monk exposes himself to every manner of distraction and vexation. The alluring world may even lure him to his destruction. Had Thomas Merton remained in his hermitage at Gethsemane, instead of flying off to a useless conference in Bangkok, he would not have met his early death by accidental electrocution.

The third reason is that vacations tend to require a recovery period for getting reestablished in our natural orbits. In the summer of  2000, two weeks in Poland and Germany cost me another two weeks of recovery time before I could get back into the philosophy writing groove. Is the time spent travelling wisely used? It is not clear to me. But then I may have been unduly influenced by Kant, who never   strayed from Koenigsberg. Your mileage may vary.

Could the Mind be the Brain?

Few philosophers nowadays would maintain the bald thesis that the mind is identical to the brain,  but it is a view that one  hears among the laity. So it is worth refuting, this being a blog that I hope is somewhat accessible to the proverbial 'educated layman.'  (One of my motives in starting it over seven years ago was to offer free philosophy lessons, thereby doing my bit to enlighten the masses and counteract, if ever so slightly, their immersion in panem et circenses.)  But note: proving that the mind cannot be identical to the brain does not amount to proving that the mind is capable of existing apart from some material embodiment or other.

So my question is this: Are mind and brain identical? To answer the question one must know what one means by 'identity.' I mean strict numerical sameness. Consider the sole of my boot and the print it leaves on the trail. Are boot sole and boot print identical? Well, if you permit the phrase 'qualitatively identical,' then they are qualitatively identical, identical in respect of at least one quality, namely, having the same shape. But they are obviously numerically distinct. Count 'em: one, two. You could say that there is a correlation between the two. But correlation is not identity. If x and y are correlated, then they are precisely not numerically identical but numerically distinct. Correlation entails numerical distinctness. 

So don't confuse qualitative with numerical identity, and don't confuse identity with correlation. That's the beginning of wisdom, but only the beginning.

I now introduce a principle known in the trade as the Indiscernibility of Identicals. Stated roughly, it says that if x and y are numerically identical, then they share all properties. (A precise formulation would have to address the question as to what exactly counts as a property.  Does 'is identical to Obama' pick out a property?)  The Indiscernibility of Identicals is not only true, but  necessarily true in the sense that it is impossible that x and y differ property-wise if they are numerically identical.

Given the self-evident necessary truth of the Indiscernibility of Identicals, if my mind is identical to my brain, then my mind and my brain share all properties: everything true of the one is true of the other, and vice versa. But it is clear that they do not share all properties. The brain is a physical thing with a definite mass, weight, location, size, shape. One can inject dyes into various of its subregions. One can insert electrodes into it. One can remove and discard parts of it. One can add parts.  I can literally give you a piece of my brain. (And you hope I won't.)  But can I literally give you a piece of my mind? Does my mind have a weight in grams? Is it  divisible?  Do my thoughts have a location or a volume?  if one thought has a second as its object, as when I reflect, is the second thought located above the second?  How far above?  Can we intelligibly speak of the voltage drop across a thought?

It is true that my mind is now wholly occupied with the mind-body problem. But it is either false or makes no sense to say that my brain is now wholly occupied with the mind-body problem. It follows from these facts alone that my mind and my brain cannot be identical.  The argument is very simple, and because so simple, very compelling (simplex sigillum veri):

If x and y differ property-wise, then x is not y.
Mind and brain differ in respect of the property of being wholly occupied with the mind-body problem. 
Ergo,
Mind is not brain.

The most we could say is that a proper part of the brain is thinking about the mind-body problem. Not everything the brain does is concerned with consciousness or with thinking. The parts that control   cardiac and respiratory functions have nothing directly to do with mental activity. Connected with this is the fact that, even if every mental event is a brain event, not every brain event is a mental event. A blockage of a brain-internal blood vessel is a brain event, but not one that is mental. The brain has perhaps 100 different structures and some of these such as the vascular and bony structures have nothing directly to do with mental phenomena. In simple terms, the brain cannot function without oxygenated blood pumped through a system of blood vessels, but those processes are not conscious   processes.  There is nothing mental about them.

So it is clear that the mind cannot be identical to the brain. If that identity held, then every brain state would be mental, which is obviously false. But what is wrong with holding the converse, namely, that every mental state is a brain state? 

A similar indiscernibility objection can be made.  If every mental state is a brain state, then every belief (e.g. my belief that Boston is on the Charles River) is a brain state.  But beliefs have properties that brain states cannot have.  One is the property of being either true or false; another is intentionality.  So no belief is a brain state.  But then there are mental states that are not brain states.

Here is another way to look at it.  For reasons already given, it is obvious that there are brain states that are not mental states.  So if there are mental states that are brain states, then there must be some properties that distinguish these brain states that are mental states from the brain states that are not mental states.  These properties will have to be specifically mental: no physical property could do the trick.  But then, applying  the Indiscernibility of Identicals once again, any brain state that was initially supposed to be a mental state would be seen to  have a property that would entail its non-identity witha brain state.  Think about it.

‘Experience’

The Mayo Clinic sent me a brochure containing the line, "Most patients begin their experience at the outpatient clinic." Now I don't know about you, but when I seek medical attention it is not an experience I want but treatment. If I could get the treatment without the experience, so much the better. 

Similarly, when I take the old buggy to Jiffy Lube it is not an automotive experience I am after but an oil change.

In both cases one pays for work to be done on a physical thing, not for experiences to be induced in the mind of the owner of the physical thing.

The aestheticism of the '60s and beyond, with its emphasis on doing things for the experience of doing them regardless of any real-world outcome positive or negative, is probably at the root of this overuse of  'experience.'

Kant on Peccatum Originale Originans and Peccatum Originale Originatum

1. An important distinction for understanding the doctrine of original sin is that between originating original sin (peccatum originale originans) and originated original sin (peccatum originale originatum).  This post will explain the distinction and then consider Immanuel Kant's reasons for rejecting originated original sin.  It is important to realize that Kant does accept something like original sin under the rubric 'radical evil,' a topic to be explored in subsequent posts.  It is also important to realize that Kierkegaard's seminal thoughts about original sin as expressed in The Concept of Dread were influenced by Kant, and that Reinhold Niebuhr's influential treatment is in turn derivative from Kierkegaard.

2. So what's the distinction?  According to the Genesis story, the Fall of Man was precipitated by specific sinful acts, acts of disobedience, by Adam and Eve.  The sins of Adam and Eve were originating original sins. They were the first sins for the first human beings, but also the first sins for the human race.  Their sin somehow got transmitted to their descendants inducing in them a state of sinfulness.  The sinfulness of the descendants is originated original sin. This originated original sin is hereitary sin:  it is inherited and innate for postlapsarians and so does not depend on any specific sin of a person who inherits it.     Nevertheless it brings with it guilt and desert of punishment.  Socrates, then, or any post-Adamic man, is guilty and deserving of punishment whether or not he commits any actual sins of his own.  And so  a man who was perfectly sinless in the sense that he committed no actual sin of his own would nonetheless stand condemned in virtue of what an earlier man had one.  This doctrine has the consequence that an infant, who as an infant is of course innocent of any actual sin, and who dies unbaptized, is justly excluded from the kingdom of heaven.  Such an infant, on Catholic doctrine at least, ends up in limbo, or to be precise, in limbus infantium.  A cognate consequence is that a perfectly sinless adult who lives and dies before Christ's redemptive act is also excluded from heaven.  Such a person lands in limbus patrum.  (See here for the Catholic doctrine.)

3.  The stumbling block is obvious:  How can one justly be held morally accountable for what someone else has done or left undone?  How can one be guilty and deserving of punishment without having committed any specific transgression?  How can guilt be inherited?  Aren't these moral absurdities? Aren't we morally distinct  as persons, each responsible only for what he does and leaves undone?  There might well be originating original sin, but how could there be originated original sin?  It is worth noting that to reject originated original sin is not to reject originating original sin, or original sin as such.  There could be a deep structural flaw in humans as humans, universal and unameliorable by human effort, which deserves the title 'original sin/sinfulness' without it being the case that sin is inheritable.

Again I revert to my distinction between the putative fact of our fallenness and the various theories about it.  To refute a theory is not to refute a fact.

4.  Kant rejects the Augustinian notion of inherited sin.  Sinfulness, guilt, desert of punishment — these cannot be inherited.  So for Kant there is no originated original  sin.  Of the various explanations of the spread of moral evil through the members and generations of the human race, "the most inept is that which describes it as descending to us as an inheritance from our first parents." (Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trs. Greene and Hudson, Harper 1960, p. 35)  But this is not to say that Kant rejects the notion of original sin.  He himself speaks of peccatum originarium, which he distinguishes from peccatum derivatum.  (26)  For Kant, original sin is a propensity in us toward moral evil which is universal and logically prior to specific immoral acts.  I hope to say more about this in a subsequent post.

5.  But what is Kant's argument against hereditary guilt and originated original sin? Kant as I read him accepts it as a fact that in all human beings there is radical moral evil, a peccatum originarium that lies deeper than, and makes possible, specific peccata derivata.  What he objects to is the explanation of this fact in terms of a propagation of guilt from the original parents.  The main point is that a temporal explanation in terms of antecedent causes cannot account for something for which we are morally responsible.  If we are morally responsible, then we are free; but free actions cannot be explained in terms of temporally prior causes.  For if an action is caused, it is necessitated, and what is necessitated by its causes cannot be free. 

What is true of actions is true of moral character insofar as moral character is something for which one is morally responsible.  Therefore our radically evil moral character which predisposes us to specific acts of wrongdoing  cannot be explained in terms of temporally antececent causes.  Hence it cannot be explained by any propagation of guilt from the original parents to us.  Thus there is no originated guilt.  Our being guilty must be viewed "as though  the individual had fallen into it directly from a state of innocence." (36)  Thus all actions which make us guilty are original employments of the will. All original sin is originating original sin.

Perhaps we can put it this way.  Adam has nothing over Socrates.  It is not as if Adam went directly from a state of innocence into a state of sin while Socrates inherited sinfulness and was never in a state of innocence.  If there is such a thing as original sin then both are equally originative of it.

The Genesis account gives us a temporal representation of a logical and thus atemporal relationship.  The state of innocence is set at the temporal beginning of humanity, and the fall from innocence is depicted as an event in time.  But then we get the problems raised in #3 above.  The mistake is to "look for an origin in time of a moral character for which we are to be held responsible . . . ." (38)  We make this mistake because we want an explanation of the contingent existence of our radically evil moral predisposition.  An explanation, however, is not to be had.  The rational origin of the perversion of our will "remains inscrutable to us." (38)

6.  Kant thus does accept something like original sin.  We have within us a deep propensity to moral evil that makes us guilty and deserving of punishment.  But there is no deterministic causal explanation for it.  So while there is a sense in which our fallenness is innate, it is not inherited.  For it is morally absurd to suppose that I could be guilty of being in a state that I am caused to be in.  Each one of us is originally guilty but by a free atemporal choice.  This makes the presence of the radical flaw in each of us inscrutable and inexplicable.  The mystery of radical evil points us to the mystery of free will.  On Kant's view, then, there is only originating original sin.  Each of us by his own free noumenal agency plunges from innocence into guilt!

We shall have to continue these ruminations later.  Some questions on the menu of rumination:

Q1.  Is Kant's account with its appeal to atemporal noumenal agency really any better than Augustine's biological propagation account?

Q2.   How can guilt be innate but not inherited, as Kant maintains?

Q3.   Why believe in radical evil in the first place?  If the evidence for it is empirical, how can such evidence  show that radical evil is both universal (and thus inscribed in man's very nature) and ineradicable by human effort?

Can One Consistently be Pro-Life and Pro-Death Penalty?

This topic just won't go away.  Recent example:

[Texas Governor Rick] Perry’s identification as a strong supporter of “a culture of life” and what he called the “ultimate justice” of capital punishment, however, raises some potentially thorny questions about the meaning of being “pro-life.” In campaign season, the question is whether American voters, especially voters who identify as “pro-life,” are going to raise concerns about why Perry’s position doesn’t represent what some Catholic theologians call “a consistent ethic of life,” opposition to both legalized abortion and capital punishment.

The above-mentioned Catholic theologians are most likely just confused.  There is no defensible sense in which it is 'inconsistent' to be both pro-life and pro-death penalty.  I prove this here.

Militarization and Weaponization of Space

Some warn of the militarization of space as if it has not already been militarized. It has been, and for a long time now. How long depending on how high up you deem space begins. Are they who warn unaware of spy satellites? Of Gary Powers and the U-2 incident? Of the V-2s that crashed down on London? Of the crude Luftwaffen, air-weapons, of the First World War? The Roman catapults? The first javelin thrown by some Neanderthal spear chucker? It travelled through space to pierce the heart of some poor effer and was an early weaponization of the space between chucker and effer.

"I will not weaponize space," said Obama while a candidate in 2008. That empty promise comes too late, and is irresponsible to boot: if our weapons are not there, theirs will be.

The very notion that outer space could be reserved for wholly peaceful purposes shows a deep lack of understanding of the human condition.  Show me a space with human beings in it and I will show you a space that potentially if not actually is militarized and weaponized. Man is, was, and will be a bellicose son of a bitch. If you doubt this, study history, with particular attention to the 20th century. You can   bet that the future will resemble the past in this respect. Note that the turn of the millenium has not brought anything new in this regard.

Older is not wiser. All spaces, near, far, inner, outer, are potential scenes of contention, which is why I subscribe to the Latin saying:

     Si vis pacem, para bellum.

     If you want peace, prepare for war.

One must simply face reality and realize that the undoubtedly great good of peace comes at a cost, the cost of a credible defense. A  credible defense is what keeps aggressors at bay. I mean this to hold at all levels, intrapsychically, interpersonally, intranationally, internationally, and in every other way. Weakness provokes. Strength pacifies. That is just the way it is. Conservatives, being reality-based, understand what eludes leftists who are based in u-topia (nowhere) and who rely on their unsupportable faith in the inherent goodness of human beings.

They should read Kant on the radical evil in human nature.  Then they should go back to Genesis, chapters 2 and 3.

Here we have one of those deep defining differences between conservatives and leftists. Vote for the candidate of your choice, but just understand what set of ideas and values you are voting for.