Author: Bill Vallicella
Political Correctness Watch
Yale University Press bans images of Muhammad in academic book. What wimps these liberals be! And there is no wimp like an academic wimp.
Cynthia Tucker: 45-65% Of Townhall Protesters Are Racists. 'Racist' is the all-purpose semantic bludgeon of choice among liberals. Disagree with a liberal on practically anything and you are a racist!
Is 'Socialist' Code for 'Nigger'? One of the most despicable characteristics of present-day liberals and leftists is their refusal to take anything a conservative says at face value. Warped by the hermeneutics of suspicion, the liberal/leftist cannot credit the plainest and sincerest asseverations of the conservative. So if the conservative points out the obvious fact that Obama's health care proposals are socialist in nature, then he must really be doing something else, namely, expressing his hatred of Obama. You see, libs and lefties do not want to discuss the issues, they want to win by intimidation, by slandering the people who disagree with them and calling them racists. This is why there can be no discussion with these people. You cannot have a discussion with someone who interprets your opposition to radical Islam as a phobia, or your opposition to socialism as racist.
Allow Comments or Not?
This U. K. reader prefers no comments:
I 'm pleased that your blog no longer publishes readers' comments. Since this has been the case, I read it more assiduously. I usually find something in your daily observations and ruminations from which I can profit. When you used to allow even very well informed people to comment on what you had to say, my concentration withered and I was "turned off" by esoteric discussions of technical problems that interest professional philosophers.
I think all serious bloggers should follow your example and exclude not only the vacuous and insolent wreckers who infest blogs, but also the erudite correspondents who can transform such as Maverick Philosopher into a kind of country club for intellectuals.
This U. S. reader prefers comments:
First of all, your blog is much more instructive than most of my formal education. Thank you for that.However, recently you linked to your post on use and mention, and I followed the link and read the discussion. Here is what I notice. The educational value of any of your posts is exponentially compounded when there is a dialectic that follows. The reason this is so is that when I can see someone who disagrees with you I can then see what positions they are forced to take in the dialectic. Also because it highlights the distinction between good reasons and bad reasons for holding a position based on your responses.
The Conservative Disadvantage
We conservatives are at a certain disadvantage as compared to our leftist brethren. We don’t seek the meaning of our lives in the political sphere but in the private arena: in hobbies, sports, our jobs and professions, in ourselves, our families, friends, neighborhoods, communities, clubs and churches; in foot races and chess tournaments; in the particular pleasures of the quotidian round in all of their scandalous particularity.
We don't look to politics for meaning. Above all, we conservatives do not seek any transcendent meaning in the political sphere. We either deny that there is such a thing, or we seek it in religion, or in philosophy, or in meditation, or in such sorry substitutes as occultism. A conservative who denies that there is ‘pie in the sky’ will certainly not seek ‘pie in the future.’ He will not, like the leftist, look to a human future for redemption. He understands human nature, its real possibilities, and its real limits. He is impervious to utopian illusions. He will accept no ersatz soteriology.
A conservative could never write a book with the title, The Politics of Meaning. Politics for a conservative is more like garbage-collecting: it is a dirty job; somebody has to do; it would be better if nobody had to do it; and we should all lend a hand in getting the dirty job done. But there is little by way of meaning, immanent or transcendent, in garbage collecting and sewage disposal: these are things one gets out of the way so that meaningful activities can first begin.
I’m exaggerating a bit. To write is to exaggerate, as a Frenchman might put it, which amounts to a meta-exaggeration. But I’m exaggerating to make a serious point. We conservatives don’t look for meaning in all the wrong places. And because we don’t, we are at a certain disadvantage. We cannot bring the full measure of our energy and commitment to the political struggle. We don't even use the word 'struggle.' We are not totally committed to defeating the totally committed who would defeat us.
But now we need to become active. Not in the manner of the leftist who seeks meaning in activism for its own sake, but to defend ourselves and our values so that we can protect the private sphere from the Left's totalitarian encirclement. The conservative values of liberty and self-reliance and fiscal responsibility are under massive assault by the Obama administration, and there are indications that they are poised to clamp down on dissent. So if you value your life and liberty, you are well advised to inform yourself and take appropriate action.
Augustine, Husserl, and Certainty
In his magisterial Augustine of Hippo, Peter Brown writes of Augustine, "He wanted complete certainty on ultimate questions." (1st ed., p. 88) If you don't thrill to that line, you are no philosopher. Compare Edmund Husserl: "Ohne Gewissheit kann ich eben nicht leben." "I just can't live without certainty." Yet he managed to live for years after penning that line, and presumably without certainty.
Some Things I Look For in a Movie: A Rant
1. No mindless 'action.' No race and chase, crash and burn. I am not a robot, so I don't want to watch a movie made by robots about robots for robots.
2. No gratuitous sex, violence, and offensive language. I have no objection to sex, violence, and bad language as such. There is a time and place for each. I would have no problem, for example, with blowing a home invader to Kingdom Come where he is more likely to receive justice than here below from a criminal justice system lousy with tolerate-anything liberals. But sex, violence and bad language ought not be thrown in for no reason or just to titillate or offend in the manner of the adolescent (whatever his age) who thinks it cool to append the F-ing qualifier to every F-ing word. Example: the opening scenes of Titanic.
I'm as much into Posterior Analytics as the next guy, but what was that female derriere doing on the screen at the beginning of Lost in Translation? The female tail is a thing of beauty whose display can rise to the genuinely erotic as in The Unbearable Lighness of Being and Blue Velvet. But to insert it any old place, for no reason, is the mark of an impoverished cinematic bonehead.
When Bogie took one of the leading ladies into the bedroom, you knew what was about to transpire. But your nose wasn't rubbed into the raw hydraulics of it.
In a 'fifties movie, if a man was about to be hanged, you say a shot of the scaffold and perhaps a shot of him lying in a pine box; but you didn't see him twisting in the wind. Violence was part of a story and not presented to demean and debase the audience by a nihilistic leftist out to trash people's aesthetic and moral sensibilities.
Continue reading “Some Things I Look For in a Movie: A Rant”
Harry and Tonto
I saw the movie Harry and Tonto (1974) a while back. Starring Art Carney as Harry, it is the story of an elderly man who travels across the USA with his cat Tonto. Tonto’s aversion to riding in buses prompts Harry to buy a clunker in which they continue their journey. Various adventures ensue until they arrive at land’s end in Venice, California. There Tonto dies and Harry begins a new life.
It is a movie of real humanity unlike so much of the robotic crap cranked out by Hollywood. No race and chase, no explosions, no gratuitous sex and violence, no special effects.
Whenever I hear a movie praised for its special effects, I suspect the praiser to be a lunkhead capable of being roused from his stupor only by rude assaults upon his senses. What were the special effects in Fellini’s classic La Strada (1954), or in that other cinematic immortal, Zorba the Greek (1964) based on the great Kazantzakis novel of the same name? How about a story? How about some human meaning? How about some decent dialogue?
Saturday Night at the Oldies: B. B. King
I'd say this is the best version of "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out." Better than Bessie Smith's, and better than Clapton's plugged or unplugged.
Study Everything, Join Nothing
Do I live up to this admonition? Or am I posturing? Is my posture perhaps a slouch towards hypocrisy?
Well, it depends on how broadly one takes 'join.' A while back, I joined a neighbor and some of his friends in helping him move furniture. Reasonably construed, the motto does not rule out that sort of thing. And being a fair and balanced guy, as everybody knows, I recently joined the Conservative Book Club to balance out my long-standing membership in the left-leaning and sex-saturated Quality Paperback Book Club. (It would be interesting to compare these two 'clubs' in respect of their target memberships — but that's another post.)
And what if I join you for lunch, or join in a discussion in a chat room? A good while ago, the anonyblogger who ran The Will to Blog, but then lost the will to blog and deleted his site, opined that my motto ought to preclude my being a conservative. But surely one does not join a set of beliefs. One joins a political party, an organization, a church, and the like. Our anonyblogger might have been making the mistake of thinking that an independent thinker cannot arrive at any conclusions, for, if he did, then he would be joining something, and lose his independence.
Advertising and the Lure of the Lucre
I received an e-mail from a fellow who offered me $35 to run an ad on the alcohol, tobacco, and firearms page of this site for a alcoholism/drug addiction resource. I declined the offer for the same reason I don't display any money-making gimmicks such as 'tip jars.' The work I do on this site is a labor of love and an end in itself. To commercialize it would be to sully it. Of course, I have no objection to someone else turning a buck from his online work. If you need money, go ahead and try to earn some by any legitimate means and if this involves cluttering your site with advertising and such, it's a free country. But if you have enough of the lean green, then why not be content with what you have and turn your mind to the nonutilitarian?
"But what if he offered you $3,500?" Well, if I don't need $35, why would I need $3,500 or $35,000?
They say every man has his price. Suppose you were offered $1,000 to kill a defenseless old lady who lives by herself in an outlying area. You wouldn't do it, would you? But what if you were offered a million or ten million? Suppose she is near death, of no use to herself or anyone else, and no one cares whether she lives or dies. Suppose not even she cares whether she lives or dies. Upon hearing such an offer, a typical human brain would go into rationalization overdrive. But again, if you don't need a thousand why do you need a million?
Money, like sex, has an astonishing delusive power, a power to corrupt and distort, so much so that many think it the root of all evil. That cannot be right, of course, as a little thought will show: the most one can say is that the inordinate love of money is at the root of some evils. See Money, Sex, Power, and Fame and Radix Omnium Malorum. Nevertheless, money makes people crazy and they have a hard time thinking clearly about it. They think it will buy them happiness when at the most it will buy them the absence of certain forms of misery. Just as absurd is the notion promoted in the silliest song of all time, John Lennon's Imagine, that the abolition of money is the way to human flourishing:
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…
It says something that this asinine exercise in the utopian is considered one of the greatest songs of all time. I am referring to the lyrics, not the music, which is not bad.
Money, Power, and Equality
J. R. Lucas, "Against Equality," in Justice and Equality, ed. Hugo Bedau (Prentice-Hall, 1971), pp. 148-149:
Since men value power and prestige as much as the possession of wealth—indeed, these three 'goods' cannot be completely separated—it is foolish to seek to establish an equality of wealth on egalitarian grounds. It is foolish first because it will not result in what egalitarians really want. It is foolish also because if we do not let men compete for money, they will compete all the more for power; and whereas the possession of wealth by another man does not hurt me, unless I am made vulnerable by envy, the possession of power by another is inherently dangerous; and furthermore if we are to maintain a strict equality of wealth we need a much greater apparatus of state to secure it and therefore a much greater inequality of power. Better have bloated plutocrats than omnipotent bureaucrats.
How to Judge a Blog
A weblog should be judged, not by the color of its 'skin,' but by the character of its content.
Diversity and Divisiveness
Liberals emphasize the value of diversity, and with some justification. Many types of diversity are good. One thinks of culinary diversity, musical diversity, artistic diversity generally. Biodiversity is good, and so is a diversity of opinions, especially insofar as such diversity makes possible a robustly competitive market place of ideas wherein the best rise to the top. A diversity of testable hypotheses is conducive to scientific progress. And so on.
But no reasonable person values diversity as such. A maximally diverse neighborhood would include pimps, whores, nuns, drug addicts, Islamo-headchoppers, Hell’s Angels, priests both pedophile and pure, Sufi mystics, bank clerks, insurance salesmen, people who care for their property, people who are big on deferred maintenance . . . . You get the point. Only some sorts of diversity are valuable. Diversity worth having presupposes a principle of unity that controls the diversity. Diversity must be checked and balanced by the competing value of unity, a value with an equal claim on our respect.
Kant on Abraham and Isaac
What I said about Abraham and Isaac yesterday is so close to Kant's view of the matter that I could be accused of repackaging Kant's ideas without attribution. When I wrote the post, though, I had forgotten the Kant passage. So let me reproduce it now. It is from The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), the last book Kant published before his death in 1804 except for his lectures on anthropology:
. . . if God should really speak to man, man could still never know that it was God speaking. It is quite impossible for man to apprehend the infinite by his senses, distinguish it from sensible beings, and recognize it as such. But in some cases man can be sure that the voice he hears is not God's; for if the voice commands him to do something contrary to the moral law, then no matter how majestic the apparition may be, and no matter how it may seem to surpass the whole of nature, he must consider it an illusion. (115)
A footnote to this paragraph reads:
We can use, as an example, the myth of the sacrifice that Abraham was going to make by butchering and burning his only son at God's command (the poor child, without knowing it, even brought the wood for the fire). Abraham should have replied to this supposedly divine voice: "That I ought not kill my good son is quite certain. But that you, this apparition, are God — of that I am not certain, and never can be, not even is [read: if] this voice rings down to me from (visible) heaven." (115)
Here is what I wrote yesterday:
Which is more certain, that I should not kill my innocent son, or that God exists, has commanded me to kill my son, and that I must obey this command? That I must not kill my innocent son is a deliverance of our ordinary moral sense. But wouldn't a command from the supreme moral authority in the universe trump a deliverance of our ordinary moral sense? Presumably it would — but only if the putative divine command were truly a divine command. How would one know that it is?
Kant's argument, put as concisely as possible, is that:
1. It is certain that one ought not kill one's innocent son.
2. It is not certain that a seemingly divine command to kill one's innocent son is truly a divine command.
Therefore
3. One ought to trust one's moral sense and not the putative divine revelation.
Therefore
4. ". . . if it [a scriptural text] contains statements that contradict practical reason, it must be interpreted in the interests of practical reason." (65)
Whether or not one accepts this argument that I am attributing to Kant — you are invited to note that I cobbled it together from disparate passages — you must, if you are rational, see that there is a problem here, one that cannot be ignored, namely, the problem of adjudicating between putative personal and Biblical revelation, on the one hand, and (practical) reason on the other. Something has to give. My judgment is that Kant is right in the passage just quoted, and that our sense of the moral law trumps any contra-moral personal revelation (e.g. a voice commanding an immoral act) and also any Bible passage that seems to endorse the acquiescence in a personal revelation that commands an immoral act.
But why not the other way around? Why not say that the Bible passage trumps our sense of the moral law? The short answer is that our sense of the moral law has superior epistemic credentials. If we know anything about morality, we know that we ought not kill our innocent children. If we don't know that, then we don't know anything about morality. But a voice commanding one to kill an innocent child has no claim on our belief.
Infirm as reason is, it is yet a divine spark within us, an element in the imago Dei. Insofar forth, it is inviolable.
Abraham, Isaac, and an Aspect of the Problem of Revelation
God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"
Abe says, "Man, you must be puttin' me on"
God say, "No." Abe say, "What?"
God say, "You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin' you better run"
Abe says, "Where do you want this killin' done?"
God says, "Out on Highway 61."Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited (1965)
Which is more certain, that I should not kill my innocent son, or that God exists, has commanded me to kill my son, and that I must obey this command? That I must not kill my innocent son is a deliverance of our ordinary moral sense. But wouldn't a command from the supreme moral authority in the universe trump a deliverance of our ordinary moral sense? Presumably it would — but only if the putative divine command were truly a divine command. How would one know that it is?
Continue reading “Abraham, Isaac, and an Aspect of the Problem of Revelation”