Category: Activism and Quietism

The Retreat Into the Private Life

When the world and its hopelessness are too much with us, one can and must beat a retreat into the private life.  Body culture, mind culture, hobbies, family life, the various escapes (which are not necessarily escapes from reality) into chess, fiction, religion, meditation, history, pure mathematics and science, one's own biography and the pleasant particulars of one's past, music, gardening, homemaking . . . .

I pity the poor activist for whom the real is exhausted by the political.  But I detest these totalitarians as well since they seek to elide the boundary between the private and the public.

So we need to battle the bastards in the very sphere they think exhausts the real.  But it is and must be a part-time fight, lest we become like them.  Most of life for us conservatives must be given over to the enjoyment and appreciation, in private, of the apolitical:  nature, for example, and nature's God.

The Quietist on the Delights of Escapism

There are the undeniable and readily accessible delights of escapism into scholarship, and science, and research and inquiry of all sorts.  When 'reality' becomes too much to bear, what is wrong with retreating into an ivory tower?  Who can rightfully begrude us our right to peace and quiet and happiness?

You say that there are more pressing concerns than the nature and extent of the influence of Avicenna on Aquinas' De Ente et Essentia?  No doubt.  But do you really believe that your becoming hot and bothered over these 'pressing concerns' will lead to any improvement?  Are you sure about that?  And isn't your political activism your mode of escape from something or other?  I like peace and quiet; you like 'drama' and contention.  To each his own.

Thus spoke the quietist.

In the Face of Totalitarians

In the face of totalitarians one cannot retreat into one's private life for they, being totalitarians, won't allow any private life.  So the conservative is forced willy-nilly to become an activist against his natural tendency.  He must draw a line in the sand and say "This far but no farther."

A minor example.  My friends Peter and Mike who teach at community colleges in Maricopa County, Arizona, were on the rant once again yesterday morning over the smoking ban that went into effect on 1 July.  This draconian ruling forbids smoking anywhere on campus, including parking lots and closed cars in such lots.  Bear in mind that reasonable smoking restrictions were already in effect and that my friends, only one of whom smokes, had no objection to them.

Now what is behind the new ruling?  Nothing but lust for power and a desire on the part of its promoters to outdo themselves in pursuit of PC thereby earning 'brownie-points' with the higher-ups.  (I intend 'brownie-points' as a double-entendre with an allusion to brown-nosing.)

And so the breakfast conversation turned to means of combating the insanity: massive disobedience, smoke-ins, and libertarian 'flash mobs':  the tweets go out, the students and faculty assemble quickly to blow some smoke and then just as quickly disperse.  Imagine several such mobs assembling and dispersing at different open-air campus locations on a single day.

The people charged with enforcement would be overwhelmed, the ruling would be flouted into risibility, and then ignored.

Mockery and derision are powerful weapons and perfectly legitimate when one is dealing with willfully stupid and morally stunted Pee-Cee power-heads.

Companion post:  The Conservative Disadvantage

Politics: Would That I Could Avoid It

Using 'quietist' in a broad sense as opposed to the Molinos-Fenelon-Guyon sense, I would describe myself as a quietist rather than as an activist. The point of life is not action, but contemplation, not doing, but thinking. (I mean 'thinking' in a very broad sense that embraces all forms of intentionality as well as meditative non-thinking.)  The vita activa is of course necessary (for some all of the time, and for people like me some of the time), but it is necessary as a means only. Its whole purpose is to subserve the vita contemplativa. To make of action an end in itself is absurd, and demonstrably so, though I will spare you the demonstration. If you are assiduous you can dig it out of Aristotle, Aquinas and Josef Pieper.  I recommend his Leisure: The Basis of Culture.

So the dominant note of my personality is quietism in the sense just sketched. The Big Questions turn my crank, not this foreground rubbish about abortion, illegal immigration, social security, misuse of eminent domain, leftist race-baiting, etc. It would be nice to be able to let the world and its violent nonsense go to hell while cultivating my garden in peace.

Unfortunately, my garden and stoa are in the world and exposed to its threats. So politics, which has too little to do with truth and too much to do with power, cannot be ignored. This world is not ultimately real, but it is no illusion either, pace some sophists of the New Age, and so some battling within it, ideological or otherwise, cannot be  avoided.  Besides, the issues of the day all have roots in the Big Questions.  So an assiduous and deep-going application to the issues of the day will lead one to the Big Questions.  An excellent example is abortion.

The Case of Morris Starsky

Quite by chance this morning I stumbled upon materials relating to one Morris Starsky, a professor of philosophy at Arizona State University who was fired from a tenured position for his political views in 1970.  Here is the Wikipedia article; here is something from the Phoenix New Times; this is from The Militant.  All of these sources to be consumed cum grano salis. 

A search at PhilPapers turned up nothing on the man, which says something.  Some commentary later, perhaps, once I know more about the case.

Addendum (7:05 PM):  The ever-helpful Dave Lull reports that Morris Joseph Starsky earned the Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1967 with a dissertation entitled, "On the Ontological Problem of Oratio Obliqua.

Addendum (5 April):  Lull informs me that the Morris J. Starsky archives are housed at the ASU library.

Why We Can’t Ignore Politics

Thomas Mann, Diaries 1918-1939, entry of August 5, 1934:

     A cynical egotism, a selfish limitation of concern to one's
     personal welfare and one's reasonable survival in the face of the
     headstrong and voluptuous madness of 'history' is amply justified.
     One is a fool to take politics seriously, to care about it, to
     sacrifice one's moral and intellectual strength to it. All one can
     do is survive, and preserve one's personal freedom and dignity.
  
I don't endorse Mann's sentiment but I sympathize with it. Hitler came to power in 1933. Imagine the effect that must have had on a man of Mann's sensitivity and spiritual depth. You witness your country, the land of Kant and Schiller, of Dichter und Denker, poets and thinkers, in Heinrich Heine's fine phrase, transformed into a land of Richter und Henker, judges and hangmen.

My response to Mann would be along these lines: It precisely because men of the spirit must survive and survive to create that they must be concerned with politics and with those who can kill and suppress them. You escaped to the USA, but what if there were no such country to which to escape because all of the people of high quality practised your cynical egotism, your selfish limitation to the personal?

One can take politics seriously and do one's bit without sacrificing one's moral and intellectual strength to it.  The latter, I agree, would be folly.

The Upside of the Downturn

Written a few years ago, this entry from the old blog merits reposting.

As the economy stumbles, CD rates tumble, the stock market falters,  gas prices soar, and foreclosures mount, I look at the bright side: less development, fewer sales of State Trust Lands, less destruction of desert and wildlife habitat. A temporary respite from the hyperkinetic rush to a universal pave-over. And less mindless zipping around in gas guzzling behemoths. I don't reckon there is much of a market for Escalades and Hummers these days. Out on U.S. 60 the other day the traffic seemed surprisingly light. People are feeling the pinch of higher gas prices. Good. Maybe they will learn to cultivate local pleasures, those of hearth and home. Maybe they will learn to slow down and walk. Or ride a bike.

Call me a green conservative. I have no patience with libertarians and other open-borders types who think economic considerations trump all others. To sacrifice quality of life and natural beauty to economic expansion makes little sense to me. But don't confuse me with eco-extremists like Dave Foreman who, in a book of his I read some years back, claimed that a bear and a human being have the same value.  That is an equal but opposite form of moral and intellectual idiocy.

And then you have the Sierra Club, the members of which are mostly squishy bien-pensant latte liberals who refuse to work with Jim Gilchrist and the Minuteman Project because they stupidly think that   anyone who insists on the enforcement of immigration laws is a 'racist' and a 'xenophobe.'

So it's a mess and I for one see little point in getting my blood pressure up over it. You've got Republicans who like cheap labor and  Democrats who are hoping that a flood of illegal aliens will assure the permanent ascendancy of their party. Contemplative types like me laugh at those who piss their lives away in activism battling activists of some other stripe. I prefer to use the time and good health I have left enjoying as much natural beauty as I can while there is still some left to enjoy.  A shot from my backyard:

IMG_0396 

I Get a Rise Out of Aristotle

Michael Gilleland, the Laudator Temporis Acti, in his part-time capacity as 'channel' of Aristotle, submits this delightful missive:

Dis-tracted

We are pulled towards the world, towards property, progeny, position, power, popularity, pleasure. But in some of us the pull toward the spirit is stronger and will triumph — in the end. Meanwhile we are pulled apart, dis-tracted, torn between lust for the world and love of the spirit. This is 'par for the course' and 'it comes with the terrain.' There's no turning back now. We must advance.

Political Action and the Principle of Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien

Attributed to Voltaire. "The best is the enemy of the good."

Meditation on this truth may help conservatives contain their revulsion at their lousy choices. Obama, who has proven that he is a disaster for the country, got in in part because of conservatives who could not abide McCain.

Politics is a practical business. It is always about the lesser of evils, except when it is about the least of evils. It is not about being ideologically pure. It is about accomplishing something in a concrete situation in which holding out for the best is tantamount to acquiescing in the bad. Political choices are forced options in roughly William James' sense: he who abstains chooses willy-nilly. His not choosing the better amounts to a choice of the worse.

Continue reading “Political Action and the Principle of Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien“

Political Discourse as Unavoidably Polemical: the Converse Clausewitz Principle

A regular reader writes:

I would urge some caution withyour recent political cartoon.  This is only because you may unjustly be treated with less seriousness than your blog deserves if someone wants to peg you in a certain way.  I'm certainly not being PC or suggesting that political satire is problematic — it's primarily a tactical point.

I couldn't agree more, of course, that liberalism (and, in particular, it's diseased and mutated zombie baby of multiculturalism) is attempting, even if unwittingly, to destroy its host body.  The cartoon is a very powerful one, indeed!

Point taken.  It's a tricky issue.  But I think it is important to let our opponents know that we will oppose them.  There is no way not to be unfairly pegged by the nimrods and numbskulls of the Left.  So conservatives shouldn't worry about it.  Janeane Garofalo's comment that the 'tea-baggers' as she derisively refers to them are racists and rednecks is, I am afraid, representative of the scum-baggery widespread on the Left.  We should stand up to them and speak the truth with courage.

Would that I could avoid this stuff.  But I cannot in good conscience retreat into my inner citadel and let my country be destroyed — the country that makes it possible for me to cultivate the garden of solitude, retreat into my inner citadel, and pursue pure theory for its own sake.

Political discourse is unavoidably polemical. The zoon politikon must needs be a zoon polemikon. ‘Polemical’ is from the Greek polemos, war, strife. According to Heraclitus of Ephesus, strife is the father of all: polemos panton men pater esti . . . (Fr. 53) I don't know about the 'all,' but strife  is certainly at the root of politics.  Politics is polemical because it is a form of warfare: the point is to defeat the opponent and remove him from power, whether or not one can rationally persuade him of what one takes to be the truth. It is practical rather than theoretical in that the aim is to implement what one takes to be the truth rather than contemplate it.  'What one takes to be the truth': that is the problem in a nutshell.  Conservatives and leftists disagree fundamentally and nonnegotiably.

Implementation of what one takes to be the truth, however, requires that one get one’s hands on the levers of power. Von Clausewitz  held that war is politics pursued by other means. But what could be called the converse-Clausewitz principle holds equally: politics is war pursued by other means.

A political cartoon like the one I posted surely won't convert any leftists.  How could it, when the 281 patiently argued pages of David Horowitz's Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (Regnery 2004) made no impression on them?  The Left cannot be persuaded; they must be opposed.

Conservative Activism, the Left’s Incomprehension, and the Genetic Fallacy

'Conservative activism' has an oxymoronic ring to it.  Political activism does not come naturally to conservatives, as I point out in The Conservative Disadvantage.  But the times they are a 'changin' and so I concluded that piece by saying that  we now 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 . . . ."

Leftists like to think that they own dissent, a conceit I demolish in Does the Left Own Dissent?  Truth is, they own dissent as little as they own activism.  But libs and leftists simply cannot credit conservative dissent.  They cannot take seriously what conservatives say, but must dismiss and psychologize.

Case in point, Michael Tomasky's Something New on the Mall.  To Tomasky's credit, he does not employ the derisive 'tea-bagger' epithet.  By the way, lefties ought to understand that they don't have proprietary rights in derision any more than they do in dissent.  So I suggest that if a leftist calls you a tea-bagger, return the compliment by calling him a scum-bagger.  A taste of his own medicine may do him some good, if not now, then later after he has grown up.

What struck me about Tomasky's lengthy piece is that there is not a hint of an admission that any of the points brought up by the conservative protesters have any merit.  Nor is there any attempt to rebut these points.  Instead we get a lengthy explanation of "how astroturfing works."  The derisive 'astroturf' is supposed to suggest that the protests are not genuine 'grass roots' expressions of populist  opposition to, among other things, fiscal recklessness, but have been artificially created and orchestrated by powerful 'corporate' interests:

This conservative protest movement, though, has three powerful forces supporting it: bottomless amounts of corporate money; an ideologically dedicated press, radio, and cable television apparatus eager to tout its existence; and elected officials who are willing to embrace it publicly and whose votes in support of the movement's positions can be absolutely relied upon.

But none of that is true of the progressive movement?  Substitute 'progressive movement' for 'conservative protest movement' in the above quotation and the result is actually closer to the truth.  More importantly, attempts by leftists to ferret out the underlying causes and motives of conservative positions border on the genetic fallacy.

The genetic fallacy is committed by those who fail to appreciate that questions about the truth or falsity, or rational acceptability or unacceptability, of a proposition are logically independent of questions about the origin or genesis of someone's believing the proposition.  Whether a proposition is true or false, or posseses some cognate epistemic property, is independent of any role that the believing of said proposition might play in the believer's mental economy. Thus if S's believing that p is comforting to S, it does not follow that p is false, or that S has no good reason for accepting that p. Similarly, if S's believing that p is painful to S, it does not follow that p is true, or that S has a good reason for accepting that p. And if you come to believe that 'Cash for Clunkers' is a policy that is both morally and economically objectionable because of arguments you heard  presented on a conservative talk show, it does not follow from the fact that your believing had that origin that the content of your belief is false or rationally insupportable.

 

In Praise of the Useless

Morris R. Cohen, A Preface to Logic (Dover, 1977, originally published in 1944), p. 186, emphasis added:

It would certainly be absurd to suppose that the appreciation of art should justify itself by practical applications. If the vision of beauty is its own excuse for being, why should not the vision of truth be so regarded? Indeed is it not true that all useful things acquire their value because they minister to things which are not useful, but are ends in themselves? Utility is not the end of life but a means to good living, of which the exercise of our diverse energies is the substance.

Or as I like to say, the worldly hustle is for the sake of contemplative repose, it being well understood that such repose can be quite active, an "exercise of our diverse energies," but for non-utilitarian ends.