Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
Open the borders; empty the prisons; empower the criminal; violate the the rights of the law-abiding; erase history and heritage and hard-won wisdom.
Above all: Destroy language so that no one can coherently think or speak about the destructive Democrat agenda.
Across the land the erasure of history via the destruction of monuments and memorials is proceeding apace. The worthless and unaccomplished are attacking the memories of people of great worth and accomplishment. Where are the authorities to whom we have entrusted the preservation of civilization? In abdication, mainly. They lack the will to put a stop to the rampages of dangerous children.
And children they are. Their thinking lacks all depth and nuance. Theirs is an adolescent passion unconstrained by either knowledge or wisdom. And yet adult fools take the likes of Greta Thunberg and A. Ocasio-Cortez seriously, granting them positions of power and influence. This too is a form of abdication.
You know what you have to do come November.
Emphases and comments added.
Immigration increases to levels too high for effective assimilation, and new ideas and cultural norms displace those of the founding stock. Like Robert Putnam, Glubb stresses that immigrants aren’t inferior, but erode cultural cohesion. Indeed, Glubb notes that “many of the foreign immigrants will probably belong to races originally conquered by and absorbed into the empire” and “when decline sets in, it is extraordinary how the memory of ancient wars, perhaps centuries before, is suddenly revived, and local or provincial movements appear demanding secession or independence.”
This was not true in the past because immigrants were vetted and assimilation was demanded.
A decline in power and wealth combined with internal strife results in a feedback loop creating pessimism and “frivolity.” A populace that cannot be roused to action slips into escapism instead. Glubb compares Roman mobs’ demand for “bread and circuses” to British and American consumption of soccer and baseball. He even writes that “the heroes of declining nations are always the same—the athlete, the singer or the actor,” rather than a statesman, a general, or a literary genius as in previous eras. Remember, Fate of Empires was published in 1977.
Panem et circenses give way to beer, football, legalized dope, and 24/7 pornography, all to keep the masses distracted and sedated.
Other hallmarks of the failing empire include a rise of the welfare state and a decline in religion. Check and check. The former affluence of the nation leads the populace to the “impression that it will always be automatically rich” and “causes the declining empire to spend lavishly on its own benevolence, until such time as the economy collapses.” These trends are easily observable in the United States. What is the Fed’s balance sheet by the way? Worse, does anyone care?
The religion of the Founders is banned from the public square while the religions of invaders are given a pass.
Glubb notes that it is doubtful that collapse can be avoided by studying the meta-history of empires. Rather, he writes that “in our present state of mental chaos… we divide ourselves into nations, parties or communities and fight, hate and vilify one another over developments which may perhaps be divinely ordained and which seem to us, if we take a broader view, completely uncontrollable and inevitable.”
Events are unfolding in ways we can just barely understand. Our technology has a life of its own and is altering our language and modes of social interaction. Marshall McLuhan should see us now! We become ever more dependent on an incredibly complex and fragile technology while giving no thought about how easy it would be to bring it crashing down. Instead we worry about such phantoms as 'systemic racism.'
If this sounds pessimistic, don’t forget the last three words of Glubb’s title are “Search for Survival.” It is far better to see the world with clear eyes than foolishly hope for a return to “High Noon.” Progressives and populists tend to agree that the future can be better; they just disagree on the route to that better future. We will survive if we are honest in what we face. Yet, questions remain how to proceed. Should we partition the country into separate nations in the hopes of mitigating what may be a Spanish-style civil war or a soft police state of tech overlords?
We need a conversation about partition.
Notable thinkers like Charles Murray suggest that only a religious revival can save the United States. If Glubb is correct that wholesale salvage is impossible, should we protect the embers of Christianity via Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option,” in the hope that future generations can one day enjoy the full light of Western Civilization? Glubb seems to insinuate this as well, noting that in the depths of decadence the “seeds of religious revival” are sown. As our nation approaches 250 years—a quarter millennium—we should be grateful to have lived in what may be the greatest nation God has known. Perhaps, after the coming unpleasantness, we will find something even greater.
Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.
Glancing at my referrals, I noticed a link from a weblog by the name of Idlings. The entry, Among the Iconoclasts, caught my eye, and a good entry it is. Excerpt:
You can see that the battle is already lost in the rising generation of ideologues: kids chanting slogans and marching lockstep round the elementary school; college sophomores spitting on a cultural inheritance they don’t understand; younger members of the newspaper editorial staff booting old-school liberals out the door for the impertinence of still believing, a little, in free speech and open debate. Rather than being educated into a sense of common purpose and shared endeavor, the young today are indoctrinated into faction and grievance.
The battle may well be lost. But we don't know that it is. So we ought to fight on. But the Political does not exhaust the Real, and so the fight against our political enemies must remain a part-time affair. This puts us conservatives at a disadvantage, but it would be worse to become like those we oppose.
So contemplate the constellations; read the great books our enemies would burn; retire from the desperate cities into nature. And if you can, look beyond time's horizon to the Source of this passing show the vanity of which will be verified by its vanishing.
The 2020 presidential election will not be Biden versus Trump; Biden is but a shell, a puppet, a has-been on cognitive life support. The election will be Biden's keepers versus Trump. But even this observation does not cut deeply enough. 2020 will be a referendum on whether the people want the preservation of the Republic or its dissolution. Conrad Black:
President Trump spoke nothing but the truth at Mount Rushmore on Friday when he said “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children. Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities. Many of these people have no idea why they are doing this but some know exactly what they are doing.”
It is inconceivable that the FBI—particularly with the opprobrium it has rightly attracted for its antics in the Russian collusion canard—is not close to being able to indict the leadership of Black Lives Matter and Antifa for sedition and incitement to a range of violent crimes, including murder and arson. It is also inconceivable that the country could fail to choose the president’s championship of patriotic continuity with strong emphasis on racial equality and the highest standards of civilized law enforcement over the nihilism and Americo-phobic mob rule of the post-George Floyd rioters whom the Democrats in their decadent insipidity have appeased.
The almost inexpressibly contemptible Democratic de Blasio regime in New York City has reduced the police budget by $1 billion as violent crime has more than doubled. The president’s reopening of the economy brought back nearly 5 million workers out of unemployment in June and this process should continue. The fatality rates of the pandemic have declined by nearly 90 percent from their high, with spread of the virus now concentrated amongst those who can best resist it. The subject of pathetic Democratic hand-wringing, the surge in new cases is effectively irrelevant other than that it increases national immunity to it.
Former conservatives and pillars of the pre-Trump Republican Party are now facing the point of no return. If they confirm their support for the almost leaderless Democratic Party now closely allied with pestilence and racist mayhem, they will never have any political influence in any party again. The time to choose between irreconcilable opposites is almost at hand.
The following is from a reader who takes issue with Chad McIntosh's Euthanizing Liberty. Secondarily, he takes issue with me since I basically endorse McIntosh's contentions. McIntosh maintains that
. . . the closure of philosophy departments, along with others in the humanities, [is] a good thing, for three reasons. First, institutions of higher education have already devolved to the point that the humanities are a mere vestigial organ. Their removal helps clarify the image of these institutions as something other than true universities. Second, removing the humanities will help slow the spread of the insidious ideology destroying society that’s incubated there. Finally, it’s plausible that the future of the humanities is better off in the hands of independent lovers of wisdom. So, to all the institutional bureaucrats just thinking about the bottom dollar: cut the humanities! Slash, chop, dice, hack them into nothing. Leave thinking about the bigger picture to those who know what a real university is.
According to my reader:
Chad's article is interesting, but short-sighted. The humanities aren't ever going to close entirely . . . . My issue is that as long as our current culture is converting people and otherwise pushing out [producing?] lefties, it's only a matter of time until they take over the country. Suppose Trump wins. What are you going to do in five years? How is he going to change the culture and stop the country from becoming more and more liberal? He's stopping some of the bleeding and slowing the left down, and that is reason to vote for him over alternatives, but let's not get carried away. I'm reminded of what Peter Hitchens said in his recent interview with Eric Metaxas talking about Christianity disappearing from e.g. political discourse: "Once you've given away that ground, it's hard to see what you can do to fight back." It seems to me that Christianity was needed to renew conservative values with each generation. Without it (or some suitable replacement), unless we fix the superstructure to include it (or a replacement), it's only a matter of time.
My reader appears to be arguing that humanities departments ought not to be shut down because they impede to some slight extent the total leftist takeover of the culture. But that impedance can happen only if some conservatives manage to get jobs, and eventually tenure, in these departments. These hardy souls, however, would have to hide their conservative beliefs to get hired in the first place, and then carefully keep them hidden for six or so years until they — if they are lucky — get tenure. So during that time they would be unable to do anything to impede the spread of leftism. But once tenured, they would not be safe either, for any espousal of conservative positions would get them branded racists and white supremacists, and, as we all know, tenure affords no absolute protection if the administrators and the faculty really want to get rid of you.
More fundamentally, any conservatives in humanities departments that are allowed to speak and publish and influence students and get tenure would be vastly outnumbered by their leftist 'colleagues.' So the net effect of keeping the humanities departments in operation would be a further poisoning of the culture with 'woke,' i.e., benighted, leftist nonsense.
So isn't McIntosh right to celebrate the closure of humanities departments, even if the closures are motivated by the wrong reasons, e.g. the failure of business types to grasp the value of the humanities (properly understood and properly taught)?
And wouldn't it be better for serious truth-seekers to abandon the present-day pseudo-universities and set up their own competing institutions, both on-line and with brick and mortar? Back to my reader:
As an aside, it's nice that he [McIntosh] holds you [BV] up as an example of an independent scholar, but I don't think a scholar of equal ability would be taken even fractionally as seriously as you are if he hadn't also held a professorship in the past. I hope I'm wrong, but it seems to me that you having gotten that "stamp of approval" is important.
Getting taken seriously is much more a matter of publishing competent work in well-regarded peer-reviewed journals and presses. That does not require having a Ph.D., or an academic post, or having had a (tenured, full-time) academic post. My being retired from a tenured, full-time academic post does nothing to enhance my credibility in the eyes of leftists for whom I remain a 'racist,' a 'white supremacist,' and and a 'theocrat.' And to these despicable people, any proof that I might proffer that I am not any of these things is just further proof that I am.
It is important to realize just how sick and destructive academe has become, and not just in the humanities and social sciences. A prime example at the present time is the tenured fool, Robin DiAngelo.
You know things are getting bad when a bookman must also be a rifleman if he intends to keep his private library safe from the depredations of leftist thugs who are out to 'de-colonize' it. You cannot reach these evil-doers with arguments, for it is not the plane of reason that they inhabit; there are, however, other ways to each them. The gentle caress of sweet reason must sometimes give way to the hard fist of unreason.
This raises an important moral question. Are there cultural artifacts so precious that violence against humans in their defense is justified? I should think so. For those out to 'cancel' high culture have no qualms about 'cancelling,' i.e., murdering its creators. That is one consideration. But also: haven't the barbarians forfeited their (normative) humanity to such an extent that they no longer deserve moral consideration? Do they form a moral community with us at all?
I am just asking. Or is inquiry now verboten?
Excerpts from, and commentary on, John Gray, Why the Humanities Can't be Saved. HT: Karl White.
It is hard to see why any sensible person would enroll in a humanities degree at the present time. A common argument used to be that the humanities taught students how to think. [. . .]
This is not an argument that can be made today. “Critical thinking” has become a cluster of progressive dogmas, which are handed down as if they were self-evident truths. Students learn an intra-academic argot – intersectionality, hetero-normativity and the like — that has zero utility in the world in which they will go on to live.
They also learn that disagreement in ethics and politics is illegitimate. Anyone who departs from the prevailing progressive consensus is not just mistaken but malevolent. When enforced in universities, this is a prescription for censorship and conformism. What is being inculcated is not freedom of mind, but freedom from thought. Losing the ability to think while attending a university may be considered a misfortune. Incurring fifty or sixty thousand pounds of debt in order to do so looks like carelessness.
It looks more like stupidity.
The decline of the humanities is one of the defining facts of the age. Yet there has not been a great deal of serious discussion of its causes. In the Eighties and Nineties, an influential critique argued that universities had been co-opted by “tenured radicals”—the title of a provocative book published by the American art critic Roger Kimball in 1990.
As Kimball saw it, an academic nomenklatura controlled sectors of higher education and used its position to attack the values of the societies that funded it. Any version of a western canon was discredited, and its origins in classical philosophy and Jewish and Christian religion disparaged.
There is some truth in this critique. Though they remain ineffably redolent of the bourgeoisie at their most sanctimonious and self-deceiving, academic radicals define themselves by their opposition to the bourgeois civilisation that produced and now supports them. Kimball’s critique also identifies a key feature of tenured radicalism: it is self-reproducing. Through their powers of patronage, the nomenklatura decide the prospects of new entrants, and exclude anyone who deviates from the party line. No young scholar who fails to genuflect to it has any prospect of a future in academic life.
So far, so good.
What this analysis fails to explain is the appeal of the ideology this class has adopted. Marx may be worth re-reading in a time when capitalism is entering another of its recurrent crises. But how could a turgid mishmash of Heidegger, Derrida and Lacan have gained such a stranglehold on institutions of higher learning?
The metamorphosis in liberalism that has occurred over the past generation has played a role. From being a philosophy of tolerance aiming at peaceful coexistence among divergent world-views, it has become a persecutory orthodoxy that tolerates no view of the world other than its own. If the contemporary academy is hostile to liberal values as they used to be understood, one reason is the rise of a new liberalism that dismisses these values as phony and repressive. But this only pushes the question one step back. Why has illiberal liberalism become so popular?
Gray notes correctly that "persecutory orthodoxy" has replaced the classically liberal philosophy of tolerance and then asks a very important question. Why has this illiberal liberalism taken hold? His answer follows.
Part of the answer may be found in a short, strange and inexhaustibly interesting volume that was published nearly a century and a half ago. The chief subject of Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy(1872), is the nature of Greek tragedy, which he interpreted as an art-form that overcame the lack of meaning in human life by reframing it as an aesthetic spectacle.
The most celebrated aspect of Nietzsche’s interpretation is his claim that Greek drama turns on an interaction between an Apollonian striving after reason and order, and a Dionysian yearning for chaos and frenzy. But the most important section of the book, to my mind, comes when he applies his account of Greek tragedy to the secular faith of modern times, which he calls “Socratism” — the belief that the world becomes properly intelligible only when the human mind has rid itself of myth.
“Socrates is the archetype of the theoretical optimist,” Nietzsche writes, “who in his faith in the explicability of things, attributes the power of a panacea to knowledge and science, and sees error as the embodiment of evil.” [. . .]
The end-result of Socratism for the West is “a resolute process of secularization, a break with the unconscious metaphysics of its previous existence”. In turn, the triumph of Socratism leads to a violent rebirth of mythic thinking, inspiring the frenzied totalitarian movements that Nietzsche saw coming and which, ironically, he was blamed for inspiring.
Writing when Europe’s high bourgeois civilisation seemed unshakably secure, Nietzsche foresaw the present crisis of the humanities. Deconstruction is Socratism in an extravagant form, an all-out effort to subvert the myths and metaphysics that underpinned western civilisation — not least Socrates’s own faith in reason. [. . .]
Like Plato, Socrates was the mouthpiece of a mystical faith. It was this—not any process of ratiocination—that allowed him to assert that the true and the good were one and the same. The ideology of deconstruction aims to demystify this Socratic faith, along with everything else. As Nietzsche understood, once Socratism knocks away its metaphysical foundations it becomes a type of nihilism.
Gray is asking an important question. How did "persecutory orthodoxy" come to replace the classically liberal philosophy of tolerance? This philosophy includes belief in free speech, open inquiry, and acceptance of dissent, all underpinned by the belief that at least partial insight into the truth is possible by dialectical means, that is, by dialog, discussion, and friendly competition in a 'free marketplace of ideas.' On classical liberalism, dissent is not hate, as it for the persecutorily orthodox, but a goad to inquiry. If you disagree with me, I don't hate you for it; I try to see what I can learn from you. I take your disagreement as a reason to examine my beliefs more carefully. I assume that there is a truth beyond both of us.
The assumption, of course, is that the world is intrinsically intelligible, and that it is possible to know something about it as it is in itself. Logos can and must supplant mythos as the guide to truth and to life. There is an impersonal truth, a truth that is not perspectival and merely expressive of the interests and the will to power of individuals and tribes, but is instead objective and absolute. And again, this truth is assumed to be knowable, to some extent at least.
Gray, leaning on Nietzsche, is in effect telling us that these assumptions about intrinsic intelligibility, truth, and knowability are part of a "mystical faith," Socratism, according to which "the belief that the world becomes properly intelligible only when the human mind has rid itself of myth." This faith in reason, in the value of critical examination, and in its efficacy at getting at the truth, then gets turned upon the very project of rational inquiry. The upshot is that the Enlightenment project, which begins with Socrates, undermines itself. Skepticism and nihilism result. Faith in reason wanes when reason cannot secure life-guiding results acceptable to all.
The critical assault on the dogmatism of tribal traditions and myths having failed, new dogmatisms arise: people need to have life-guiding beliefs. Only the rare Pyrrhonian skeptic can live adoxastos, and even for him that is arguably only a rarely attained ideal. The vast majority cannot live belieflessly. Thus arise dogmatisms that persecute other dogmatisms. There is, for example, the dogmatism of the hate-America leftist with his slanderous talk of systemic racism.
The question again, is: How did "persecutory orthodoxy" come to replace the classically liberal philosophy of tolerance? It is not clear to me what Gray's answer is. He may be telling us that the "mystical faith" in reason is as groundless and mythical as any other myth, and that once this was appreciated suspected late in the history of the West by Nietzsche, it was just a matter of time before that the "mystical faith" was de-mystified and a sort of perspectivism arose that at once privileges its own tribal perspective while denying that there is any absolute 'perspective' (e.g. a God's eye point of view or that of an ideal spectator hovering above the flux and shove of history).
This privileging of a mere perspective seems definatory of the contemporary culturally Marxist Left. It is at once both relativistic and dogmatic. It denies that there is objective truth by holding that truth is relative to tribal interests while at the same time dogmatically asserting those interests as if they were absolutely valid.
What is unclear to me is whether or not Gray agrees with Nietzsche that there are no facts, only interpretations; no truth, only power; that Being has no intelligible bottom, that, in the end, Die Welt is der Wille zur Macht und nichts anders! (From the eponymous and posthumous book.) If such a view is accepted, then there is no saving the humanities.
If Nietzsche’s diagnosis is even half-way sound, some awkward conclusions follow for the future of the humanities. Many lament the collapse of standards of truth and evidence in higher education. But what is their remedy? To restore rationality, no doubt. It seems not to have occurred to them that this may not be possible. For the most part, those who lament the condition of the humanities are evangelists for the Socratism that has led the humanities to where they are now.
But how does Gray know that there is an inevitable slide from "Socratism" to "persecutory orthodoxy"? That the former must lead to the latter? It could be that the faith in reason is a true faith and nothing 'mythical' or 'mystical,' and that the loss of that faith was a grave mistake sired by decadence. Or better: Socratism was never a mere faith but a rational insight into the importance of reason and its power to lead us toward truth. Our falling away from that insight would then condemn us, not reason.
The claim that the Enlightenment Project undermines itself is a mere claim from one perspective among others. Those who make the claim privilege their perspective for no good reason: that a belief enhances one's power over others is no good reason for believing it to be true. Those who reject that perspective have been given no good reason to accept it. The defenders of "Socratism" are entitled to stand their ground and assert: You Nietzscheans are wrong, and indeed non-perspectivally wrong.
For "Socratism" to undermine itself, it would have to be non-perspectivally true that it bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction. That is something a sort of inverted Hegelian could maintain, but not a Nietzschean.
But suppose now that I assert that I have rational insight into the objective, non-perspectival, truth that the world is intrinsically intelligible, and knowable to some extent at least, and that what I know is true non-perspectivally — what stops that claim from being a dogmatic assertion? I cannot prove it. I can of course presuppose it. My opponent, however, can presupposes the opposite. The specter of groundless and ungroundability arises.
Chad McIntosh sees an upside in the recent closures of philosophy programs. I agree with him.
In conclusion, I now see the closure of philosophy departments, along with others in the humanities, as a good thing, for three reasons. First, institutions of higher education have already devolved to the point that the humanities are a mere vestigial organ. Their removal helps clarify the image of these institutions as something other than true universities. Second, removing the humanities will help slow the spread of the insidious ideology destroying society that’s incubated there. Finally, it’s plausible that the future of the humanities is better off in the hands of independent lovers of wisdom. So, to all the institutional bureaucrats just thinking about the bottom dollar: cut the humanities! Slash, chop, dice, hack them into nothing. Leave thinking about the bigger picture to those who know what a real university is.
Since the spirit of true philosophy has fled the leftist seminaries, a New Monasticism is needed to preserve and transmit high culture:
I will end on a (slightly) more hopeful note. In his 2017 book The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher says orthodox Christians should think of themselves as a people in exile, and that their best chance of preserving their faith and traditions is to form quasi-monastic communities within this increasingly hostile post-Christian culture. Those of us who still believe in the university, classically understood, would do well to consider adopting a similar strategy. Since we can no longer depend on modern institutions of higher education as places where the great classics of Western thought and tradition can be faithfully taught, learned, and engaged, we will have to do those things on our own. Thankfully, we are not in wholly untrodden territory. Homeschooling parents have been blazing these trails for a long time. As for aspiring academics, William Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, is a model. True, few people have the means to support themselves as an independent scholar. But those who find a way will be precisely those seek knowledge for its own sake. The independent scholar will not have to continually debase himself by justifying his own field of study to some institutional bureaucrat or even to his colleagues. Furthermore, being unburdened by the duties of managing classes of disinterested students and time-consuming administrative tasks, he is in a position to do his best work.
It appears that a tipping point has been reached in America's decline. Our descent into twilight and beyond is probably now irreversible. Collective race madness blankets the land, the dogs of destruction have been set loose, and the authorities have abdicated.
Should any of this trouble the philosopher?
Before he is a citizen, the philosopher is a "spectator of all time and existence" in a marvellous phrase that comes to us from Plato's Republic (486a). The rise and fall of great nations is just more grist for the philosopher's mill. His true homeland is nothing so paltry as a particular nation, even one as exceptional as the USA, and his fate as a truth-seeker cannot be tied to its fate. Like the heavenly Jerusalem, the heavenly Athens is not bound to a geographical location.
National decline is not just grist for the philosopher's mill, however, it is also perhaps a condition of understanding as Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel suggests in the penultimate paragraph of the preface to The Philosophy of Right:
When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey on grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at the falling of the dusk.
Daughter of Jupiter, Minerva in the mythology of the Greeks is the goddess of wisdom. And the nocturnal owl is one of its ancient symbols. The meaning of the Hegelian trope is that understanding, insight, wisdom arise when the object to be understood has played itself out, when it has actualized and thus exhausted its potentialities, and now faces only decline.
When a shape of life has grown old, philosophy paints its grey on grey. The allusion is to Goethe's Faust wherein Mephisto says
Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,
Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.Grey, dear friend, is all theory
And green the golden tree of life.
Philosophy is grey, a "bloodless ballet of categories" (F. H. Bradley) and its object is grey — no longer green and full of life. And so philosophy paints its grey concepts on the grey object, in this case America on the wane. The object must be either dead or moribund before it can be fully understood. Hegel in his famous saying re-animates and gives a new meaning to the Platonic "To philosophize is to learn how to die."
In these waning days of a great republic, the owl of Minerva takes flight. What we lose in vitality we gain in wisdom.
Some of us, those of the tribe of Plato, not that of Hegel, look beyond time's horizon to the topos ouranos where the heavenly Jerusalem and the heavenly Athens are one. We see this world as a vanishing quantity whose very nature is to vanish as all things vain must vanish.
The consolations of philosophy are many.
As a philosophic emollient one may reflect that all empires and civilizations must end, and ours is. America will remain as a place, a military bastion, a large if declining economic force. It will never again be, even by the low standards of humanity in such things, a relatively free and vigorous society. The world will not again credit its charades of moral leadership. The rot, the tens of thousands of derelict people living on the sidewalks, the looting and fire setting, the censorship, are now visible to the entire earth. Oh well. It was a good thing while it lasted.
You thought the thugs were out to tear down the first. Then their actions made it clear that American traditions and values as a whole were in their sights. But it goes deeper still: they oppose our entire Judeo-Christian, Graeco-Roman legacy.
And now comes the existential question: are you willing to fight to defend it?
Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,
erwirb es, um es zu besitzen!What from your fathers you received as heir,Acquire if you would possess it.(Goethe's Faust, Part I, Night, lines 684-685, tr. W. Kaufmann)
If possible, avoid the near occasion of armed confrontation, assuming that such avoidance is consistent with manly virtue. But with hot civil war nigh, manly avoidance may not be possible. If push comes to shove, and shove to shoot, you had better be prepared both for the shooting and its aftermath.
Intellectually, though, it is exciting to be an owl of Minerva taking flight at dusk to survey the collapse of civilization. This old man is more intellectually and spiritually alive than he has ever been. The waning of sexual appetite definitely helps. What a curse is concupiscence; what a drag on intellectual and spiritual development! What a time waster! How sick a society that keeps one in heat for no good purpose.
As the end approaches, salutary Besinnung sets in. I am glad I am 70 and not 7. It is the having done, not the doing, that is often the most enjoyable and the most profitable. The serious philosopher should essay to live as long as he can so as to view life from every temporal perspective, and to squeeze from the grapes of experience the wine of many a vintage. But he should also rejoice that he is not condemned to live in this world forever. He sets his sights beyond time's horizon in the company of the immortals, Plato at their head.
I tried to post the following at my Facebook page, but it wouldn't fit. So here it is.
Has Islam played any role in the civilizing of the peoples in the lands where it has held sway? Yes, of course. But when we consider Islamic penology, it is positively barbaric compared to that of the West. Of the five great religions, Islam seems to have had the least civilizing effect.
Here:
Iran’s judicial system remains among the most brutal in the world. Iran executes more people per capita than any other country and carries out more total executions than any nation but China (whose population is over 17 times the size of Iran’s). Tehran continues to target political dissidents and ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities for execution. Capital punishment can be—and often is—carried out against juvenile offenders and for nonviolent crimes.
Here:
In Somalia, a 13-year-old girl was buried up to her neck and stoned to death by 50 men in a stadium with 1000 spectators. After her death it was revealed she had been raped by three men and she was arrested after trying to report the rape to militants who control the city.
Here: A graphic that details how people, including women and children, are stoned to death. Imagine a death by stoning that takes two hours. Physicians (under duress) are on hand to determine when enough stoning has taken place. You wouldn't want to waste good stones on a dead girl.
Gruesome video of amputation. The actual amputation of a hand begins around 1:30. Watch it, especially you leftist reality deniers.
LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) – Islamic fundamentalists want to impose sharia law on the entire world, not just where they live. They believe the law is sacred and just and the best way to preserve order.
In the video, two thieves are condemned, and they each provide a taped confession. Finally, their hands are cut off in a semi-medical environment. During the procedure the men are awake and fully conscious. Each forced amputation takes nearly a minute and there's blood and bone, naturally.
These are not Islamic extremists, but rather this is how Islam is practiced in many parts of the world with the full sanction of the law. This is the face of Islam. Although this punishment has been carried out under a militant force, it also happens in sharia countries with the police as opposed to a local militia carrying out the sentence.
In Islam, the right hand is cut off. This is because in that culture the left is unclean, reserved for sanitary reasons. Without their right hand, these people will be compelled to handle things with their left, including their food. It's a subtle form of permanent psychological punishment that goes beyond the simplicity of amputation.
Just as these people punish their neighbors, imagine how they might treat you, the non-Muslim. You are an atheist in their eyes and worthy of far more gruesome punishment.
Is every Muslim a terrorist? No, but most terrorists are Muslims. Islam is the main source of terrorism in the world today.
Are there Buddhist terrorists? Yes, a few. But their terrorism is accidental to their being Buddhists: it does not flow from Buddhist teaching. Quite the contrary is the case with Islam.
Were cruel and unusual punishments ever inflicted by law in the West? Yes, of course. But to bring this up is anachronistic and irrelevant.
Is every Muslim a barbarian who supports the practices detailed above? No, but Muslim lands are lands where these barbaric practices take place. And the good Muslims have had no effect in reversing them. (Turkey under Ataturk's influence an exception. But did you ever see Midnight Express? I saw it the night before leaving for a year in Turkey!)
Is every leftist an apologist for radical Islam and its barbaric practices? No, but leftism is the main source of support of radical Islam in the West. The "unholy alliance" — to cop a title from a book by David Horowitz — between leftism and Islam is explored in my Why the Left Will Not Admit the Threat of Radical Islam and What Explains the Left's Toleration of Radical Islam?
Are some Muslim immigrants to the West willing to assimilate and accept the West's values? Yes, but they are in a small minority.
Is there a right to immigrate? No. Immigration is at the discretion of the host country and must benefit the host country.
Is there any net benefit to the West of Muslim immigration? I'll leave this question for the reader to ponder. As you ponder it, bear in mind that immigrants bring their culture with them. (Sicilians brought the mafia.) You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy.
The rules of engagement relate to how we deal with our disagreements. In Culture War 1.0, if an evolutionary biologist gave a public lecture about the age of the Earth based on geological dating techniques, creationist detractors would issue a response, insist that such dating techniques are biased, challenge him to a debate, and ask pointed—if unfairly loaded—questions during the Q&A session.
In Culture War 2.0, disagreements with a speaker are sometimes met with attempts at de-platforming: rowdy campaigns for the invitation to be rescinded before the speech can be delivered. If this is unsuccessful, critics may resort to disrupting the speaker by screaming and shouting, engaging noise makers, pulling the fire alarm, or ripping out the speaker wires. The goal is not to counter the speaker with better arguments or even to insist on an alternative view, but to prevent the speaker from airing her views at all.
Today’s left-wing culture warriors are not roused to action only by speakers whose views run afoul of the new moral orthodoxy. They combat “problematic” ideas anywhere they’re found, including peer-reviewed academic journals. In 2017, Portland State University Political Science Professor Bruce Gilley published a peer-reviewed article titled “The Case for Colonialism” in Third World Quarterly. Many academicians were enraged, but rather than write a rebuttal or challenge Gilley to a public debate (as they might have done in the era of Culture War 1.0), they circulated a popular petition demanding that Portland State rescind his tenure, fire him, and even take away his Ph.D. “The Case for Colonialism” was eventually withdrawn after the journal editor “received serious and credible threats of personal violence.”
Christian organizations have a long history of censorship, and this has continued to some extent even in recent decades. All the same, such an attempt to suppress an academic article would have been almost unthinkable during Culture War 1.0. There were some analogous attempts on the part of Christians during precursors of this culture war, as for example in the incidents surrounding Tennessee’s Butler Act of 1925 and the subsequent “Scopes Monkey Trial.” And religious would-be censors during Culture War 1.0 did occasionally make attempts on novels and movies interpreted as blasphemous or obscene, such as The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). But for the most part, Creationists in the first Culture War didn’t want evolutionary biologists to lose their tenure and their doctorates. They wanted to debate and prove them wrong.
One common theme running throughout Culture War 2.0 is the idea, endorsed by many well-meaning activists, that speech is violence. And if speech is violence, the thinking goes, then we must combat speech with the same vigor we use to combat physical violence. This entails that we cannot engage supposedly violent speech, sometimes referred to indiscriminately as “hate speech,” merely with words. If someone is being punched in the face, it’s futile to say, “Would you kindly stop?” or “This is not an ethical way to behave.” You need to take action. The rules of engagement change if speech cannot be met with speech—with written rebuttals, debates, and Q&A sessions. If speech is violence, it must either be prevented or stopped with something beyond speech, such as punching Nazis, throwing milkshakes, or using institutional mechanisms to smother unwanted discourse.
Is Speech Violence?
As the nursery rhyme goes,
Sticks and stones may break my bones
But words can never hurt me.
No speech is physically violent, and so the first thing that ought to be said is that unwanted speech, offensive speech, dissenting speech, contrarian speech, polemical speech, and the like including so-called 'hate speech,' ought not be met by physical violence. There are exceptions, but in general, speech is to be countered, if it is countered and not ignored, by speech, not physical assaults on persons or property private or public. The speech may be sweet and reasonable or ugly and combative.
Here is an exception. Some speech is of course psychologically violent and psychologically damaging to some of those who are its recipients. The young, the impressionable, and the sensitive can be harmed, and in instances terribly, by psychologically violent speech. Suppose one parent is verbally abusing a sensitive child in a psychological damaging way. ("You worthless piece of shit, can't you do anything right? I wish you were never born!") The other parent would be justified in using physical violence to stop the verbal abuse.
A second exception. Blasphemers invade a church service. It would be morally permissible to force them to leave by physical means. A third exception. Protestors block a major traffic artery. The police would be justified in using physical force to remove the law breakers. In this case it is not the speech that is being countered by physical violence but the protestors' illegal action of blocking the artery.
But in general, no speech may be legitimately countered with physical violence to the person or property of the speaker. Speech is not a form of physical violence and may not be countered by physical violence.
That's one point. A second is that we of the Coalition of the Sane are justified is using physical violence against those who try to shut down our dissent by physical means if the authorities abdicate. This is why Second Amendment rights are so very important.
Finally, as I have said many times, dissent is not hate to those who can think straight and are morally sane.