Decline of the West – Page 20 – Maverick Philosopher

Another Round on Trump

This from a regular reader, professional philosopher, and Trump supporter:

You're disturbed that so many Trump supporters "refuse to admit the man's negatives". Maybe they do refuse, but I think many of them feel as I do. He has many negative qualities, and maybe in some ways he's even worse than the average politician, but — as you yourself have often emphasized — we're no longer in a situation where politics is about people with shared loyalties and values coming together to engage in fair rational discussion with each other. We are in a war. The left simply hates us, wants to destroy us culturally and maybe personally to while they're at it. The real American people are facing an existential crisis.

So what really matters in this situation? Not the personal failings of any candidate, not even the likelihood that he's sincere or able to do what he says he'll do. What really matters for now is that he is taking the crucial necessary _first step_ toward organizing a real movement to defend America and the west. What if, when Muslims were poised to invade France, we found out that Charles Martel was actually a child molester? What if I knew, in 1939, that Churchill was a total fraud and psychopath? I'd say that in that kind of situation these considerations make no difference. If he [Trump] can speak a few basic truths that inspire people to fight back and stand up, for the first and possibly last time, that's all that matters. (My analogies are extreme, but not _that_ extreme.) I realize that we won't agree on this; Trumpites and mainstream conservatives are as badly polarized as Trumpites and leftists (which may have deep implications). But I offer these remarks as a way to understand why the valid criticisms you make of him just don't have much force for me, or for millions of others, I'm assuming.

This is a good response in part because I do reluctantly incline to the view that we are in a war with the Left. So why should I be concerned with the merely personal foibles and failings of the one man with the best chance of stopping the leftist juggernaut? Who cares that he is a low life, a vulgarian, a cultural polluter, a hypocrite, a narcissist, an egomaniac, and a serial liar and bullshitter? One of his most recent lies was the one about not knowing who David Duke is. But not only did he lie, he lied unnecessarily. There was no need for him to tell that particular lie since a disavowal of David Duke and the KKK would not have hurt him much, especially since he had already disavowed Duke. This speaks to Trump's lack of good judgment and also perhaps to a lack of seriousness. Would someone who is serious about winning the presidency lie unnecessarily? He also demonstrates contempt for his audience in telling a lie that is transparently a lie.

But why should we care about any of this? One reason is that these are not merely personal defects but defects that could bring down the conservative movement and lead to a victory, perhaps even a landslide victory, by Hillary come November. This is what lefties are counting on. They hope Trump will destroy the GOP. You say you don't care? But then what party will implement conservative ideas and policies? The Constitution Party?

Another reason is that it is not clear that Trump is better equipped to defeat Hillary. Is he better qualified than Cruz? It is not clear to me or to anyone. If it is clear to my reader, I should like him to tell me why Trump is a more effective culture warrior than Cruz. And let's not underestimate the opposition Trump will get in the general election. Women, minorities, leftists, and a sizeable number of conservatives will align against him. Among the conservatives, many will not vote at all, and some will vote for Hillary to punish Trump and the GOP for supporting him.

I appreciate the force of my reader's historical analogies. But let me try one of my own. Would you have supported the Austrian corporal back in '33 to stop the Communists? Now we know what happened after 1933. Abstract from the sequel and imagine yourself to be a German anti-communist who in '33 is trying to make up his mind about the incendiary outsider. Would you have rolled the dice?

Weimar America

Another spectacular column by Victor Davis Hanson. I will resist the temptation to quote the entire piece.

On college:

Today’s campuses have become as foreign to American traditions of tolerance and free expression as what followed the Weimar Republic. To appreciate cry-bully censorship, visit a campus “free-speech” area. To witness segregation, walk into a college “safe space.” To hear unapologetic anti-Semitism, attend a university lecture. To learn of the absence of due process, read of a campus hearing on alleged sexual assault. To see a brown shirt in action, watch faculty call for muscle at a campus demonstration. To relearn the mentality of a Chamberlain or Daladier, listen to the contextualizations of a college president. And to talk to an uneducated person, approach a recent college graduate.

On Bernie:

Sanders has little appreciation that he is an artifact of free-market capitalism, which alone has created enough bounty for such a demagogue to call for massive redistribution—in a way impossible for socialists any longer in exhausted Cuba, Greece, Venezuela, or any other command-economy paradise. Where does Sanders think his statism has worked—China, North Korea, Bolivia, Cuba, or the ossified European Union?

On Hillary:

Mrs. Clinton is now like a tottering third-world caudillo—she can’t really continue on in politics and she can’t quit trying if she wants to stay out of jail. Her possible indictment depends entirely on her political viability and utility. She and the once disbarred Bill Clinton might appear like tired, tragic dinosaurs, bewildered that politics have left them behind in their late sixties—were it not for these aging egoists’ routine petulance and sense of entitlement.

On Trump:

Donald Trump is probably not a serious student of the European 1930s, but in brilliant fashion he has sized up the public’s worries over a Potemkin economy, exhaustion with wars, and namby-pamby leadership. His own remedy is 1930s to the core: nationalism, crude bombast, mytho-history, and sloganeering without much detail. Trump’s trajectory is predicated on the premise that a jaded public cares more about emotion than logic, and how a leader speaks rather than what he says.

In European 1930s street-brawling fashion, no one knows quite whether Trump is a 1990s Clinton Democrat, a 1980s Reagan Republican, or a Perotist misfit. He has thrown a ball and chain through the pretentious glass of American campaigning. Trump excites voters because he can profane, smear, interrupt, and fabricate—on the premise that as a performance artist he reifies what they think but don’t dare say about a corrupt political class and its warped, politically correct values. Trump reminds Americans what deterrence is: the supposedly courageous media, the so-called truth-to-power leftists, and the sober and judicious careerist politicians are all terrified how he might reply or react to their criticism. None of them want to spend 2-3 days trading smears with Donald Trump.

On Pope Francis:

Not since Pius XII has a pope proved as mysterious and exasperating as Francis. He seems not to have transcended the parochial time and space of Peronist Argentina. The well-meaning and kindly pope acts as if he is unworried about the historical wages of leftwing authoritarianism and government-mandated redistribution. Why would a pontiff, protected by medieval walls and Vatican territorial security, blast U.S. immigration policy toward Mexican illegal immigrants?

Since Obama’s reelection, the southern border has been wide open, in naked efforts to recalibrate American electoral demography. The U.S. has taken in more immigrants, legal and illegal, than has any other country—the only impediment for entry is being educated, skilled, with resources, and insisting on legality. The U.S. last year allowed nearly $80 billion to be sent in annual remittances to Mexico and Latin America, mostly from those here illegally. Certainly, Mexico, in a most un-Christian fashion, has built walls on its own southern border to prevent unlawful entry, published comic-book manuals to instruct its emigrants how to violate U.S. immigration law, and written into its own constitution repulsive racial prerequisites for emigrating to Mexico—all to the apparent ignorance of the otherwise intrusively editorializing pope. Mexico’s own obsession with exporting its indigenous people to the U.S. is predicated on historic Mexican racism, always emanating from grandees in Mexico City.

On segregation:

Segregation, not integration and assimilation, is the new trajectory of racial relations. “White privilege” is said to be such an insidious aid to career success that careerist whites like Elizabeth Warren, Ward Churchill, Shaun King, and Rachel Dolezal will do almost anything to insist that they are really non-white. The president of the United States invited a rapper for a White House visit. The rapper's latest album cover shows a dead white judge lying at the feet of celebratory African-American men, with fists of money and champagne held in triumph—in front of the White House. Reality imitates art. Could the president give another Cairo speech about such symbolism?

Is it perhaps time to give dictatorship a chance?

I would have liked to have read from Professor Hanson a comparison of the sexual decadence of Weimar Germany and that of Weimar America.

Zapffe Must be Popular!

This weblog averages about 1,350 page views per day. But yesterday it snagged 10,695 views, and now at 6:20 AM local time it has already racked up 3,200 or so. What explains this? Reddit got hold of my Zappfe post, scroll down a bit, and that must be driving the surge.

Perhaps we philosophers need to pay more attention to anti-natalism as a cultural phenomenon and as a component in der Untergang des Abendlandes.

We are losing the will to perpetuate our civilization and its values. Christians in the Middle East are being slaughtered and their churches pulverized by Muslim savages. So what did Pope Francis say in response to Donald Trump's call for a wall along the southern U.S. border? We don't need to build walls, but bridges. Francis the fool is one dope of a pope.

Evangelicals understand this, though they are too polite and politic to put it the way I just did. This is why, mirabile dictu, so many of them support Trump, the nasty sybarite of Gotham who builds casinos to the greater glory of Lust, Greed, Gluttony, and Lady Luck.

Point of logic: 'Muslim savages' does not imply that all Muslims are savages. Or do you think that 'deciduous trees' implies that all trees are deciduous?

UPDATE 2/27: Traffic settled down a bit yesterday with a mere 4,509 page views. It should get back to normal over the next few days. As every conservative appreciates, the 'regard' of fellow mortals is a decidedly mixed blessing. I am quite happy to bump along at 1, 500 page views per day. Obscurity is bliss and he who craves fame is a fool. Fame is conferred by others and the quality of these others is a good measure of the value of fame.

The United States at the Point of No Return

An article by Steve McCann. Others by him here including Who is Donald Trump?

Veiling Statues to Please the Mullahs

Not a pretty sight: the representatives of a superior culture abasing themselves before the representatives of an inferior one.

Decadent Europe may already be lost. But we still have time to learn.

Do you think Italy might contain a few cultural treasures worth preserving? Then you may want to inform yourself of the fact that Muslims are not known for their preservation of antiquities. See The Destruction of the Middle East for starters.

There is a deep paradox here that would require a lot of writing to set forth properly. Roughly, it is the very superiority of our culture with its philosophy, science, free speech, open inquiry, toleration of dissent, freedom of religion, and the whole panoply of Enlightenment values together with the advanced technology and prosperity that they make possible that has led and is leading us into decadence. Our superiority is thus breeding inferiority so that we become easy marks for an inferior culture that believes in itself and its benighted values and is, insofar forth, superior to us in its will to dominate us by any and all methods.

UPDATE (2/1): Malcolm Pollack (HT: Bill Keezer) writes:

I meant to comment on this when it happened a few days ago:

Rome’s nude statues covered up ahead of Rouhani visit

In further concession to Iranian president, official dinner with Italian PM does not include wine on the menu

What a craven, flabby, neutered thing our civilization has become. This is what ACID syndrome does to its victims: it sickens and enervates them with doubt; it destroys and disables their confidence, potency, and virility; it paralyzes them in the face of peril; it turns their bones and sinews to jelly.

In contrast: Winston Churchill, who was to host a dinner attended by ibn Saud, was told by the Arabian king that those attending must not drink or smoke in his presence. His response?

I said that if it was his religion that made him say such things, my religion prescribed as an absolute sacred ritual smoking cigars and drinking alcohol before, after and if need be during, all meals and the intervals between them. Complete surrender.

The Dead Smokers' Society hereby registers its opposition to this anti-tobacco Islamo-wackery. Carpe fumam!

Britannia Once Ruled the Waves . . .

. . . now it waives the rules — for Muslims.

Religion of Peace or Religion of Pieces? Islamists Destroy Christian Monastery

The oldest Christian monastery in Iraq has been reduced to a field of rubble by the Islamic State's relentless destruction of ancient cultural sites.

The monastery, called Dair Mar Elia, is named for the Assyrian Christian monk — St. Elijah — who built it between 582 and 590 A.C. It was a holy site for Iraqi Christians for centuries, part of the Mideast's Chaldean Catholic community.

In 1743, tragedy struck when as many as 150 monks who refused to convert to Islam were massacred under orders of a Persian general, and the monastery was damaged. For the next two centuries it remained a place of pilgrimage, even after it was incorporated into an Iraqi military training base and later a U.S. base.

But of course, Islam is the religion of peace and no true Muslim would have been involved in such destruction.

See my The No True Muslim Fallacy.

If you cite a racial fact, are you a racist?

Swedish police seem to think so.

Death by a Thousand Cuts

"Popular exams in UK to be rescheduled to avoid Ramadan." The UK commits cultural suicide. Not all at once, but little by little, bit by bit, concession by concession. A culture is doomed when it no longer has the will to defend itself. (HT: London Karl)

In the West, Muslims are accommodated. In Muslim lands, Christians are persecuted and suppressed even unto beheading and crucifixion. And Barack Hussein Obama worries about global warming and the National Rifle Association? By the way, his presidency is a clear indicator of our decline: that a feckless fool, a know-nothing, could be elected and then re-elected. We may just be getting what we deserve. A foolish folk, fiscally irresponsible, addicted to panem et circenses, gets a POMO idiot who works to increase the dependency of the people on government while violating their liberties and undermining the rule of law.

Meanwhile, conservative inaction gives traction to the likes of Donald Trump.

Hic Rhodus, Hic Salta

"Here is Rhodes, jump here" (through the hoops of political correctness). A graduate of Oriel College, Oxford University, sent me this statement concerning the Rhodes Must Fall petition. A memorial to Cecil Rhodes, that is. Can you say Der Untergang des Abendlandes?

"Here is Rhodes, jump here." From Aesop's Fables #209, "The Boastful Athlete." A man who had been off in foreign lands returns home. He brags of his exploits. He claims that in Rhodes he made a long jump the likes of which had never been seen before. A skeptical bystander calls him on his boast: Here's your Rhodes, jump here!

The moral? Put your money where your mouth is. Don't talk about it, do it!

Perhaps an erudite classicist such as Mike Gilleland could say more on this topic. He would have to do at least the following: dig up all the ancient sources in Greek and Latin; trace the saying in Erasmus and Goethe; comment on Hegel's variation on the saying in the Vorrede zur Philosophie des Rechts, explaining why he has saltus for salta; find and comment on Marx's comment on Hegel's employment of the saying.

Finally, if Alan Rhoda were to rename his cleverly titled, but now defunct, weblog Alanyzer — and I'm not saying he should — he might consider Hic Rhoda, Hic Salta. He is a very tall man; I'm 6' 1'' and had to look up to see his face when I met him in Las Vegas some years back. To jump over him would be quite a feat.

UPDATE 12/19: Dave Lull, argonaut nonpareil of cyberspace and friend and facilitator of bloggers, informs me that Dr. Gilleland has taken note of my call for an erudite classicist. This bibliomaniac, antediluvian, and curmudgeon does not, however, consider himself "truly erudite." If his self-deprecatory consideration is just, then he had me fooled.

As for Mr. Lull, here is a tribute to him.

The Lapse of Laïcité: Cause and Effect

Alain Finkielkraut:

Laicity is the solution that modern Europe found in order to escape its religious civil wars. But contemporary Europe doesn’t take religion seriously enough to know how to stick to this solution. She has exiled faith to the fantastic world of human irreality that the Marxists called “superstructure”… thus, precisely through their failure to believe in religion, the representatives of secularism empty laicity of its substance, and swallow, for humanitarian reasons, the demands of its enemies.

I haven't read anything by Finkielkraut except the above and a few other excerpts translated and edited by Ann Sterzinger. But that won't stop me from explaining what I take to be the brilliant insight embedded in the above quotation.

Laicity is French secularity, the absence of religious influence and involvement in government affairs. It has had the salutary effect of preventing civil strife over religion. But to appreciate why laicity is important and salutary one must understand that the roots of religion lie deep in human nature. Religion is even less likely to wither away than the State. Leftists, however, are constitutionally incapable of understanding that man by nature is homo religiosus and that the roots of religion in human nature are ineradicable. The Radicals don't understand the radicality (deep-going rootedness) of religion. (Radix is Latin for 'root.') In their superficial way, leftists think that religion is merely "the sigh of the oppressed creature" (Marx) and will vanish when the oppression of man by man is eliminated, which of course will never happen by human effort alone, though they fancy that they can bring it about if only they throw enough people into enough gulags. Leftists cannot take religion seriously and they don't think anyone else really takes it seriously either, not even Muslims. They don't believe that most Muslims really do believe in Allah and divine origin of the Koran and the 72 black-eyed virgins and the obligation to make jihad. They project their failure to understand religion and its grip into others. See my Does Anyone Really Believe in the Muslim Paradise in which I report on the Sam Harris vs. Scott Atran debate.

The issue is not whether religion is true but whether it answers to deep human needs that cannot be met in any other way. My point is not that leftists think that religion is false or delusional, although they do think it to be such; my point that they don't appreciate the depth of the religious need even if it is a need that, in the nature of things, cannot be met.

Not understanding religion, leftists fail to understand how important laicity is to prevent civil strife over religion. And so they don't properly uphold it. They cave in to the Muslims who reject it. Why don't they understand the dire existential threat that radical Islam poses to European culture? I suspect that it is because they think that Muslims don't really believe in all their official claptrap and what Muslims really want are mundane things such as jobs and material security and panem et circenses.

In nuce: leftists, who are resolutely secular, fail to uphold the secularity that they must uphold if they are to preserve their loose and libertine way of life, and they fail to uphold it by failing to understand the dangers of religion, dangers they do not understand because they fail to take religion seriously and to appreciate the deep roots it has in human nature. Even pithier:

Leftists, whose shallow heads cannot grasp religion, are in danger of losing their heads to radical jihadi. Cause and effect of the lapse of laicity.

Two quibbles with Finkielkraut. First, it is not that leftists "do not believe in religion," but that they do not believe that religion is a powerful and ineradicable force in human affairs. You don't have to believe in religion to believe facts about it. Second, if I remember my Marx, the superstructure (Ueberbau) though a repository of fantastic ideas devoid of truth such as religious ideas and the ideas of bourgeois law and morality, also contains all ideology and therefore the 'liberating' Marxist ideology as well. It too is a reflection of the Unterbau, the social base and the means of production. So not everything in the superstructure is "fantastic." This conception leads to relativism, but that's not my problem.

I Feel a Little Guilty . . .

. . . at deriving so much intellectual stimulation from the events of the day. It is fascinating to watch the country fall apart. What is a calamity for the citizen, however, is grist for the philosopher's mill. Before he is a citizen, the philosopher is a "spectator of all time and existence" in a marvellous phrase that comes down to us from Plato's Republic (486a). And if the philosopher is an old Platonist who has nearly had his fill of the Cave and its chiaroscuro, he is ever looking beyond this life, and while in no rush to bid it a bittersweet adieu, is not affrighted at the coming transition either. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk. The old Platonist owl lives by the hope that the dusk of death will lead to the Light, a light unmixed with darkness.

National decline is not just grist for the philosopher's mill, however; it is also perhaps a condition of understanding as 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.

The consolations of philosophy are many.

On the other hand, it ain't over until it's over, and as citizens we must fight on, lest our spectatorship of all time and existence suffer a premature earthly termination. The joys if not the consolations of philosophy are possible only in certain political conditions. We are not made of the stern stuff of Boethius though we are inspired by his example.

Tet, Take Two: Islam’s 2016 European Offensive

Here.

Recognizing Microagressions and the Messages They Send

A remarkable document. Tell me what you think.

To understand the Left you must understand that central to their worldview is the hermeneutics of suspicion which is essentially a diluted amalgam of themes from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.

Thus nothing has the plain meaning that it has; every meaning must be deconstructed so as to lay bare its 'real meaning.'

Suppose I say, sincerely, "The most qualified person should get the job." To a leftist that means: "People of color are given extra unfair benefits because of their race."

Or suppose I describe a black malefactor as a thug. What I have actually said, according to the hermeneutics of suspicion, is that the malefactor is a nigger. But 'thug' does not mean 'nigger.' 'Thug' means thug. There are thugs of all races.

Leftists often call for 'conversations' about this or that. Thus Eric Holder famously called for a 'conversation' about race. But how can one have a conversation — no sneer quotes — about anything with people who refuse to take what one sincerely says at face value?

I now hand off to Dennis Prager, American Universities Begin to Implode.

Leftist Insanity Update

Every day brings further evidence that contemporary liberals have lost their minds.

A yoga class has been cancelled at the University of Ottawa on the ground that participants are complicit in 'oppression' and 'cultural genocide.' By the way, we are talking about hatha yoga here which is essentially just stretching.

So you might think that re-labelling the course 'Stretching' would solve the problem. But no!

This is a good place to observe that stretching is an essential ingredient in a balanced physical fitness program along with aerobic exercise (walking, hiking, running, biking, etc.), anaerobic work (weight-lifting), and activities that maintain good hand-eye coordination (tennis, pickleball, etc.) The Maverick recommends a four-pronged approach.

Why is Canada such a Pee Cee place? I should think that with all that rugged country up there, those vast empty expanses, and the ass-freezing temperatures a tougher breed of cat would live there and not a bunch of pc-whipped pussies.

Another 'interesting' development is the assault on free speech. According to Pew Research, 40% of millennials think it acceptable to limit speech offensive to minorities.

Trouble is, almost anything will be found offensive by the members of some minority or other. Some blacks have shown themselves to be absurdly sensitive to the slights they imagine embedded in such words and phrases as 'niggardly,' 'denigrate,' 'black hole,' and 'watermelon.'

Some take offense at 'chink in the armor.' But if 'chink in the armor' is about Asians, then the Asians in question would have to be rather tiny to hang out interstitially in, say, a coat of mail.

Why not take offense at 'chunk'? Someone might get it into his Pee Cee head that a chunk is a fat chink.

There is no end to this madness once it gets going, which is why we sane and decent people need to mock and deride liberals every chance we get. Mockery and derision can achieve what calm reasoning cannot.

One cannot reason with those who are permanently in a state of self-colonoscopy.

Finally, this outrage at Mizzou against Thomas Jefferson.