Decline of the West – Page 25 – Maverick Philosopher

Political Lawlessness Viewed Philosophically at Twilight

It is twilight time for a great nation. One indication is the rise of political lawlessness.*

Should 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 down 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 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, and 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.

But as citizens we fight on. For the wise philosopher knows that he can live his vocation only in certain political conditions.

______________

*See Angelo M. Codevilla, Lawlessness, Large and Small

Andrew Cuomo and ‘Liberal’ Extremism

A recurrent theme of mine is that contemporary liberals are extremists. Note the qualifier 'contemporary.' I am not talking about 1960 JFK liberals, let alone the classical liberals of the 19th century. Contemporary liberals are, in my recent coinage, LINOs, liberals in name only. What in fact they are are hard leftists.

So I suppose I should thank Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York and son of Mario Cuomo for saying what he and his ilk think when their normal modus operandi is to hide what they really think and engage in stealth tactics, Obama being a prime practitioner thereof. Cuomo has spilled the beans and shown his true colors if you will permit me a mixed metaphor. Here is what he said:

Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.

Does this deserve a civil response? No, but it does call for a response, of the sort illustrated here.

No Country for Young Men

The young especially ought to read this excellent Victor Davis Hanson piece. It begins as follows:

It is popular now to talk of race, class, and gender oppression. But left out of this focus on supposed victim groups is the one truly targeted cohort — the young. Despite the Obama-era hype, we are not suffering new outbreaks of racism. Wendy Davis is not the poster girl for a resurgent misogyny. There is no epidemic of homophobia. Instead, if this administration’s policies are any guide, we are witnessing a pandemic of ephebiphobia ^[2] — an utter disregard for young people.

The war against those under 30 — and the unborn — is multifaceted. No one believes that the present payroll deductions leveled on working youth will result in the same levels of support upon their retirements that is now extended to the retiring baby-boom generation. Instead, the probable solutions of raising the retirement age, cutting back the rate of payouts, hiking taxes on benefits, and raising payroll rates are discussed in an environment of après moi le déluge ^[3] — to come into effect after the boomers are well pensioned off.

The baby-boomer/me generation ^[4] demands what its “greatest generation” parents got — or, in fact, far more ^[5], given its increased rates of longevity. The solution of more taxes and less benefits will fall on young people and the unborn, apparently on the premise that those under 18 do not vote, and those between 18 and 30 either vote less frequently than their grandparents or less knowledgeably about their own self-interest.

The Social Security pyramidal scheme ^[6] is merely the tip of the ephebiphobic iceberg. Currently student indebtedness exceeds $1 trillion. Many of these loans begin compounding before graduation and are pegged at interest rates far higher than parental mortgages. The cause of this tuition bubble is also not controversial. The prices colleges charge for annual tuition, room and board have for over two decades far exceeded ^[7] the annual rate of inflation.

There were four causes of such price gouging of students. None of them had anything to do with offering better education for a more competitive price for job-hungry graduates. The first was automatic escalations in the amount of money students could borrow that would be backed by federal guarantees. If campuses hiked their wares at prices consistently twice the rate of inflation, they could assume that students — while in college — could qualify to borrow the needed sums. What happened afterwards was not all that much a concern of the campus, at least as long as it did not affect subsequent admissions.

Second, the size and compensation of the administrative class exploded ^[8]. Again, the reason why was not difficult to understand. Awash in federally backed loan dollars, hoping to lure students with high-tech and social amenities, and to indoctrinate them with race, class, and gender ideology, campuses created new positions from diversity associate provosts to technology gurus — all to oversee everything from rock-climbing walls to on-campus lectures and paid workshops from fashionable cultural icons.

Third, there was a radical bifurcation ^[9] among faculty, a sort of divide-and-conquer strategy that rewarded fossilized tenured professors with reduced teaching loads and support for research, while cutting back on new replacement tenure-track billets and upping the percentage of units taught by pastime adjunct teachers. The new younger Morlocks did the grunge 1A work for their more rarefied and contemplative elder Eloi, and the students who paid for it sat through their lectures on fairness and equality.

Finally, the idea of medieval exemption masked the oppression. Colleges were loudly progressive. Faculties sided with the Palestinians and Walmart greeters in the abstract, never the exploited part-timers in their midst. The noble poor were always distant, not the supposedly clueless lower-middle-class student who went into hock ^[10] to subsidize academic rants on equalitarianism.

Read the rest.

Maverick Tattoos

I tend to take a dim view of tattoos, seeing them as the graffiti of the human body, and as yet another, perhaps minor, ingredient in the Decline of the West. Christians believe that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit; they ought to consider whether tattoos deface the temple. But I do not dogmatize on this topic. You can reasonably attack my graffiti analogy, and if you insist that tattoos are beautiful, not ugly, I won't be able to refute you. If you argue that there is no, or needn't be, a connection between tattoos and cultural decline, you may have a case. You might even be able reasonably to maintain that the bodily temple is beautified by judicious inking. Leviticus 19:28, see article below, cuts no ice with me.

I only advise caution: permanent or semi-permanent modifications of the mortal coil are to be made only after due deliberation. You might want to consider such things as: the signal you're sending, your future employability, and, for the distaff contingent, how ugly that tattoo will look on your calf when you are 45 as opposed to 20 and the ink is cheek-by-jowl with varicose veins and cellulite. Cute baristas in hip huggers with tattoos on their lower backs invite impertinent questions as to how far down the patterns extend. If you are thinking of a career in public relations, a bone through the nose is definitely out, as are facial hardware and a Charley Manson-style swastika tattooed onto the forehead.

See here for a harsher view.

So while I am pleased that one of my readers was sufficiently impressed with one of my sayings to tattoo it onto his forearm, my pleasure is alloyed by my slight aversion to tattoos. In the second shot below, the same person sports the Logical Square of Opposition on his leg. Perhaps he should follow it up with E. J. Lowe's Ontological Square of Opposition on the other leg.

The Decline of the West: How Long Can We Last?

Victor Davis Hanson, The Last Generation of the West and the Thin Strand of Civilization. "Note the theme of this essay: the more in humane fashion we provide unemployment insurance, food stamps, subsidized housing, legal advice, health care and disability insurance, the more the recipients find it all inadequate, inherent proof of unfairness and inequality, and always not enough." [. . .] "Popular culture is likewise anti-civilizational ^[11]. Does anyone believe that Kanye West, Miley Cyrus, and Lady Gaga are updates to Glenn Miller, jazz, Bob Dylan and the Beatles? Even in the bimbo mode, Marilyn Monroe had an aura ^[12] that Ms. Kardashian and Ms. Hilton lack. Teens wearing bobby socks and jeans have transmogrified to strange creatures in our midst with head-to -toe tattoos and piercings ^[13] as if we copied Papua New Guinea rather than it us. Why the superficial skin-deep desire to revert to the premodern? When I walk in some American malls and soak in the fashion, I am reminded of National Geographic tribal photos of the 1950s."
Nat Hentoff on Obama the Lawless. He calls for impeachment, and rightly so. Hentoff is a liberal I respect, but then his liberalism has little in common with the extremism of the liberal fascists of the present day.
Jonathan Tobin on Andrew Cuomo's Version of Liberal Tolerance. Cuomo is a 'liberal' who deserves contempt; he is what I call a LINO, a liberal in name only. Toleration is the touchstone of classical liberalism. There is precious little of it in this extremist. If you can't see that he is an extremist, then you are an extremist and part of the problem.
The universities ought to be in the business of transmitting high culture, not pandering to the trends of the moment. But the universities abdicated their authority in the '60s. It has been said that there is no coward more cowardly than a college administrator. Hanson, above, mentions Dylan and the Beatles, alluding to their vast superiority to such cultural polluters as Kanye West and Miley Cyrus. But I say that no serious university would devote more than a tiny fraction of its curricula to the works of Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, or the Beatles. (As anyone who reads this weblog knows, I am a big-time aficionado, from way back, of the aforementioned. I know their work inside and out.) What we have now is a major assault on the humanities. See Heather MacDonald, The Humantities and Us.
David Gelernter, The Closing of the Scientific Mind. On the same theme of an assault on the humanities. A pack of anti-humantistic ignoramuses have infiltrated the sciences. (My way of putting it, not Gelernter's.) I could round up the usual suspects, but if you read these pages you know who they are. See Scientism category. You must study Gelernter's piece. He knows whereof he speaks. His article begins thusly: >>The huge cultural authority science has acquired over the past century imposes large duties on every scientist. Scientists have acquired the power to impress and intimidate every time they open their mouths, and it is their responsibility to keep this power in mind no matter what they say or do. Too many have forgotten their obligation to approach with due respect the scholarly, artistic, religious, humanistic work that has always been mankind’s main spiritual support. Scientists are (on average) no more likely to understand this work than the man in the street is to understand quantum physics. But science used to know enough to approach cautiously and admire from outside, and to build its own work on a deep belief in human dignity. No longer.<<

The Disaster Named ‘Obama’

More brilliant columns by Victor Davis Hanson:

Obama and the Suspension of Disbelief

The Politicization of Everything

This is an extremely penetrating analysis, worthy of careful study. Excerpt (emphasis added):

Again, note the nature of the “foremost” ideological mandate: if Muslim nations do not feel “good” about their historical contributions to science and engineering, such depression could not be attributed to their present scientific ossification or Islam’s often historical subordination to Western science, especially after the fifteenth century. Instead, the discontent over the absence of scientific parity might be due to other more nefarious causes—and thus in part rectified by the power, wealth, and influence of a properly sensitive U.S. federal government.

Similarly, homeland security is no longer just about ensuring the safety of the United States. In a series of bizarre euphemisms—overseas contingency operations, man-caused disasters, work-place violence—Islamic terrorism was redefined as a spontaneous tragedy without specified causation. To the degree that the issue of radical Islam was unavoidable in the debate over U.S. domestic and foreign policy, the contortions only grew worse: we should not allow the mass murderer Major Hasan to prejudice the Army’s diversity program; the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was largely secular; and jihad is a legitimate tenet of Islam properly characterized as a “holy struggle,” and therefore improperly associated with radical Islamic terrorists.

The politicization of almost every aspect of American culture and politics over the last five years could easily be expanded. Traditional employment background checks are now “racist” given that minorities with higher crime records might be unduly affected. The 2009 reordering of the Chrysler creditors leap-frogged junior union creditors over senior bondholders—as enforcement of existing legislation becomes predicated on perceptions of social justice rather than faithfully executing settled laws on the books. Each new tropical storm launches a fresh debate about “climate change,” despite no evidence that recent weather is more prone to hurricanes or the planet has heated up over the last 15 years. Almost every new mass shooting offers occasion for mobilization to enhance existing gun control legislation.

America's Coastal Royalty

An Outbreak of Lawlessness: Obama as Dictator

Krauthammer nails it once again. Excerpt:

What distinguishes an institution from a flash mob is that its rules endure. They can be changed, of course. But only by significant supermajorities. That’s why constitutional changes require two-thirds of both houses plus three-quarters of the states. If we could make constitutional changes by majority vote, there would be no Constitution.

As of today, the Senate effectively has no rules. Congratulations, Harry Reid. Finally, something you will be remembered for.

Barack Obama may be remembered for something similar. His violation of the proper limits of executive power has become breathtaking. It’s not just making recess appointments when the Senate is in session. It’s not just unilaterally imposing a law Congress had refused to pass — the Dream Act — by brazenly suspending large sections of the immigration laws.

We’ve now reached a point where a flailing president, desperate to deflect the opprobrium heaped upon him for the false promise that you could keep your health plan if you wanted to, calls a hasty news conference urging both insurers and the states to reinstate millions of such plans.

Except that he is asking them to break the law. His own law. Under Obamacare, no insurer may issue a policy after 2013 that does not meet the law’s minimum coverage requirements. These plans were canceled because they do not.

The law remains unchanged. The regulations governing that law remain unchanged. Nothing is changed except for a president proposing to unilaterally change his own law from the White House press room.

That’s banana republic stuff, except that there the dictator proclaims from the presidential balcony.

Kanye West, Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga, and Obama: How Low Can We Go?

A fine jeremiad. And of course we cannot call Obama the Mendacious and his shills on their brazen lies for that would be discrimination! To discriminate between justifiable and unjustifiable discrimination is itself unjustifiably discriminatory.

An American Satyricon

Another brilliant Victor Davis Hanson column.

Filed under: Decline of the West.

Christina Hoff Sommers contra ‘Puellafication’

I coined the word here. Christina Hoff Sommers combats the thing. While so doing she provides further proof that the Left is devoid of common sense:

Across the country, schools are policing and punishing the distinctive, assertive sociability of boys. Many much-loved games have vanished from school playgrounds. At some schools, tug of war has been replaced with “tug of peace.” Since the 1990s, elimination games like dodgeball, red rover and tag have been under a cloud — too damaging to self-esteem and too violent, say certain experts.

Tug of peace? Is that a joke? Peace is better than war, of course, but to secure and maintain peace one must be prepared to wage and win war. Or as the Latin saying has it, Si vis pacem, para bellum. "If you want peace, prepare for war."

And another thing. Bring back the monkey bars and the long summer vacations. Enough with the wussification. (Not a word? It is now.)

It’s Twilight Time

Victor Davis Hanson, Life in the Twilight (bolding added to underscore the need for mavericks if we are to stop the transmogrification of the US into the SU):

We are becoming like Eastern Europeans who were oblivious that the faces on the May Day dais had sometimes changed. In other words, the evil and Islamophobic Nakoula did it in Benghazi, the overzealous (but otherwise understandably progressive) Cincinnati rogue agents alone did the improper audits, the evil (Fox News) James Rosen perhaps deserved the monitoring — all enemies of social justice.

Statism and the voices of megaphones like Jay Carney wear down a population. If the Great Leader says that there is a war on women because hip young affluent females like Sandra Fluke have trouble getting free condoms, then there surely is — and elevator-owning, dog-torturing, and equestrian-marrying Mitt Romney is waging it.

But there is no war when a Philadelphia abortionist, under the nose of state authorities, murders fetuses as they cry and gasp for air — and sometimes their laboring mothers along with them. If guns that are black and plastic and look scary are “automatic” assault weapons whose banning will save the children, then by all means ban these machine guns. If the planet has not warmed up in 15 years, then it is still warming up, and companies like Solyndra need more subsidies.

Still, the human psyche is a strange thing. It needs to feel transcendent, either spiritually or by confidence in children or through the reputation of a life lived well. Crush that spirit through government obfuscation, and the people become the walking dead of a dreary Warsaw Pact Budapest or Prague, given that there is no hope for those who follow.

The soul appreciates equality, but not of the enforced kind that destroy individual liberty. Insult the voter, call him names, regulate him, lecture him about his various -ologies and -isms, regiment his youth with proper thinking, curb his speech, and he becomes a mute, a dead soul, a Brit in about 1955 ^[12], a Hungarian in 1956, a Russian in about 1970, or today’s Cuban.

To keep America exceptional, we need eccentrics, contrarians, doubters, politically incorrect truth-tellers. Take them away, and we are a nation of head-nodders like most other states.

Go to sleep in 2009 and wake up now. The world has changed: golf is the people’s game; racist, sexist, homophobic thought and speech are predicated on the ideology of who says it; the IRS, the NSA, and the Justice Department are watching you; the State Department is run like a campaign organization; the president offers politically correct thoughts on local trials; the attorney general worries about “my people”; the government is producing more oil and gas by trying to stop it; wind and solar are the way of the future; gropes and pornography are either career-ending or cause for needed sabbaticals; and high unemployment, debt, and low growth are proof of a robust recovery.

The model of our future will be a landscape like Detroit, as those on MSNBC or on NPR find ever more clever ways to assure us that the city is “saved” from the free-market capitalist and racist buccaneers. We will shuffle on, as the voices go in one ear and out the other, as they screech that Big Brother saved us at last from the reactionary Goldsteins ^[13] of the world who nearly destroyed it.

Detroit City

Bobby Bare's 1963 Country and Western crossover hit features the lines, "By day I make the cars, by night I make the bars . . . ." But that was '63, around the time a series of Democrat mayors took control of the city. Since then there have been seven, five of them black, with nary a Republican, and now 50 years later the place is a disaster with the bars outnumbering the cars. Post hoc ergo propter hoc? I don't think so. Liberalism has destroyed the city in five ways as detailed here.

1. Unions crippled the auto industry.

2. Whites were demonized until they left.

3. Out-of-control crime helped drive much of the black middle class out of the city.

4. Reckless government spending bankrupted the city.

5. The government is completely incompetent.

Could the USA Go the Way of Detroit?

Why not, given the incorrigible stupidity of reactionary liberals? Krauthammer:

But Detroit is an object lesson not just for other cities. Not even the almighty federal government is immune to Stein’s Law. Reactionary liberalism simply cannot countenance serious reform of the iconic social welfare programs of the 20th century. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are pledged to their inviolability. President Obama will occasionally admit that, for example, Medicare cannot go on as is, but then reverts to crude demagoguery when Republicans propose a structural reform, such as premium support for Medicare or something as obvious as raising the retirement age to match increasing longevity.

On the contrary. Obama added one enormous new entitlement (Obamacare) and, in his last State of the Union address, proposed yet another (universal preschool).

Charles Blow

I saw Mr. Blow and his lovely wife on TV last night. A charming couple. I mean that sincerely. But when I read his columns I am reminded that we live in the Age of Feeling, as Dennis Prager calls it. There is no thinking in Blow's op-ed pieces for The New York Times, only emoting. Add 'Blow' to the list of aptronyms. His latest is The Whole System Failed Trayvon Martin. I was tempted to sort through the nonsense it contains, but thought better of it. Time is short and some writings are beneath refutation.

Blow has a skull full of mush, but at least he is articulate. The real problems of the black community lie much deeper, not in any systemic or institutional racism — the imputation of which to our great country is just slanderous nonsense — but in a culture that produces people like Rachel Jeantel who belong to a seemingly unassimilable indigenous subculture. A fellow blogger points to the genetic factors involved, remarking that the culture that produces a Jeantel is itself produced by Jeantels. I responded that the genetics are given, while the social and cultural factors are malleable. I don't want to believe that a person like her cannot be taught to read, write, and speak basic English.

And while we are on the topic of Ms. Jeantel, she explains here that Zimmi simply failed to appreciate the cultural context in which he was being "whoop-assed." How insensitive of him! Had he been able properly to contextualize the beat-down, he surely would not have 'smoked' the poor boy.

Liberal Fascism: The Floral Variation

Suppose a florist refuses to provide flowers for a Ku Klux Klan event, or a caterer refuses to cater a neo-Nazi gathering. Suppose the refusal is a principled one grounded in opposition to the respective ideologies. Would you say that the purveyors of the services in question would have the right to refuse service, and that the State would have no right to force the purveyors to provide their services?

Yes you would. Well, it is no different if a florist refuses on grounds of principle to sell flowers to be used in a same-sex ceremony. She has the right to refuse, and the State has no right to compel the florist to violate her conscience.

There is no relevant difference between these cases. Opposition to same-sex marriage is grounded in principle. For some these principles are religious, for others purely philosophical, and for still others a mixture of both.

People had better wake up. Day by day we are losing our liberties to the fascists of the totalitarian Left.

The above is an actual case, and it is no suprise that the shysters of the ACLU are among the tormentors of the florist in question.

One what ground? Discrimination!

The shysters of the ACLU need to read my Profiling, Prejudice, and Discrimination.