Category: Human Predicament

Every Generation Faces a Barbarian Threat in its Own Children

David Horowitz, Radical Son:

Irving Kristol, who had second thoughts before me, has observed that every generation faces a barbarian threat in its own children, who need to be civilized. This is the challenge perennially before us: to re-teach the young the conditions of being human, of managing life's tasks in a world that is and must remain forever imperfect. The refusal to come to terms with this reality is the heart of the radical impulse and accounts for its destructiveness, and thus for much of the bloody history of our age. (Emphasis added)

The world is imperfect, and it cannot be perfected by us either individually or collectively. This is a defining truth of conservatism. The conservative stands on the terra firma of a reality antecedent to his hopes, dreams, and desires, a reality from which he must learn what is possible and what is not. The conservative is not opposed to such  piecemeal ameliorations as are possible, but he does not conflate the possible with what he can dream up or imagine.  He is rightly unmoved by the utopian imaginings of a leftist like John Lennon in his song Imagine, imaginings that presuppose human perfectibility and the possibility of a quasi-religious immanentization of the eschaton. But of course Lennon's leftist imaginings are not mere imaginings but veiled prescriptions for such destructive actions as the suppression and ultimate eradication of religion together with the eradication of the belief that we as individuals have a spiritual origin and destiny; the spread of a smiley-faced half-way nihilism, that of Nietzsche's Last Man ("noting to kill or die for") which, while denying genuine transcendence does not reject this life but degrades it to a life of self-indulgence; the levelling of all differences and the ultimately futile assault on natural hierarchies which of course reassert themselves in the end. In short:

  • Humans are imperfect. They are structurally flawed and in such a way as to disallow any possibility of perfection.
  • Being imperfectible, they cannot be improved in any fundamental ways by human effort whether individual or collective.
  • The failure of leftists to understand these truths and their consequent misguided attempts at perfecting the imperfectible have led to an over-all worsening of the human condition. And that is to put it mildly: in the 20th century alone communist governments murdered over 100 million. That is a lot of eggs to break for an impossible omelet.
  • Leftists are reality-deniers who refuse the tutelage of experience.

 

No Resolution Here Below

It is a mistake to think that we can resolve in this life the questions pertaining to it and the question of what, if anything, is beyond it. It is a passing scene, a moving image, a chiaroscuro of light and dark, a land of shadows and seemings, a twilit scene of confusion in which the ground shifts and oblivion consumes memory.

Any dogmatic resolution will share in the insubstantiality of this world of shadows and adumbrations. There is no security hereabouts, doxastic or otherwise. Get used to it.

Nothing too Small for so Small a Creature

I am petty; nothing petty is foreign to me. Or to my journal.

Richard Weaver, "Life Without Prejudice" in Life Without Prejudice and Other Essays, Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1965, p. 11:

Upon one occasion when Boswell confessed to Johnson that he feared some things he was entering in his journal were too small, the latter advised him that nothing is too small for so small a creature as man.

 

Recognition, Attention, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Alexander

As social animals we have a legitimate need for recognition by others. This need is not a mere desire for attention. Parents and teachers harm a child when they dismiss the legitimate need for recognition and respect as a bid for attention. A child so maligned may father a man who is more monster than man. 

……………………..

"The child is father of the man" is from William Wordsworth's 1802 poem, "My Heart Leaps Up."

My Heart Leaps Up

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

My allusion to Wordsworth above extends, and some will say, 'distorts,'  the meaning of his "The Child is Father of the Man." 

I learned the phrase "natural piety" from Samuel Alexander, but now I see where Alexander found it.

Samuel Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity, vol. II, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1979, (originally published in 1920), p. 46:

The higher quality emerges from the lower level of existence and has its roots therein, but it emerges therefrom, and it does not belong to that lower level, but constitutes its possessor a new order of existent with its special laws of behaviour.  The existence of emergent qualities thus described is something to be noted, as some would say, under the compulsion of brute empirical fact, or, as I would prefer to say in less harsh terms, to be accepted with the "natural piety" of the investigator.  It admits no explanation.

If, however, the emergent entities admit of no explanation, if their emergence is a brute fact, then claims of emergence are open to the 'poof' objection.  It would appear to be rather unbecoming of a hard-assed physicalist to simply announce that such-and-such has emerged when he can offer no explanation of how it has emerged.  If interactionist dualists are supposed to be embarrassed by questions as to how mind and body interact, then emergentists are in a similar boat.

That being said, "natural piety" is a beautiful phrase.

On Prejudice

Hector writes,

It seems he [John McWhorter] is not aware that 'prejudice' does not necessarily require a negative attitude towards that concerning which one is prejudiced and is therefore actually not an ideal replacement for 'racist'. Surely, 'bigoted' would be better.

I agree. 'Prejudice' admits of pejorative but also non-pejorative uses.  'Bigot' does not. Note also that racial prejudice is not the only kind.  That is why a careful writer and speaker does not use 'prejudiced' sans phrase, but always adds the appropriate qualifier unless the context makes the addition unnecessary.

As for 'prejudice,' it could refer to blind prejudice: unreasoning, reflexive (as opposed to reflective) aversion to what is other just because it is other, or to an unreasoning pro-attitude toward the familiar just because it is familiar.  ("My country right or wrong.") We should all condemn blind prejudice.  It is execrable to hate a person just because he is of a different color, for example. No doubt, but how many people in fact do that?  How many people who are averse to blacks are averse because of their skin color as opposed to their behavior patterns? Racial prejudice is not, in the main, prejudice based on skin color, but on behavior. 

'Prejudice' could also mean 'prejudgment.'   Although blind prejudice is bad, prejudgment is generally good.  We cannot begin our cognitive lives anew at every instant.  We rely upon the 'sedimentation' of past experience.  Changing the metaphor, we can think of prejudgments as distillations from experience.  The first time I 'serve' my cats whisky they are curious.  After that, they cannot be tempted to come near a shot glass of Jim Beam. They distill from their unpleasant olfactory experiences a well-grounded prejudice against the products of the distillery.  They know what is good for them and what isn't.

My prejudgments about rattlesnakes are in place and have been for a long time.  I don't need to learn about them afresh at each new encounter with one. I do not treat each new one encountered as a 'unique individual,' whatever that might mean.  Prejudgments are not blind, but experience-based, and they are mostly true. The adult mind is not a tabula rasa.  What experience has written, she retains, and that's all to the good.

So there is good prejudice and there is bad prejudice.  The teenager thinks his father prejudiced in the bad sense when he warns the son not to go into certain parts of town after dark.  Later the son learns that the old man was not  a bigot after all: the father's prejudice was not blind but had a fundamentum in re.  The old man was justified in his prejudgment.

Memory: Content and Affect

The trick is to retain the content so that one can rehearse it if one wishes, but without re-enacting the affect, unless one wishes.  Let me explain.

Suppose one recalls a long-past insult to oneself, and feels anger in the present as a result. The anger is followed by regret at not having responded in kind. (L'esprit de l'escalier.) And then perhaps there is disgust at oneself for having remained passive, for not having stood up to the aggressor and asserted oneself. This may be followed by annoyance with oneself for allowing these memorial affects  to arise one more time despite one's assiduous and protracted inner work. Finally, pessimism supervenes concerning the efficacy of attempts at self-improvement and mind control.  

Well, welcome to the human predicament.  Buck up, never give up. We are not here to slack off and have a good time. This world is preparatory and propadeutic if not penal. That is the right way to think of it. Live and strive. Leben und streben! Streben bis zum Sterben!  There is no guarantee that the "long, twilight struggle" will open out into  light.   For there are two twilights, one that leads to dawn, the other to dusk. But we live better if we believe in the advent of the first.

Judge your success not by how far you have to go, but how far you've come.

Inquire and aspire.  What Plato has Socrates say about inquiry (intellectual self-improvement) in response to Meno's Paradox is adaptable to aspiration (moral self-improvement).

And therefore we ought not to listen to this sophistical argument about the impossibility of inquiry: for it will make us idle; and is sweet only to the sluggard; but the other saying will make us active and inquisitive. (Plato, Meno, 81a-81e)

Attributed to Robert Frost

Here:

"A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel” is usually credited to American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963). Frost used the quote in January 1961 (discussing John F. Kennedy, who Frost thought was not this type of liberal) and Frost used it again in January 1962. A popular form of the quotation is: “A liberal is someone who won’t take his own side in a fight.”

William Ernest Hocking (1873-1966) wrote this in his book What Man Can Make of Man (1942): “He lends himself to the gibe that he is ‘so very liberal, that he cannot bring himself to take his own side in a quarrel.’” It is not known where Hocking got the phrase, or if Frost (who was an avid reader) was borrowing from another source.

One can be hobbled by one's virtues. There is something noble about being fair-minded, objective, and considerative of all points of view. It is the way of the philosopher, the lover of objective truth, "the spectator of all time and existence" in a stirring line from Plato's Republic. But before a man is a philosopher, he is a man of flesh and blood, brutally embedded in a brutal world in which he must stand his ground and battle his enemies. He must not allow his noble viewership of life's parade to make impossible  his marching in it.  

Crises There Always Will Be

So buck up and fight on. Philosophy is a great consolation. We lesser lights ought to look up to the luminaries, and their example. Boethius wrote in prison, Nicolai Hartmann in Berlin in 1945 in the midst of the Allied assault.

In February 1945, the university building in which Hartmann used to lecture was destroyed in an aerial bombing and all his classes were suspended. He was then living in Berlin, which had been transformed into a real-life inferno. Without teaching obligations, Hartmann decided to write his aesthetics book, completing the first draft in the period from March to September 1945. Perhaps the most fascinating book in his entire opus [corpus], there is no despair in it over war and violence, maimed bodies, and destroyed buildings. As a boy he learned to measure the movement of the stars against the objects on earth, and now he measured the events of the day against the eternal beauty of Bach's music, the portraits of Rembrandt, the dramas of Shakespeare, and the novels of Dostoevsky. He delivers a remarkable message:wherever we are and whatever events pull us into their currents, we should not lose sight [of] and cease to strive toward the highest and most sublime. (Predrag Cicovacki, The Analysis of Wonder: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nicolai Hartmann, Bloomsbury, 2014, p. 159.)

Hartmann Nicolai

 

Inter faeces et urinam nascimur

Recalling our miserably indigent origin in the the wombs of our mothers and the subsequent helplessness of infancy, how did we get to be so arrogant and self-important? We criticize and condemn one another hurling epithets and anathemas. How did we get to be so harsh and judgmental?

In a line often (mis)attributed to Augustine, but apparently from Bernard of Clairvaux, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: "We are born between feces and urine." 

So inauspicious a beginning for so proud a strut upon life's stage.