Category: Substack

Conservatives, Liberals, and Happiness

Top o’ the Stack.

Conservatives are happier. Why?

Conservative explanation. Marriage and religious faith are conducive to happiness. More conservatives are married than liberals, and more practice a religion. Ergo, conservatives as a group are happier than liberals as a group.

Liberal explanation. Conservatives are happier because they turn a blind eye to the injustices of the world. They are oblivious to inequality. And when they do see it, they rationalize it. Ignorance is bliss. Conservatives naively believe that people can better themselves by the practice of the old virtues of frugality, perseverance, hard work, self-control, deferral of gratification, and the like, when the truth is that people are products of their environment and need government help to do well.

As a conservative, I of course consider the liberal explanation to be bogus.

Gary Kasparov on Socialism

Top o’ the Stack.

In the same vein, here is a quick little rant of mine on Facebook (3 July):

THE REVOLT OF DSA know-nothings like Darializa Chevalier and that Kiros woman is less an embrace of communism than an adolescent-female rebellion against the strut and swagger of patriarchal Trump and a febrile expression of the frustration of pampered, spoiled, entitled, and over-‘educated’ malcontents who wasted years and money getting worthless degrees from leftist seminaries and can now find work only as baristas and bartenders. The notion that these punks are going to “seize the means of production” is risibility on stilts.

John Locke on the Right to Self-Defense

Substack latest.

Calm, clear, rigorous, and free of invective. Which is not to say that invective does not have important uses. Different strokes for different folks. For thugs, slugs. The hard fist of unreason. For the reasonable, the open-handed, loving caress of sweet reason. Civility for the civil. Respect for the respectful.

Weil’s Wager

Karl White tells me he looked for this old essay of mine but couldn’t find it. His interest, for which I am grateful, inspired me to thoroughly re-think and re-work it. It is now tighter, cleaner, and better organized, and to be found at the top of the Stack.

In her New York Notebook from 1942, Simone Weil presents an argument which she claims “…is greatly preferable to Pascal’s wager.”[i] One of her commentators agrees, finding her argument “obviously both morally and intellectually” superior to Pascal’s.[ii] I will call this argument “Weil’s Wager.” As far as I know, it has yet to be subjected to a close examination.

If God Created the World, Who Created the Creator?

Thomas Merton claims that the title question is a good koan. I maintain that it isn’t.  I then give two examples of what I consider to be good Christian koans. Substack latest.

This article is relevant to my ongoing discussion with Tom Carroll. I thank him once again for engaging, as opposed to opposing, my ideas.  Those who think oppositionally in philosophy are not philosophers but ideologues.

After MacIntyre: On Deriving ‘Ought’ from ‘Is’

Are there any (non-trivial) valid arguments that satisfy the following conditions: (i) The premises are all purely factual in the sense of purporting to state only what is the case; (ii) the conclusion is normative/evaluative? Alasdair MacIntyre gives an example (After Virtue, U. of Notre Dame Press, 1981, p. 55) that is plausible but not rationally coercive.

Substack latest.

On Marx

A little sympathy for the devil at the top o’ the Stack.  It begins like this, and then I lay into him.

Physical work is good for body and soul if you are working for yourself and have time for other things. So I have long felt a certain sympathy for a famous passage from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (ed. C. J. Arthur, New York: International Publishers, 1970, p. 53):

. . . as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

Tribalism and Diversity

Substack latest.  First two paragraphs with a Study Guide I’ve just now appended.

Tribalism is on the rise while classical liberalism is on the wane. Given this fact, does it make sense to admit into one’s country ever more different tribes? A piety oft-intoned by leftists is that diversity is our strength. An Orwellianism, that, if tribal diversity is at issue.* For that would amount to the absurdity that the more domestic strife, the stronger we become. It is plain, after all, that different tribes do not like each other, and do not see themselves in the other. Tribal identification is other-exclusive. There is no comity without commonality.

I am against tribal identification. I realize, however, that I am sawing against the grain of the crooked timber of humanity. People will continue to identify themselves as members of groups. Classically liberal ideals such as toleration are no match for the ingrained tendency to revert to the tribal. So the realist in me says that immigration policy must favor those who are assimilable to our values and principles and must exclude those who aren’t.

You should be able to explain each of these terms:  tribalism, classical liberalism, Orwellianism, comity, toleration.

Who am I alluding to with the phrase “crooked timber of humanity”?