I was relieved to hear today that Spencer Case, long-time friend of MavPhil, and Middle Eastern correspondent, is once again safely Stateside after a nine month stint in Cairo as a Fulbright fellow researching Islamic philosophy. I say 'relieved' because of the Andrew Pochter case. Spencer tells me that he writes a monthly column for a conservative collegiate publication, The College Fix. His latest column is Bipartisan Efforts to Hasten Elections in Egypt Bad Policy.
Welcome home, Spencer!
If a person or institution is essentially F, then to criticize it for being F is equivalent to criticizing it for existing. (If x is essentially F, then x cannot exist without being F. If x is F, but not essentially, then x is accidentally F: capable of existing without being F.) Let's test this thought against some examples.
1. Its core doctrines are essential to the Roman Catholic Church; to demand that it abandon one or more of them is to demand that it cease to exist.
2. The rejection of capitalism is essential to communism. Therefore, to demand that a communist embrace capitalism is to demand that he cease to be a communist.
3. The moral legitimacy of killing the other side's combatants in times of war is an essential commitment of the miltary. To demand that the military be pacifistic, that the Marine Corps become the Peace Corps, for example, is to demand that the military cease to exist.
4. If marriage is essentially between one man and one woman, then to demand same-sex marriage is to demand that marriage cease to exist.
But before I do, I'll wish my American readers a happy and healthy Fourth of July to the strains of Johnny Horton's The Battle of New Orleans.
Starts tomorrow, muchachos. Begins at 8 AM Eastern and runs until 6 AM July 5th. Schedule here.
My eyes glued to the set, my lovely wife invariably asks, "Haven't you seen that episode before?" She doesn't get it. I've seen 'em all numerous times each. Hell, I've been watching 'em since 1959 when the series first aired. But the best are inexhaustibly rich in content, delightful in execution, studded with young actors and actresses who went on to become famous alongside the now forgotten actors of yesteryear, replete with period costumes and lingo, and sprinkled with allusions to the politics of the day. Timeless and yet a nostalgia trip. A fine way to celebrate Independence Day.
Could popular art of this caliber have been produced in the Soviet Union? Of course not. So if you are an American, celebrate your freedom tomorrow while bemoaning how much of it we have lost 'thanks' to the liberal-left fascists.
To see how much philosophical juice can be squeezed out of a Twilight Zone episode, see here.
The original series ran from 1959 to 1964. In those days it was not uncommon to hear TV condemned as a vast wasteland. Rod Serling's work was a sterling counterexample.
The hard-driving Serling lived a short but intense life. Born in 1924, he was dead at age 50 in 1975. His four pack a day cigarette habit destroyed his heart. Imagine smoking 80 Lucky Strikes a day! Assuming 16 hours of smoking time per day, that averages to one cigarette every twelve minutes. He died on the operating table during an attempted bypass procedure.
But who is to say that a long, healthy life is better than a short, intense one fueled by the stimulants one enjoys? That is a question for the individual, not Hillary, to decide. To hell with you nanny-staters.
Next stop, the Twilight Zone.
If a hippopotamus swallows a man, does the man become a part of the hippo's body? Might this be relevant to the Woman's Body Argument?
What the hell's going on in Florida? The other day an oven shot a woman, and now a dog has shot a man, with an 'unloaded' gun no less.
Tragedies like these show the need for Dog Control. Members of the Dog Lobby such as Duane LaRufus of the National Hound Association will scream in protest, but moral cretins like him and Leroy Pooch of Dog Owners of America are nothing but greedy shills for the Canine Industrial Complex. They routinely oppose all sensible Dog Control measures. Follow the money!
Reason dictates that all dogs must be kept muzzled at all times, and when transported in a vehicle containing a gun, must be kept securely locked in the trunk. Assault dogs, whose only purpose is to kill and maim, such as Doberman Ass Biters and Pit Bulls, must be banned. Such breeds are inherently evil and no one ouside of law enforcement and the military has any business owning them. Food magazines for all breeds must be kept strictly limited lest any dog become too rambunctious. Dog owners should be 'outed' and their names published in the paper. Special taxes must be levied on all things canine to offset the expenses incurred by society at large in the wake of the rising tide of dog violence.
Such reasonable measures will strike extremists as draconian, but if even one life can be saved, then they are justified. We must do something and we must do it now so that tragedies like the one in Florida never happen again.
She didn't know a friend stored his ammo there.
Will liberals call for oven control? Or perhaps demand that ovens come with warning labels: Do not store ammunition in ovens! Or perhaps: Remove all ammo, fuels, cats and babies before preheating!
Is there anything so stupid that some liberal won't jump to embrace it?
That last sentence is an example of a rhetorical question, which I define as follows. A rhetorical question is an interrogative form of words utterance of which is used to make a statement or issue a command. For example, suppose you are the father of a teenage daughter. It gets back to you that she was texting while driving. You utter this grammatically interrogative sentence: 'Do you have to text while you drive?' You are not, logically, asking a question or making a statement. You are, logically, issuing a command: Do not text while driving! Depending on the proclivities of the lass you might add: And do not 'sext' while driving!
'Is there anything so stupid that some liberal won't jump to embrace it?' is grammatically interrogative but logically declarative.
But it is a very wet snow that does not survive its contact with the ground. A nasty cold front has arrived from the Left Coast. Can we blame this on libruls too?
Snow had the Grapevine closed for a spell. And that puts me in mind of Johnny Bond, 1960, Hot Rod Lincoln:
We left San Pedro late one night/ The moon and stars were shining bright/Everything went fine up the Grapevine Hill/ We were passing cars like they were standing still.
Today I preach on a text from Joseph Joubert:
Light. It is a fire that does not burn. (Notebooks, 21)
Just as the eyes are the most spiritual of the bodily organs, light is the most spiritual of physical phenomena. And there is no light like the lambent light of the desert. The low humidity, the sparseness of vegetation that even in its arboreal forms hugs the ground, the long, long vistas that draw the eye out to shimmering buttes and mesas — all of these contribute to the illusion that the light is alive. This light does not consume, like fire, but allows things to appear. It licks, like flames, but does not incinerate. ('Lambent' from Latin lambere, to lick.)
Light as phenomenon, as appearance, is not something merely physical. It is as much mind as matter. Without its appearance to mind it would not be what it, phenomenologically, is. But the light that allows rocks and coyotes to appear, itself appears. This seen light is seen within a clearing, eine Lichtung, which is light in a transcendental sense. But this transcendental light in whose light both illuminated objects and physical light appear, points back to the onto-theological Source of this transcendental light.
Augustine claims to have glimpsed this eternal Source Light upon entering into his "inmost being." Entering there, he saw with his soul's eye, "above that same eye of my soul, above my mind, an unchangeable light." He continues:
It was not this common light, plain to all flesh, nor a greater light of the same kind
. . . Not such was that light, but different, far different from all other lights. Nor was it above my mind, as oil is above water, or sky above earth. It was above my mind, because it made me, and I was beneath it, because I was made by it. He who knows the truth, knows that light, and he who knows it knows eternity. (Confessions, Book VII, Chapter 10)
'Light,' then, has several senses. There is the light of physics, which is but a theoretical posit. There is physical light as we see it, whether in the form of illuminated things such as yonder mesa, or sources of illumination such as the sun, or the lambent space between them. There is the transcendental light of mind without which nothing at all would appear. There is, above this transcendental light, its Source.
One could characterize a materialist as one who is blind to the light, except in the first of the four senses lately mentioned.
Numerology is buncombe.
The Constructive Curmudgeon waxes instructive:
1. Care about truth.
2. Care about grammar.
3. Care about eloquence in speaking.
UPDATE: Seldom Seen Slim writes to point out that the CC does not practice in #10 what he preaches in #2.
See the triangle-like piece of roadway where the routes diverge? That's called the gore lane. Gore lanes are also found near on ramps and exit ramps. Driving across such a lane is a moving violation. The gore lane is not, strictly, a lane, nor is it named after Al Bore Gore.
This scintillating topic came up in conversation with Peter L. yesterday morning after we had done with Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos. Peter maintained that the 'lane' was so-called because of one Officer Gore, a motorcycle cop who supposedly had been killed in a gore lane near an entry ramp to a freeway. But I learned this morning that the noun 'gore' has among it meanings, "a small usually triangular piece of land." This leads me to suspect that Peter's explanation is a bit of urban folklore.
Imagine no 'Imagine'
It's easy if you try
No more lefty lyrics
Above us only sky.
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And Lennon's song'll go unsung.
It was my pleasure to meet science writer and long-time reader and friend of MavPhil, John Farrell, in Flagstaff Friday evening. He was in town for a conference on the origins of the expanding universe, as he reports in Forbes here. Flag is a lovely dorf sitting at 7,000 feet amongst the pines and home to the Lowell Observatory. It is an excellent retreat from the heat of the Valle del Sol where you would never catch me this time of year in long pants, jacket, and beret.
John and I are standing in front of an excellent Mexican eatery on old Route 66. I first heard about this joint on Guy Fieri's Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. As luck would have it, Farrell the Irishman is enthusiastic about Mexican chow. Our tequila-fueled conversation was so good that I failed to clean my plate, a rare occurrence as my companions (literally those with whom one breaks bread, L. panis) know.
Perhaps the best thing about maintaining a weblog is that it attracts like-minded, high-quality people some of whom one then goes on to meet in the flesh.
I regret having to kill you, but one of my thoughts is worth more than your entire life.
"But if the fly could speak, he would most assuredly disagree with your value assessment."
If the fly could speak, then I would consider him a spiritual being and accord him the respect I accord myself.
