Can we avoid both polarization and a noncommittal floating above the fray that does not commit to one side or the other? I fear not. Politics is war. You must take a side. You can't play the philosopher on the battlefield. A warrior at war cannot be "a spectator of all time and existence," as noble as such spectatorship is. A warrior who is fully human, however, will know when to put aside his weapons and take up his pen. He will know that, in the end, "The pen is mightier than the sword." But only in the end. Now you are in the field. If you don't survive the fight, there will be no time left for 'penmanship.'
Category: War and Peace
Opponents or Enemies?
If you shrink back from regarding your political opponents as enemies, you do not appreciate the threat they pose. You are not taking them seriously enough. They pose an existential threat. Such a threat is not merely a threat to one's physical existence; it is a threat to one's way of life, to one's cultural and spiritual traditions and heritage. Human life is not merely biological.
Civilization Requires Deterrence
Wisdom from Victor Davis Hanson. There is precious little of it on the Left. We are awash in the deleterious consequences. Excerpt below the fold.
Weakness is No Justification: The Converse Callicles Principle
It needs to be said again at this time when Israel is under attack again due in no small measure to President Biden's weakness and senility. First posted 24 July 2014.
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Might does not make right, but neither does impotence or relative weakness. That weakness does not justify strikes me as an important principle, but I have never seen it articulated. The Left tends to assume the opposite. They tend to assume that mightlessness makes right. I'll dub this the Converse Callicles Principle.
The power I have to kill you does not morally justify my killing you. In a slogan: Ability does not imply permissibility. My ability to kill, rape, pillage and plunder does not confer moral justification on my doing these things. But if you attack me with deadly force and I reply with deadly force of greater magnitude, your relative weakness does not supply one iota of moral justification for your attack, nor does it subtract one iota of moral justification from my defensive response. If I am justified in using deadly force against you as aggressor, then the fact that my deadly force is greater than yours does not (a) diminish my justification in employing deadly force, nor does it (b) confer any justification on your aggression.
Suppose a knife-wielding thug commits a home invasion and attacks a man and his family. The man grabs a semi-automatic pistol and manages to plant several rounds in the assailant, killing him. It would surely be absurd to argue that the disparity in lethality of the weapons involved diminishes the right of the pater familias to defend himself and his family. Weakness does not justify.
The principle that weakness does not justify can be applied to the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict from the summer of 2006 as well as to the current Israeli defensive operations against the terrorist entity, Hamas. The principle ought to be borne in mind when one hears leftists, those knee-jerk supporters of any and every 'underdog,' start spouting off about 'asymmetry of power' and 'disproportionality.' Impotence and incompetence are not virtues, nor do they confer moral justification or high moral status, any more than they confer the opposite.
The principle that mightlessness makes right seems to be one of the cardinal tenets of the Left. It is operative in the present furor over the enforcement of reasonable immigration laws in Arizona. To the south of the USA lies crime-ridden, corrupt, impoverished Mexico. For millions and millions it is a place to escape from. The USA, the most successful nation of all time, is the place to escape to. But how does this disparity in wealth, success, and overall quality of life justify the violation of the reasonable laws and the rule of law that are a good part of the reason for the disparity of wealth, success, and overall quality of life?
Politics as Polemics: The Converse Clausewitz Principle
Would that I could avoid this political stuff. But I cannot in good conscience retreat into my inner citadel and let my country and its Western heritage be destroyed — the country that makes it possible for me to cultivate the garden of solitude, retreat into my inner citadel, and pursue pure theory for its own sake.
Political discourse is unavoidably polemical. The zoon politikon must needs be a zoon polemikon. 'Polemical’ is from the Greek polemos, war, strife. According to Heraclitus of Ephesus, strife is the father of all: polemos panton men pater esti . . . (Fr. 53) I don't know about the 'all,' but strife is certainly at the root of politics. Politics is polemical because it is a form of warfare: the point is to defeat the opponent and remove him from power, whether or not one can rationally persuade him of what one takes to be the truth. It is practical rather than theoretical in that the aim is to implement what one takes to be the truth rather than contemplate it. What one takes to be the truth: that is the problem in a nutshell. Conservatives and leftists disagree fundamentally and non-negotiably. There is no common ground left, and if you think otherwise, you are fooling yourself.
Implementation of what one takes to be the truth, however, requires that one get one’s hands on the levers of power. Von Clausewitz held that war is politics pursued by other means. But what could be called the Converse Clausewitz principle holds equally: politics is war pursued by other means.
David Horowitz, commenting on "Politics is war conducted by other means," writes:
In political warfare you do not just fight to prevail in an argument, but rather to destroy the enemy's fighting ability. Republicans often seem to regard political combats as they would a debate before the Oxford Political Union, as though winning depended on rational arguments and carefully articulated principles. But the audience of politics is not made up of Oxford dons, and the rules are entirely different.
You have only thirty seconds to make your point. Even if you had time to develop an argument, the audience you need to reach (the undecided and those in the middle who are not paying much attention) would not get it. Your words would go over some of their heads and the rest would not even hear them (or quickly forget) amidst the bustle and pressure of everyday life. Worse, while you are making your argument the other side has already painted you as a mean-spirited, borderline racist controlled by religious zealots, securely in the pockets of the rich. Nobody who sees you in this way is going to listen to you in any case. You are politically dead.
Politics is war. Don't forget it. ("The Art of Political War" in Left Illusions: An
Intellectual Odyssey Spence 2003, pp. 349-350)
Trump’s Space Force
"I will not weaponize space," said Barack Obama while a candidate in 2008. That empty promise came too late, and is irresponsible to boot: if our weapons are not there, theirs will be.
Some warn of the militarization of space as if it has not already been militarized. It has been, and for a long time now. How long depending on how high up you deem space begins. Are they who warn unaware of spy satellites? Of Gary Powers and the U-2 incident? Of the V-2s that crashed down on London? Of the crude Luftwaffen, air-weapons, of the First World War? The Roman catapults? The first javelin thrown by some Neanderthal spear chucker? It travelled through space to pierce the heart of some poor effer and was an early weaponization of the space between chucker and effer.
The very notion that outer space could be reserved for wholly peaceful purposes shows a deep lack of understanding of the human condition. Show me a space with human beings in it and I will show you a space that potentially if not actually is militarized and weaponized. Man is, was, and will be a bellicose son of a bitch. If you doubt this, study history, with particular attention to the 20th century. You can bet that the future will resemble the past in this respect. Note that the turn of the millennium has not brought anything new in this regard.
Older is not wiser. All spaces, near, far, inner, outer, are potential scenes of contention, which is why I subscribe to the Latin saying:
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
If you want peace, prepare for war.
One must simply face reality and realize that the undoubtedly great good of peace comes at a cost, the cost of a credible defense. A credible defense is what keeps aggressors at bay.
I mean this to hold at all levels, intrapsychically, interpersonally, intranationally, internationally, and in every other way. Weakness provokes. Strength pacifies. That is just the way it is. Conservatives, being reality-based, understand what eludes leftists who are based in u-topia (nowhere) and who rely on their unsupportable faith in the inherent goodness of human beings.
They should read Kant on the radical evil in human nature. Then they should go back to Genesis, chapters 2 and 3.
Here we have one of those deep defining differences between conservatives and leftists. Vote for the candidate of your choice, but just understand what set of ideas and values you are voting for.
President Trump can claim a big win with approval of the funding that includes money for the Space Force. But will he get any credit for it from his political opponents? Of course not. For the Left, politics is war and Trump is an enemy to be removed from office by any means, fair or foul, right or wrong, Constitutional or extra-Constitutional.
After Enough Time Passes . . .
. . . de mortuis nil nisi bonum lapses.
(In justification of some negative remarks about Senator John McCain (R-AZ) posted on my Facebook page. I pointed out that while McCain served with great distinction in the Vietnam war, he failed to translate military valor into civil courage, while Donald J. Trump, who did not serve, has it in spades.)
Military Service and ‘Skin in the Game’
There is something to be said in favor of an all-voluntary military, but on the debit side there is this: only those with 'skin in the game' — either their own or that of their loved ones — properly appreciate the costs of foreign military interventions. I say that as a conservative, not a libertarian.
There is also this to consider: In the bad old days of the draft, people of different stations – to use a good old word that will not be allowed to fall into desuetude, leastways not on my watch — were forced to associate with one another — with some good effects. It is 'broadening' to mingle and have to get along with different sorts of people. And when the veteran of foreign wars returns and takes up a profession in, say, academe, he brings with him precious hard-won experience of all sorts of people in different lands in trying circumstances. He is then more likely to exhibit the sense of a Winston Churchill as opposed to the nonsense of a Ward Churchill.
How Close Are We to Civil War? A Pessimistic View
The following view is pessimistic, but current events give me no good reason to be optimistic. A bad moon's rising and trouble's on the way. A house divided cannot stand. Don't say that Trump has divided us. The division was well-entrenched long before he came on the political scene. He merely gave voice to the conservative side in a way that the bow-tie boys of Conservatism, Inc. could not and would not. In so doing, he enraged the Left forcing them to show their true colors and reveal themselves for what they were all along. So, far from being the Great Divider, Trump has proven to be the Great Clarifier. You will have to work out for yourself how best to weather the storm that's coming. The wise hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. Emphases below are my addition.
We and the Left are now two nations within one country. This is undeniable. We are now so different that we cannot even agree on what a country is, or on the merits of a country having a border. The number of people who still say, "I just don't care about politics" dwindles. It is still possible to hate both sides — but it is getting hard to be indifferent and still be breathing. How many people can just take or leave infanticide? How many people are entirely flexible about the idea of the government having authority over anything and everything, to experimenting with our fundamental demographics, or to giving up fossil fuels cold turkey?
The author is right.
. . . We have our breaking point, and they have theirs. Our two nations hang suspended over war's abyss, kept in mid-air temporarily by a tug-of-war of pundits, politicians, and overpaid attorneys. Our "leaders" are not quite ready to repudiate the only instruments of power they know how to wield, but in their cynical maneuvering, they have broken the very foundations of the rule of law itself. We have seen the two-tiered legal system and found it unworthy of respect. We have watched in quiet horror as a federal judge in Hawaii stuck his dainty legal foot in front of Trump's immigration order — but that's exactly how the game is played. You and I hold our breath, waiting for the shambling Frankenstein's monster of formalities to eventually keel over and drop dead. We wait for our side to finally draw a line and say, "Enough!" — or for their side to dig in and openly proclaim, "We won't be bound by a constitution written by old dead white men anymore!"
Consider the National Popular VoteInterstate Compact that a dozen states have now passed into law. These states have agreed to sign their citizens' electoral votes over to whatever presidential candidate wins the popular vote. In one sense, this may be constitutional. The framers allowed each state to determine for itself how its electors would be assigned. In another sense, such laws are clearly anti-constitutional. The framers quite explicitly intended to preserve the sovereignty of the less populous states, and a National Popular Vote Interstate Compact accomplishes just the opposite end. Such laws are nothing less than attempts by California and New York to nullify the interests of whole regions of the country. If the National Popular VoteInterstate Compact movement succeeds in achieving its golden number of 270 votes, will the state of Oklahoma, or Alabama, or Alaska, be content to have its votes made moot? At what point does such a clever lawyer's trick make secession less objectionable than the alternative?
The abyss looms large beneath us. We are stretched closer and closer to our limits.
The people who are eager for a civil war are fools. They don't understand the catastrophe they're begging for. But the people who believe that a civil war is now a real possibility are neither fools nor wild-eyed alarmists. Moreover, the people who believe that, grim though the prospect may be, war might be the lesser of two evils have a daily strengthening case. The Left has shown itself to be dedicated to the destruction of Western civilization itself. We have not been faced with such an existential threat since European armies threw the Turks back from Vienna in 1529. The fascists of the mid–2oth century, for all their loathsome policies, were not the kind of threat to the fabric of our society that we face now. Bad as they were, they did not seek the destruction of Europeans as a people, or of European culture as a living, breathing thing. Progressivism does. What could be more worthy of, if you will forgive the word, "resistance"?
We conservatives have let this ideological cancer metastasize for far too long for its excision to be simple or painless. For too long, we have been patient with outrages we should have fought to reverse. We have let our opponents secede incrementally from us for decades. We have been tolerant and patient. In our tolerance and patience, we have given up our civil society, our political representation, and our freedoms one by one. Our maladies won't be fixed by delicate adjustments now — half-heartedly performed by yet another generation of narcissistic government planners and invisible elitist bureaucrats. Intellectuals like George Will and think-tanks like the Heritage Foundation have done us little good. Our condition demands a radical, unflinching surgery if we, as a nation, are to survive. Either the cancer wins, and kills us all, or we defeat it — and we accept the scars. Let us not pretend they would not be hideous scars. And let us not pretend it would not be a deeply barbarous and bitter surgery.
Toleration is a high value, but it has limits. One cannot tolerate the intolerant. And let's be clear that only some are culturally equipped to appreciate the high value of toleration, the touchstone of classical liberalism, which is not to be confused with leftism or progressivism or contemporary 'liberalism.' Muslims as a group are not so equipped, which is presumably why leftists encourage their immigration. Leftists think that they can use sharia-supporting Muslims, whose values are antithetical to Western values, to undermine American values.
Virtues can vitiate when taken to extremes. Our toleration has weakened us. The author is right about this.
Another strength that has weakened us is our understanding that the political does not exhaust the real and important. I call this The Conservative Disadvantage. If you care to know what I mean, bang on the hyperlink.
The truth is that we, as individuals, have rather few decisions left to make. The titanic nations of the Left and right are rising en masse — flexing their muscles and snorting menacingly at one another. We cannot get out of their way. There is no safe part of the country, nor any genuinely safe haven left in any other country. This is a global conflict. We have run out of frontiers. There is only so much "prepping" one can do for an upheaval of this magnitude. We Americans have not seen such a calamity on our soil for six generations. What our ancestors knew, we have forgotten. The Civil War of our history has become a dim and comfortable myth. A new war leers at us like the devil, but we talk about it like a football game. We may learn as human beings have always learned — the hard way.
Let's hope that the author is overstating his case. But hope is not enough. Every sane, decent American has to do his bit to help defeat the destructive Left and to do so politically if possible. Resort to extra-political means is the last resort, not to be hoped for, but for which we must be prepared.
‘Liberal’ Aggression is Getting Dangerous
The Dan Bongino Show, Ep. 749
Seven Forces Driving America Toward Civil War
No one in his right mind could wish for civil war. At the moment it is unlikely, but it is becoming more likely each day as the nation sinks into madness, 'thanks' almost exclusively to the ever-expanding extremism of the hard Left which has captured the Democrat Party.
John Hawkins lists seven 'forces' pushing us in the direction of armed civil conflict: disrespect for the Constitution; tribalism; the ever-expanding power of the Federal government; moral decline; the national debt; lack of a shared culture; mindless gun-grabbing.
We certainly do live in interesting times! Who can be bored?
The Left and Political Violence
A very interesting Vanity Fair article.
Civil War is Upon Us
Two articles by Daniel Greenfield. Read this one first, then the sequel.
War, Torture, and the Aporetics of Moral Rigorism
That the deliberate targeting of noncombatants is intrinsically evil and cannot be justified under any circumstances is one of the entailments of Catholic just war doctrine. I am sensitive to its moral force. I am strongly inclined to say that certain actions are intrinsically wrong, wrong by their very nature as the types of actions they are, wrong regardless of consequences and circumstances. But what would have been the likely upshot had the Allies not used unspeakably brutal methods against the Germans and the Japanese in World War II? Leery as one ought to be of counterfactual history, I think the Axis Powers would have acquired nukes first and used them against us. But we don't have to speculate about might-have-beens.
If I understand the Catholic doctrine, it implies that if Harry Truman had a crystal ball and knew the future with certainty and saw that the Allies would have lost had they not used the methods they used, and that the whole world would have been been plunged into a Dark Age for two centuries — he still would not have been justified in ordering the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, if the deliberate targeting of noncombatants is intrinsically evil and unjustifiable under any circumstances and regardless of any consequences, then it is better that the earth be blown to pieces than that evil be done. This, I suppose, is one reading of fiat iustitia pereat mundus, "Let justice be done though the world perish." Although I invoked an historical example, nothing hinges on it since a matter of principle is at stake.
This extreme anti-consequentialism troubles me if it is thought to be relevant to how states ought to conduct themselves. Suppose that there is no God and no soul and no post-mortem existence, and thus that this life is all there is. Suppose the political authorities let the entire world be destroyed out of a refusal to target and kill innocent civilians of a rogue state. This would amount to the sacrificing of humanity to an abstract absolutist moral principle. This would be moral insanity.
On the other hand, extreme anti-consequentialism would make sense if the metaphysics of the Catholic Church or even the metaphysics of Kant were true. If God is real then this world is relatively unreal and relatively unimportant. If the soul is real, then its salvation is our paramount concern, and every worldly concern is relatively insignificant. For the soul to be saved, it must be kept free from, or absolved of, every moral stain in which case it can never be right to do evil in pursuit of good. Now the deliberate killing of innocent human beings is evil and so must never be done — regardless of consequences. On a Christian moral scheme, morality is not in the service of our animal life here below; we stand under an absolute moral demand that calls us from beyond this earthly life and speaks to our immortal souls, not to our mortal bodies. Christianity is here consonant with the great Socratic thought that it is better to suffer evil, wrong, injustice than to to do them. (Plato, Gorgias, 469a)
But then a moral doctrine that is supposed to govern our behavior in this world rests on an other-worldly metaphysics. No problem with that — if the metaphysics is true. For then one's flourishing in this world cannot amount to much as compared to one's flourishing in the next. But how do we know that the metaphysics is true? Classical theistic metaphysics is reasonably believed, but then so are certain versions of naturalism.
I am not claiming that classical theism false. I myself believe it to be true. My point is that we know that this world is no illusion and is at least relatively real, together with its goods, but we merely believe that God and the soul are real.
If the buck stops with you and the fate of civilization itself depends on your decision, will you act according to a moral doctrine that rests on a questionable metaphysics or will you act in accordance with worldly wisdom, a wisdom that dictates that in certain circumstances the deliberate targeting of the innocent is justified?
An isolated individual, responsible for no one but himself, is free to allow himself to be slaughtered. But a leader of a nation is in a much different position. Even if the leader qua private citizen holds to an absolutist position according to which some actions are intrinsically wrong, wrong regardless of consequences, he would not be justified in acting in his official capacity as head of state from this absolutist position. The reason is that he cannot reasonably claim that the metaphysics on which his moral absolutism rests is correct. God may or may not exist — we don't know. But that this world exists we do know. And in this world no action is such that consequences are irrelevant to its moral evaluation. By 'in this world' I mean: according to the prudential wisdom of this world. Is adultery, for example, intrinsically wrong such that no conceivable circumstances or consequences could justify it? A worldly wise person who is in general opposed to adultery will say that there are conceivable situations in which a married woman seduces a man to discover military secrets that could save thousands of lives, and is justified in so doing.
Anscombe's case against Truman does not convince me. Let the philosophy professor change places with the head of state and then see if her moral rigorism remains tenable.
We confront a moral dilemma. On the one hand, a head of state may sometimes justifiably act in the interests of the citizens of the state of which he is the head by commanding actions which are intrinsically wrong. On the other hand, no one may ever justifiably do or command anything that is intrinsically wrong.
Of course the dilemma or aporetic dyad can be 'solved' by denying one of the limbs; but there is no solution which is a good solution. Or so say I. On my metaphilosophy, the problems of philosophy are almost all of them genuine, some of them humanly important, but none of them soluble. The above dilemma is an example of a problem that is genuine, important, and insoluble.
Torture
Patrick Toner holds that waterboarding is torture. I incline to say that it isn't. But let's assume I am wrong. Presumably, most who hold that waterboarding is torture will also hold that torture is intrinsically wrong. But how could it be wrong for the political authorities to torture a jihadi who knows the locations and detonation times of suitcase nukes planted in Manhattan? Here again is our moral dilemma. I suspect Toner would not 'solve' it by adopting consequentialism. I suspect he holds that torture is wrong always and everywhere and under any conceivable circumstances. But then he is prepared to sacrifice thousands of human lives to an abstract moral principle, or else is invoking a theological metaphysics that is far less grounded than the prudence of worldly wisdom. I would like to hear Toner's response to this.
Some have tried to solve the dilemma by invoking the Doctrine of Double Effect. But I am pretty sure Patrick will not go that route.
Related: The Problem of Dirty Hands
Is Waterboarding Torture?
Here is the opinion of a man who has both done it and had it done to him. "I volunteered to be waterboarded myself and can assure you that it is not a pleasant experience. But no one volunteers to be tortured."
Words mean things. They ought to be used responsibly. No good purpose is served by exaggeration in a context such as this. If waterboarding is torture, what would you call having a red-hot poker rammed 12 inches up your anal cavity? Would anyone volunteer for that?
Come Thursday it will be the fifth anniversary of the death of Christopher Hitchens. He, along with other journalists, allowed himself to be waterboarded.
I grant, however, that being waterboarded by friends is considerably different from being so treated by enemies.