On the Water Front

It is still deliciously cool, mornings, this Sonoran spring in the Zone, but the summer will soon be upon us. And so my regimen changes. I leave for my desert mountain bike ride earlier and earlier. This morning I was out from 5:11 to 6:37. First light is now around 5:00. The idea is to get to the Easternmost point of my loop before Old Sol is up and in my eyes. Ideally, he peeps his ancient head over the Superstition ridgeline just as I am turning Southwest.

The true Zone Man follows the sun.

Will I buy an e-bike? Eventually, after I can no longer respectably crank my Trek 930 over hill and dale, road and trail.

As for what Thoreau calls "the philosopher's drink,"  I double the early-morning hydration this time of year: no less than two 12 oz glasses of water right after arisal, and only then to coffee, that synaptic lubricant par excellence without which morning would be a mistake.

I exaggerate slightly and your mileage may vary.

On Sets: A Response to Brightly

David Brightly in a comment far below writes:

Bill says, at 03:21 PM.

…a family cannot be reduced to a number of persons; it is not a mere manifold, or a mere many…

The same is true for a pair (of shoes) and other collective terms. They all imply relations of some sort between their members. But this is not so for a mathematical set. No such relations are implied. A set is a pure manifold. Bill also says, at 03:42 PM,

…it also makes no sense to say that an abstract object — which is what math sets are — has Gomer surrounded.

I dispute this: mathematical abstract objects have relations between their parts and sets qua sets do not, so sets cannot be abstract objects. These are the chief reasons for thinking that sets are pure plural referring terms. Artificial, structured, linguistic extensions engineered by us for clarity of mathematical thought and expression.

Respondeo

I am afraid I find most of the above unacceptable.  First of all a pair of shoes is not a term, collective or singular. Terms are linguistic items; shoes are not.  It is true, though, that mathematical sets abstract from any relation their members bear to one another. But this is not something I denied.

It is also not the case that "a set is a pure manifold." That cannot be right because a set can have sets as elements (members). The Power Set axiom of axiomatic set theory states that for any set S, there exists a set P such that X is an element of P if and only if X is a subset of S. Thus the power set P of a set S is the set of all of S's subsets. So the power set of {1,2} = {{1}, {2}, {1,2}, { }}.  

The subsets of S are elements of the power set which fact shows that sets are distinct from their members and are therefore not pure manifolds. Sets are distinct from their members in that they count as objects in their own right. So if there is a set of Ed's dancing shoes, then this set is distinct from the left shoe, the right shoe, and the two taken collectively. This is one of the ways a set differs from a mereological sum/fusion. The sum of Ed's shoes is just those shoes, not an object distinct from them. 

Mereology is "ontologically innocent" as David Lewis puts it, whereas set theory is not:

Mereology is innocent . . . we have many things, we do mention one thing that is the many taken together, but this one thing is nothing different from the many. Set theory is not innocent. . . . when we have one thing, then somehow we have another wholly distinct thing, the singleton. And another, and another . . . ad infinitum. (Parts of Classes, Basil Blackwell 1991, p. 87)

Brightly argues: "mathematical abstract objects have relations between their parts and sets qua sets do not, so sets cannot be abstract objects." This makes no sense to me since the mereological notion of parthood does not belong in standard axiomatic set theory.  It is at best analogous to the  elementhood and subset relations which are essential to set theory.  The sum/fusion of Max and Manny has them and their cat-parts as parts.  The set {Max, Manny} does not have as elements their whiskers, claws, tails, etc. 

If there are sets, they are abstract objects, which is to say that they do not exist in space or time.  I can trip over my cat, but I can't trip over my cat's singleton.  Where in space is the null set? When did it come to be? How long will it last? Is it earlier or later than the null set's singleton? Is the nondenumerably infinite set of real numbers somewhere in spacetime?  These questions involve category mistakes.

I said that if the Hatfields have Gomer surrounded, that  cannot be taken to mean that the set having all and only the members of the Hatfield clan as its members has poor Gomer surrounded. What I said is obviously true.

So I conjecture that David is using 'abstract' in some idiosyncratic way. I await his clarification.

Genuine Inquiry and Two Forms of Pseudo-Inquiry: Sham Reasoning and Fake Reasoning

Steven Nemes sent me to his Substack site where he has an article entitled Theology and Philosophy in Roman Catholicism. His way of thinking reminds me of my younger self. What follows is a revised re-posting of an article of mine from September 2014 which explores similar themes. At the end of the re-posting I offer some comments on Nemes' article.

…………………….

In Philosophers Who Compartmentalize and Those Who Don't,  I drew a distinction between

1. Philosophical inquiry pursued in order to support (defend and rationally justify) an antecedently held thesis or worldview whose source is extra-philosophical

and

2. Philosophical inquiry pursued in order to support (by generating) a thesis or worldview that is not antecedently held but arrived at by philosophical inquiry.  

But we need to nuance this a bit inasmuch as (1) conflates the distinction between

1a. Philosophical inquiry pursued in order to support (defend and rationally justify) an antecedently held thesis or worldview whose source is extra-philosophical, a thesis or worldview that will continue to be maintained whether or not the defensive and justificatory operations are successful

and

1b. Philosophical inquiry pursued in order to support (defend and rationally justify) an antecedently held thesis or worldview whose source is extra-philosophical, a thesis or worldview that will continue to be maintained only if the defensive and justificatory operations are successful.

Alvin Plantinga may serve as a contemporary example of (1a). I think it is fair  to say that his commitment to his  Dutch Reformed Christian worldview is such that  he would continue to adhere to it whether or not his technical philosophical work is judged successful in defending and rationally justifying it.  For a classical example of (1a), we may turn to Thomas Aquinas.  His commitment to the doctrine of the Incarnation does not depend on the success of his attempt at showing the doctrine to be rationally acceptable. (Don't confuse rational acceptability with rational provability.  The Incarnation cannot of course be rationally demonstrated. At best it can be shown to be rationally acceptable.)  Had his amanuensis Reginald convinced him that his defensive strategy in terms of reduplicatives was a non-starter, Thomas would not have suspended his acceptance of the doctrine in question; he would have looked for a  defense immune to objections.

There are of course atheists and materialists who also exemplify (1a).  Suppose a typical materialist about the mind proffers a theory that attempts to account for qualia and intentionality in purely naturalistic terms, and I succeed in showing him that his theory is untenable. Will he then reject his materialism about the mind or suspend judgment with respect to it?  Of course not.  He will 'go back to the drawing board' and try to develop a naturalistic theory immune to my objections. 

The same thing goes on in the sciences.  There are climate scientists who are ideologically committed to the thesis that anthropogenic global warming is taking place to such a degree that it poses an imminent threat to life on Earth.  They then look for evidence to buttress this conviction. If they find it, well and good; if they don't, they keep looking or adjust their thesis by shifting from the species to the genus, from global warming to climate change.  Clearly, the ideological commitment drives the well-funded research, and raises doubts about whether the science itself is more ideology than science.

According to Susan Haack, following C. S. Peirce, the four examples above (which are mine, not hers) are examples of pseudo-inquiry:

The distinguishing feature of genuine inquiry is that what the inquirer wants is to find the truth of some question. [. . .] The distinguishing feature of pseudo-inquiry is that what the 'inquirer' wants is not to discover the truth of some question but to make a case for some proposition determined in advance. (Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate, University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 8)

Haack SusanHaack, again following Peirce, distinguishes within pseudo-inquiry sham inquiry and sham reasoning from fake inquiry and fake reasoning.  You engage in sham reasoning when you make  "a case for the truth of some proposition your commitment to which is already evidence- and argument-proof."  (8) Characteristic of the sham 'inquirer' is a "prior and unbudgeable commitment to the proposition for which he tries to make a case." (9)

There are also those who are indifferent to the truth-value of the thesis they urge, but argue for it anyway to make a name for themselves and advance their careers.  Their reasoning is not sham but fake.  The sham reasoner is committed to the truth of the thesis he urges; the fake reasoner isn't: he is a bullshitter in Harry Frankfurt's sense.  I will not be concerned with fake inquiry in this post.

The question I need to decide is, first of all,  whether every case of (1a) is sham inquiry.  And the answer to that is No.  That consciousness exists, for example, is something I know to be true, and indeed from an extra-philosophical source, namely, introspection or inner sense.  Those who claim that consciousness is an illusion are frightfully mistaken.  I would be within my epistemic rights in simply dismissing their absurd claim as a bit of sophistry.   But suppose I give an argument why consciousness cannot be an illusion.  Such an argument would not count as sham reasoning despite my mind's being made up before I start my arguing, despite my "prior and unbudgeable commitment to the proposition" for which I argue.

Nothing is more evident that that consciousness, in my own case at least, exists.  Consider a somewhat different case, that of other minds, other consciousnesses.  Other minds are not given to me in the way my own mind is given to me.  Yet when I converse with a fellow human being, and succeed in communicating with him more or less satisfactorily, I am unshakably convinced that I am in the presence of an other mind: I KNOW that my interlocutor is an other mind.  And in the case of my cats, despite the fact that our communication does not rise to a very high level, I am unbudgingly convinced that they too  are subjects of consciousness, other minds. As a philosopher I want to know how it is that I have knowledge of other minds; I seek a justification of my belief in them.  Whether I come up with a decent justification or not, I hold fast to my belief.  I want to know how knowledge of other minds is possible, but I would never take my inability to demonstrate possibility as entailing that the knowledge in question is not actual.  The reasoning I engage in is genuine, not sham, despite the fact that there is no way I am going to abandon my conviction.

Suppose an eliminative materialist claims that there are no beliefs or desires.  I might simply dismiss his foolish assertion or I might argue against it.  If I do the latter, my reasoning is surely not sham despite my prior and unbudgeable commitment to my thesis.

Suppose David Lewis comes along and asserts that unrealized possibilities are physical objects.  I know that that is false.  Suppose a student doesn't see right off the bat that the claim is false and demands an argument.  I supply one.  Is my reasoning sham because there is no chance that I will change my view?  I don't think so.

Suppose someone denies the law of non-contradiction . . . .

There is no need to multiply examples: not every case of (1a) is sham inquiry.  Those who claim that consciousness is an illusion or that there are no beliefs and desires can, and perhaps ought to be, simply dismissed as sophists or bullshitters.  "Never argue with a sophist!" is a good maxim.  But deniers of God, the soul, the divinity of Christ, and the like cannot be simply dismissed as sophists or bullshitters.

So now we come to the hard cases, the interesting cases.

Consider the unshakable belief held by some that there is what William James calls an "unseen order." (Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 53)  Some of those who have this belief claim to have glimpsed the unseen order via mystical experience.  They claim that it lies beyond the senses, outer and inner, and that is also lies beyond what discursive reason can grasp.  And yet they reason about it, not to prove its existence, but to show how it, though supra-rational, is yet rationally acceptable.  Is their reasoning sham because they will hold to their conviction whether or not they succeed in showing that the conviction is rationally acceptable? 

I don't think so.  Seeing is believing, and mystical experience is a kind of seeing. Why trust abstract reasoning over direct experience? If you found a way out of Plato's Cave, then you know there is a way out, and all the abstract reasoning of all the benighted troglodytes counts for nothing at all in the teeth of that experience of liberation.  But rather than pursue a discussion of mystical experience, let's think about (propositional) revelation.

Consider Aquinas again.  There are things he thinks he can rationally demonstrate such as the existence of God.  The existence of God is a philosophically demonstrable preamble of faith, but not an article of faith. And there are things such as the Incarnation he thinks cannot be rationally demonstrated, but can be known to be true on the basis of revelation as mediated by the church's teaching authority. But while not provable (rationally demonstrable), the Incarnation is rationally acceptable.  Or so Thomas argues.  Is either sort of reasoning sham given that Aquinas would not abandon belief in God or in the Incarnation even if his reasoning in either case was shown to be faulty?  Bertrand Russell would say yes:

There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading.  (Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy, Simon and Schuster, p. 463)

It is easy to see that Haack is a sort of philosophical granddaughter of Russell at least on this point.

In correspondence Dennis Monokroussos points out that "Anthony Kenny had a nice quip in reply to the Russell quotation. On page 2 of his edited work, Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays (London, 1969) (cited in Brian Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 19), he says that the remark “comes oddly from a philosopher who took three hundred and sixty dense pages to offer a proof that 1 + 1 = 2.”

Exactly right.  This is yet another proof that not every instance of (1a) above is an instance of sham reasoning or sham inquiry. 

It is certainly false to say that, in general, it is unphilosophical or special pleading or an abuse of reason to seek arguments for a proposition antecedently accepted, a proposition the continuing acceptance of which does not depend on whether or not good arguments for it can be produced.  But if we are to be charitable to Lord Russell we should read his assertion as restricted to propositions, theological and otherwise, that are manifestly controversial.  So restricted, Russell's asseveration cannot be easily refuted by counterexample, which is not to say that it is obviously true.

Thus I cannot simply cite the Incarnation doctrine and announce that we know this from revelation and are justified in accepting it whether or not we are able to show that it is rationally acceptable.  For if it really is logically impossible then it cannot be true.  If you say that it is actually true, hence possibly true whether or not we can explain how it is possible for it to be true, then you beg the question by assuming that it is actually true despite the opponent's arguments that it is logically contradictory.

It looks to be a stand-off.

One can imagine a Thomist giving the following speech. 

My reasoning in defense of the Incarnation and other such doctrines as the Trinity is not sham despite the fact that I am irrevocably committed to these doctrines.  It is a question of faith seeking understanding.  I am trying to understand what I accept as true, analogously as Russell tried to understand in terms of logic and set theory what he accepted as true in mathematics.   I am not trying to decide whether what I accept is true since I know it it to be true via an extra-philosophical source of knowledge.  I am trying to understand how it could be true.  I am trying to integrate faith with reason in a manner analogous to the way Russell sought to integrate arithmetic and logic.  One can reason to find out new truths, but one can also reason, and reason legitimately, to penetrate intellectually truths one already possesses, truths the ongoing acceptance of which does not depend on one's penetrating them intellectually.

What then does the Russell-Haack objection  amount to?  It appears to amount to a rejection of certain extra-philosophical sources of knowledge/truth such as mystical experience, authority, and revelation.  I have shown that Russell and his epigones cannot reject every extra-philosophical source of knowledge, else they would have to reject inner and outer sense.  Can they prove that there cannot be any such thing as divine revelation?  And if they cannot prove that, then their rejection of the possibility is arbitrary.  If they say that any putative divine revelation has to validate itself by our lights, in our terms, to our logic, then that is just to reject divine revelation.

It looks to be a stand-off, then.  Russell and his epigones are within their  rights to remain within the sphere of immanence and not admit as true or real anything that cannot be certified or validated within that sphere by the satisfaction of the criteria human reason imposes.  And their opponents are free to make the opposite decision: to open themselves to a source of insight ab extra.

………………….

Nemes mentions a "fundamental asymmetry." "Theology takes itself for granted and makes use of philosophy only to the extent that it is useful for furthering theology’s own purposes. Theology is never really critiqued or corrected by philosophy per se." That's right: philosophia ancilla theologiae. But secular ideologies do the same thing.  Metaphysical naturalism and its epistemology, scientism, do not allow themselves to be "critiqued or corrected by philosophy per se." Philosophia ancilla scientiae.

Where is the asymmetry? The situation is symmetrical: both magisteria put philosophy to work to shore up their respective worldviews.  Atheists and mortalists, as a group, never admit defeat.  Corner a naturalist and he'll go eliminativist or mysterian on you.  Show Dennett that consciousness has no naturalist explanation, and he'll just deny its existence and pronounce it an illusion.  We don't explain illusions; we explain them away. Drive McGinn to the wall and he will tell you that it's a mystery.  How is that different from the orthodox Chalcedonian incarnationalist's claim that Christ is fully human and fully divine, one suppositum supporting two natures? Each side is committed to its 'truths' come hell or high water.

Secretum Meum Mihi

On the topic of Latin mottoes, Edith Stein's is from Isaiah 24, 16:

From the ends of the earth we have heard praises, the glory of the just one. And I said: My secret to myself, my secret to myself, woe is me: the prevaricators have prevaricated, and with the prevarication of transgressors they have prevaricated.

A finibus terrae laudes audivimus gloriam iusti et dixi secretum meum mihi secretum meum mihi vae mihi praevaricantes praevaricati sunt et praevaricatione transgressorum praevaricati sunt.

Edith Stein wrote the phrase, Secretum meum mihi ("My secret belongs to me," Mein Geheimnis gehört mir) to her friend, the philosopher Hedwig Conrad-Martius, the morning after Stein's conversion experience in the summer of 1921. Her conversion was occasioned by her reading of the autobiography of St. Theresa of Avila a copy of which she found in the library of Theodor Conrad and Hedwig Martius.

One is reminded of the Tolle, Lege passage  in St. Augustine's Confessions.

How Many Friends Have You Lost Over Politics?

I have lost about a half dozen. How about you? I am interested in your stories, but even more in your analysis.

Austin Ruse bemoans friendships lost. His piece ends:

Maybe my friend is right. Maybe we can’t be friends right now, maybe never. For me, though, that would be unspeakably sad. Message to my old pal: my door is always open. 

Unspeakably sad? I see things differently. People who lost their minds over Trump, people too stupid to see past the man's obnoxious style and credit his ideas and numerous positive accomplishments; people who refused to see Biden for what he is, a fraud, a phony, a brazen liar, an empty suit rooted in no principle, morally corrupt, physically feeble, and non compos mentis; people who donned useless masks out of ovine fear, people who went along, to get along, with wokery and trans-delusionality and the celebration of thugs and criminals and every manner of loser — such people were never worthy of my friendship in the first place. They were false friends from the start and I am glad circumstances made them show their true colors.  Good riddance!

Some say Trump is the Great Divider. Nonsense. He is the Great Clarifier.

How the Dems Will Win in 2024

Victor Davis Hanson explains.

Here's an alternative scenario from Paul Kengor.

"If RFK [Jr.] goes third party, it would be doomsday for Democrats. It could bring Donald Trump back to the White House. And if that happens, Democrats [will] have only themselves to blame for their idiotic, authoritarian policies on everything from vaccine mandates to drag queen story hours to transgender athletes bullying girls."

Comments now enabled.

Nominalism Presupposes What it Denies

What makes a pair of shoes a pair and not just two physical artifacts? Nominalist answer: nothing in reality. Our resident nominalist tells us that it is our use of 'a pair' that imports a unity, conventional and linguistic in nature, a unity that does not exist in reality apart from our conventional importation. We are being told that out there in the world there are no ones-in-many, let alone any ones-over-many. If that is  right, then there are no sets. For a set is a one-over-many in this sense: it is one item distinct from its many members. (Let's not worry about the null set, which has no members and unit-sets or singletons which have exactly one member each. Here lies yet another rich source of aporiai, but one problem at a time.) 

If there are no sets, then there are neither finite sets nor infinite sets. There are just pluralities, and all grouping, collecting, subsuming under common rubrics, unifying, etc. is done in language by language-users. What I will try to show is that if you think carefully about all of this you will have to make distinctions that are inconsistent with nominalism. 

My aim is purely negative: to show that the nominalism of the resident nominalist is untenable. If you have read a good amount of what I have written you will recall that I am a solubility skeptic, which in this instance means that I am not endorsing any realist solution of the problem. I am not pushing an opposing theory. 

I will start with some data that I find 'Moorean,' i.e., rationally indisputable and pre-theoretical.  (Unfortunately, one man's datum is another man's theory.) The phrase 'a pair' has a sense that remains the same over time and space, a sense that is the same for all competent speakers of English whether here or abroad. The same holds for ein Paar in German, and similarly for all languages. The sense or meaning of an expression, whether word, phrase, sentence, etc. must be distinguished from the expression.  An expression is something physical and thus sensible. The sensible is that which is able to be sensed via one of our senses.  I hear the sound that conveys to me the meaning of 'cat,' say, or I see the marks on paper. Hearing and seeing are outer senses that somehow inform us or, more cautiously, purport to inform us of the existence and properties of physical or material things that exist whether or not we perceive them. But I don't hear or see the meaning conveyed to me by your utterance of  a sentence such 'The cats are asleep.' The sentence, being a physical particular, is sensible; the meaning is intelligible. That's just Latin for understandable. I hear the words you speak, and if all goes well, I understand their meaning or sense, thereby understanding the proposition you intend to convey to me, namely, that the cats are asleep. Note that while one can trip over sleeping cats, one cannot trip over that the cats are asleep.

There are two distinctions implicit in the above that need to be set forth clearly.  I argue that neither is compatible with nominalism

A. The distinction between the sense/meaning of a linguistic expression and the expression. Why must we make this distinction? (a) Because the same sense can be expressed at different times by the same person using the same expression. (b) Because the same sense can be expressed at the same and at different times by different people using the same expression. (c) Because the same sense can be expressed in different languages using different expressions by the same and different people at the same and at different times. For example the following sentences express, or rather can be used to express, the same sense (meaning, proposition):

The cat is black.
Il gatto è nero. 
Die Katze ist schwarz.
Kedi siyah.
Kočka je černá.

So the sense of a word or phrase or sentence is a one-in-many in that each tokening of the word or phrase expresses numerically the same sense.  A tokening, by definition, is the production of a token, in this case, a linguistic token.  One way a speaker can produce such a token is by uttering the word or phrase in question. Another way is by writing the word or phrase down on a piece of paper. (There are numerous other ways as well.)  This production of tokens therefore presupposes a further distinction:

B. The distinction between linguistic types and linguistic tokens. In the following array, how many words are there?

cat
cat
cat

Three or one? Is the same word depicted three times? Or are there three words? Either answer is as good as the other but they contradict each other. So we need to make a distinction: there are three tokens of the same type. We are forced by elementary exegesis of the data to make the type-token distinction.  If you don't make it, then you will not be able to answer my simple question: three words or one?

You see (using the optical transducers in your head, and not by any visio intellectualis) the three tokens. And note that the tokens you now see are not the tokens I saw when I wrote this entry. Those were different tokens of the same type, tokens which, at the time of your reading are wholly past. Linguistic tokens are in time, and in space, which is not obviously the case for linguistic types. I said: not obviously the case, not: obviously not the case.   You see the three tokens, but do you see the type of which they are the tokens? If you do, then you have powers I lack. And yet the tokens are tokens of a type. No type, no tokens. So types exist. How will our nominalist accommodate them? He cannot reduce types to sets of tokens since he eschews sets. No sets, no sets of linguistic tokens. Linguistic types are multiply instantiable. That makes them universals. But no nominalist accepts universals.  Nominalists hold that everything is a particular.  I grant that the rejection of sets and the rejection of universals are different rejections. But if one rejects sets because they are abstract objects, one ought also to reject universals for the same reason.

Now glance back at the first array. What we have there are five different sentence tokens from five different languages.  Each is both token – and type-distinct from the other four. 

To conclude, I present our nominalist with two challenges. The first is to give a nominalist account of linguistic types without either reducing them to sets or treating them as ones-in-many or ones-over-many. The second challenge is to explain the distinction between the sense or meaning of an expression, which is not physical/material and the expression which is.

Suppose he responds to the second challenge by embracing conceptualism according to which  meanings are mental.  Conceptualism is concept-nominalism, as D. M. Armstrong has maintained. My counterargument would be that the meaning/sense expressed by a tokening of 'The cats are asleep'  is objectively either true or false, and thus either true or false for all of us, not just for the speaker. Sentential meanings are not private mental contents.  Fregean Gedanken, for example, are not dependent for their existence or truth-value on languages or language-users.  

 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Starting, Stopping, Moving, and Grooving

These tunes in memory of my cat Zeno and the 'cat' he was named after, Zeno of Elea.

Sammy Davis, Jr., I Can't Get Started Bunny Berigan, 1937.

Don Gibson, I Can't Stop Loving You

Little Eva, Locomotion Eva was Carole King's housekeeper. Carole wrote her a song . . .

Sir Douglas Quintet, She's about a Mover (She's a body mover.)

Electric Flag, Groovin' is Easy

A contender for the greatest, tightest band of the '60s, featuring Mike Bloomfield on guitar, my second guitar hero. I saw him play at the Monterey Pop Festival in '67. The Jewish kid from an affluent Chicago suburb exemplifies cultural appropriation at its finest. His riffs derive from B. B. King but he outplays the King of the Blues.  Is that a racist thing to say? It can't be racist if it's true.

From Dylan's Down in the Groove album, Ugliest Girl in the World.  From racism to sexism. But it can't be sexist if it's true. For any X, it can't be X-ist if it is true.  Is it speciesist to say that man is the crown of creation, or to prefer human beings to robots? Humanity first!

Trump the Only Way Forward

Conservatives Lost the Culture War and the Trump Agenda is the Only Path Forward

Refreshingly realistic but also deeply troubling. I fear the author is right. Conservatives lost the culture war and so now: 

Conservatives do not have a viable path to political power any other way. The issues of national survival are of primary importance. There is no point in fighting a culture war if we don’t have a country in which this war can take place. [. . .]

Trying to rehash these old battles in the present political moment, when institutional Christianity no longer has any meaningful political or cultural clout, is a waste of time—at least at the national level.

COVID-19 made the weakness of American Christianity painfully clear. Protestant and Catholic churches alike overwhelmingly declared themselves nonessential during the spring of 2020. That was, sadly, merely an acknowledgement of a longstanding reality.

Virtually no one today cares what the pope or any megachurch pastor, for that matter, has to say about political and cultural life. Their endorsements do not move the needle and their influence has had little to no bearing, even on their own flocks, when it comes to preserving the older standards of Christian morality and decency.  

[. . .]

We live in a country where the president says it is antisemitic to ban trans surgery for minors. And yet you will strain yourself trying to hear any priest or pastor say a word in response. Millions of Americans are hurting, desperately confused about their very identity and sexual impulses, and the leaders of the churches have almost nothing to say. Nonessential workers indeed.

[. . .]

One wonders what purpose, at this point, the differentiation between denominations even serves. Pope Francis, just like John MacArthur, agrees with the leftist view of racism. And Tim Keller, just like Pope Francis, lauds mass immigration. On the most prominent liberal issues of our day there is total agreement among the leaders of the West’s supposedly different Christian denominations. 

America has a moral majority, all right. It’s just liberal. The Left controls every institutional power center in America. Wall Street, the media, the universities, Hollywood, the military—you name it—everywhere the liberal consensus reigns supreme. There is not a single Fortune 500 company in America, not one, that would denounce transgender surgery for minors. 

Those institutions shape the public consciousness in a way social conservatives simply cannot. Manufactured consent is real and all around us. A large portion of Americans simply accept whatever their televisions and cellphones tell them to believe no matter how perverted, wrong, or harmful. Even many of those who do not agree with it, at least bow to the moral consensus. Think of all those many millions who got vaccinated, not because they wanted to, but because their “job required it” or because they couldn’t “travel without it.”

The idea that large numbers of Americans are going to “wake up” and “push back” is simply a cope. That’s not how popular opinion works. The idea that Americans are going to see transgenderism as a bridge too far is, I think, much overhyped. I remember the gay marriage “debates,” such as they were. I remember Prop 8 passing in 2008 in California. I also remember how none of these setbacks for the Left ultimately had any bearing in the end. By 2015, gay marriage was the law of the land. Today it is untouchable liberal orthodoxy supported by a majority of Americans, including large numbers of “conservatives.”

Deploying more 10,000-word essays on teleology and the new natural law isn’t going to solve the social issue problem either. Millions of Americans didn’t start shoving dildos in orifices, guzzling sex change hormones, and consuming billions of hours of pornography a year because they read an article or heard an argument. These sexual and social perversions spring from a much deeper source, one that isn’t going to be solved by policy wrangling in D.C. think tanks. 

The spiritual crisis that afflicts the West runs far deeper than most social conservatives want to admit. They don’t understand how bad things really are, which is why they stand around, mouths agape, as they try to figure out what a “furry” is or why U.S. military officers dress up in leather “pup play” fetish gear while they sodomize each other in uniform and then post photos to social media.

In light of our ongoing moral and spiritual crisis, I fully expect that the Bud Light/Dylan Mulvaney controversy is merely a blip that will soon pass. In the 1990s Ikea ran the world’s first commercial featuring a gay couple. In 2022, Ikea was valued at $17 billion. Go woke, go broke? 

Sure. 

The Matt Walsh’s of the world won’t want to hear this, but trying to fight the Left on gender with desiccated Socratic arguments (“What is a woman?”) is a losing battle. Owning liberals with facts and logic is mostly a waste of time.Political power doesn’t flow from scoring debate points in the “free marketplace of ideas.” It comes from the willingness to impose one’s beliefs on others and possessing the resources to do so. 

All morality requires enforcement. 

The Left implicitly understands that point. They are more than happy to crush their opponents. Just ask Donald Trump, John Eastman, Douglas Mackey, or any of the January 6 defendants. Strip away civilization and politics boils down to the distinction between friend and enemies. [You need a reference to Carl Schmitt here, son.] That’s why the White House hosted a trans day of visibility just two days after a transgender terrorist murdered six Christians in Tennessee. 

At some point, every political regime must put its foot down. Some people think cannibalism is wrong, others think that it is right. If the former are to prevail politically they must be willing to use force against the latter. In the end, this is what morality requires. This is what morality is. 

BV: The sound point here is that morality is just a lot of impotent prescriptions and proscriptions without an enforcement mechanism. But that is not to say that might makes right.  If the enforcer is to enforce good  and not evil, then the enforcer must either be God or, here below, godly men and governments.

Conservatives and Christians today simply lack the force of will to impose their social morality on the Left. That is why they lose cultural battles and the Left wins. Conservatives aren’t even willing to mock their enemies. If you want to make “respectable” social conservatives and Christians uncomfortable, call a prostitute a “whore” in their presence. Mock OnlyFans as a den of “sluts.” Express deep revulsion at sodomy. Watch them writhe in psychic pain. 

Such firm moral condemnation, I am frequently told, is “judge-y” and “un-Christian.” “We” need to “watch our tone” as “we” seek to “draw others to the faith.” As their flock comes under attack from wolves, the shepherds condemn those who would fight back. There are many such cases. 

The deep-rooted weakness of the American Christian Right is a serious problem. I wish it wasn’t this way. I wish my fellow Christians had more spirit. I wish our leaders would lead. That isn’t the reality we have, though, as much as I may wish otherwise.

Right now, conservatives in deep red areas can still fight cultural battles at the local and state levels. Even some purple states, at the local level, still provide a way to maneuver against the Left’s cultural hegemony. Everywhere else, and at the national level especially, conservatives must sideline the cultural battles in favor of the issues of national survival.  

Trump showed that even in our degraded moral culture, a huge percentage of Americans still want the nation to survive. They don’t hate themselves despite all the propaganda to which they’ve been subjected. The old pre-World War II conservative consensus in favor of protectionism, non-intervention, and immigration restrictions is still enormously popular. 

If we win on those fronts and secure a future for our country then, and only then, will we have a chance to fight once again for the family, for our faith, and for a return of moral decency. 

That day, however, is still a long way off. We have work to do.