Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • Salman Rushdie, the Left, and Free Speech

    Last week's Sunday CBS Morning Show featured a segment on Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses, who was recently attacked in an apparent assassination attempt by a Muslim living in New Jersey.  You may recall that the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on Rushdie in 1989 in which the ayatollah called for Rushdie's death because of his depiction of Muhammad in the above-mentioned book.  Here are some observations and questions.

    1) Muslims have a long memory for anything they consider an attack on them or their religion. 33 years have passed since the issuing of the fatwa calling for the author's death. They neither  forgive nor  forget.  I note in passing that a fatwa is a high-level edict that need not include a call for anyone's death.

    2) True-believing, sharia-supporting Muslims have values antithetical to the Enlightenment values of our constitutional Republic, a central one of which is the value of free speech. So one might naturally wonder  what  the Muslim assailant was doing living in New Jersey. How did he get there? Did he arrive legally or illegally? Either way there are serious questions that need to be asked, but are never asked by leftists, whose ostensible aim is "fundamental transformation" (Obama), which amounts to destruction of the USA as she was founded to be. You might think that after the events of 9/11, the importance of border security would be well understood, even by leftists.  But for them open borders offer them an opportunity to so alter the demographics of the country that the Democrat Party can be expected to achieve permanent hegemony. To attain this glorious result they are willing to risk further terrorist attacks.

    3) It is of course hypocritical, though typical,  for a left-leaning media outlet such as CBS to stand up for Salman Rushdie and his right to freedom of expression while uttering nary a word of criticism of the regime's suppression of conservative dissent. By the  regime I mean the deep-state apparatus in cahoots with its woke-capitalist enablers and adjuncts.  Among the latter I include Big Tech, Big Pharma, the universities, and such mainstream media outlets  as CBS.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ten Violent Democrat-Run Cities

    New York, New York. "Start spreading the news . . ."

    L. A. Woman

    Born in Chicago

    Houston

    Streets of Philadelphia

    Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again. "The post office has been stolen and the mail box is locked." Prescient!

    Detroit City

    Dallas Alice

    By the Time I Get to Phoenix

    Lady Came from Baltimore

    Like crime? Vote Democratic!

    Bill Vallicella

  • Can an Atheist be Moral?

    Yes, but would he have a reason to be?

    Substack latest.

    Bill Vallicella

  • ARs and Cattle Cars

    Those who wield the former are less likely to be forced into the latter.

    Arbeit macht frei

    Orwellianisms come naturally to totalitarians. Arbeit macht frei reads the inscription over the Auschwitz concentration camp.  "Work makes one free." So you are most truly free when you are worked to death as a slave.

    The unarmed man is a defensively naked man.

    Now I defend your right to go around (defensively) naked, but only on condition that you defend, or at least not interfere with, my right to go around 'clothed.'

    ……………………….

    Facebook comment:

    Paraphrasing Machiavelli: Why should a man who is wrong pay any attention at all to a man who is right, and not armed?

    Just so. In the world as it is, appeals to what is right carry no weight unless backed by might.  Suppose you are hiking in the wild. You come across a girl being raped by some brute. If you are unarmed, all you can do is appeal to the brute's conscience. "Sir, don't you see that what you are doing is both morally and legally impermissible? Please stop!" If, on the other hand, you are armed, then then you have the means to intervene effectively should you decide to do so. Whether you should intervene is a difficult decision that depends on the exact circumstances. I am making just one very simple and indisputable point: an unarmed man lacks the means to defend himself or anyone else.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Rod Dreher on Critics of the Benedict Option

    A re-post from 20 July 2015.  Things are falling apart so fast that July 2015 seems  like a long time ago, even to an old man for whom tempus fugit is an understatement. The original posting occurred roughly four and a half years before the annus horribilis of 2020. And here we are more than half-way through 2022. The Amerikan police state is metastasizing as we speak. 87,000 new IRS agents armed with semi-automatic pistols and carbines to persuade the hyper-lawyered billionaire fat cats to 'pay their fair share' — to ape the idiom of Fauxcahontas Warren? Think again you of the ovine and bovine and usefully-idiotic persuasion. It is one of the several modes of what I am now calling the Assault on the Middle. More on this, anon.

    ……………………………..

    Excerpt:

    You keep talking about the Benedict Option, but you never say what it is. Give us the formula.

    I keep telling you that there is no formula! We are going to have to be experimental, because we have never faced a post-Christian culture. The first point is for Christians to wake up and face reality. There will be no “take back our country” moment, because we have lost, and lost decisively. We are rapidly de-Christianizing. True, we have a long way to go before we get to European rates of secularization and religious indifference, but the trajectory is the same. Rather than change the world, the world is changing the churches. The power of popular culture is overwhelming, and in ways that many Christians scarcely grasp — and this, as MacIntyre says, is part of our predicament.

    Granted, there is no formula:  there are different ways of implementing the Benedict Option.  But there ought to be discussion — not provided by Dreher in the above-referenced piece — of a potential problem with one form of the Option's implementation.  

    Suppose you and yours join a quasi-monastic community out in the middle of nowhere where you live more or less 'off the grid,' home-school your kids, try to keep alive and transmit our Judeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman traditions, all in keeping with that marvellous admonition of Goethe in Faust:

    Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,
    erwirb es, um es zu besitzen!
     
    What from your fathers you  received as heir,
    Acquire if  you would possess it. (tr. W. Kaufmann)

    So now you are out in the desert or the forest or in some isolated place free of the toxic influences of a society in collapse.  The problem is that you are now a very easy target for the fascists of the Left.  You and yours are all in one place, far away from the rest of society and its infrastructure.  All the fascists have to do is trump up some charges, of child-abuse, of gun violations, whatever.  The rest of society considers you kooks and benighted bigots and religious fanatics and won't be bothered if you are wiped off the face of the earth.  You might go the way of the Branch Davidians.

    Is this an alarmist scenario?  I hope it is.  But the way things are going, one ought to give careful thought to one's various withdrawal options. 

    It might be better to remain in diaspora in the cities and towns, spread out, in the midst of people and infrastructure the fascists of the Left will not target.  A sort of subversive engagement from within may in the long run be better than spatial withdrawal.  One can withdraw spiritually without withdrawing spatially.  One the other hand, we are spatial beings, and perhaps not merely accidentally, so the question is a serious one:  how well can one withdraw spiritually while in the midst of towns and cities and morally corrupt and spiritually dead people?

    And then there is the vexed and vexing question of armed resistance.  This is especially vexing for Christians.  Should we meet violence with violence, or let ourselves and our culture be destroyed?  On Christian metaphysics, this world is not an illusion.  It is not a dream one can hope to wake up from.  On the other hand, it is not ultimately real: it, and we who sojourn through it, are in statu viae. What then should be the measure and mode of our defense of it?

    If you think violence is to be met with violence, then I advise you to remain in diaspora in the cities and towns, spread out, in the midst of people and infrastructure the fascists of the Left will not target.

    We are indeed living in very interesting times.  How can one be bored?

    Bill Vallicella

  • The View from Mount Zappfe

    Substack latest.

    Zappfe nothingness

    Bill Vallicella

  • Tribalism and Diversity

    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. 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. 
     
    There are severe constraints on the diversity of the ingredients that can properly blend and  enhance each other in the proverbial melting pot.  This was well understood until about the mid-1960s.
     
    Now aren't my points the sanest you've heard all day? They are indeed eminently sane, but not to the destructive and self-enstupidated. They now dominate the Democrat Party here in the USA. 
     
    But while what I have said is sane, it has the air of the fantastic. "How can you concern yourself with immigration policy which you intend to have the force of law when the current lawless administration promotes wide-open borders and the elision of the key distinctions without which there can be no legal immigration policy?" The objector has in mind such distinctions as the following: legal versus illegal immigrant, citizen versus non-citizen,  asylum entry versus illegal entry. The granting of asylum to a political refuge from another country is an exceptional practice that grants immunity from the extradition that would normally be demanded in the case of illegal entry. To subsume all irregular entry under asylum entry destroys a crucial distinction.
    ___________
    *I grant that some types of diversity could strengthen a body politic.
    Bill Vallicella

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: ‘The King’ Dead 45 Years

    Elvis Presley died on 16 August 1977, 45 years ago. We can't let this weekend pass without a few tunes in commemoration.

    First a couple of 'Italian' numbers modeled, respectively, on O Sole Mio and Torna a Surriento: 

    It's Now or Never

    Surrender

    Continuing in the romantic vein:

    Can't Help Falling in Love.  A version by Andrea Bocelli. A woman for a heterosexual man is the highest finite object. The trick is to avoid idolatry and maintain custody of the heart.

    A Gospel number:

    Amazing Grace

    From the spiritual to the secular:

    Little Sister

    Marie's the Name of his Latest Flame

    Devil in Disguise. "Woman is man's devil." (Turkish proverb)

    And then there was hokey stuff like this reflecting his time in the Army in Germany:

    Wooden Heart

    Marlene Dietrich, Muss i denn 

    You Tuber comment:

    I was taught this song, in German, by a lovely young woman. I was 21 years old. She was a bit younger in years but older in so many – – – so very many – – – ways. We had just finished a room-service breakfast in a sun-filled hotel room overlooking the Rhine in Koln (Cologne) in 1954. I was impatient to get dressed and leave. The song changed my mind. I never hear this song without thinking of that lovely morning. My tour was over. I left Germany 4 days later. I never saw or heard of her again.

    Can't leave out the overdone and hyperromantic:

    The Wonder of You. (Per mia moglie)

    Out of time. Next stop: dinner with Dan Bongino.

    Posted by  on Saturday, August 19, 2017 at 05:56 PM 

    Bill Vallicella

  • Is the Left Out for Power Alone?

    Tucker Carlson and many other conservatives say that the Left is out for power alone, but it is not true. I grant, of course, that leftists love power and will do anything to gain it and maintain it. But why do they want it? Not for the sake of power alone, but to implement their agenda which they believe will be good for them and their clients. It is for the sake of the agenda — the things to be done — that leftists want power.
     
    With their hands on the levers of power, the Democrats can keep the borders open, empty the prisons, defund the police except for the state police, confiscate the firearms of law-abiding citizens, do away with the filibuster, give felons the right to vote while in prison, outlaw home schooling, alter curricula to promote the 'progressive' worldview (by among other things injecting 1619 Project fabrications into said curricula), infiltrate and ultimately destroy the institutions of civil society, pass 'hate speech' laws to squelch dissent, suppress religion, and so on into the abyss of leftist nihilism.
    Bill Vallicella

  • From the Mail Bag: Tony Benvin on Need

    On Aug. 7th you wrote ". . .the best response to the leftist who asks, "'Why do you need a gun?' is wrong question!"
     
    I have been saying for years that debating that question is allowing the left to set the premise of the debate.
     
    I also wanted to point out that questioning "need" is inherently a socialistic/communistic premise (". . . to each according to his need") which betrays the underlying nature of the gun controller's attack.  It's also an argument that is only ever selectively used. No one questions the need for air conditioning in a car (or an office for that matter), no one questions the need for a 75 inch OLED television, etc.  In fact, one of my touchstones for years has been asking would-be socialists to explain just why Leonid Breshnev NEEDED an antique car collection along with my offer to join their ranks if they could adequately respond.  
     
    After years of making that offer I have still not needed to join, and thought you might enjoy my essay in American Thinker about deconstructing socialists and their ilk:
     
     Thanks for your blog.  Your observations and discussions often make my day.
     
    UPDATE (8/11) Tony adds:
     
    Wow!  A post!  I didn't expect that or I would have written a little less informally.  Thank you for the attention and citation.
     
    You mention trying times; that they are, but I am also quite hopeful because I see success written in our national DNA.  My grandparents came to this country with little more than the clothes on their backs and to a language they didn't speak (I'll bet this applies to you, too).  Like Columbus, they set sail and took the chance that there be dragons out there, and now here we are two former professors (in my case, just the 2nd generation removed from the plow) with Ph.D.s and successful careers; we are the legacy of their bravery both personally and nationally.
     
    BV: Yes, it applies to me as well. All four of my grandparents immigrated from Italy, and my mother as well, coming over at age ten.  All learned English and assimilated.  The children were given Anglo names and not just because of the prejudice against Italians, but out of respect for Anglo-American culture.  Before the rot set in in the 'sixties, it was understood that immigration without assimilation would lead to trouble of the identity-political and tribalist sorts we are now experiencing. It was also understood that the borders had to be enforced and that only legal immigrants were to be allowed in. What's more — and this is also very important and now completely ignored — it was  understood that there is no right to immigrate and that legal immigration was to be allowed from only some countries and that these countries were to be ranked in terms of the potential contributions of their citizens to the well-being of the host country.  It was understood that an immigration policy is not a suicide pact, and that ethnomasochists are to have no hand in its formulation. But now we must witness the spectacle of a destructive fool who calls himself ALEJANDRO Mayorkas, a brazen liar who heads the Orwellian Department of Homeland Security, who repeats against the evidence of the senses that the border is secure!  It is evident that he and the entire Biden Administration is working to destroy the United  States as she was founded to be. 
     
    And so, Tony,  I am considerably less sanguine than you are. We are over-extended abroad and collapsing under the weight of our own decadence within. All of our institutions are being undermined by leftist termites. But we fight on, nonetheless, to the tune of 'It ain't over til it's over.' It will be very 'interesting' to see if the fight can be confined to the political sphere.
     
    As I'm sure you know, good men create good times, good times create soft men, soft men create bad times, and bad times create good men.  We are in the latter stage of that cycle, but unfortunately for you and I, that can mean generational change.
     
    UPDATE (8/12). Vito Caiati chimes in:
     

    Your and Tony’s stories on immigrant ancestors brought to mind that of my maternal grandfather Giovanni, who arrived with my grandmother, Anna, and three very little daughters in New York City just after the turn of the last century. Giovanni, who was a skilled machinist, in the days when that meant literally making and assembling the parts of machines, leaves his job at the naval shipyard in Palermo, travels to Naples to board a liner, crosses the Atlantic with a wife and three children, arrives in New York, where he is met by a cousin, Fausto, who is employed in a company that makes machines to produce paper bags. The cousin leads the immigrants to a small apartment in the Bronx, which he has procured for them, and early the very next morning, Giovanni, who speaks no English, leaves with the cousin, descends into the subway, emerges in mid-Manhattan, and ends up in a factory adjacent to the West Side piers, where he is immediately hired by the company (no big state welfare with this crowd) and where he works more than fifty years, sitting alongside of immigrant German machinists, all of them fashioning parts for prototype machines.  Like your grandparents and mother, everyone learned to speak, read, and write English, although the girls were given Italian names and Sicilian, along with English, was spoken at home.

    Another America, another New York, both of which I love dearly, now unrecognizable in my old age.   

     
    Bill Vallicella

  • Adeimantus, Machiavelli, Bloom, and Strauss

    Owl of Minerva bookishly bewingedRecent events make it clear that the West is on the wane. The sun is setting on the Land of Evening. As the West goes under, the philosopher, like the proverbial owl of Minerva, spreads his wings in the gathering dusk so as to attain an altitude from which to survey the passing scene.  He soars and he strains, to com-prehend and understand, and if he is of the tribe of Plato, he seeks to discern what might lie beyond the scene he surveys.  His flight is fueled by the thoughts of his great predecessors.

     

    I found the following in Allan Bloom's interpretive essay on Plato's Republic which is appended to his translation thereof. (Allan Bloom, The Republic of Plato, Basic Books, 1968, p. 371, correction and emphasis added.)

    Adeimantus' objection, then, is the same as Machiavelli's: the best regime is a mere dream, for a good city cannot avoid ruin if it does not do the things which will enable it to survive among vicious cities. It is foreign policy which makes the devotion to the good life within a city impossible [sic; read: possible]  One must be at least as powerful as one's neighbors and must adopt a way of life such as to make this possible. Poverty, smallness, and unchangingness cannot compete with wealth, greatness, and innovation. The true policy is outward-looking, and cities and men are radically dependent on others for what they must be. Without a response to this objection— which Machiavelli thought to be decisive for the rejection of classical political thought — the very attempt to elaborate a utopia is folly. (p. 371)

    My gloss: An enlightened nationalism, while chary of intervention, cannot be isolationist.

    And the following I found in Leo Strauss' essay "What is Political Philosophy?" in What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies, University of Chicago Press, 1988, originally published by The Free Press, 1959, pp. 40-41, emphasis and hyperlink added.

    The founder of modern political philosophy is Machiavelli. He tried to effect, and he did effect, a break with the whole tradition of political philosophy. He compared his achievement to that of men like Columbus. He claimed to have discovered a new moral continent. His claim is well founded; his political teaching is "wholly new." The only question is whether the new continent is fit for human habitation.

    In his Florentine Histories he tells the following story: Cosimo de Medici once said that men cannot maintain power with pater-nosters in their hands. This gave occasion to Cosimo's enemies to slander him as a man who loved himself more than his fatherland and who loved this world more than the next. Cosimo was then said to be somewhat immoral and somewhat irreligious. Machiavelli himself is open to the same charge. His work is based on a critique of religion and a critique of morality.

    His critique of religion, chiefly of Biblical religion, but also of paganism, is not original. It amounts to a restatement of the teaching of pagan philosophers, as well as of that medieval school which goes by the name of Averroism and which gave rise to the notion of the three impostors. Machiavelli's originality in this field is limited to the fact that he was a great master of blasphemy. The charm and gracefulness of his blasphemies will however be less strongly felt by us than their shocking character. Let us then keep them under the veil under which he has hidden them. I hasten to his critique of morality which is identical with his critique of classical political philosophy. One can state the main point as follows: there is something fundamentally wrong with an approach to politics which culminates in a Utopia, in the description of a best regime whose actualization is highly improbable. Let us then cease to take our bearings by virtue, the highest objective which a society might choose; let us begin to take our bearings by the objectives which are actually pursued by all societies. Machiavelli consciously lowers the standards of social action. His lowering of the standards is meant to lead to a higher probability of actualization of that scheme which is constructed in accordance with the lowered standards. Thus, the dependence on chance is reduced: chance will be conquered.

    I will take a stab at a gloss of the italicized passage. It is a grave error to aim at a utopian resolution of our political predicament. To seek the unachievable best is to preclude the attainment of the achievable good. The pursuit of unrealizable ideals will make hypocrites of us and what is far worse, murderers who will be able to justify mass murder  to achieve perfection as if anything truly straight could ever be made by human effort from the crooked timber of humanity.

     

    Bill Vallicella

  • Pascal, Buber, and the God of the Philosophers

    Substack latest.

    It is a mistake to oppose the God of the philosophers to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Rights and Needs

    You can have a right to a thing whether or not you have or will have a need for it. So the best response to the leftist who asks, "Why do you need a gun?" is wrong question! Stop the pointless conversation right there. "The question is not whether I need one; the question is whether I have a right to one." Then explain that the right to appropriate means of self-defense follows from the right to self-defense which in turn follows from the right to life.

    Depending on the sort of leftist you are dealing with you could then go on to explain why you do need a gun. But the wisest policy is not to debate leftists. Leftists need to be defeated not debated. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • Truth is not a Leftist Value

    Posted today on my Facebook page. I could not resist making some additions for the present venue.

    ………………………..

    My title is a Dennis Prager riff. But it needs a bit of nuancing, a job for a philosopher, not a talk show host.  Truth is a value for leftists in an instrumental sense: they will tell the truth if it serves their agenda. If it doesn't, they feel justified in lying. So perhaps we should say that for a leftist, truth is not an absolute value. They don't respect it as an objectively binding norm.
     
    For a leftist, especially the 'woke' species thereof, truth is simply a matter of perspective: it is the perspective of a particular power-hungry individual or tribe. The perspective is true to the extent that it enhances the power of the power-unit whose perspective it is.
     
    The underlying metaphysics and epistemology is Nietzschean. Now this here's Facebook, and not the place to get all academic. But perhaps now you understand why a leftard like the Ladder Man is enamored of Nietzsche.
     
    Die Welt is der Wille zur Macht und nichts anders!
    Das Kriterium der Wahrheit is die Steigerung des Machtgefühls! 
     
    "The world is the Will to Power and nothing besides!"
    "The criterion of truth is the increase in the feeling of power."
    It is also worth pointing out that coherence is not a leftist value either. Lefties say all sorts of things that make no sense in pursuit of their agenda. For example, "Walls are immoral." (Pelosi); "Diversity is our strength." (Pelosi and numerous other leftards.) Here too the absolute-instrumental distinction kicks in.
     
    The problem with "Walls are immoral" is not that it is false, but that it makes no sense, and therefore does not satisfy a necessary condition of a proposition's having a truth-value. A wall cannot be either moral or immoral; only a person who uses a wall for one purpose or another.
     
    But try explaining that to a destructive knucklehead like Madame Speaker! You won't get through to her because power is the cynosure of her political machinations. She was always a dingbat, but now she is a dingbat wrapped in senility. And a clear and present danger to the Republic, as witness her ill-advised Taiwan junket.
     
    A decrepit donkey should not poke a dragon with a stick.
    Bill Vallicella

  • Buber on Buddhism: Notes on a Trenchant Critique

    Substack latest. 

    Martin Buber's critique of Buddhism, and of mysticism generally, is formidable.

     

    Bill Vallicella

Latest Comments

  1. It’s unbelievable that people who work with the law are among the ranks of the most sophists, demagogues, and irrational…

  2. https://www.thefp.com/p/charles-fain-lehman-dont-tolerate-disorder-charlie-kirk-iryna-zarutska?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

  4. Hey Bill, Got it now, thanks for clarifying. I hope you have a nice Sunday. May God bless you!

  5. Vini, Good comments. Your command of the English language is impressive. In my penultimate paragraph I wrote, “Hence their hatred…

  6. Just a little correction, since I wrote somewhat hastily. I meant to say enemies of the truth (not from the…

  7. You touched on very, very important points, Bill. First, I agree that people nowadays simply want to believe whatever the…

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