Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • Not Dark Yet

     Tomorrow, Bob Dylan turns 81.

    Can one get tired of Dylan? That would be like getting tired of America. It would be like getting to the point where no passage in Kerouac brings a tingle to the spine or a tear to the eye, to the point where the earthly road ends and forever young must give way to knocking on heaven's door. The scrawny Jewish kid from Hibbing Minnesota, son of an appliance salesman, was an unlikely bard, but bard he became. He's been at it a long, long time, and his body of work is as vast and as variegated as America herself. We old fans from way back who were with him from the beginning are still finding gems unheard as we ourselves enter the twilight where it's not dark yet, but getting there. But it is a beautiful fade-out from a world that cannot last.

    A tip of the hat to Bro Inky for sending me to Powerline where Scott Johnson has a couple of celebratory pieces with plenty of links to Dylan covers. Here's one and here's the other. An excerpt from the first:

    In his illuminating City Journal essay on Pete Seeger — “America’s most successful Communist” — Howard Husock placed Dylan in the line of folk agitprop in which Seeger took pride of place. Husock’s essay is an important and entertaining piece. Dylan is only a small part of the story Husock has to tell, however, and Husock therefore does not pause long enough over Dylan to observe how quickly Dylan burst the confines of agitprop, found his voice, and tapped into his own vein of the Cosmic American Music. Looking back on his long career, one can discern his respect for the tradition as well as his ambition to take his place at its head.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Augustine was Right

    It is our love of the Unchanging Light, a love unconscious of itself and grotesquely diffracted into creatures, that animates our inordinate love of them. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • Against Marx

    "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world, but the point is to change it." (Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, #11) No, the point is to understand it, and to understand it so well that one understands that it cannot be changed in any but metaphysically inessential and unimportant ways.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Free Speech Absolutism?

    Substack latest.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Edward W. Farrell on Populism

    An impressive essay by an old friend of this weblog. Excerpts:

    Populists feel betrayed by the movers and shakers of the world who they faintly hoped were working in their best interests but were actually working in the interest of something else. What is this "something else?" Nothing less than a perfectly homogenous world untroubled by nationality or biology or religion, a world superficially diverse in ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation but lockstep in rigid ideology and hatred of dissent; a world, oddly enough, that's perfectly suited to fuel the engines of global commerce which feeds the global lust for feel-good distraction. The down payment for this perfect world is the perfect elimination of populists. Populists have discovered this by observing the inexorable erosion of their accustomed way of life over several decades along with the livelihoods that once supported their freedom of self-determination–all to the tune of "things are getting better all the time."  When they have the temerity to ask "getting better for whom?" and become too loud to be ignored, or God forbid they support a Trump, they receive a scornful lecture that they're working against their own best interests, which they are too stupid to understand. But they understand what this means: shut up and quit interfering with the best interests of your employers, their employers, all the government wonks that tirelessly work to support the wealth brokers to whom everyone grovels, and everyone else who knows nothing except that you and your kind are an albatross hung on civilization's neck.

    [. . .]

    Identity Politics and the Transformation of Civil Rights My discussion here is based largely on Christopher Caldwell's The Age of Enlightenment, though of course he cannot be blamed for any tangential interpretations or conclusions I've drawn from it.

    The path of race relations since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 reveals the true depth of the chasm between progressives and traditionalists. The traditionally-minded American sees America as exceptional: a beacon, "the city on the hill," built on constitutional foundations that are wise, sound, and unprecedented. In this view civil rights was never intended to alter American exceptionalism or the foundations that supported it. Rather, civil rights was seen as an effort to bring blacks, oppressed first by slavery and then by discriminatory Jim Crow laws in the South, into full citizenship with the majority of US citizens with all their attendant privileges and opportunities. The ultimate goal here was "race neutrality," a concept whereby race would no longer be a factor that lead to discrimination or preferential treatment.

    By 2020 it became obvious that many progressives had something entirely different in mind. They did not share the vision of America as a "city on a hill;" rather, they believed racism was central to America's ethos and that all of its institutions were racist. Racism had not so much to do with individuals and their treatment of other individuals. Racism was "built into" all of Americas laws and institutions; in fact, the notion of race neutrality was simply a dodge that perpetuated white power. And the progressive goal of racial equality (as opposed to neutrality) demanded that the institutions, laws, and cultural ethos that supported white power be destroyed or otherwise rendered harmless to its victims. Identity politics became the means of determining which group was the most oppressed and thus stood first in line for their share as white power was dismantled and redistributed.

    How did this divide come about?

    Read the rest.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Are We the Government?

    "We the people are the government." (Joe Biden) Barack Obama used to spout that same falsehood. "The government is us."
     
    It is a nice question whether they were lying or bullshitting.  The liar cares enough about the truth to want to hide it from us. The bullshitter doesn't care about the truth and will say anything. I borrow the distinction from Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit, a book undoubtedly more purchased than read.  It is a fine piece of analysis, but probably beyond the grasp of those who have 'twitterized' their attention spans.
     
    The government is not us. It is an entity distinct from most of us, and opposed to many if not most of us, run by a relatively small number of us. Among the latter are some decent people but also plenty of power-hungry individuals who may have started out with good intentions but who were soon suborned by the power, perquisites, and pelf of high office, people for whom a government position is a hustle like any hustle.
     
    Government likes power and likes to expand its power, and can be counted on to come up with plenty of rationalizations for the maintenance and extension of its power. It must be kept in check by us, who are not part of the government, just as big corporations need to be kept in check by government regulators.  Not that proper regulation is likely now under 'woke' capitalism.  But this is a large and separate topic.
     
    If you value liberty you must cultivate a healthy skepticism about government. To do so is not anti-government. Leftists love to slander us by saying that we are anti-government. It is a lie and they know it. They are not so stupid as not to know that to be for limited government is to be for government. But truth is not their concern; winning is. To their way of thinking the glorious end justifies the shabby means.
    Bill Vallicella

  • Hey Wokester!

    You won't teach your students grammar, but you will 'teach' them the 'right' pronouns?

    …………………………….

    J. E. comments:

    Having fled to a tavern following the presentation at an academic conference of a paper on modal verbs, I found your recent remark about the woke approach to grammar and language indicative of my broad experience as an English teacher. I would point out only one thing: when you say the wokester won't teach his/her/xe students grammar, a reader might presume you are attributing to the wokester the ability to teach grammar but the willful refusal to do so. Not so. Most that I have encountered could not distinguish a participle from a particle, though whether cause or consequence of their enwokened state I can never tell. Thanks for your time in reading this missive.

    And thank you for your well-written response.  I fear that you are right. But at least the wokester knows what a pronoun is. What hasn't dawned on him, however, is that his exiguous knowledge of grammar makes him partially racist since we all now know that grammar is racist and for the same reason that mathematics is.

    I will add that grammar is propadeutic to logic, or, as I heard a German say, Grammatik ist logische Vorschule. But we all now know how utterly racist logic is, precisely because of its having been secreted by the brains of  dead old white racists.  Please forgive the pleonastic expression, 'white racist.' 

    And if my employment of a German sentence isn't racist enough, here is a racist gloss on the foregoing:

    "Propaedeutic" is from Greek paideuein, meaning "to teach," plus "pro-," which means "before." "Paideia" and "paideuein" both spring from the root "paid-," which means "child."

    But you don't know that word, do you? You probably attended 'schools' run by leftists. Would it be an exaggeration to say that leftists specialize in the erasure of history and the erosion of standards? How much of an exaggeration?

    Bill Vallicella

  • Go Gray!

    The car of a neighbor sports a bumper sticker: "I vote pro-gun!"

    I say go gray.  Never advertise your political views when you are out and about in public.  These are dangerous times as polarization peaks and comity collapses. You must of course speak out, stand up, and prepare.  I am not advocating timid withdrawal from the fray. But there are more and less prudent ways to proceed. Prudence, you will recall, is one of the cardinal virtues.

    I have more to say on this topic at Substack in Are You a Gray Man?

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Long and the Short of it

    Long views or short? Substack latest.

    Bill Vallicella

  • A False Religious Humility?

    I wonder about the self-abasing humility of those at the extreme forward edge of the religious sensibility as personified by Simone Weil and others and as expressed in such locutions as "I am nothing" that one finds sprinkled about in devotional literature.   How could I be nothing given my divine origin? Is the creature nothing at all? That makes no sense. If the creature is nothing at all, then there is no creature and God is not creator.

    From our inauspicious  debut in copulative slime to our end in ashes and dust, we are nothing much, but real nonetheless. The Weilian extreme with its false humility is best avoided, but better than the insane arrogance of a Russell or a Sartre.

    To be arrogant is to arrogate to oneself attributes one does not possess. And so the mortal man puffs himself up as if he were an immortal god.  Russell and Sartre and Co. make idols of their petty, rebellious  egos. They've  got the direction right, but not the way to it. Theosis is indeed the goal, but it cannot be attained on one's own, by one's own power. Genesis has it that man alone is made in the image and likeness of God. I take that to mean that man alone is a spiritual animal, a personal animal.  Man alone has a higher origin and higher destiny, a destiny that Eastern Orthodox Christianity describes as theosis or deification.  The goal is to become god-like, a goal unattainable without  God and the divine initiative. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • Hard and Soft

    You must become hard to protect what is soft in yourself and in others. Become too hard, however, and you lose the reason for becoming hard. Fail to become hard and you won't be long for this world whose via dolorosa  must be tread a life long to arrive at self-individuation.  Self-individuation is a task, not a given. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • Face Masks

    Masks are a form of cultural appropriation. We have no right to adopt the apparel of criminals, thereby disrespecting by co-opting the accoutrement of their chosen lifestyle.  That lifestyle is who they are!  But not only that. Since criminals are disproportionately black, masks are also racist! 

    Masks are also discriminatory and non-inclusive. Doesn't every pathogen have a right to migrate whithersoever it wants?  Nancy Pelosi, that shining star of political wisdom, taught us that walls are immoral using those very words; how then could masks be any less immoral? 

    Bill Vallicella

  • “The People are Supreme”

    Thus read a protester's placard. Now that is rich!

    The implication is that in a democracy the people decide, not nine black-robed elitists, when the whole point of overturning Roe v. Wade is to return the question of the legality of abortion to the states where — wait for it –  the people will decide.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Heart Failure

    There is heart failure of the electrical and hydraulic sort and there is custody-of-the-heart failure. Which is worse? Well, which is better, our spiritual or our physical health?

    Johnny Cash: "I keep a close watch on this heart of mine."

    Elvis Presley: "I can't help falling in love with you." Andrea Bocelli in Las Vegas

    Bea Wain, Heart and Soul, 1939.  

    Neil Young, Heart of Gold

    Tom Waits, Heart Of Saturday Night

    Marcels, Heartache, 1961

    Linda Ronstadt, Heart Like a Wheel

    Bill Vallicella

  • Free Speech Absolutism?

    Time was when leftists were latitudinarian to the point of extremism on the question of free speech. But of late a "sea change into something rich and strange" (Shakespeare, The Tempest) has occurred, the 'trigger' being the liberation of Twitter by Elon Musk.  Leftists are now spooked by the specter of 'free speech absolutism.' And not only leftists, but certain of their pseudo-con fellow travellers such as the bootless Max Boot.

    To discuss the topic sensibly we need a definition.  One thing it should do is to specify that the topic is public expression, whether in speech or writing, not what occurs in private or in solitude. And let's be clear that the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution protects speech against abridgment  by the Federal government alone: "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . . ."  We also need to agree on what it means to say that a right is absolute. A right is absolute if and only if it is (i) inviolable (in the sense that it ought not be violated), (ii)  exceptionless, and (iii) equal, i.e., the same for everyone.  

    Free speech absolutism, then, is the view that everyone has the moral right right to express publicly, whether in speech or in writing, whatever one wants to express, on any topic, anywhere, and before any audience. 

    This is what I mean by free speech absolutism. (I also think that this is what one ought to mean by it.) Is that what you mean? There is no point in discussing this question or any question unless we agree on what exactly we are talking about.  If you don't agree with my definition than you ought to provide and defend a different one.

    Note that if the right to free expression is absolute, then whatever anyone anywhere expresses to anyone, whether true, false, meaningless, incitive of violence, etc.  ought to be tolerated. This follows from the correlativity of rights and duties.   If the right to free expression is absolute, then the duty to tolerate is absolute and therefore exceptionless and the same for all. But then we get toleration extremism, a position defended by J. S. Mill which I demolish in a Substack article.

    Free speech and open inquiry must be defended, but no intelligent and morally sane person could support free speech absolutism. The speech-suppressive Left aided and abetted by cranky neo-cons such as the bootless Boot have created a bogeyman.

    Bill Vallicella

Latest Comments

  2. Hi Bill Addis’ Nietzsche’s Ontology is readily available on Amazon, Ebay and Abebooks for about US$50-60 https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=addis&ch_sort=t&cm_sp=sort-_-SRP-_-Results&ds=30&dym=on&rollup=on&sortby=17&tn=Nietzsche%27s%20Ontology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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