Saturday Night at the Oldies: September Songs

September's on the wane.  A transitional month leading from hot August to glorious October, Kerouac month in the MavPhil 'secular liturgy.'

Dinah Washington, September in the Rain

Rod Stewart, Maggie May. "Wake up Maggie, I think I got something to say to you/It's late September and I really should be back at school."

Carole King, It Might as Well Rain Until September

And while we have Miss King cued up, lend an ear to One Fine Day.

The 'sixties forever! We were young, raw, open, impressionable, experience-hungry; we lived intensely and sometimes foolishly.  We felt deeply, and suffered deeply. Youth has its truth. And our popular music put to shame the crap that came before and after. Or so we thought. And so we still think. Would I want to live though the 'sixties again? Hell no, I am having too good a time enjoying it memorially at a safe distance.  Youth has its truth, but if you can make it into old age with health and intellect intact, and a modicum of the lean green, you are winning the game. 

Django Reinhardt, September Song

George Shearing, September in the Rain

Walter Huston, September Song 

Van Morrison, September Night

Brothers Four, Try to Remember. I do remember when I was "a tender and callow fellow." 

Billie Holliday, September Song

Addendum

This from a London reader:

Thanks for linking to the George Shearing ‘September’. I had forgotten he grew up in London (in Battersea, just down the road from me). I love the Bird-like flights on the piano. Indeed I think he wrote ‘Lullaby of Birdland’. Another Londoner is Helen Shapiro who does a great version of ‘It might as well rain until September.’  Great alto voice, never made it in the US as far as I know. There is an  account of her conversion to Christianity here.

I was first hipped to Shearing by Kerouac who referred to him in On the Road.  I too love the 'Bird'-like flights on the piano. The allusion is to Charley 'Bird' Parker, also beloved of Kerouac.  Helen Shapiro is new to me, thanks. She does a great job with the Carole King composition.  Believe it or not, King's version is a demo. That's one hell of a demo. A YouTuber points out that Shapiro was not part of the 1964 'British Invasion.'  I wonder why.

Downplay Both

If you downplay your wins, downplay your losses. The pain of defeat is worse than the pleasure of victory is good. But you have the power  to regard them as equal. In some measure the pain of loss can be lessened. The Stoic therapy is no cure, but it is a palliative. If our predicament is a splitting headache, said therapy is a couple of aspirin. Take it and them for what they are worth.

With Detachment from the Outcome

There are games and there is life, and life is not a game. But life is like a game, and sufficiently so to warrant application of the same principle: play hard, but with detachment from the outcome.

In chess, and not just in chess, it is 'unsporting' not to try to defeat the opponent by all legal means.  It shows a lack of respect for the opponent and for the game to not do one's best. 

In life as in chess, play hard, but with detachment from the outcome.

If the above reminds you of the Bhagavad Gita, that's a feather in your cap.

Related: Coitus Reservatus and Beyond

Crime and ‘Equity’

On Biden's watch, crime is surging. It is easy to see why. For the 'woke' Left, the achieving of 'equity' is a high if not the highest desideratum. 'Equity' is wokespeak for equality of outcome. To achieve 'equity' in apprehension, prosecution, sentencing, and incarceration of blacks as compared to whites, given the much greater criminality of blacks as compared to whites and Asians, certain 'reforms' have to be made, including the elimination of cash bail. Standards have to be lowered to the point where blacks become the equals of whites and Asians with respect to such outcomes as apprehension, prosecution, sentencing, incarceration, and the like. The lowering of standards naturally brings more crime of all sorts.
 
If you believe that the upsurge of crime is a price that has to be paid to achieve the lofty goal of 'equity,' then I recommend that you continue to vote Democrat.

If God is Simple, How can the World be Contingent?

This entry is an offshoot of the earlier discussion of classical theism and its difference from theistic personalism. These labels have the meaning here than they had in that earlier discussion. Classical theism is committed to all three of the following:

1) God is simple.

2) God freely created the world in the libertarian 'could have done otherwise' sense.

3) There is no absolute necessity that God create our world or any world.

Theistic personalists hold that these three propositions are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.  If they are logically inconsistent, then at least one of them must be either rejected or modified. The theistic personalist will reject (1) on the ground that God is a person and that no person is simple.  This the classical theist will refuse to do on the basis of reasons he finds compelling. So refusing, he must find a way to turn aside the accusation of inconsistency.

Well, why should the triad be thought inconsistent? Here's why. If God is simple, then he is purely actual. If purely actual, then he harbors no potencies or unrealized powers. His power, which is manifested in his creating of the world (the totality of creatures), could then not have gone unrealized. He could not have refrained from creating. If so, his power to create had to be realized, in which case God's creating of the world (the totality of created items)  is necessary, not contingent. It is the necessary action of a necessarily existent agent, and is thus absolutely, as opposed to conditionally necessary. But then it follows that the world exists necessarily and not contingently. This is a consequence that cannot be countenanced by the classical theist. For it  conflicts with the divine aseity which is an entailment  of the divine simplicity, which is a plank in the classical platform. If God is a se, then he is under no necessity to create.  If God is a se, then he is wholly self-sufficient and fully actual whether or not he creates anything.

Can this reasoning be evaded?  I will conclude this entry by considering and rejecting one evasive stratagem.  Nathan Greeley writes,

. . . to say that God's activity of knowing and willing exist necessarily is not to say that created objects of his knowing and willing must also exist necessarily. As long as these created objects are considered really distinct from the acts by which they are known and willed, then the objects in themselves, need not have the same modal status as these acts. [. . .] God, one can then say, necessarily knows and necessarily wills  in an absolute manner, but at least some of the particular objects of his knowledge are contingent. ("Divine Simplicity: A Reply to Philosophical Objections" in The Lord is One: Reclaiming Divine Simplicity, eds. Minich and Kamel, Davenant Press, 2019, p. 237, emphasis added.)

The idea here is that what God necessarily creates, and thus could not have failed to create, can nevertheless be contingent, i.e., possibly nonexistent. As far as I can see, there is only way this could be true. Suppose that God's creating of a thing simultaneously releases it into ontological independence.  The divine creative act makes the thing exist, but once it exists, it exists on its own, 'by its own power' without divine assistance.  In other words, when God creates a thing, he creates it in such a way that its existence, moment by moment, does not depend on God's ongoing creative sustenance after the initial creative action. If this is the nature of creation, then the created entity could very well be contingent despite the creative act's being necessary. For the created entity to exist in the first place it is necessary that God create it, but after he does so the entity exists contingently. On this scheme, there is creatio originans (originating creation), but no creatio continuans (continuing creation). This allows what is originally caused to exist to be contingent.

Unfortunately, this understanding of creation is foreign to classical theism. On classical theism, creation is both originating and continuing. What's more, classical theism need not insist on the reality of this distinction. For even if the world (the created realm) has an infinite past and always existed, it could nonetheless have creaturely status. If that were the case, then there would be no real distinction between originating and continuing creation. If, on the other hand, the world had a beginning in time, then, on classical theism, it still needs to be kept in being moment by moment. 

I conclude that the stratagem proposed by Greeley above does not allow the proponent of divine simplicity to evade the conclusion that, if the simple God creates, then the product of his creative act necessarily exists. 

Next stop: modal collapse.

Were They Always On?

Did Socrates or his Danish disciple ever just play the regular guy while out and about in the public square? Did they ever hide their true selves in a concession to their own all-too-human humanity and in recognition of a need to stay loosely tethered to the mundane for the sake of sanity?

Or were they always on, examining their companions, playing the midwife, drawing them out, e-ducating and e-ducing, ever birthing a flame of inwardness in those lost in the diaspora of the sensual and the conventional? The same question could be asked about Jesus Christ.