A large part of moral progress is progress in the realization of how much you need it. So, initially at least, the recession of the goal as you approach it indicates progress toward it.
Cacoethes Scribendi
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Self-Deprecation
A little self-deprecation is good, but more is not better. Nobody likes the boaster. Take self-deprecation too far, however, and people will have contempt for you.
Wife and Life, Truth and Practice
My wife is easy-going, tolerant, forgiving, good-hearted, and unselfish. Hungry, she bought herself a Costco hot dog and then, without my asking, gave me the lion's share,* concerned that I was hungry! I chose well in matters marital.
Human nature leaves a lot to be desired. And yet there is goodness and nobility in some people. The world is ugly, but there is also beauty in it. Life can seem meaningless, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," and yet it also at times appears under the aspect of ultimate Sense and Rightness.
You will have to decide which of these seemings to live by. Try both and see which is more conducive to happiness. The one that makes you happier has a solid claim on being the truer. That the truth should in the end thwart us strikes me as implausible. But the question cannot be resolved theoretically. You resolve it by living, thoughtful living, each for himself and by himself.
Titans once bestrode Harvard Yard.** Josiah Royce was one, William James the other. The latter held that truth is "the good in the way of belief." I commend that thought to your delectation, examination, and practical implementation.
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*Time was, when the lion's share of something was the whole of it. Despite my linguistic conservatism, I have acquiesced in the latter-day usage according to which the lion's share of something is most of it. If lions could speak, they would protest the semantic dilution.
**Pygmies now rule.
Memory and Existence: An Aporetic Tetrad
Try this foursome on for size:
1) Memory is a source of knowledge.
2) Whatever is known, exists.
3) Memory includes memory of wholly past individuals and events.
4) Whatever exists, is temporally present.
The limbs of the tetrad are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. To appreciate the logical inconsistency, note that 'exists' in (2) and in (4) have exactly the same sense, and that this is not the present-tensed sense. It is the tense-neutral and time-independent sense. Something that exists in this sense simply exists: it is one of the things listed in the ontological inventory. Hence talk in the literature of existence simpliciter. In both of its occurrences above, 'exists' means: existence simpliciter.
The limbs are individually plausible. But they are not equally plausible. (4) is the least plausible, and thus the most rejectable, i.e., the most rejection-worthy. Rejecting it, we arrive at an argument against presentism given that (4) is a version of presentism, which it is.
1*) Some of what is remembered is known.
2*) All that is known, exists.
Therefore
2.5) Some of what is remembered exists.
3*) All of what is remembered is wholly past.
Therefore
3.5) Some of what exists is wholly past.
Therefore
~4*) It is not the case that whatever exists, is temporally present. (Presentism is false.)
All is Fleeting
The 'is' gladdens; the 'fleeting' saddens.
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.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ten Violent Democrat-Run Cities
New York, New York. "Start spreading the news . . ."
Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again. "The post office has been stolen and the mail box is locked." Prescient!
Like crime? Vote Democratic!
Can an Atheist be Moral?
Yes, but would he have a reason to be?
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ARs and Cattle Cars
Those who wield the former are less likely to be forced into the latter.
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.'
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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.
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.
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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?
The View from Mount Zappfe
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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.
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*I grant that some types of diversity could strengthen a body politic.
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:
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:
From the spiritual to the secular:
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:
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.
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.