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.

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?

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?

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. 

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. 

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? 

“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.

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

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.

Courage

Mut verloren — alles verloren!
Da wär es besser, nicht geboren!
To lose courage is to lose everything, in which case it would have been better never to have been born.
 
A few stabs at rhyme-preserving translation:
Of courage shorn, of everything shorn!
In that case better, never to have been born!
Courage lost — everything lost!
Then having been born's too high a cost!
Loss of courage, something fatal!
Better then, never natal!
Loss of heart — loss of all!
'Twould then have been better, not to be at all!

Democracy and Abortion Law

There is no need for me to make the point when Malcolm Pollack has made it so well:

As a detached observer, I have to ask: If the two most important things in the moral universe are Democracy and abortion law, why is it a catastrophe when the Court decides that abortion law should be determined democratically? All that the Court has said in the leaked opinion is, in effect, this:

“You folks seem to care a very great deal about the sovereignty of the people. Very well, then — if you really are fit to rule yourselves, here is a vexatiously difficult question upon which the Constitution is silent, and which, therefore, must be decided by the sovereign power of the nation. (That’s you, the People, in case you haven’t been following along, you knuckleheads!) We were wrong to take this sovereign power away from you back in ’73, and so now we’re giving it back to you.

Happy Democracy! Mind how you go.”

The response to all this, however, from the ironically named Democrats, has been to explode with anger that such an important issue might actually have to be worked out in a democratic fashion, by things like debating and voting. And perhaps that’s reasonable, because we don’t do any of that very well at all anymore; it seems that we are actually rather farther along in the great cycle of Polybius than the people running things would care to admit.

So, here we are, America: you’ve been doing a lot of yelling about “MUH DEMOCRACY” lately, and now it looks like you’re about to be served up a heaping helping of it. If you don’t really want it after all, that’s, fine — but in that case I think we’d be glad if you would please shut the hell up about it.

Addendum (5/13)

Malcolm above implies that the abortion question is "vexatiously difficult." In one sense it is and in another sense it isn't.  Clarity will be served if we distinguish these two senses. I will begin with the second.

1) I take the central abortion question to be the question whether the aborting (and thus the intentional killing) of human fetuses is morally permissible at every stage of fetal development for any reason the mother may have. (I don't doubt that there are some good prima facie reasons for permitting abortion at any stage of pregnancy in such special cases as rape, etc.)   Now if this is the question, then it has a fairly easy answer: no, abortion is not morally permissible.  For we all accept — I hope — that there is a general moral prohibition against the intentional killing of innocent human beings.  Now human fetuses are human and they are innocent. It follows that the general prohibition against the intentional killing of innocent human beings extends to pre-natal human beings at every state of gestation. More needs to be said to counter various misunderstandings and objections, but that was fairly easy, don't you think?

2) The question becomes difficult and vexing when we descend from the general level to that of a particular woman in particular circumstances who becomes pregnant, but didn't intend to become pregnant, and doesn't want to be pregnant for whatever reason (she can't afford another child; giving birth will interfere with her career plans; she wants to go to Europe, etc.) It is not very difficult to know what ONE ought to do; what is difficult is to do it. For then it is not ONE who is doing it, but YOU. 

To put it in Kantian terms, duty and inclination come into conflict at the level of the individual agent.  I know what I ought to do, but I am very strongly inclined not to do it, and if I live in a permissive society the mores and laws of which allow me to do what is morally wrong, I will probably "go the way of all flesh," follow the path of least resistance and then put my intellect to work rationalizing my decision to take the easy way out, and then make use of the decadent West's multiple opportunities for 24-7 distraction to induce amnesia  about what I did.