Here is the six-page letter.
More at my Facebook page.
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President Trump Delivers a Stinging and Well-Deserved Rebuke to Nancy Pelosi
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Practice the ‘Step Back’
Keep the obtrusions of memory and perception and anticipation at mental arm's length. Practice the 'step back.' Rather than 'go with the flow' of centrifugal mind, examine whither it tends. To a place worth visiting? Harder still, well-nigh impossible, is to examine whence it comes. Swimming upstream to the hidden Source of the stream is much harder than impeding the outward flow. Content yourself for now with mental continence, an analog of, and probably impossible without, sexual continence. The practice of non-attachment is recommended by the major wisdom schools in the East and the West.
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What is Cultural Marxism?
Despite the febrile complaints of some leftists, 'cultural Marxism' is a useful term that picks out a genuine cultural phenomenon. It is no myth. Nor is it an anti-Semitic or a racist 'dog whistle.' It is alleged by leftists to be an anti-Semitic conservative slur because the members of the Frankfurt School were mainly Jews, even Adorno. Adorno's original name was not 'Theodor W. Adorno,' but 'Theodor Adorno Wiesengrund.'
But what is cultural Marxism?
For Karl Marx, the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class conflict. In market societies the two main classes in conflict are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, which stand to each other as oppressor and oppressed. This is not a conflict that can be mediated: it can be overcome only by the defeat of the oppressors. Herein lies an important difference between (classical) liberalism and Marxist leftism.i For the latter, politics is war, not a process of bargaining and accommodation on the basis of mutually accepted norms between parties with common interests and a desire to coexist peacefully. Cultural Marxism, retaining both the oppressor-oppressed motif and the belief in the intractability of the conflict, moves beyond classical or economic Marxism by widening the class of the oppressed to include blacks and other 'people of color,' women, male and female homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals, Muslims, immigrants legal and illegal, and others deemed to be victims of oppression.
Correspondingly, cultural Marxism widens the class of oppressors to include potentially all whites, males, heterosexuals and religionists, Christians mainly, regardless of their economic status. Thus within the ambit of cultural Marxism, a working-class Southern white male heterosexual Christian ends up among the oppressors. Such are Hillary Clinton's deplorables and irredeemables, and those about whom Barack Obama said, “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”ii
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i cf. Ralph Miliband, Marxism and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 17.
ii https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/apr/14/barackobama.uselections2008. Read the sentence carefully. It makes no sense.
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Death as the Muse of Morality Limits Our Immorality
How much more immoral we would be if we didn't have to die! Two thoughts.
1. Death sobers us and conduces to reflection on how we are living and how we ought to live. We fear the judgment that may come, and not primarily judgment of history or that of our circle of acquaintances. We sense that life is a serious 'business' and that all the seriousness would be drained from it were there no final reckoning, no Last Judgment. Some of us, like Wittgenstein, strive to make amends and put things to right before it is too late. (Do not scruple over his scrupulosity but take the message of his example.) We apply ourselves to the task of finally becoming morally 'decent' (anstaendig). The end approaches swiftly, and it will make a difference in the end how we comport ourselves here and now. One will especially feel this to be so when the here and now becomes the hora mortis.
DRURY: I had been reading Origen before. Origen taught that at the end of time here would be a final restitution of all things. That even Satan and the fallen angels would be restored to their former glory. This was a conception that appealed to me — but it was at once condemned as heretical.
WITTGENSTEIN: Of course it was rejected. It would make nonsense of everything else. If what we do now is to make no difference in the end, then all the seriousness of life is done away with. Your religious ideas have always seemed to me more Greek than biblical. Whereas my thoughts are one hundred per cent Hebraic.
(Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rhees, Oxford, 1984, p. 161.)
Death has been recognized from the beginning as the muse of philosophy. I supplement, or perhaps merely unpack, the Platonic thought by writing that death is the muse of morality.
2. Lives without limit here below would afford more time for more crime. Death spells a welcome end to homo homini lupus, at least in individual cases.
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Hitchens, Horowitz, Clinton, and Impeachment
Christopher Hitchens died on this date in 2011. The synergistic effects of his excessive consumption of smoke and spirits did him in at the tender age of 62. By comparison, David Horowitz is still going strong at 81 churning out books, manning the ramparts, and fighting the good fight. May he live to be 100!
We who live the life of the mind celebrate the longevity of Horowitz while mourning the loss of Hitchens despite the latter's excesses and aberrations. I will quote David Horowitz on Hitchens on Bill Clinton. This is relevant to the current impeachment proceedings against Donald J. Trump. The case for impeaching Clinton was much stronger than the case that was actually brought against him. There is no case at all against Trump.
In his mordantly incisive articles in both Vanity Fair and Salon, Hitchens has demonstrated that the nation's commander in chief cynically and mendaciously deployed the armed forces of the greatest power on earth to strike at three impoverished countries, with no clear military objective in mind. Using the most advanced weaponry the world has ever seen, Clinton launched missiles into the Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq for only one tangible political purpose, to — as Hitchens puts it — "distract attention from his filthy lunge at a beret-wearing cupcake."
Hitchens' claim that Clinton's military actions are criminal and impeachable is surely spot-on. Republicans, it seems, were right about the character issue, and failed only to demonstrate how this mattered to the policy issues the public cares deeply about. Instead they got themselves entangled in legalistic disputes about perjury and obstruction, losing the electorate along the way. In making his own powerful case against Clinton, Hitchens has underscored how Republicans botched the process by focusing on criminality that flowed from minor abuses of power — the sexual harassment of Paula Jones and its Monica Lewinsky subtext — while ignoring a major abuse that involved corrupting the presidency, damaging the nation's security and killing innocents abroad.
[. . .]
Given the transparent morality of Hitchens' anti-Clinton crusade, it is all the more revealing that so many of his comrades on the left, who ought to share these concerns, have chosen instead to turn on him so viciously. In a brutal display of comradely betrayal, they have publicly shunned him in an attempt to cut him off socially from his own community. One after another, they have rushed into print to tell the world at large how repulsed they are by a man whom only yesterday they called "friend," yet whom they now apparently no
longer even wish to know.Leading this pack was Hitchens' longtime colleague at the Nation, Alexander Cockburn, who denounced him as a "Judas" and "snitch." Cockburn was followed by a second Nation columnist, Katha Pollitt, who smeared Hitchens as a throwback to McCarthy-era informers ("Let's say the Communist Party was bad and wrong — Why help the repressive powers of the state? Let the government do its own dirty work."). She was joined by a 30-year political comrade, Todd Gitlin, who warned anyone who cared to listen that Hitchens was a social "poison," in the same toxic league as Ken Starr and Linda Tripp.
Consider the remarkable nature of this spectacle. Could one imagine a similar ritual performed by journalists of the right? Bob Novak, say, flanked by Pat Buchanan and William F. Buckley, pronouncing an anathema on Bill Safire, because the columnist had called for the jailing of Ollie North during the Iran-contra hearings? Not even North felt the need to announce such a public divorce. When was the last time any conservative figure (let alone a gathering of conservatives) stepped forward to declare they were ending a private friendship over a political disagreement?
The curses rained on Hitchens' head are part of a ritual that has become familiar over generations of the left, in which dissidents are excommunicated and consigned to various Siberias for their political deviance. It is a phenomenon normal to religious cults, where purity of heart is maintained through avoiding contact with the unclean. To have caused the left to invoke so drastic a measure, Hitchens had to have violated some fundamental principles of its faith. So what were they?
Read it all. An updated and extended version appears as "Defending Christopher," Chapter 23 of Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (Spence 1999), pp. 240-248.
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Do We Have Immaterial Souls?
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Should a Philosopher Care about the Political Situation?
It would seem that a "spectator of all time and existence" (Plato, Republic 486a) ought to care inasmuch as his 'telescope' is located in the world, well within range of the agents of the State, the power of which has rarely been limited, and the malevolence of which has too often swamped the good things some states have done. (The State is a necessary evil.) In the 20th century alone, communists murdered some 100 million, destroyed countless churches and other religious edifices, and replaced philosophy with communist ideology.
You say you could still do philosophy in the gulag? Who are you, Boethius? I am no Boethius.
The philosopher here below must needs be a man of action, a fighter with words and weapons, to some extent at least, to defend the precincts within which alone the free life of the mind and spirit can flourish.
Companion post: The Consolations of Philosophy
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Butchvarov: Knowledge as Requiring Objective Certainty
We begin with an example from Panayot Butchvarov's The Concept of Knowledge, Northwestern University Press, 1970, p. 47.
[CK is the red volume on the topmost visible shelf. Immediately to its right is Butch's Being Qua Being. Is Butch showing without saying that epistemology is prior to metaphysics?]
But now to work.
There is a bag containing 99 white marbles and one black marble. I put my hand in the bag and without looking select a marble. Of course, I believe sight unseen that the marble I have selected is white. Suppose it is. Then I have a justified true belief that a white marble has been selected. My belief is justified because of the fact that only one of the 100 marbles is black. My belief is true because I happened to pick a white marble. But surely I don't know that I have selected a white marble. The justification, though very good, is not good enough for knowledge. I have justified true belief but not knowledge.
Knowledge, says Butchvarov, entails the impossibility of mistake. This seems right. The mere fact that people will use the word 'know' in a case like the one described cuts no ice. Ordinary usage proves nothing. People say the damndest things. They are exaggerating, as a subsequent post may show. 'Know' can be used in non-epistemic ways — think of carnal knowledge for example — but used epistemically it can be used correctly in only one way: to mean absolute impossibility of mistake. Or as least that is Butchvarov's view, a view I find attractive.
Admittedly, knowledge as impossibility of mistake is a very stringent concept of knowledge. Why should we care to set the bar so high? Why is knowledge in the strict sense important? It is important because there are life and death situations in which one needs to know in order to decide on a course of action.
Suppose I am calmly and rationally contemplating suicide. I have lived a full life, my spouse has died, I have no dependents, and I have accomplished all that I can accomplish. But I am old and worn out and I have been diagnosed with a painful form of terminal cancer. Should I do away with myself? The money saved on expensive treatments could be donated to a worthy cause, etc.
If I know that I am just a material being with no prospects of post-mortem survival, then I have nothing to fear from God or an afterlife, and no need to factor in the moral progress I could make by bravely enduring the terminal suffering. For if I am nothing but a complex natural organism, then there is nothing to hope for beyond this life, and that moral progress could do me no good. (The little good it would do others is a vanishing quantity in comparison to the suffering I would have to endure.) Now is it not obvious that knowing whether one will or will not survive is very important? Clearly, what one wants here is genuine knowledge, which implies impossibility of mistake. For one is about to make a very important decision, perhaps the most important decision one can make.
Kant asked four great questions: What can I know? What ought I do? What can I hope for? What is man? One makes a joke of the first question if one demands anything less than certain knowledge. And note that what one wants is knowledge with respect to the other questions, not mere conjecture. Butchvarov puts the point as follows:
Where the truths in question are of the greatest importance, as philosophical truths usually are, where what is at issue is the immortality of the soul and the possibility of eternal damnation, the existence of an external world, of other persons, God, or of a real past, mere evidence, however good, is not enough — it is knowledge, impossibility of error, that we demand. (CK, 271)
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Like Islamists, Leftists Hate Apostates
David Horowitz, Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey (Spence Publishing, 2003), pp. 274-276:
The radical commitment is less a political than a moral choice. Leaving the faith is a traumatic experience because it involves an involuntary severing of communal ties. That is why "political correctness" is a habit of the progressive mind – it is the line of fear that holds the flock in check.
No greater caution exists for those tempted to leave the faith than the charge of "selling out." Prior to the temptation, leaving the faith is inconceivable, a sign that one is no longer a good person. Only pathological behavior – a lust for money or some other benefit – could explain to a leftist the decision to join the opposition. To the progressive mind, no decent person could ever freely make such a choice. Even in the post-communist world, the most untheoretical progressive remains in this way a vulgar marxist despite all that has historically transpired. The fact that Peter [Collier] and I actually lost opportunities for personal gain as a result of our change of heart made no impression on out former comrades, who labeled us "renegades" and accused us of selling out just the same.
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Five Grades of Agnosticism
In David Horowitz's Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America (Humanix, 2018), we read:
My own theological views are those of an agnostic — one who doesn't know. I do not know whether there is a Divine designer or not. (p. 24)
Well, I don't know either. I agree with Horowitz when he tells us, on the preceding page, that
. . . the question of whether God exists cannot be resolved. Both sides must rely on faith. (p. 23)
So what is the difference between me and Horowitz? We are both agnostics by his definition. But I am a theist whereas he is not. It appears that we need to distinguish different types or grades of agnosticism. It will develop that one can be both a theist and an agnostic.
AG-1: "I don't know, and I don't care. The existence of God is not a (live) issue for me." This sort of agnostic is a practical atheist. He lives as if there is no God, but without denying or doubting his existence.
AG-2: "I don't know, but I care, and I appreciate the importance of the question. But I see no good reason either to affirm or to deny, and so I suspend judgment. Rather than trouble my head over such a question, I content myself with the ordinary life of a mortal man. I do not dream of immortality or hanker after transcendence. While I grant that the question is of some importance, I do not consider the question of enough importance to trouble myself over it." This sort of agnosticism is close to Pyrrhonism.
AG-3: "I don't know, but I care, and I appreciate the importance of the question. And while I see no good reason to affirm or deny, I don't suspend judgment; I continue to inquire. I sense that my ultimate happiness is at stake, and that it would be imprudent simply to dismiss the question as unanswerable and sink back into everydayness."
AG-4: "I don't know, but I care, and I appreciate the great importance of the question. What's more, I find nothing epistemically disreputable about believing beyond the evidence, seeing as how we do this regularly in other areas of life; I cannot, however, bring myself to believe."
AG-5: "I don't know, but I care, and I appreciate the great importance of the question. I am inclined to believe, and I do believe, for reasons that are not rationally compelling, but also not epistemically disreputable. My faith is a living faith, not merely intellectual assent to a proposition; it is something I live, and my living as I do attests to the psychological reality of my believing."
The fifth grade of agnosticism is a type of theism. It is not the theism of the one who claims to know that God exists, or who claims to be able to prove that God exists. But it is theism nonetheless, for it is an affirmation of the existence of God. It follows that one can be both an agnostic and a theist. In fact, I would argue further that an agnostic is the only sort of theist one ought to be.
To conclude, what is the difference between me and Horowitz? We are both agnostics by his definition. But whereas I am an AG-5 agnostic, he, as far as I can tell, is an AG-3 agnostic.
Addendum (12/12). Vito Caiati responds:
I found your most recent post “Five Grades of Agnosticism” most valuable in that it succinctly sets out the quite diverse tenors of this philosophic position on the existence of God. Over the years, I have fallen into all of these “five grades,” with the exception of AG-1. As you know, I now, as for much of my life, affirm a much more specific version of AG-5, one that centers my life on Christian dogmas and practices, as taught by the Roman Catholic Church. My most recent return to Catholicism was, if you recall from our correspondence over the last few years, fraught with intellectual conflict, since my faith exists alongside of a powerful skeptical inclination, which is only further reinforced once the already daunting difficulties involved in an assertion of God’s existence are compounded by those involved in matters of dogma and doctrine. I have often thought that it would be best to remain with the embrace of philosophic theism, which is, I assume, what you are affirming in AG-5, that is, the affirmation of the existence of a theistic God and an adherence to those moral precepts that are evident to reason and conscience. Am I right about this?
Not quite. I am thinking of AG-5 as a type of theism that could be filled out and made more specific in different ways. One could add some or all of the following beliefs: immortality of the soul, resurrection of the body, triune nature of the one God, divine simplicity, divine incarnation, and so on through a range of even more specific beliefs concerning, e.g., the nature of post-mortem rewards and punishments, the impossibility of gaining merit after death, etc. None of these are precluded by the AG-5 schema. What the schema excludes is any claim to knowledge with regard to these matters. I am assuming that knowledge entails objective certainty. And so AG-5 runs counter to the traditional Roman Catholic claim that its magisterium teaches infallibly with absolute, divinely sanctioned and grounded authority, with respect to faith and morals. AG-5 rules out that sort of dogmatism.
If so, where does religion fit in, since a commitment to theism, even one that guides one’s mode of life is not a religion but a private philosophic and moral stance? Is it your position that a life-shaping belief, in a theistic God renders the choice of, say, a particular religious tradition not of first importance? So, for example, one might simply be advised to follow the theistic tradition into which one was born, as long as it possesses doctrinal, ethical, and liturgical features that are not inimical to the existence of a deity as classically construed?
AG-5 is not a merely philosophical schema that excludes religion. I am thinking of it as allowing for religious deployment and development. And if religion is communal, then the schema would permit a development that was not merely private.
I would say that a life-shaping belief in God (which goes beyond the mere belief that God exists) does not require adherence to any extant religious tradition. But that would be a hard row to hoe for most. They would be well-advised to stick to the tradition in which they were raised — except perhaps for Islam which is more of a destructive political ideology than a religion, although for peaceful Muslims it is better than no religion.
So you, Vito, would be well-advised to remain within the Roman Catholic ambit, provided you can find a parish with a Latin mass that is not manned by pedophiles or mere social workers or theological know-nothings and that adheres to and attempts to transmit traditional teachings.
Your post raises many other questions and concerns, such as those touching on revelation, but I will stop here.
Yes it does, and I am willing continue the conversation "until death do us part." It is my firm belief that there is no better and more noble way to spend the lion's share of one's brief time here below than by addressing, reverentially but critically, the Great Questions. And that includes the question of the possibility and actuality of divine revelation and all the rest of the theological and philosophical conundra, including Trinity, Incarnation, Transubstantiation, Ascension, Assumption, and so on, until death which, we hope, will lift the curtain and bring us light.
And if it doesn't? Well then, we have spent our lives in a most excellent way and have lost nothing of value.
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Military Service and ‘Skin in the Game’
There is something to be said in favor of an all-voluntary military, but on the debit side there is this: only those with 'skin in the game' — either their own or that of their loved ones — properly appreciate the costs of foreign military interventions. I say that as a conservative, not a libertarian.
There is also this to consider: In the bad old days of the draft, people of different stations – to use a good old word that will not be allowed to fall into desuetude, leastways not on my watch — were forced to associate with one another — with some good effects. It is 'broadening' to mingle and have to get along with different sorts of people. And when the veteran of foreign wars returns and takes up a profession in, say, academe, he brings with him precious hard-won experience of all sorts of people in different lands in trying circumstances. He is then more likely to exhibit the sense of a Winston Churchill as opposed to the nonsense of a Ward Churchill.
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Nancy Pelosi and the Divine Spark
Donald Trump famously referred to MS-13 gangsters as "animals." That's not the way I would put it inasmuch as it is an insult to animals who, unlike the gangbangers, are beneath good and evil. But Trump talks like a working stiff and we all know what he meant. Pelosi, however, took umbrage, protesting that the murderous bunch possesses "the divine spark" (her phrase) along with the rest of us. I don't disagree, but I do have a couple of questions for Madame Speaker.
First, Nancy dear, do you think the pre-natal also have the divine spark? If not, why not? Isn't that what your Catholic religion, bits of which you regularly inject into your speeches, teaches? And if the horrific rapes, murders, beheadings, etc. of the MS-13 do not cause them to forfeit the "divine spark," then how it it that a human fetus' lack of development prevents it from having said spark?
Second, as a leftist committed to driving every vestige of religion, or rather Christianity, from the public square, can't you see that it is inconsistent of you to use themes from your Catholic girlhood when it suits you and your obstructionist purposes?
You come across as a silly goose of a dingbat. Or is that just an act to mask your mendacity and subversiveness and Alinskyite disregard of double standards?
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A Paradox of Plenty
Complain if you like about the low level of your students, but bear in mind that you probably wouldn't have a teaching job if if it weren't for the decline in standards that is both cause and effect of the expansion of 'higher education.' A better term would be 'higher remediation.'
And then there is the Sermon on the Mount. Here is a list of 12 different interpretations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sermon_on_the_Mount