Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • The Grave Danger to the Republic of ‘Red Flag’ Laws

    Destructive Democrats now label the National Rifle Association  a 'domestic terror organization.' Mind-mannered Mike of Mesa is a member and receives their publications. His mail man, though, is a flaming lefty. The mail man reports Mike to the government as a domestic terrorist on the ground that anyone who is a member of a terrorist organization is a terrorist. ATF agents break into Mike's house in the wee hours and seize his one and only firearm, a semi-automatic pistol. A year later, Mike is able to get his gun back, but he must pay all court costs.

    Not quite Nazi Germany, but getting there.

    If Democrats call NRA members domestic terrorists, I call Democrats totalitarian proto-Nazi scum. The difference between the two labels is that my label applies.

    Never forget that the Left's strategy is incremental: gun confiscation in violation of both the Second and Fourth Amendments.

    The Democrat Party is now a hard-Left party. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • Too Shallow for Self-Knowledge

    You cannot point out to the superficial their superficiality.  For that they are not deep enough.

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Notebook and its Ideal Entry, the Aphorism

    Susan Sontag on Elias Canetti:

    The notebook is the perfect literary form for an eternal student, someone who has no subject or, rather, whose subject is ‘everything’. It allows entries of all lengths and shapes and degrees of impatience and roughness, but its ideal entry is the aphorism. Most of Canetti’s entries take up the aphorist’s traditional themes: the hypocrisies of society, the vanity of human wishes, the sham of love, the ironies of death, the pleasure and necessity of solitude, and the intricacies of one’s own thought processes. Most of the great aphorists have been pessimists, purveyors of scorn for human folly. (The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well,’ Canetti has noted.) Aphoristic thinking is informal, unsociable, adversarial, proudly selfish. ‘One needs friends mainly in order to become impudent – that is, more oneself,’ Canetti writes: there is the authentic tone of the aphorist. The notebook holds that ideally impudent, efficient self that one constructs to deal with the world. By the disjunction of ideas and observations, by the brevity of their expression, by the absence of helpful illustration, the notebook makes of thinking something light.

    The first two sentences sound for all the world like a description of this here weblog.  Or as I put it above:

    . . . this weblog is just one philosopher's online journal, notebook, common place book, workshop, soapbox, sandbox, literary litter box, and online filing cabinet.    A lot of what I write here is unpolished and tentative.  I explore the cartography of ideas along many paths.  Here below we are in statu viae, and it is fitting that our thinking should be exploratory, meandering, and undogmatic.  Nothing human, and thus nothing philosophical, is foreign to me. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • Praeparatio Mortis

    We cannot prepare for the journey at the time of departure; the time of departure must find us prepared.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Let it Go!

    Why are you recalling an unpleasant event when everyone else involved has forgotten — not only it, but you?

    Bill Vallicella

  • 9/11: Eighteen Years After

    And the nation's borders are still not secure.

    The morning of 9/11 was a beautiful, dry Arizona morning. Back from a hard run, I flipped on the TV while doing some cool-down exercises only to see one of the planes crash into one of the towers. I knew right away what was going on.

    I said to my wife, "Well, two good things will come of this: Gary Condit will be out of the news forever, and finally something will be done about our porous southern border."

    I was right about the first, but not about the second.

    Do you remember Gary Condit, the California congressman? Succumbing as so many do to the fire down below, Condit initiated an extramarital affair with the federal intern, Chandra Levy. When Levy was found murdered, Condit's link to Levy proved his undoing. The cable shows were awash with the Condit-Levy affair that summer of 2001. 9/11 put an end to the soap opera.

    But it didn't do much for the security of the southern border.

    We have one last chance,and its name is Donald Trump.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Should We Discuss Our Differences? Pessimism and Optimism about Disagreement

    Our national life is becoming like philosophy: a scene of endless disagreement about almost everything. The difference, of course, is that philosophical controversy is typically conducted in a gentlemanly fashion without bloodshed or property damage. Some say that philosophy is a blood sport, but no blood is ever shed, and though philosophers are ever shooting down one another's arguments, gunfire at philosophical meetings is so far nonexistent.  A bit of poker brandishing is about as far as it goes.

    Some say we need more 'conversations' with  our political opponents about the hot-button issues that divide us.  The older I get the more pessimistic I become about the prospects of such 'conversations.'  I believe we need fewer conversations, less interaction, and the political equivalent of divorce.  Here is an extremely pessimistic view that I mention not to endorse but to mark one end of a spectrum:

    I believe the time for measured debate on national topics has passed. There are many erudite books now decorating the tweed-jacket pipe-rooms of avuncular conservative theorists. And none as effective at convincing our opponents as a shovel to the face. But setting that means aside, there is no utility in good-faith debate with a side whose core principle is your destruction. The “middle ground” is a chasm. It is instead our duty to scathe, to ridicule, to scorn, and encourage the same in others. But perhaps foremost it is our duty to hate what is being done. A healthy virile hate. For those of you not yet so animated, I can assure its effects are invigorating.

    Bret Stephens offers us an optimistic view in The Dying Art of Disagreement.

    Unfortunately, Stephens says things that are quite stupid. He says, for example, that disagreement is "the most vital ingredient of any decent society." That is as foolish as to say, as we repeatedly hear from so-called liberals, that our strength lies in diversity.  That is an absurdity bordering on such Orwellianisms as "War is peace" and 'Slavery is freedom."  Our strength lies not in our diversity, but in our unity. Likewise, the most vital ingredient in any decent society is agreement on values and principles and purposes.  Only on the basis of broad agreement can disagreement be fruitful.

    This is not to say that diversity is not a value at all; it is a value in competition with the value of unity, a value which must remain subordinated to the value of unity. Diversity within limits enriches a society; but what makes it viable is common ground. "United we stand, divided we fall."  "A house divided against itself cannot stand."

    Stephens goes on to create a problem for himself. Having gushed about how wonderful disagreement is, he then wonders why contemporary disagreement is so bitter, so unproductive, and so polarizing. If disagreement is the lifeblood of successful societies, why is blood being shed?

    Stephens naively thinks that if we just listen to  one another with open minds and mutual respect and the willingness to alter our views that our conversations will converge on agreement. He speaks of the "disagreements we need to have" that are "banished from the public square before they are settled."  Settled?  What hot button issue ever gets settled?  What does Stephens mean by 'settled'?  Does he mean: get the other side to shut up and acquiesce in what you are saying?  Or does he mean: resolve the dispute in a manner acceptable to all parties to it?  The latter is what he has to mean. But then no hot-button issue is going to get settled.

    Stephens fails to see that the disagreements are now so deep that there can be no reasonable talk of settling any dispute.  Does anyone in his right mind think that liberals will one day 'come around' and grasp that abortion is the deliberate killing of innocent human beings and that it ought be illegal in most cases?  And that is just one of many hot-button issues. 

    We don't agree on things that a few years ago all would have agreed on, e.g., that the national borders need to be secured.

    According to Stephens, "Intelligent disagreement is the lifeblood of any thriving society."  Again, this is just foolish.  To see this, consider the opposite:

    Agreement as to fundamental values, principles and purposes is the lifeblood of any thriving society.

    Now ask yourself: which of these statements is closer to the truth? Obviously  mine, not Stephens'. He will disagree with me about the role of disagreement.  How likely do you think it is that we will settle this meta-disagreement?  It is blindingly evident to me that I am right and that he is wrong.  Will he come to see the light? Don't count on it.

    It is naive to suppose that conversations will converge upon agreement, especially when the parties to the conversations are such a diverse bunch made even more diverse by destructive immigration policies.  For example, you cannot allow Sharia-supporting Muslims to immigrate into Western societies and then expect to have mutually respectful conversations with them that converge upon agreement.  

    I am not saying that there is no place for intelligent disagreement. There is, and it ought to be conducted with mutual respect, open-mindedness and all the rest.  The crucial point Stephens misses is that fruitful disagreement can take place only under the umbrella of shared principles, values, and purposes.  To invert the metaphor: fruitful disagreement presupposes common ground.

    And here is the problem:  lack of common ground.  I have nothing in common with the Black Lives Matters activists whose movement is based on lies about Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and the police.  I have nothing in common with Antifa thugs who have no respect for the classical traditions and values of the university.  I could go on: people who see nothing wrong with sanctuary jurisdictions, with open borders, with using the power to the state to force florists and caterers to violate their consciences; the gun grabbers; the fools who speak of 'systemic racism'; the appeasers of rogue regimes . . . .

    There is no comity without commonality, and the latter is on the wane.  A bad moon is rising, and trouble's on the way.  Let's hope we can avoid civil war. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • Democratic Socialism

    The problem with democratic socialism is that the adjective contradicts the noun.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Peter Unger on the Emptiness of the Present-Eternalist Debate

    Peter Unger doubts, with respect to the past, but not with respect to the future, whether there is any “concretely substantial difference” between presentism and eternalism (Empty Ideas, Oxford UP, 2014, 176 ff.). He argues that any appearance of a substantial difference is “illusory.” Both parties agree on such contingent past-tensed truths as that dinosaurs once roamed the earth. They agree that there are such truths about the past whether we know them or not. The parties to the dispute further agree that these truths are fixed and determinate, and as such unalterable. To employ one of Unger's examples, was Abe Lincoln as a boy ever friends with a boy named 'David'? According to Unger, he either was or was not, and there is a fact of the matter one way or the other. No matter that we don't know which. Unger: “. . . our Presentist and our Eternalist will agree that 'what's past is already fixed and determined; it's a done deal which cannot possible be undone.” (2014, 177) In sum, both parties to the controversy agree that there are truths about the past; that some of them are known to be true; that these truths, whether known or not, form a complete set; and that these truths cannot be changed.

    Unger's point is that presentist and eternalist differ only in the ways they talk and think about the collection of agreed-upon Moorean facts. The eternalist, but not the presentist, will say that dinosaurs tenselessly exist and tenselessly roam the earth at times millions of years earlier than the time at which the eternalist speaks, etc. The presentist, but not the eternalist, will just use ordinary English with its tenses: dinosaurs don't exist now, but they used to exist millions of years ago, and when they existed they roamed the earth, etc. There is no “concretely substantial difference” between what the presentist holds and what the eternalist holds with respect to the past. (2014, 178) Their disagreement is trivial and insubstantial because they differ merely on how to talk about a body of agreed-upon facts.

    But this can't be right since, while there is much that presentists and eternalists agree on, there are substantive points of disagreements that divide them. Unger says on behalf of the presentist that “a tenseless way of talking and thinking will have us (at least tend to) 'spatialize time,' thus (tending to make or) making obscure to us the dynamic aspect of concrete reality . . . .” (2014, 177, emphasis in original). Right here Unger himself unwittingly points to a substantive disagreement that divides presentists and eternalists, or at least those (the majority) of the latter who are B-eternalists. Is there a dynamic aspect of concrete reality? Surely it is a substantive question whether concrete, mind-independent reality is static or dynamic. If real time is exhausted by the B-series, then B-eternalism advocates a static view of time and change unacceptable to presentists.

    It surely seems that the following related questions are also substantive: Is temporal passage real or is it mind-dependent? Is time a fourth dimension of a four-dimensional manifold, space-time, which features time as its fourth dimension? Is the existence of temporal items independent of when they exist, or does the existence of such items depend on when they exist? Is existence reducible to temporal presentness, or not? Are the truths about the past on which presentists and eternalists agree brute truths or are they truths grounded in items external to the truths? Suppose we pursue the last question.

    Presentist and eternalist agree on the contingent truth that Socrates existed but does not now exist. What is this truth about? The natural answer is that it is about Socrates. The presentist, however, for whom only the present exists, cannot avail himself of this natural answer. For if present items alone exist, then Socrates does not exist in which case he cannot be referred to: the reference relation is such that, necessarily, if a name refers to, or is about, a thing, then the thing exists. The presentist has to say, implausibly, that 'Socrates' is about something else such as Socrates' haecceity, or else that the name is not about anything, and that therefore the truth in question is a brute truth. To say that it is a brute truth is to say that it is just true! When he was alive, the present-tensed 'Socrates exists,' or rather the proposition expressed by the Greek equivalent, was about Socrates, and true in virtue of Socrates' existence, but after he ceased to exist, 'Socrates existed,' which became true on Socrates' demise, is not about him. That is surely strange.

    The eternalist, recoiling in disgust, will say that the truth that Socrates existed is about Socrates who exists tenselessly at (some but not all of the) times earlier than the time of this observation, and that, therefore, the truth in question is not a brute truth, but one grounded in the (tenseless) existence of Socrates. Whatever the merits of the competing views, we certainly seem to have here a substantive disagreement, one that pivots on the question whether singular, affirmative truths about merely past items need truth-makers or truth-grounds. Maybe they do; maybe they don't. Either way, this is not a dispute about different ways of talking and thinking about some agreed-upon collection of Moorean facts.

    Unger also says on behalf of the presentist that

    . . . there aren't any such tenseless senses of, or forms of, 'exist' and 'be,' and any other naturally available constructions featuring verbs. . . . when it is said that two and three make five, the only real sense of that is the same as the single sense of what's stated when it's said that two and three now make five. . . . So, properly, we should say that two and three always did make five, and they now do make five, and they always will make five. (2014, 176-7.)

    But here too there are points of substantive disagreement. It is a substantive question whether or not numbers are timeless entities. Suppose they are. Then the copula in '7 is prime' will have to be tenseless. Talk about the timeless is tenseless. Since it is a substantive question whether there are timeless items, it is a substantive question whether there are tenseless senses of 'exist' and 'be.' Suppose I say to my class, “David Hume is an empiricist who believes that every significant idea is traceable to a corresponding sensory impression.” It is an interesting substantive question whether the verb forms in this sentence are tenseless or tensed.

    Bill Vallicella

    2 responses to “Peter Unger on the Emptiness of the Present-Eternalist Debate”

  • Word of the Day: Psephology

    Merriam-Webster: "the scientific study of elections." "Psephology is from the Greek word psēphos, meaning 'pebble.'"

    Necro-psephology is a growing field of inquiry in the Chicago area. For in those precincts there is a sizable turnout at elections of the dearly departed.

    If you have a large vocabulary you will love my blog; if you don't, you need it.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Dissembling in the Barber’s Chair

    My barber once asked me if I had done any travelling  since last I saw him.  I lied and said that I hadn't, when in fact I had been to Geneva, Switzerland.  If I had told the truth, then that truth would have led to another and yet another.  "And what did you do in Geneva?"  "I was invited to a conference on Bradley's Regress."  And thus would I have had to blow my cover as regular guy among regular guys in that quintessential enclave of the regular guy, the old-time barber shop.  I might have come across as self-important or as a braggart.  I might have come across as I come across to some on this weblog.

    Lies often lead to more lies, but truth-telling can get you in deep too. Life in this world of surfaces and seemings often goes down easier with a dollop of mendacity.  In a world phenomenal and phony a certain amount of phoniness is forgivable. 

    But how much?

    ……………………..

    Dave G. responds:

    Boy can I relate to that. It took me most of the way through college, but eventually I found out that people didn't like me and thought I was arrogant in part because of my vocabulary (full disclosure, I was also somewhat impatient with people who didn't think as quickly as I did). After that I stuck to Germanic-root words and found it noticeably easier to talk to girls. It was a few more years before I developed patience.

    The life of someone who is absorbed in things that almost no one else cares about can be lonely. I suppose that is part of what inspires philosophy bloggers. And model railroad bloggers, for that matter.

    The Internet has its negatives, obviously, but it is a wonderful tool for those who are not, as it were, stamped out by a cookie-cutter.  It makes it possible to locate the like-minded. It has enriched my life enormously.   

    Bill Vallicella

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Fred Neil

    Fred NeilRemember Fred Neil?  One of the  luminaries of the '60s folk scene,  he didn't do much musically thereafter.  Neil is probably best remembered  for having penned 'Everybody's Talkin' which was made famous by Harry Nilsson as the theme of Midnight Cowboy.  Here is Neil's version. Nilsson's rendition.

    Another of my Fred Neil favorites is "Other Side of  This Life."  Here is Peter, Paul, and Mary's version.

    And it's been a long long time since I last enjoyed That's the Bag I'm In.

    I've Got a Secret. YouTuber comment: "Why were the sixties so special and important? Fred Neil, for one." But why were they so special to us and not others? In part because we were raw, open to experience, and full of the painful & passionate intensity of youth.

    The reclusive Neil died in 2001 at the age of 64.  Biography here.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Meinertsen on the Merely Apparent Existence of Thick Particulars

    Meinertsen's bookThis is the second in a series on Bo Meinertsen's 2018 book. It is part of a 'warm-up' for a review article to appear in Metaphysica.  Here is the first installment.

    A thick particular in the parlance of David Armstrong is an ordinary particular taken together with its non-relational properties. But an ordinary particular is distinct from each and from all of its properties: it is that which has these properties. If we consider an ordinary particular in abstraction from its properties, what we have before our minds is the particular qua particular. From here it is but a short step to the much maligned and hotly contested bare or thin particular. Meinertsen ably defends bare or thin particulars as constituents of states of affairs in Chapter 5.

    A tomato will serve as an example. Call it 'Tom.' There are any number of contingent truths about Tom. Tom is red; Tom is ripe; Tom is round; etc.  Meinertsen and I agree that these truths need truthmakers. As I would put it, they can't just be true. What in the world makes them true? For Meinertsen, states of affairs (STOAs) play the truthmaker role.  A (first-order) state of affairs is a unified complex consisting of the instantiation of a property by a thin particular, or the instantiation of a relation by two or more thin particulars. Instantiation is an asymmetrical external relation that, in the monadic case, connects a thin particular to a property thereby forming a state of affairs.  The truth that Tom is red is thus made true by the state of affairs, Tom's being red, where the subject constituent is a thin particular, thin-Tom if you will, and not thick-Tom, Tom together with his intrinsic properties. And the same goes for the truth that Tom is ripe, and the truth that Tom is round.  For each truth there is a truthmaking state of affairs, a thin state of affairs we can call it since it includes only one of thick-Tom's properties.  

    Now take the conjunction of all of Tom's intrinsic properties. The result is a conjunctive property.  Call it the nature N of Tom. The instantiation of this nature by a thin particular is a state of affairs.  This is because N is a bona fide property, and the instantiation of any property by a thin particular is a state of affairs. This state of affairs is a thick state of affairs, and is identical to the thick particular, Tom. So the following comment (in the earlier thread) by Meinertsen comes as a bit of a surprise:

    As to (4), well, in my view, thick particulars aren’t real STOAs, merely apparent ones. It’s true that I assay a thick particular as the instantiation of N, the conjunctive property that is the conjunction of its intrinsic properties. But I also argue that conjunctive properties are truthmaking reducible (TM-reducible) – i.e. only existing at the level of truths, not at the level of truthmakers – and that the instantiation (‘instantiation’) of a TM-reducible property isn’t a real STOA.

    This is puzzling because the dialectic started with a really existent thick particular, Tom together with his properties, but seems to end with the elimination of the starting point and the demotion of the thick particular to a mere appearance.

    The reasoning seems to proceed as follows. The contingent truth that a is F needs a truthmaker, and so does the contingent truth that a is G. But the conjunction of the two truths — which is 'automatically' true given the truth of the conjuncts — does not need its own truthmaker.  So these three truths need only two truthmakers. There is no need for a third truthmaker because the truth of the conjunctive proposition supervenes on the truth of its conjuncts. It's an aletheiological 'free lunch.'

    Now consider the conjunction C of all the truths about a, or about Tom in our example. What makes this conjunction true are the 'thin' states of affairs corresponding to and grounding each of the truths  in the conjunction. The 'thin' states of affairs do all the truthmaking work: there is no need for a separate 'thick' state of affairs to serve as truthmaker for the conjunction itself.  But if there is no need for 'thick' states of affairs, then there is no need to posit thick particulars in reality. (A thick particular just is a 'thick' state of affairs.)  So thick particulars are best regarded as merely apparent.

    That is the argument as far as I can tell. Did I get it right, Bo?

    Critique

    But if there is no thick particular in reality, then what makes it the case that each of the thin particulars in each of the thin states of affairs is the same thin particular? Meinertsen speaks above of "the conjunctive property that is the conjunction of its intrinsic properties." (emphasis added) What is the antecedent of the pronoun 'its'?  That would have to be Tom in our example, thick-Tom, Tom together with all its properties. So the very identity of C — its being the conjunction it is and not some other conjunction — presupposes the reality of thick-Tom, Tom together with his intrinsic properties.  For C to exist and to be true, thick-Tom must exist. 

    I conclude that one cannot take thick particulars to be merely apparent.  Their reality is presupposed if the STOA style of ontology is to get off the ground in the first place.

    Now the tomato example is what Meinertsen rightly calls a "toy example." (5).  We philosophers employ such examples for convenience ignoring the fact, if it is fact, that tomatoes and other meso-particulars are not ontologically fundamental. So it may make sense to say that thick-Tom and his colleagues do not really exist. But surely the micro-entities of physics do exist and are thick particulars and thus 'thick' states of affairs. There have to be some thick particulars somewhere.

    On p. 70, Meinertsen tells that at the level of truthmakers, there are no such things as molecules. Presumably he will say the same about their constituent atoms.  But what about sub-atomic particles?  Could he be telling us that, no matter how far down we go, we will never encounter anything fundamentally real?

    Bill Vallicella

    One response to “Meinertsen on the Merely Apparent Existence of Thick Particulars”

  • Nicolai Hartmann on Søren Kierkegaard and Competing Attitudes Toward Individuality

    Although existentialist themes can be traced all the way back to Socrates and then forward through St. Augustine and Blaise Pascal, to mention only three pre-Kierkegaardian luminaries, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is rightly regarded as the father of existentialism. His worked proved to be seminal for that of Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Jean-Paul Sartre, to mention just three post-Kierkegaardian luminaries.  You won't be able to understand properly Angst, Existenz, or Sein-Zum-Tode in Heidegger without having read Kierkegaard. And the same goes for the key concepts of the others who are loosely collectible under the umbrella of existentialism.

    Kierkegaard's subjective-existential philosophical approach is one that is the polar opposite of one that could be described as objectivist or cosmological, for want of better labels. Nicolai Hartmann is an excellent representative of the latter tendency.  Here is what Wolfgang Stegmueller has to say about Hartmann's attitude toward Kierkegaard (the translation is mine):

    In Kierkegaard, the spiritual creator of existential philosophy, Hartmann sees the unhappiest and most cunningly refined (raffiniertesten) self-tormentor of human history.  Hartmann denies to anxiety and death any metaphysical significance while admitting their role as emotional phenomena.  Only an egotist (Ichmensch) consumed with self-importance sees in anxiety and death something unsettling and terrifying.  Cosmically considered, the death of the individual  shows itself to be a totally insignificant event in the totality of the world process.  It is only an unnatural attitude of protracted self-reflection that artificially induces anxiety of death which then assumes metaphysical weight. (Hauptstroemungen der Gegenwartsphilosophie, Alfred Kroener Verlag, 1960, 242.)

    For Hartmann, then, Kierkegaard's concern with the existing individual , and in the first instance himself as existing individual, merely reflects unhealthy self-absorption and egocentricity.  The individual, whether an individual rock, plant, animal or man is fleeting, ephemeral, of no final significance.

    Maybe I will finish this entry some day. Maybe I will die first. It has been languishing  in the queue for many a year. So here it is, a stub. If it gets you reading the luminaries mentioned, then it was worth posting.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Kevin Kim on John Pepple on Sweden as Europe’s Sacrificial Lamb

    A tip of the hat to Bill Keezer, and greetings to fellow bloggers Kim and Pepple. The titles of their blogs do not, however, earn the coveted MavPhil transparency of content award.

    Feed: BigHominid's Hairy Chasms
    Posted on: Thursday, September 5, 2019 1:22 AM
    Author: Kevin Kim
    Subject: Pepple on Sweden

    Is Sweden Europe's sacrificial lamb, to be laid out as a bloody example of what happens when you heedlessly allow an influx of Muslims who refuse to assimilate into your culture? In John Pepple's grim blog post, Dr. Pepple quotes a Frenchwoman who immigrated to Sweden, but who is now leaving the country for Budapest because the crime has gotten so bad, and because PC politicians, who fear being branded as racists, refuse to recognize that there's any problem with current immigration policy and law enforcement. Here's an excerpt of something the woman wrote—one long, cri de coeur sentence:

    I can no longer live under this immense mental stress, insecurity, murder, shooting, executions, explosions, rapes and gang rapes, robberies, home burglaries, beatings, car fires, school fires, serious criminals who, after a relatively short prison stay, may again be released to move freely among us, an increasingly dismantled welfare system, lack of health care staff, teachers, elderly housing, lack of elderly care, an increasing number of poor pensioners, municipalities in principle bankrupt or in bankruptcy, all these no-go zones called something else, lack of police resources where it may take 1.5-2 hours for them to arrive at the scene of ongoing crimes if they arrive at all, the lying politicians regardless of political color and the accomplished so-called PC media, the demonization of people who think differently, the shrinking freedom of expression, the increasingly diminishing democracy, and last, but not least, the ongoing and widespread Islamization of the country.

    Go read the rest.

    A similar picture is being painted of countries like France, which is dealing with its own immigration/assimilation problem. France has a built-in cultural immune system called laïcité or, roughly, secularism. This is why French law has made no bones about disallowing the wearing of religious items like Muslim veils (hijab, etc.). But in the area surrounding Paris, which is filled with tenements and housing projects, there are the same no-go zones, with plenty of robbery, rape, car fires, and so on. In Paris itself, tent cities—with their attendant filth and violence—can be found as well. But once you leave Paris, you'd be forgiven for thinking France is still France. In the area where my buddy Dominique lives, in the small town of Le Vanneau-Irleau, life goes on much as it has for decades, utterly untouched by what's happening in France's big cities.

    In the United States, there's a similar state of affairs, albeit with somewhat different demographics. Still, the heart of the US problem has much in common with Europe's problem: a lack of political will when it comes to things like immigration and the true causes of poverty, and a lack of will when it comes to law enforcement. Any teacher knows that losing control of the classroom means the students will rule and nothing of significance will be learned. This is basic human psychology: people need structure if they are to live in harmony and to flourish. Without structure, life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

    This is the paradox of freedom: true freedom is, far from being unstructured, veined throughout with structure. The creative freedom and amazing technique you can see in a great painter or martial artist is the result of focus and discipline. It's strange, but it's strictures that allow humans to flourish. And a society is no different from an individual in this regard: a society without strictures—an organic system of rules and laws and unspoken social contracts—becomes flabby and moribund. Look at New York City before and after Rudy Giuliani's two terms: Giuliani enforced the law, and his policies resulted in a few years of glorious prosperity between long periods of poverty and crime. Sweden is experiencing this problem now; so is France, at least in its big cities. The US has its own similar urban problems. As the folk song goes, When will they ever learn?

    View article…

    Bill Vallicella

Latest Comments

  2. 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

  9. Bill, One final complicating observation: The pacifist interpretation of Matt 5:38-42 has been contested in light of Lk 22: 36-38…

  10. The Kant-Swedenborg relation is more complicated than I thought. https://philarchive.org/archive/THOTRO-12

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