Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
Opposing natural diversity, leftists seek to impose social diversity by law.
Creeping wussification is contributory to the anti-gunnery of the liberty-inimical Left.
Is vanity the last word? Or does the emptiness of this life point to a fullness beyond it? Vanity, I say, is the penultimate word.
Having renounced natural maternity, many women today seek an outlet in the political: they seek to become the nannies of the nanny state.
On this date in 1940, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Trotsky in exile in Mexico City when an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day. The Left eats its own.
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The last days of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, prime mover of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, are the subject of Bertrand M. Patenaude's Trotsky: The Downfall of a Revolutionary (HarperCollins, 2009). It held my interest from the first page to the last, skillfully telling the story of Trotsky's Mexican exile, those who guarded him, and their failure ultimately to protect him from an agent of the GPU/NKVD sent by Stalin to murder him. Contrary to some accounts, it was not an ice pick that Ramon Mercader drove into Trotsky's skull, but an ice axe. Here is how Trotsky ends his last testament, written in 1940, the year of his death:
For forty-three years of my conscious life I have been a revolutionary; and for forty-two I have fought under the banner of Marxism . . . I will die a proletarian revolutionary, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is no less ardent, indeed it is even stronger now than it was in the days of my youth. [. . .] Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air might enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight is everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of evil, oppression, and violence, and enjoy it to the full. (Patenaude, pp. 234-235)
No pie-in-the-sky for old Trotsky, but pie-in-the-future. Those of us who take religion seriously needn't deny that it can serve as opium for some. But if one can see that, then one should also be able to see that secular substitutes for religion can be just as narcotic. Why is utopian opium less narcotic than the religious variety? Why is a faith in Man and his future more worthy of credence than faith in God?
I should think that it is less credible. Note first that there is no Man, only men. And we human beings are a cussedly diverse and polyglot lot, a motley assortment of ornery sons-of-bitches riven by tribalisms and untold other factors of division. The notion that we are all going to work together to create a workers' paradise or any sort of earthly paradise is a notion too absurd to swallow given what we know about human nature, and in particular, what we know of the crimes of Communism. In the 20th century, communists murdered 100 million to achieve their utopia without achieving it.
We know Man does not exist, but we do not know that God does not exist. Religious faith, therefore, has a bit more to recommend it than secular faith. You say that God does not exist? That may be so. But the present question is not whether God exists or not, but whether belief in Man makes any sense and can substitute for belief in God. I say that it doesn't and can’t, that it is a sorry substitute if not outright delusional. We need help that we cannot provide for ourselves, either individually or collectively. The failure to grasp this is of the essence of the delusional Left, which, refusing the tutelage of tradition and experience, and having thrown overboard every moral standard, is ever ready to spill oceans of blood in pursuit of their utopian fantasies.
There may be no source of the help we need. Then the conclusion to draw is that we should get by as best we can until Night falls, rather than making things worse by drinking the Left's utopian Kool-Aid.
Trotsky, as you can see from the quotation, believed in a redemptive future. Life in this world is beautiful and will be cleansed by future generations of evil, oppression, and violence. But even if this fantasy future were achieved, it could not possibly redeem the countless millions who have suffered and died in the most horrible ways since time beyond memory. Marxist redemption-in-the-future would be a pseudo-redemption even if it were possible, which it isn't.
There is also the moral and practical absurdity of a social program that employs present evil, oppression, and violence in order to extirpate future evil, oppression, and violence. Once the totalitarian State is empowered to do absolutely anything in furtherance of its means-justifying ends it will turn on its own creators as it did on Trotsky. Because there is no such thing as The People, 'power to the people' is an empty and dangerous phrase and a cover for the tyranny of the vanguard or the dictator. The same goes for 'dictatorship of the proletariat.' What it comes to in practice is the dictatorship of the dictator.
The tragedy of Trotsky is that of a man of great theoretical and practical gifts who squandered his life pursuing a fata morgana. His was not the opium of the religionists but the opium of the intellectuals, to allude to a tile of Raymond Aron's. The latter species of opium I call utopium.
It is interesting to compare Edith Stein and Lev Davidovich Bronstein. Each renounced the present world and both set out in quest of a Not-Yet, one via contemplation, the other via revolution. Which chose the path of truth, which that of illusion? It is of course possible that both quests were illusory.
How strange the stage of this life and the characters that pass upon it, their words and gestures resounding for a time before fading away.
Gisle Tangenes describes the life and ideas of a cheerfully pessimistic, mountain-climbing Norwegian existentialist, pessimist, and anti-natalist, Peter Wessel Zapffe:
Thus the ‘thousand consolatory fictions’ that deny our captivity in dying beasts, afloat on a speck of dust in the eternal void. And after all, if a godly creator is waiting in the wings, it must be akin to the Lord in The Book of Job, since it allows its breathing creations to be “tumbled and destroyed in a vast machinery of forces foreign to interests.” Asserts Zapffe: “The more a human being in his worldview approaches the goal, the hegemony of love in a moral universe, the more has he become slipshod in the light of intellectual honesty.” The only escape from this predicament should be to discontinue the human race. Though extinction by agreement is not a terribly likely scenario, that is no more than an empirical fact of public opinion; in principle, all it would require is a global consensus to reproduce below replacement rates, and in a few generations, the likening of humankind would “not be the stars or the ocean sand, but a river dwindling to nothing in the great drought.”
So if you believe in a moral world order and the ultimate hegemony of love in the midst of all this misery and apparent senselessness, if you deny our irremediable "captivity in dying beasts," (what a great line!) then you display a lack of intellectual honesty. Let's think about this.
The gist of Zapffe's position as best I can make out from the fragments I have read is that our over-developed consciousness is an evolutionary fluke that makes us miserable by uselessly generating in us the conceit that we are more than animals and somehow deserving of something better than dying like an animal after some years of struggle. Giseles: "Evolution, he [Zapffe] argues, overdid its act when creating the human brain, akin to how a contemporary of the hunter, a deer misnamed the ‘Irish elk’, became moribund by its increasingly oversized antlers." A powerful image. The unfortunate species of deer, having evolved huge antlers for defense, cannot carry their weight and dies out in consequence. Similarly with us. We cannot carry the weight of the awareness born of our hypertrophic brains, an awareness that is not life-enhancing but inimical to life.
Human existence is thus absurd, without point or purpose. For human existence is not a merely biological living, but a conscious and self-conscious living, a reflective and self-questioning living in the light of the 'knowledge' of good and evil. Human existence is a mode of existence in which one apperceives oneself as aware of moral distinctions and as free to choose right or wrong. Whether or not we are really free, we cannot help but experience ourselves as free. Having become morally reflective, man becomes self-questioning. He hesitates, he feels guilty, his direct connection to life is weakened and in some cases destroyed. He torments himself with questions he cannot answer. The male beast in heat seizes the female and has his way with her. He doesn't reflect or scruple. 'Respect for persons' does not hobble him. The human beast, weakened by consciousness, self-consciousness, moral sensitivity, reason, objectivity, and all the rest, hesitates and moralizes — and the female gets away.
In short, man is a sick animal weakened by an over-developed brain who torments himself with questions about morality and ultimate meaning and then answers them by inventing consolatory fictions about God and the soul, or else about a future society in which the problem of meaning will be solved. Either pie in the sky or pie in the future to be washed down with leftist Kool-Aid. The truth, however, is that there is no ultimate meaning to be found either beyond the grave or this side of it. The truth is that human existence — which again is not a merely biological living — is absurd. And at some level we all know this to be the case. We all know, deep down, that we are just over-clever land mammals without a higher origin or higher destiny. One who will not accept this truth and who seeks to evade reality via religious and secular faiths is intellectually dishonest. Anti-natalism follows from intellectual honesty: it is wrong to cause the existence of more meaningless human lives. It is unfortunate that the human race came to be in the first place; the next best thing would be for it to die out.
Many of us have entertained such a dark vision at one time or another. But does it stand up to rational scrutiny? Could this really be the way things are? Or is this dark vision the nightmare of a diseased mind and heart?
There are several questions we can ask. Here I will consider only one: Can Zapffe legitimately demand intellectual honesty given his own premises?
The Demand for Intellectual Honesty
Zapffe thinks that we ought to be intellectually honest and admit the absurdity of human existence. This is presumably a moral ought, and indeed a categorical moral ought. We ought to accept the truth, not because of some desirable consequence of accepting it, but because it is the truth. But surely the following question cannot be suppressed: What place is there in an amoral universe for objective moral oughts and objective moral demands? No place at all.
It is we who demand that reality be faced and it is we who judge negatively those we do not face it. We demand truthfulness and condemn willful self-deception. But these demands of ours are absurd demands if our mental life is an absurd excrescence of matter. The demands would in that case have no objective validity whatsoever. The absurdist cannot, consistently with his absurdism, make moral demands and invoke objective moral oughts. He cannot coherently say: You ought to face the truth! You ought not deceive yourself or believe something because it is consoling or otherwise life-enhancing. Why should I face the truth?
"Because it is the truth."
But this is no answer, but a miserable tautology. The truth has no claim on my attention unless it is objectively valuable and, because objectively valuable, capable of generating in me an obligation to accept it. So why should I accept the truth?
"Because accepting the truth will help you adapt to your environment."
But this is exactly what is not the case in the present instance. The truth I am supposed to accept, namely, that my existence is meaningless, is inimical to my happiness and well-being. After all, numerous empirical studies have shown that conservatives, who tend to be religious, are much happier than leftists who tend to be irreligious. These people, from the absurdist perspective, fool themselves, but from the same perspective there can be no moral objection to such self-deception.
So again, assuming that human life is absurd, why should we accept rather than evade this supposed truth?
The absurdist cannot coherently maintain that one ought to be intellectually honest, or hold that being such is better than being intellectually dishonest. Nor can he hold that humans ought not procreate. Indeed, he cannot even maintain that it is an objectively bad thing that human existence is absurd.
The fundamental problem here is that the absurdist cannot coherently maintain that truth is objectively valuable. In his world there is no room for objective values and disvalues. By presupposing that truth is objectively valuable and that our intellectual integrity depends on acknowledging it, he presupposes something inconsistent with his own premises.
"You are ignoring the possibility that objective values are grounded in objective needs. We are organisms that need truth because we need contact with reality to flourish. This is why truth is objectively valuable."
But again this misses the crucial point that on Zapffe's absurdism, acceptance of the truth about our condition is not life-enhancing, not conducive to our flourishing. On the contrary, evasion of this 'truth' is life-enhancing.
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Addendum : Karl White refers us to some translations of Zapffe.
Some, not all. The ones I like.
The Exciters, Tell Him An incredibly tight and energetic live version.
Vince Guaraldi Trio, Cast Your Fate to the Wind
Cascades, Rhythm of the Rain
Rebels, Wild Weekend. Garage band guitar work. Great period photos. Nostalgia city.
Jan Bradley, Mama Didn't Lie
Johnny Cymbal, Mr. Bassman
Ray Baretto, El Watusi
Kyu Sakamoto, Sukiyaki
Los Indios Tabajares, Maria Elena. A standard dating from 1932. YouTuber comment: intramontabile, magica, fantastica, semplicemente fantastica!
Randy and the Rainbows, Denise. Great photos of Jack Kennedy.
Kai Winding, More
Jaynetts, Sally Go Round the Roses. This one goes out to Sally S. I'm thinking about you, Sal.
Barry and the Tamerlanes, I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight. I know what she's doing tonight. She's in the living room watching TV while I drink Tequila and prowl the vasty deeps of YouTube in search of one-hit wonders from 1963.
Robin Ward, Wonderful Summer
Bill Pursell, Our Winter Love
The Singing Nun, Dominique
Herewith, some comments on an excerpt from Michael Liccione, Faith, Private Judgment, Doubt, and Dissent.
So understood, private judgment can yield at least a measure of certitude, but not in any fashion certainty.
I agree that private judgment cannot deliver certainty, if objective certainty is in question. But I should think that the same is true of any collective judgment as well, including the collective judgments of the Roman Catholic magisterium. I am a cradle Catholic, but my 'inner Protestant' demands his due. In what follows, I will quote Liccione, agree with much of what he says, but try to explain why I cannot accept his ultimate conclusion.
If no human collectivity can be counted on implicitly to preserve and transmit the deposit of faith in its fullness, still less can any fallible, human individual. One can, for a lesser or greater time, feel certain that one is in possession of the faith once delivered; it can and does happen that the cognitive content of one’s faith thus contains much truth; one can even and thereby develop a genuine relationship of love and trust with Jesus Christ. But by one’s own profession one is no closer to infallibility, and probably less so, than any external human authority.
I agree with the above.
Faith must accordingly co-exist with a principle if not always a feeling of doubt, and be hedged about by that principle. For if councils and popes can err even in their most solemn exercises of doctrinal authority, then so a fortiori can anybody who eschews for themselves or their own faith community the kind of authority those sources have claimed. Ultimately, then, one’s faith is a matter of opinion. No matter how great the certitude which which one holds one’s religious opinions, they are just that—human opinions, always and in principle open to revision, just as any and all churches are human organizations semper reformanda.
If there is no ecclesial any more than individual indefectibility, then there is no ecclesial any more than individual infallibility. In principle if not always and everywhere in practice, everything remains up for grabs. If by nothing else, that is proven by the apparently limitless capacity of Protestantism to devolve into denominations and sects who can agree only on the proposition that, whatever the Bible means, it doesn’t have God giving the Catholic or even the Orthodox Church the kind of interpretive authority they claim.
The above too strikes me as correct as long as it is understood that matters of opinion needn't be matters of mere opinion and that some opinions are better than others, whether these be the opinions of individuals or the opinions officially endorsed by groups.
Faith so constituted and developed is radically different from what the Catholic and Orthodox churches both think of as faith. On the latter showing, part of the content of faith is that the Church teaches about faith and morals with an authority divinely bestowed and maintained; the differences between Catholicism and Orthodoxy about how “the Church” manifests such authority are secondary; in either case, the assent of faith entails accepting, as divinely revealed, what the Church definitively proposes as such. Such assent is not a matter of opinion, as it would be if it were a merely human product rather than a divine gift. It does not merely entail certitude; the certitude is itself based on the objective relation of certainty. By that latter relation, what is believed is understood to be unchangeably true because its ultimate object, a God who neither deceives nor can be deceived, is the same who proposes, through his Church, what is to be believed. When faith so understood is accepted as a gift of the Holy Spirit, and thus of grace, it is a virtue infused into the soul and its faculties, chiefly the mind. While its cognitive content can and should deepen and develop along with the coordinate virtues of life, nevertheless one either has such a virtue or one does not. It is not a human product and does not depend on human opinion. And if one has it, then one has eo ipso abandoned private judgment in matters pertaining to it.
The crucial proposition is the following. For the Catholic and Orthodox churches, "part of the content of faith is that the Church teaches about faith and morals with an authority divinely bestowed and maintained . . . ." Part of what one believes, then, is that the Church teaches with divine authority: God himself teaches us through the Church. If so, then its specific teachings with respect to faith and morals are objectively certain. Being taught by God himself is as good as it gets, epistemically speaking. We also note that if the Church teaches with divine authority, then this teaching itself, namely, that the Church teaches with divine authority, is objectively certain.
But what justifies one's belief that this particular church teaches with divine authority? If it teaches with divine authority, then not only are the particulars of the depositum fidei objectively and absolutely secured beyond all private judgment, but also the meta-claim to teach with divine authority is objectively and absolutely secured beyond all private judgment. But how do I know — where knowledge entails objective certainty — that the antecedent of the foregoing conditional is true?
That is, how can I be objectively certain that the Catholic and Orthodox churches teach with divine authority?
Of course, I can believe it, and perhaps I can believe it reasonably. Reasonable belief does not, however, amount to objective certainty. So I can't be objectively certain of it, whence it follows that I can't be objectively certain that the collective judgment of the Roman Catholic magisterium with respect to faith and morals is infallible. But I hear an objection coming.
"You believe it because the Church teaches it. And since the Church teaches with divine authority, you can be objectively certain that what you believe is true. And since part of what the Church teaches is that it teaches with divine authority, you can be objectively certain that the Church teaches with divine authority."
This objection, however, is plainly circular. I want to know how I can know with objective certainty that a particular church, the Roman Catholic Church, is the unique divine mouthpiece, and I am told that I can know this with objective certainty because it is the unique divine mouthpiece. But this doesn't help due to its circularity.
Liccione speaks above of the assent of faith as a divine gift and not as something I create from my own resources. Thus my acceptance of the Church's absolute authority and reliability with respect to faith and morals is a gift from God. But even if this is so, how can I be objectively certain that it is so and that my acceptance is a divine gift? Again the circle rears its head: it is objectively certain that the acceptance is a divine gift because it is God who gives the gift through the Church.
What Liccione is claiming on behalf of the Church is that it is an objectively self-certifying source of objectively certain truth with respect to faith and morals. As objectively self-certifying, it needs no certification by us. The Church is like God himself. God needs no external certification of his beliefs; he is the self-certifying source of his own certainty which is at once both subjective and objective.
Unfortunately, this doesn't help me. After all, I am the one who has to decide what to believe and how to live. I am the one who needs salvation and needs to find the right path to it. I am the one who needs to decide whether I will accept the Church's authority. The Church doesn't need my certification, but I need to certify to my own satisfaction that the Church's CLAIM to be the unique objectively self-certifying source of objectively certain moral and soteriological knowledge is a CREDIBLE claim that I ought to accept.
The aporetic philosopher regularly finds himself in a bind. What bind am I in now? It looks to be the old business about Athens and Jerusalem whose recent heroes are Husserl and Shestov. Autonomous reason demands validation of all claims by its own lights. Faith says, "Obey, submit, stop asking questions, accept the heteronomy of the creature who owes everything to his Creator, including his paltry reason and its flickering lights. Accept the divine gift of faith in humility."
To end on a romantic note, it seems somehow noble to stand astride the two great cities, with a leg in each, seeking, but not finding the coincidentia oppositorum, maintaining oneself in this tension until death reveals the answer or puts an end to all questions.
Treat your family members with the same respect as you would strangers. Unfortunately, propinquity militates against politeness. Conservatives understand that a certain formality in our relations with others, both within and without the family, helps maintain respect. Formality helps keep in check the contempt bred of familiarity.
In a missive this morning London Ed reports, "Badiou was awful, and not sure there is anything coherent that can be said about a writer so incoherent. He goes on for a chapter or so about history, then says ‘there is no such thing as history’." Ed's comment put me in mind of an entry of mine from over ten years ago, 22 March 2009, to be exact, that I hereby dust off, re-format, and present for your delectation and instruction.
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I hereby begin a series of posts highlighting various examples of objectionable Continental verbiage. Today’s example is not the worst but lies ready to hand, so I start with it. I don’t criticize the Continentals because I am an ‘analyst’; one of the reasons the Maverick Philosopher is so-called is because he is neither. The ‘analysts’ have their own typical failings which will come under fire later. A pox on both houses!
Alain Badiou’s Manifesto for Philosophy (tr. N. Madarasz, SUNY Press, 1996) begins like this:
The dominant philosophical traditions of the century agree that philosophy, as a discipline, is no longer really what it used to be. It must be said that Carnap’s critique of metaphysics as nonsense is very different from Heidegger’s announcement of the supersession of metaphysics. It is also very different from the Marxist dream of a concrete realization of philosophy. Very different as well from what Freud ferrets out as illusion, indeed paranoia, from speculative systematicity. But the fact remains that German hermeneutics like Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy, revolutionary Marxism and psychoanalytical interpretation concur to declare the ‘end’ of a millenial regime of thought. No further question of imagining a philosophia perrenis perpetuating itself. (27)
Although I have skimmed the whole of Badiou’s book, this opening paragraph really is enough reason to return the book to the library. Part of what he is saying is that "Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy" has declared the end of philosophy. This is simply false. It may be true for Richard Rorty, but Rorty does not represent analytic philosophy. It is true that Rorty rejects the existence of perennial philosophical problems, but this is not true of many or even most analytic philosophers.
When a book starts off with a grotesque falsehood, why continue reading? But if one does continue reading, one quickly finds oneself immersed in the usual Continental mishmash of persons and themes: Lacoue-Labarthe, Lyotard, Lacan, Deleuze, Gadamer, Celan, Derrida, Genet, Heidegger and the Jews and the Nazis, Kolyma and Auschwitz, Plato . . . . And all of this on one page! (28) What’s the point of all this name dropping? Are you a literary scribbler or a philosopher? Are you at a cocktail party or in your study?
Here is what I would say to Badiou et al. Define your terms. Make an assertion and defend it. Tell us what your thesis is. Say something definite. Try to be clear. Philosophy is hard enough even when one is clear. Avoid name dropping, that mark of the pseudo-intellectual. Go easy on the rhetorical questions. If you ever find something definite to say, employ the indicative mood.
One can re-read a page of this stuff half a dozen times and still not know what is being said or where the discussion is going. And I say this as someone who has read practically all of Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Gadamer, a crapload of Derrida (who, according to John Searle, gives bullshit a bad name) and plenty of others besides.
This Badiou book seems to have all the typical French faults: the confusion of philosophy with a kind of Begriffsdichtung (conceptual poetry) in which practically anything can be associated with anything else; the historicist confusion of a theory’s being accepted or in favor with its being true (but cf. p. 140); the promiscuous over-deployment of universal quantifiers; the excessive use of rhetorical questions . . . .
As an example of the latter: "What in fact did Heidegger do other than presume that the ‘firm resolve’ of the German people as embodied by the Nazis was transitive to his thinking as a professor and hermeneutician?" (29) Rewrite that interrogative as a declarative and it still won’t make much sense. Declarative nonsense doesn't suddenly become sense when translated into the interrogative. "Transitive to his thinking"?
UPDATE (8/16). Claude Boisson comments,
Alain Badiou on himself:« le philosophe français vivant le plus traduit, lu et commenté dans le monde » (2009)and, again talking to himself:« Vous [Badiou, à Badiou] êtes devenu le philosophe français vivant le plus traduit et le plus demandé, et de loin ». (2008)Badiou apparently likes to quote his own works and was the advisor for a doctoral dissertation devoted to his own thought.Sources:
A reader inquires,
A question. It seems I hit a wall every year or so in my intellectual life which involves uncertainty about what books/essays to read next, what subject matter to systematically pursue, what to reread and review (review is all too important). Now I know everyone is different, but could you share your approach to study during the week/month? Do you have a review day once a week? Do you have both a long-term project and a short term one going at the same time? Sorry if you’ve answered this in a post before, you may refer me to it.
I do have a long-term project, namely, a book I am trying to finish. The subject matter is extremely difficult and technical and so the going is slow. I am perhaps perversely attracted to the nastiest and toughest problems there are, problems that tax my poor pate to its paltry limits. I work on the book a little each day. And then I have a number of short-term projects going at the same time. One is a review article I have been invited to write, and another is an invited contribution to a collection of essays that must be submitted by January 1st. And then there is my pursuit of all sorts of other questions via blogging. On top of that 'culture war' activities: Blasting away day by day against the insanity of the destructive Left. The Kavanaugh proceedings galvanized me and 'inspired' me to bring the fight into the belly of the beast, Zuck's Facebook. I can't sit back and only think about God and the soul, time and existence, while my beloved country is destroyed by liberal-left filth.
You ask about review. Blogging helps with this. You shouldn't read serious material if you are not willing to study it, and there is little point in studying it if you don't take notes, assemble them into a coherent commentary, and evaluate what the author is maintaining, taking on board what is useful to you. For example, I have written series of posts on books by Benatar, Nagel, Plantinga, and others. These posts are available for review and cannibalization. The book I am writing will have a chapter on death. Some of the material from the Benatar posts will find its way into it.
Above all you need a direction and a definite focus. What is it that most concerns you that you want to understand? What is the cynosure of your interest? The nature of disagreement? The rationality/irrationality of religious belief? The foundation of morality? The nature of the political? Mind's place in nature? In Aristotelian terms, you need a 'final cause' of your inquiries, a unifying telos lest you spread yourself too thin and scatter your energies — as I am wont to do.
Related:
Peter Suber, Taking Notes on Philosophical Texts
Studiousness as Prophylaxis Against the Debilities of Old Age
The other night we heard Elizabeth Warren speak of various forms of racism, including 'environmental racism.' Bear with me as I try to figure out what this might be.
An industrial polluter dumps chemicals into a river. Now rivers come in colors. Anything that has a color, however, has a race. After all, race = color. So rivers are of various races. Now the river in question that the capitalist dog sullies is a River of Color. The rapids portion of the river is of course white and therefore white supremacist; but that doesn't count since the portion of the river where the pollutants enter is brown. So what we have here is a River of Color being maltreated by a white supremacist capitalist dog.
Here, then, is a clear case of environmental racism.
Alles klar?
Addendum
Another important question is whether any river is an illegal alien. Could a river change its course in such a way as to violate the territorial sovereignty of the USA, say? The Rio Grande perhaps? Would such a river become an illegal alien river? Presumably it would. And given the leftist conflation of illegal aliens with Hispanics, would such a river be rightly deemed an Hispanic river eligible for certain perquisites and privileges such as 'free' health care? Polluted rivers need health care; to withhold such care from an Hispanic river would be racist! We need to have a 'conversation' about this.
Yes, and I think I’m using in roughly the same sense that Jaspers means, which is why reading a work…
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
Vito, The monastery in question is located in a canyon accessible only by a 13-mile dirt road. Unsecured, anyone could…
Vito, Very stimulating comments, but I am pressed for time. The trouble with the scriptures is that you can find…
Your use of ‘cipher’ struck me. It is a key term in Karl Jaspers.
Bill, Gravity’s Rainbow was fascinating. I read it at a time when I was preeminently fascinated by works that had…
Hi Bill, Thanks so much for the references to work by Cheever’s daughter and the Lucas Thorpe article on Kant…
Excellent comments, Vito. Will try to respond tomorrow.
Bill, One final complicating observation: The pacifist interpretation of Matt 5:38-42 has been contested in light of Lk 22: 36-38…
The Kant-Swedenborg relation is more complicated than I thought. https://philarchive.org/archive/THOTRO-12