Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
A Northern California reader sends this photo of a street scene in the vicinity of City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco. I made a 'pilgrimage' to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's famous bookstore in the early '70s. That was before the Kerouac street sign was up.
Some of Ferlinghetti's poetry can be read here. To my surprise, Ferlinghetti is still alive at 99. By contrast, old Kerouac quit the mortal coil and "the slaving meat wheel" at age 47. He is, we hope, "safe in heaven, dead."
Here is the full text of Senator Collins' speech before the U. S. Senate. (HT: Bill Keezer)
The analog of military valor in civilian life is called civil courage. Senator Collins has it. My impression is that some Republicans are finally learning from President Trump how to fight, as witness Senator Lindsey Graham's finest moment.
Malcolm Pollack, A Roundup of Reaction from the Right.
Most interesting to me is the following quotation from Pollack which embeds a quotation from Michael Anton on the "Gillibrand Standard" which well exposes the twisted viciousness of the contemporary Democrat Party (the bolding is mine, read it if you don't have the attention span for the whole thing):
Next, here’s Michael Anton, who as “Publius Decius Mus” wrote the critically important Flight 93 Election essay back in 2016. In this essay he writes about what he calls The Gillibrand Standard. Here are some longish excerpts, but you should read the whole thing.
The Left has created a new “standard” for American politics—indeed, new in the entire history of Anglo-American jurisprudence. Let us call it the Gillibrand Standard, after its most insistent advocate, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.).
According to the Gillibrand Standard, accusation suffices to destroy. Not only is no corroborating evidence necessary, to ask for such evidence makes one just as guilty as the accused. Especially monstrous is to ask questions of the accuser; that is to repeat or compound the alleged crime. The accusation, once stated, immediately takes on metaphysical certainty. To doubt is to blaspheme.
Actually, “accusation” is too generous. Machiavelli distinguishes between “accusation” and “calumny” in order to demonstrate that “as much as accusations are useful to republics, so much are calumnies pernicious.” The difference is that accusations are public, subject to critique and refutation, and a mendacious or even inaccurate accuser pays a price. Calumnies, by contrast, “have need neither of witnesses nor any other specific corroboration to prove them, so that everyone can be calumniated by everyone; but everyone cannot be accused, since accusations have need of true corroboration and of circumstances that show the truth of the accusation.” A more incisive summary of the Gillibrand Standard cannot be found.
… There is but one limiting principle to the Gillibrand Standard: It shalt be used only against the Right and Republicans. Credible accusations—with evidence, witnesses, contemporaneous police reports—against Democrats and liberals are not merely to be ignored but also stonewalled and attacked, alleged victims and witnesses alike smeared. That is, until this or that liberal is no longer useful in the moment and safely can be discarded. Throwing an expired liberal to the wolves now and then is useful to maintain the fiction of evenhandedness.
This is obviously outrageous, unjust, unfair, and offensive to any conceivable standard of decency. Just as obvious, the Democrats and Left not only do not care, they welcome the weaponization of accusation. Their only conceivable regret is that it might not work this time. But even if it doesn’t “work” in the sense that Kavanaugh is not confirmed, they know that it “works” in other ways. It rallies their base. It drives fundraising. It degrades public standards of decency and credibility, making its effective use more likely in the future. It delegitimizes institutions—in this case, the Supreme Court, which, with the addition of Justice Kavanaugh, may later rule constitutionally and correctly in ways the Left does not like. And, most important for the nihilistic Left, it delegitimizes and dehumanizes—makes a villain out of—Kavanaugh himself.
It is hard to say what is the most shamelessly disgusting aspect of this affair. I offer as a candidate the following tactic. First, smear your target with uncorroborated, unprovable and almost certainly false allegations. After you have—inevitably—failed to substantiate those charges, insist that your target withdraw since his reputation will now forever be under a cloud and his rulings will lack popular legitimacy. This is akin to breaking an opponent’s arm before a sporting event and then insisting that he forfeit.
Here:
These people. They have to be stopped. They’re ruining life. Who wants to work for a company where you can become an internal pariah for standing by your old friend? Who wants to work in a neurosis-ridden hamster cage where you have to be afraid that the internal mob will turn on you for having the “wrong” opinion? Who wants to get involved in helping out at your local school when ideologically-charged activists rush in to politicize everything?
[. . .]
UPDATE: A reader who grew up in communist Czechoslovakia writes:
It may look like Communism but it isn’t. It’s worse. Nobody, and I mean nobody (perhaps with one notable exception of a very decent guy, actually), believed the communist propaganda drivel. I don’t recall anybody fainting at the thought of imperialist ‘diversants’ sneaking across the border, revanchists hiding in their closets. It was a mechanism to control, brutalize and destroy and both the brutes and the brutalized understood it as such. Our current situation is somewhat unique. We actually have a large class of people who take this garbage at face value. That’s scary.
Victor Reppert poses the following important question on his Facebook page:
What, if anything, is wrong with holding, at the same time that a) Abortion is murder, and b) abortion should be legal?
It's not a logical contradiction, is it? Is it merely counterintuitive? Is it un-Christian?
One way of reaching this position might be to hold that, given a metaphysical or religious perspective, you view abortion as murder, but, living in a society where large segments of the population don't share that perspective, you don't think it reasonable to pass laws imposing that view on the general public.
The propositions in question are not logically contradictory. But one can generate a logical inconsistency by adding an eminently plausible proposition. Consider the following antilogism:
a) Abortion is murder
b) Abortion should be legal
c) Murder should be illegal.
The triad is logically inconsistent: the constituent propositions cannot all be true.
Now (c) is the least rejectable (the least rejection-worthy) of the three propositions. For if the law does not proscribe murder, what would it proscribe? The purpose of the State, at a bare minimum, is to protect life, liberty, and property. (Call it the Lockean triad.) If the State is morally justified, then its passing and enforcing of laws is morally justified. Among these laws are laws pertaining to the killing of human beings. Without going any deeper into it, I will just assert what most of us will accept, namely, that the intentional killing of innocent human being is morally wrong and therefore ought to be made illegal by a morally justified State.
In short, we ought not reject (c). Therefore, one who accepts (a) ought to reject (b). Transforming the antilogism into a syllogism, we get:
Murder should be illegal
Abortion is murder
Ergo
Abortion should be illegal.
Reppert ought to be persuaded by this argument since he accepts the minor and I have given a powerful argument for the major.
Reppert asks whether it is reasonable to pass laws against abortion in a society in which large segments of the population do not oppose abortion. Well, was it reasonable to pass laws against slavery in a society in which large segments of the population did not oppose slavery?
Suppose we become even more morally depraved than we are now. We get to the point where the majority considers infanticide morally acceptable. Would it be reasonable to do away with the laws proscribing it? Or the laws proscribing child pornography? Or rape laws? Should the law merely reflect the going moral sentiment no matter how decadent it becomes?
I'll leave you with these questions.
David Dalton, Who is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion, 2012, p. 65:
As Dave van Ronk pointed out in his autobiography, many of the people involved in the first folk revival of the 1930s and '40s were Jewish — as were the folkies of the '60s. Van Ronk reasoned that for Jews, belonging to a movement centered on American traditional music was a form of belonging and assimilation.
[. . .]
"The revelation that Jack [Elliot] was Jewish was vouchsafed unto Bobby one afternoon at the Figaro," Van Ronk recalled. "We were sitting around shooting the bull with Barry Kornfeld and maybe a couple of other people and somehow it came out that Jack had grown up in Ocean Parkway and was named Elliot Adnopoz. Bobby literally fell off his chair; he was rolling around on the floor, and it took him a couple of minutes to pull himself together and get up again. Then Barry, who can be diabolical in things like this, leaned over to him and just whispered the word 'Adnopoz' and back he went under the table."
Lacking as it does the proper American cowboy resonance, 'Elliot Charles Adnopoz' was ditched by its bearer who came to call himself 'Ramblin' Jack Elliot.' Born in 1931 in Brooklyn to Jewish parents who wanted him to become a doctor, young Adnopoz rebelled, ran away, and became a protege of Woody Guthrie. If it weren't for Ramblin' Jack, Guthrie would be nowhere near as well-known as he is today.
Pretty Boy Floyd. "As through this life you ramble, as through this life you roam/You'll never see an outlaw drive a family from their home." No? An example of the tendency of lefties invariably to take the side of the underdog regardless of whether right or wrong.
Ramblin' Jack does a haunting version of Dylan's Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues. It grows on you. Give it a chance. Cigarettes and Whisky and Wild Woman. Soul of a Man. Dylan's unforgettable, Don't Think Twice. Here he is with Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Buffy Sainte Marie singing the beautiful, Passing Through.
Lyrics below the fold.
Yet, in tossing out the “Catechism of Political Correctness” and treating the character assassination of Kavanaugh as what it was, a rotten conspiracy to destroy and defeat his nominee, Trump’s instincts were correct, even if they were politically incorrect.
This was not a “job interview” for Kavanaugh.
In a job interview, half the members of the hiring committee are not so instantly hostile to an applicant that they will conspire to criminalize and crush him to the point of wounding his family and ruining his reputation.
When Sen. Lindsey Graham charged the Democratic minority with such collusion, he was dead on. This was a neo-Bolshevik show trial where the defendant was presumed guilty and due process meant digging up dirt from his school days to smear and break him.
Our cultural elites have declared Trump a poltroon for daring to mock Ford’s story of what happened 36 years ago. Yet, these same elites reacted with delight at Matt Damon’s “SNL” depiction of Kavanaugh’s angry and agonized appearance, just 48 hours before.
Is it not hypocritical to laugh uproariously at a comedic depiction of Kavanaugh’s anguish, while demanding quiet respect for the highly suspect and uncorroborated story of Ford?
It is time to wake up and realize that Democrats are not fellow citizens but domestic enemies and ought to be treated as such.
There are those who are cocksure that there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem judgment, no ultimate meaning to human existence, and that we are all just material bits of a material world. Now it may be so for all we know. This is not an area in which proofs or disproofs are possible.
But for those who are cocksure about it, I suspect that it is their cocks that make them sure.
Crudity aside, their natural concupiscence blinds them to the spiritual reality of God and the soul, dulls their consciences, and ties them to a passing world that their lust convinces them is ultimately real.
This is why I do not trust the atheisms of Russell and Sartre. They were sensualists and worldlings who failed to satisfy the prerequisites of spiritual insight. Pride and lust dimmed their eyes.
Issued by Roger Kimball:
As the spurious case against Brett Kavanaugh disintegrates, splinters, and re-forms into a cacophony of whiny, irrelevant expostulations, it is instructive to step back and survey the field upon which this battle took place.
The ground is littered with dead and wounded ideals: civility, dead; basic decency, dead; the presumption of innocence, gravely wounded, ditto for the idea of due process. And this disgusting carnage is all on you, O ancient one, Dianne Feinstein, and your self-important, preposterous colleagues. You were desperate to keep Brett Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court so you abandoned any semblance of decency and respect. You travestied the processes of the United States Senate for the sake of a cynical grab at power. I’d say that you should be ashamed of yourselves, but, like the thugs that you are, you have no shame. You believe the acquisition of power is a magical antidote to shame. You are wrong about that, and one can only hope that you will one day reap some portion of the obloquy you have sowed.
Read it all.
And you are still a Democrat?
There was a time when it was respectable to be a Democrat. That time is long gone. You Dems need to note what is happening, how your party has betrayed its ideals, as has the ACLU, and examine your consciences. Assuming you have properly-formed consciences. Or are you as shamelessly thuggish as Feinstein?
The wise man abstains from an excess of socializing as from an excess of whisky; but just as a little whisky at the right time and in the right place is a delightful adjunct to a civilized life, so too is a bit of socializing. But he who quits his solitude to sally forth among men must do so with his maxims at the ready if he values his peace of mind.
Herewith, a faithful transcription from a 19th century work, The Corsair: A Gazette of Literature, Art, Dramatic Criticism, Fashion and Novelty, Volume 1, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Timothy O. Porter 1839, 831 pages. (Obviously, not to be confused with the Danish publication that pilloried Kierkegaard):
Never discuss politics or religion with those who hold opinions opposite to yours; they are topics that heat in handling, until they burn your fingers; never talk learnedly on topics you know, it makes people afraid of you; never talk on subjects you don't know, it makes people despise you; never argue, no man is worth the trouble of convincing, and the better your reasoning the more obstinate people become; never pun on a man's words; it is as bad as spitting in his face. In short, whenever practicable, let others perform and do you look on: a seat in the dress circle is preferable to a part in the play. — This is my rule.
A pretty good rule, one of what Schopenhauer calls Weltweisheit, worldly wisdom. In a fallen world, one needs such maxims. Did you know that Schopenhauer believed in something like Original Sin despite his being an atheist?
"Never argue, no man is worth the trouble of convincing." This is sage advice for almost all social situations.
I would add: never in general correct anyone's grammatical, logical, or factual mistakes unless it is your job to do so; the exception of course is serious discourse among serious and well-qualified people. Avoid talk of money if you don't want to be taken to be either poor-mouthing or bragging. Sex-tinged jokes can get you into trouble. And so on.
Should we go all the way with Pascal? “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Pensées
To paraphrase a line often attributed (rightly or wrongly) to the cowboy wit, Will Rogers:
Never miss an opportunity to keep your mouth shut.
That of course is an exaggeration. But exaggerations are rhetorically useful if they are in the direction of truths. The truth here is that the damage caused by idle talk is rarely offset by its paltry benefits.
My mind drifts back to the fourth or fifth grade and the time a nun planted an image in my mind that remains. She likened the tongue to a sword capable of great damage, positioned behind two 'gates,' the teeth and the lips. Those gates are there for a reason, she explained, and the sword should come out only when it can be well deployed.
Related: Safe Speech
Now if you bear all of the above in mind, you may safely sally forth into society as long as your sojourn is brief and your maxims are 'cocked and locked.'
A powerful statement by Malcolm Pollack, at once both personal and objective. I recommend in particular the penultimate paragraph:
We who came of age in the latter half of the twentieth century have lived our whole lives in such ease and peace and prosperity that we have mostly forgotten, I think, how rare, and how precarious, order and peace and safety are — how easily they are lost, and what sacrifices, and what sense of duty and gratitude, are necessary to sustain them. We just take it all for granted — this astonishing edifice of law and tradition and culture and trade and agriculture and innovation and justice and security — as if it was simply a pre-existing and eternal feature of the world. We imagine, lately, that we can just pick at it as we please, pull pieces out of it and burn them, hack away at its foundations, rip out its beams and joists, and crack its pillars without causing it, someday very soon, to come crashing down on our heads.
One does well to recall the wisdom at Hosea 8:7: Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
And never forget who has the guns. Is that a threat? No, it's a warning. You do not want a civil war. You will not like it.
Please exercise your historically-informed imagination now so that you won't have to rely on perception later.
The Joan Anderson letter. Not to be missed by Kerouac aficionados. (HT: the indefatigable and ever-helpful Dave Lull)
Related: Who is Dave Lull?
Neal Cassady (on the right) as brakeman for Southern Pacific Railroad:
Well worth reading. Especially this:
The #MeToo movement is revolutionary feminism. Like all revolutionary movements, it favors summary justice. Since April 2017, more than 200 men have been publicly accused of some form of sexual offense, ranging from rape to inappropriate language. A few of these men seem likely to have committed crimes and are being prosecuted accordingly — notably the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. But #MeToo seems to have created a single catch-all crime, in which rape, assault, clumsy passes, and banter are elided into one.
With a few exceptions, reputations have been destroyed and careers ended without due process. "I believe her" are the fateful words that, if uttered by enough people, perform the roles of judge and jury.
Sexual harassment is bad, no question. And yet a much bigger threat to women's rights is largely ignored by Western feminists. As my wife likes to point out, verse 2:282 of the Koran states that a woman's testimony is worth only half of a man's testimony in court. (Some people want the opposite to apply in Ford v. Kavanaugh.) Wherever sharia law is imposed — from the armed camps of Boko Haram or ISIS to the sharia courts found in most Muslim-majority countries — it is women who lose out. Do Senate Democrats care? No. When my wife testified on this subject last year, they literally ignored her.
Read it all. I mean it. It gets even better! If you've seen Ferguson in action on C-Span or on Fox you know he is tops — assuming you have my level of good judgment.
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…
Lotte Lenya sings September song, very smokily: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdc4oBnu_fw&list=RDrdc4oBnu_fw&start_radio=1