Thomas Merton, Journals, vol. 5 (1963-1965), p. 295:
In the refectory the other day articles on the Council [Vatican II, 1962-1965] were being read and a lot was said about St. Thomas [Aquinas] — he is no longer on an official pedestal — he is no longer the one to be followed as chief authority in seminary teaching. This is the best thing that could happen to St. Thomas and to Catholic Truth, if we consider that he himself would never have consented to be the kind of authority the textbooks have made of him (and as a matter of fact the Church did not really constitute him an authority — but rather a model.)
It would be interesting to hear Ed Feser's take on this.
There are those who attempt to downplay the depth of our social and political disagreements. But no honest and intelligent observer can fail to note just how deep they go.
One sort of disagreement is over the attributes of an object admitted to exist. That's bad enough. Worse still are those disagreements over the very existence of the object. And perhaps the worst form of denialism or eliminativism is the form in which the object denied manifestly exists.
For example, it is manifestly the case that there are beliefs and desires. But there is a species of loon in the philosophy of mind who, unable to make sense of these intentional states, denies their existence.
In the political sphere we have a tribal Hispanic such as Francisco Hernandez who denies the very existence of sanctuary jurisdictions. He does not admit their existence and defend them, which would be slightly respectable. The mendacious bastard denies their very existence. See for yourself. The brilliant Mark Steyn sits in for Tucker Carlson. Camarota refutes Hernandez.
Is it not obvious that politics is war? There are very nice people who say we need to come together, drop the labels, and have 'conversations.' Their hearts are in the right place, but where are their heads?
Or to change the metaphor: what planet do they live on? Uranus?
Come together? On what common ground?
Have a conversation? What's to discuss? Should we have a conversation about the validity of arithmetic? (I'm not talking about the foundations of arithmetic, or the Peano axioms, or anything like that, but about the arithmetic you learned or should have learned in grade school.)
Believe it or not, I actually have Hillary Clinton's What Happened checked out of a local library and have read chunks of it. But there is no need for me to comment on the 492 page exercise in self-deception and outright lying inasmuch as Conrad Black has done a fine job of it. Here are some excerpts:
More alarming than Mrs. Clinton’s ungraciousness is her dishonesty. She all but accuses Trump of treasonable collusion with Russia, and Russian interference in the election looms even larger than misogyny and Comey’s skullduggery in her demonology of causes of the national tragedy of her defeat. But all the “evidence” she cites of Trump–Kremlin collusion is taken from the now-infamous Christopher Steele dossier. Since the publication of this book, it has come to light that the Clinton campaign paid $10 million for Steele’s unverifiable pastiche of defamatory gossip and fabrications against Trump. The entire case against Trump has, after 16 months of FBI investigation, turned up no evidence. The Clinton campaign denied, until the facts came to light, that it had any knowledge of the origins of the Steele dossier, and now says that it doesn’t matter who paid for it; and she now refers to it as “campaign information.” The bipartisan leadership of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee has confirmed that this dossieris the sole basis for the continuation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
[. . .]
She has an unblemished record, she implies, and the fact that the majority of Americans don’t trust her is due to the “viciousness of the Republican smear merchants.”She says that the timely release of the Billy Bush tape of Trump’s verbal indiscretions eleven years before (about the ease for a celebrity of groping women), though it was clearly fired as an intended game-ender, came as a surprise to her, and that she was heroic in “winning” the second presidential debate two days later, given the pressure she was under. In fact, Trump, with his campaign apparently in shambles and principal figures deserting or taking their distance, was under more pressure than anyone in the history of those debates going back to Kennedy and Nixon in 1960, and he won the debate. Trump’s production, earlier in the day, of a trio of women who alleged sexual assault against her husband was, in Mrs. Clinton’s view, a tawdry and outrageous resurrection of those she memorably described in the past as “the bimbos.” Trump’s coarse locker-room reflections are apparently disqualifying, but Bill Clinton’s scandalous and possibly criminal sexual assaults on various women when he was governor and president do not alter the Norman Rockwell marriage of Bill and Hillary.
The author is a relentless partisan: Republicans are under-educated pessimists, “the deplorables,” as she called them last year. Reagan “sapped the spirit of the country,” though he restored the country’s confidence. (He also led the greatest economic boom in modern U.S. history and won the Cold War, but she doesn’t mention that.) Dwight Eisenhower isn’t mentioned at all, apart from having been Adlai Stevenson’s opponent, and Richard Nixon was a criminal, never mind that Nixon ended school segregation and conscription, extracted the country from the Democrats’ war in Vietnam while preserving a non-Communist government in Saigon, opened relations with China and the Mideast peace process, signed the greatest arms-control agreement in history with the USSR, founded the Environmental Protection Agency, reduced the crime rate, and stopped the endless rioting in American cities.
Since the publication of this book, former party chairman Donna Brazile has written that Mrs. Clinton rigged a number of primaries in her struggle with Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination, and may have violated the Federal Election Campaign Act. Mrs. Clinton dismisses Whitewater (which led, circuitously, to the impeachment of her husband), Travelgate, the Benghazi tragedy (where the American ambassador to Libya was murdered by terrorists and she and Obama pretended that it was mob anger provoked by an anti-Islamic video produced by a private American citizen), and the email controversy that “amounted to precisely nothing” (I think not). She does not mention her speech of apology to the world’s Muslims, a toe-curling embarrassment to the entire Western world, nor her inability to utter or write the words “Islamic terrorism or extremism,” nor the very disconcerting pay-to-play activities of the Clinton Foundation, including the payment or pledge of $145 million and a $500,000 speech fee for Bill Clinton at a time when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s agreement was required to approve a sale of uranium assets in the U.S. to Russian interests.
Democratic senators whom she praises in comradeship have turned on the Clintons: Elizabeth Warren accuses her of cheating Bernie Sanders, and Kirsten Gillibrand says that Bill Clinton, because of his peccadilloes, should have resigned. They may be unjust, but this is what the Clintons’ allies now think of them. Her righteousness is moth-eaten and threadbare.
Here I must register a pedantic objection. A peccadillo is a little sin; but rape is not a little sin. (Juanita Broderick alleges that Bill Clinton raped her.) Nor are perjury and obstruction of justice, the crimes that he was alleged to have committed when he was impeached. And yes, he was impeached, although he was not removed from office.
Mrs. Clinton believes she is a good and sincere Christian, though she makes it clear that joining a church and being a communicant in it should be with the purpose of turning that church into an agency for leftward political action, what she calls “progressive reform.” By this, we are left in no doubt, she means rounding up all those who are beneath the average in prosperity or acceptability in mainstream-majority society, or if not, at least highly dissatisfied with the lot of those who are, and mobilizing them as a democratic majority to impose transfers of wealth and status from those who have earned or inherited it to the less fortunate or successful. This is a constant process of evaluating where the electoral majorities are, pitching to them as victims in the name of a benign state, and representing to those who pay for these transfers that it is their Christian and social duty and that they should rejoice in their opportunity to better the quality and stability of American life and society.
In Mrs. Clinton’s America, spiritual inspiration exists to pursue redistributive materialism, all “progress” apart from a little doughty self-help is the result of state intervention, the state has a practically unlimited right and duty to correct meritocratic as well as inherited or exploitive socioeconomic imbalances, and the U.S. Democratic party must be a secular church militant where those who oppose abortions (about half the American public) are, along with many other large groups, unwelcome. All politics is a constant process of “reform,” in which, miraculously, the majority gain at the expense of the more accomplished (as well as more fortunate) minority. This isn’t really Christianity or democracy; it easily slips into rank acquisition of votes with the money of part of the electorate in a cynical and corrupt manner, and Mrs. Clinton convicts herself of such attitudes with this astonishing display of rage, affected humility, idealism, and myth-making. It is a sobering and a disturbing read.
Not so long ago I was about to take a philosophy 101 class at a community college in Arizona, but the professor, who I later was told spends a substantial amount of time talking about "white privilege," was going to make it about the "sociology of philosophy." He explicitly said on day one that the class was going to focus on the racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, classism, etc. of thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and so on. I dropped with the ability to get a more sensible professor.
It's really remarkable. A classically liberal education should be about opening minds and considering ideas of past thinkers as they thought, not looking at the greatest minds through a narrow ideological filter promoting today's political ideas. Now I'm fully aware that someone like Aristotle defended slavery. Yet to primarily focus on these aspects, in an introductory course no less, is really to do a disservice. I know something about Aristotle—and I did then. The rest of the students? Probably nothing. What did they learn?
Thanks for reading my note. And thanks for your blog!
You're very welcome, George. What you say is true and important. I get a fair amount of mail like yours and it is gratifying to receive.
Leftist termites are hard at work undermining our institutions including the universities, the government, the Christian churches, and the Fourth Estate. Genuine conservatives need to emerge from their private lives and fight back, else it will be all over in a generation. One reason is precisely to preserve the private life against the Left's totalitarian encroachment. And notice I said genuine conservatives, not never-trumping pseudo-conservative, yap-and-scribble-but-do-nothing quislings such as Bill Kristol and George Will. I don't use the label 'cuckservative,' but I understand why others do.
The sociology of knowledge is a worthy field of inquiry. A branch thereof is the sociology of philosophy. But any sociology of philosophy will of necessity rest on philosophical assumptions, the examination of which is the office of philosophy. Philosophy does not allow herself to be outflanked, by anyone or anything, including sociology. She outflanks all possible outflankers. Changing the metaphor, we can can that she always ends up on top.
This is a topic worth developing, but at the moment I need to gear up for a hike. One exercise for you is to think through the following: If all knowledge is ideology in support of existing societal power relations, then what about that very claim? Does it escape being ideology in support of a different set of power relations? And if it doesn't why should we accept it? If it does, then not all knowledge is ideology.
Just thought I'd pass this on in case you come across it. I read some of it in a bookstore today. It looks very good: clinical, to the point, merciless.
(I had no idea that when Francis invited the first ever Imam to speak Koranic verses in the Vatican, the latter chose a verse that urged the killing of infidels!)
I heard Representative Jackie Speier (D-California) say on Face the Nation this morning that former U. S. president William Jefferson Clinton "faced impeachment."
Not so. He was impeached. What he faced, but did not suffer, was removal from office.
Impeachment is not the same as removal from office. Impeachment is analogous to indictment in regular court proceedings. The House of Representatives votes to impeach, and then the Senate conducts the trial. Clinton was acquitted of the charges brought against him, perjury and obstruction of justice.
You would expect a member of Congress to know that. But then she's a Dem . . . or maybe she just misspoke.
The trouble with the Democrat Party is that so many of its leading 'lights' are dimwits, Nancy Pelosi heading the list. What gives this airhead such staying power? Answer: a preternatural ability to raise money.
Keith Burgess-Jackson offers six items of sound advice, each both prudential and moral. Here is #1:
Don't touch a woman without her specific consent. Consent, to be consent, must be informed. Don't resort to trickery, subterfuge, dissimulation, or manipulation (including getting her drunk or high).
I would add a qualification: unless she is your wife and you have a loving relationship. (And if you don't share a loving relationship, why are you still married to her?)
That is a good point about the nature of consent, by the way.
I would say that the above, even with my qualification, is a rule of thumb (rule of hand?), which is to say that it is broadly accurate.
Suppose you are seated opposite a woman not your wife whom you find attractive and with whom you are enjoying a tête-à-tête. She strokes your hand. She has given you a signal that may justify your touching her in a similar way even without explicit consent.
Prudent? Moral? The near occasion of sin? You decide!
In any case, don't be an Al Franken. Where is his hand? And what can be inferred from the gal's 'goosey' expression?
. . . a very common error of exalted minds. He applied too rigorous and unvarying a standard to the multitude. He leaned to the error of expecting the strength of manhood in the child, the harvest in seed-time. On this subject, above all others, we feel that we should speak cautiously. We know that there is a lenity [leniency] towards human deficiencies full of danger ; but there is, too, a severity far more common, and perhaps more ruinous. Human nature, as ordinarily exhibited, merits rebuke ; but whoever considers the sore trials, the thick darkness, the impetuous will, the strong passions, under which man commences his moral probation, will temper rebuke with pity and hope. There is a wisdom, perhaps the rarest and sublimest attainment of the intellect, which is at once liberal and severe, indulgent and unbending ; which makes merciful and equitable allowance for the innocent infirmities, the necessary errors, the obstructions and temptations of human beings, and at the same time asserts the majesty of virtue, strengthens the sense of accountableness, binds on us self-denial, and points upward, with a never-ceasing importunity, to moral perfection, as the great aim and only happiness of the human soul.
Channing, William Ellery, 1780-1842. The works of William E. Channing, D.D (Kindle Locations 2721-2729). Boston : James Munroe.
Fenelon was a quietist. Here is something on quietism with excepts from the writing of Molinos, Guyon, and Fenelon.
It would be desirable to be able to survey one's faults and limitations with an equanimity that does not give way to acceptance, but combines with both a gentle resolve to work at self-improvement, and a detachment from the outcome of such work.
Them, Here Comes the Night. Still gives me shivers up and down the spine as it did in '65. A blend of the Dionysian and the tender. A similar blend in Roy Orbison's Pretty Woman.
Bob Dylan, "Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you are trying to be so quiet?" Visions of Johanna, live from '66. Marianne Faithfull does a good job with it.
. . . to Sedona, Arizona and back. Left early Friday, back at noon on Saturday. 338 miles round-trip from my place in the foothills of the Superstition Mountains by the leisurely and scenic route via Payson which avoids Phoenix and most of Interstate 17. Wifey read a paper, so we had posh digs at the Bell Rock Hilton at conference rates.
I've lived in Hawaii, Santa Barbara, Boston, and the Midwest, not to mention other places in the USA and abroad. No place beats Arizona, all things considered. That is a mighty subjective judgment, to be sure, but if a blogger cannot vent his subjectivity, who can?
For one thing, Arizona is in the West and we all know the West is the best, far, far away from the effete and epicene East, lousy with liberals, and the high taxes they love; but not so far West as to be on the Left Coast where there was once and is no more a great and golden state, California. Geographical chauvinism aside, there is beauty everywhere, even in California, when you abstract from the political and economic and social malaise wrought by destructive leftists, the majestic Sierra Nevada, for example, the Range of Light (John Muir). Herewith, an amateur shot of the the Sedona red rock country:
David Bentley Hart reviews Edward Feser and Joseph M. Bessette, By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment, Ignatius Press, $24.95, 424 pp. (HT: Karl White)
I will add my two cents later if time permits.
Meanwhile, if you care to know where I am 'coming from,' feel free to poke around in my Crime and Punishment category. Trigger Warning: not for liberals!
Anecdote. I once asked Dale Tuggy how Ed Feser, a friend of both of us, does it. How does he sire a house full of kids, teach a heavy community college load, read papers all over, maintain an excellent, content-rich blog, and write so many books (see second article below)?
Dale, who has written on mysterianism in connection with the Trinity, replied, "It's a mystery."
Kathy Sheehan, mayor of Albany, New York, while defending sanctuary cities, told an egregious lie on Tucker Carlson's show tonight (11/16) when she said that 'undocumented' (her word) workers were not in the U. S. illegally. Although Carlson eventually called her on it, he failed to clarify the distinction that Sheehan was mendaciously and confusedly exploiting.
Is Illegal Immigration a Crime?
It is. Illegal immigrants are subject to criminal penalties. While improper entry is a crime, unlawful presence is not a crime. One can be unlawfully present in the U. S. without having entered improperly, and thus without having committed a crime.
If a foreign national enters the country on a valid travel or work visa, but overstays his visa, failing to exit before the expiration date, then he is in violation of federal immigration law. But this comes under the civil code, not the criminal code. Such a person is subject to civil penalties such as deportation.
So there are two main ways for an alien to be illegal. He can be illegal in virtue of violating the criminal code or illegal in virtue of violating the civil code.
Those who oppose strict enforcement of national borders show their contempt for the rule of law and their willingness to tolerate criminal behavior, not just illegal behavior.
This is very serious business especially when the criminally illegal aliens are also criminal in the manner of MS-13 gang members.
Sheehan may well have her heart in the right place as so many benighted liberals do. She came across to me as a nice Irish Catholic girl out to make the world a better place. Being of the female persuasion, she probably thinks of government maternally. If so, this tendency might help explain why she has trouble with such simple distinctions as the one I drew above.
