Dreher contra Buchanan on “All men are created equal”

Rod Dreher quotes Patrick J. Buchanan:

“All men are created equal” is an ideological statement. Where is the scientific or historic proof for it? Are we building our utopia on a sandpile of ideology and hope?

Dreher responds:

With that, Buchanan repudiates not only the founding principle of our Constitutional order, but also a core teaching of the Christian faith, which holds that all men are created in the image of God. 

I am with Dreher on this without sharing quite the level of high dudgeon that he expresses in his piece. 

I am always surprised when people do not grasp the plain sense of the "that all Men are created equal" clause embedded in the opening sentence of the second paragraph of the American Declaration of Independence. It cannot be charitably interpreted as a statement of empirical fact. If it were so interpreted, it would be false. For we all know, and certainly the Founders knew, that human beings are NOT equal as a matter of empirical fact either as individuals or as groups.

Suppose a statement can be interpreted in two ways. One way it comes out plainly false; the other way it comes out either true or plausible or not obviously untrue. Then what I understand the Principle of Charity to require is that we go the second way. 

For Buchanan to demand "scientific or historic proof" shows deep misunderstanding. For again, the claim is not empirical. Is it then a normative claim as Mona Charen (quoted by Dreher) seems to suggest? It implies normative propositions, but it is not itself a normative proposition. It is a metaphysical statement. It is like the statement that God exists or that the physical universe is a divine creation. Both of the latter statements are non-empirical. No natural science can either prove them or disprove them. But neither of them are normative.  

Note that the Declaration's claim is not that all men are equal but that all men are created equal. In such a carefully crafted document, the word 'created' must be doing some work. What might that be?

There cannot be creatures (created items) without a Creator. That's a conceptual truth, what Kant calls an analytic proposition. So if man is created equal, then he is created by a Creator. The Creator the founders had in mind was the Christian God, and these gentlemen had, of course, read the Book of Genesis wherein we read that God made man in his image and likeness. That implies that man is not a mere animal in nature, but a spiritual being, a god-like being, possessing free will and an eternal destiny. Essential to the Judeo-Christian worldview is the notion that man is toto caelo different from the rest of the animals. He is an animal all right, but a very special one. This idea is preserved even in Heidegger who speaks of an Abgrund zwischen Mensch und Tier. The difference between man and animal is abysmal or, if you prefer, abyssal. Man alone is Da-Sein, the 'There' of Being; man alone is endowed with Seinsverstaendnis, an understanding (of) Being.  But I digress onto a Black Forest path.

Now if all men, whether male or female, black or white, are created equal by God, and this equality is a metaphysical determination (Bestimmung in the sense of both a distinctive determination and a vocation) then we have here the metaphysical basis for the normative claim that all men ought to be treated equally, that all men ought to enjoy equally the same  unalienable rights, among them, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.  (We note en passant that these are negative rights!)

All men are normatively equal because they are metaphysically equal. They are the latter because they are spiritual beings deriving from one and the same spiritual source.  Each one of us is a person just as God is a person. We are equal as persons even though we are highly unequal as animals.

Without this theological basis it is difficult to see how there could be any serious talk of equality of persons. As the alt-righties and the neoreactionaries like to say, we are not (empirically) equal either as individuals or as groups. They are absolutely right about that.   

Dreher is also right that the theologically-grounded equality of persons is "the founding principle of our Constitutional order," and thus of our political order.  Repudiate it, as Buchanan seems to be doing, and you undermine our political order.

What then does our political order rest on if the equality of persons is denied? 

Related: Sullivan is Right: Universalism Hasn't Been Debunked

Saturday Night at the Oldies: ‘The King’ Dead Forty Years

Elvis Presley died on 16 August 1977, 40 years ago. We can't let this weekend pass without a few tunes in commemoration.

First a couple of 'Italian' numbers modeled, respectively, on O Sole Mio and Torna a Surriento: 

It's Now or Never

Surrender

Continuing in the romantic vein:

Can't Help Falling in Love.  A version by Andrea Bocelli. A woman for a heterosexual man is the highest finite object. The trick is to avoid idolatry and maintain custody of the heart.

A Gospel number:

Amazing Grace

From the spiritual to the secular:

Little Sister

Marie's the Name of his Latest Flame

Devil in Disguise

And then there was hokey stuff like this reflecting his time in the Army in Germany:

Wooden Heart

Can't leave out the overdone and hyperromantic:

The Wonder of You. (Per mia moglie)

Out of time. Next stop: Judge Jeannine.

Why Something rather than Nothing? The ‘Why not?’ Response

According to a presumably apocryphal story, Martin Heidegger asked G. E. Moore, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Moore replied, "Why not?" A reader finds the 'Moorean' response cheap and unphilosophical. Let's think about this.

Suppose we ask a related but more tractable question: Why does the universe exist? and we get the response: Why not? Why shouldn't it exist?  Charitably interpreted, the response amounts to the suggestion that the question is gratuitous or unmotivated or unnecessary in the sense of unneeded.

Some explanation-seeking why-questions are gratuitous. (It is worth noting that grammatically interrogative formulations such as 'Why does anything at all exist?' might be used merely as expressions of wonder that the, or a, universe exists, and not as requests for an explanation. Here we are concerned with ultimate explanations.)

Suppose it is 110 degrees Fahrenheit.  I walk into your house where the temperature is a pleasant 80 degrees. If I were to ask why the air conditioning is on, you would be puzzled. "Why shouldn't it be on?"

But if your house were a miserable 95 degrees and I asked why the air conditioning was not on, or why it was so bloody hot in there, you would give some such answer as: "My A.C. unit is on the fritz; the repairman should be here in a couple of hours."

My first question is gratuitous; my second question is not. Some things need explaining; other things don't need explaining. 

Perhaps it is like that with the universe. Why should anyone think that it needs an explanation in terms of some item transcendent of it such as the One of Plotinus or the God of Aquinas? 

I assume, quite reasonably, that the universe U is modally contingent. Thus it does not exist of metaphysical necessity, the way God exists if he exists; nor is U's existence metaphysically impossible.  U exists, but it might not have: its nonexistence is possible.  That is to say: U exists, but its nonexistence is not ruled out by the laws of logic or the laws of metaphysics.  It exists, but its nonexistence is neither logically nor metaphysically impossible.

But if x is modally contingent, 'contingent' for short, it does not straightaway follow that x depends for its existence on something. It is a mistake to conflate modal contingency with contingency-on-something. That is an important conceptual/semantic point. 

So it might be like this: U exists, and exists contingently, but it exists without cause or reason or explanation. If this is the case, then we say that the universe exists as a matter of brute fact. The factuality of the fact resides in its existence; the 'brutality' in (a) its contingency and (b) its lacking a ground, cause, reason, explanation.

I conclude that one cannot argue a contingentia mundi to a prima causa without a preliminary demonstration that our ultimate explanation-seeking why-question is not gratuitous. Before one can mount a cosmological argument from a contingent universe to a transcendent Cause, one must show or at least give a good reason to think that the universe needs an explanation.

In my published work on this topic I argue that contingent particulars, taken by themselves as "independent reals" are contradictory structures. But they patently exist, and nothing can exist that is self-contradictory. So there must be something transcending th realm of contingent particulars to remove the contradiction. Now I cannot go into the many details here and fill in the steps in the argument, but the main point I want to make, in answer to my reader's query, is that it is not unphilosophical to take seriously the 'Why not?' response.

One needs to be able to show that the question, Why does the universe exist? is not gratuitous. 

Define or Drop

For leftists, words are weapons. If you are a lefty, and you disagree, then I invite you to define 'fascist,' 'racist,' 'white supremacist,' and the rest of the epithets in your arsenal. Define 'em or drop 'em.

Show us that you are people of good will.

Suppose I point out the incompatibility of Sharia with Western values and you call me an 'Islamophobe.' You thereby demonstrate that you are not a person of good will.  A person of good will does not dismiss the arguments of his rational interlocutor as driven by a phobia.  Here is a good illustration of what I mean when I say that for leftists, words are weapons, or as I also like to say, "semantic bludgeons."

Although righties are far less offensive in this regard, they too must be held to the standard of define or drop.

There were those who called Obama a socialist. But there can be no reasonable discussion of whether he is or isn't without a preliminary clarification of the term.  If a socialist is one who advocates the collective or government ownership of the means of production, then I know of no statement of Obama's in which he advocated any such thing.

Am I being soft on one of the worst presidents in American history? No, I am just being fair.

Related articles
Spotify bans white supremacist bands, as Apple CEO Tim Cook denounces neo-Nazis

How to Know You are in a Mass Hysteria Bubble

Scott Adams:

The most visible Mass Hysteria of the moment involves the idea that the United States intentionally elected a racist President. If that statement just triggered you, it might mean you are in the Mass Hysteria bubble. The cool part is that you can’t fact-check my claim you are hallucinating if you are actually hallucinating. But you can read my description of the signs of mass hysteria and see if you check off the boxes.

A Site Stat Coincidence

Yesterday and the day before this site received the same number of page views, 1,559.   That's never happened before. Deep Meaning or mere coincidence? I reckon the latter. (Total page views since Halloween, 2008: 4.3 million.)

In any case, I thank you all for your patronage. Any complaints? Double your money back if not completely satisfied.

Image result for complaint form funny

The Kristol Crackup

You say that 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' is an over-the-top expression? Well, I bid you consider the sad case of Bill Kristol and his tweeting, twittering, meltdown.

I am put in mind of the opening line of Allen Ginsberg's Howl: 

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness . . . .

"So sad!" as the Orange Man might say.

Is Islam a Religion of Peace?

A video by Aayan Hirsi Ali. 5:09. Can you spare five minutes to improve your thinking on this topic?

Is Islam a religion of peace? Is it compatible with Western liberalism? Or does Islam need a reformation, just as Christianity had the Protestant Reformation? Somali-born author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali explains.

What is White Supremacy?

Robert Paul Wolff offers the following:

Hatred has fundamentally very little to do with White Supremacy.  White Supremacy is a policy of domination and economic superiority of Whites in a multi-racial society.  African-Americans are not worried about whether White people want to be friends.  Most of the African-Americans I know have quite enough friends, thank you very much.  African-Americans demand legal, economic, and political equality.  And that terrifies many Whites, who do not want to give up the superior legal, political, and economic position in American society that they acquired through being born White.

Perhaps Malcolm Pollack will comment on this definition over at his place. He tilts in the alt-right direction; I reject the alt-right.

Here are some preliminary thoughts/questions of my own.

1) If White Supremacy is a policy, who is implementing it? The government?  Is the government insuring the economic superiority of Whites? How? By what programs? 

2) Blacks have every right to demand legal and political equality, but they cannot reasonably demand economic equality. That is something they have to work for.  

3) Whites are in an economically superior position to blacks, no doubt, but one cannot validly infer from this that Blacks have been unjustly discriminated against. 

4) It is false that Whites enjoy by birth legal and political privileges denied to Blacks.  If you think they do, name the privileges.  

5) Suppose a white Southerner considers slavery a grave moral evil and is glad the Union was preserved. He opposes, however, the Left's iconoclasm re: statues of Robert E. Lee, et al.  Is this person a White supremacist?

6) If 'white supremacist' is not to be just another smear word like 'racist,' then it has to be defined. How ought it be defined?

7) Suppose Whites as a group are superior to Blacks as a group in some respect R, and suppose Jones points this out.  Is Jones a white supremacist with respect to R?  This raises the question: How can White Supremacism with respect to R be a bad thing, which it is supposed to be, if it is true?

8) Wolff's decoupling of White Supremacy from hatred suggests that he is thinking of it as something 'institutional' or 'systemic.' Are our institutions white supremacist? What might that even mean given that our institutions allowed for the elimination of slavery and Jim Crow?

Addendum (8/18)

Malcolm Pollack responds, and I agree (red emphasis mine, italics his):

Consider: a generation of identitarian politics across the West has deliberately cultivated tribal resentments among non-whites. For decades white people have been blamed in media and academia for all the world’s ills, while aggressive immigration policies have openly sought to make them minorities in every one of their homelands (a prospect that is widely celebrated in our mainstream institutions). In colleges and universities, white applicants are disfavored for admission, while curricula feature pugnacious courses on eliminating “whiteness”. At the Academy Awards, a black actor says of his latest film “I get to kill all the white people! How great is that?”, and the audience laughs and cheers.

Is it any wonder, then, that in this toxic climate, many white people are developing a sense of identitarianism themselves? This is not “supremacy”; it is nothing more than an perfectly natural (and, therefore, easily predictable) sense of unity and belonging, in an explicitly and increasingly hostile environment. Express this readily understandable sentiment in public, however, and you are now a “white supremacist” — and your sense of identity is not mere attachment, but can only be “hate”.

“White supremacist”, then, is nothing more than a cudgel, to be used without mercy against anyone who says, however reluctantly, that: yes, we are white, and we are not ashamed of it, and if you are determined to divide all of society into competing racial groups, then our people will have to play the game too. It is a truly awful state of affairs, and it will all get much, much worse before it gets any better. “Diversity is our strength”? Rubbish. As we are already learning to our sorrow, it is anything but: it is the death of peace and order and comity, and, at last, of nations and cultures.