Summer of Love, Winter of Decline

The down side of the 'sixties.

The counter-culture validated styles of living once considered coarse, delinquent, tragic, or mad. It was said to be about Love. Was that eros, or philia, or agape? One cannot be sure, but the gross hypersexualization of entertainment and culture since suggests eros, down and dirty.

The point is essentially correct, but I would add needed nuance by making a tetrapartite distinction among eros, philia, agape, and sexus. It is true that the word  eros puts most in mind of sex, raw and raunchy, down and dirty. And it is true that eros, the love of the lower for the higher, is often mixed with purely sexual desire and sometimes perverted by it. But the love of the spiritually empty for that which might fulfill them is erotic, even when freed of the sexual.  The longing love of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, the love of Wisdom, the love of God are not examples of philia or agape. Philia is friendship, and friendship is between equals. But I am not the equal of Wisdom or Justice or the Good; I merely aspire to be wise, just, and good.  

This aspiration for the higher is erotic. But it may be best to introduce a different word to ward off confusion: the aspiration is erothetic. In a decadent, corrupt, sex-saturated society any talk of eros and the erotic is bound to be misunderstood. Erothetic love is love that aspires and seeks to acquire. It is rooted in need and lack, spiritual need and lack.

As for agape, it is the love of the higher for the lower. It is a love that bestows, grants, helps. To put the point in a way that exploits the ambiguity of the genitive construction, the love of God (objective genitive) is erothetic; the love of God (subjective genitive) is agapic.  The same goes for the love of Christ. God does not lack anything; nor does he aspire or seek to acquire. The divine plenitude does not allow for aspiration or acquisition.

My point, then, is that eros is not to be condemned; it is not inherently "down and dirty." The love of the Good and the desire to be good, the desire to imitate the Good and participate in it are noble aspirations. (The Christian and Platonic allusions will not be missed by the well-educated, e.g., imitatio Christi, methexis.)

What ought to be condemned is not eros, but sex when it is divorced from such ennobling adjuncts as the erothetic, the philiatic, and the agapic.  What ought to be condemned is sex reduced to the 'hydraulic,' to the exchange of bodily fluids for the sake of mere sensuous gratification.1  This perversion is well-conveyed by the contemporary phrase 'hook-up.' I hook up a hose to a tank to fill it. But we live in a sick society getting sicker with each passing day and I am something of a vox clamantis in deserto. So I don't expect many even to understand what I am saying, let alone agree with it.

These topics are deep and rich. If you want to gain some insight into them you need to begin at the beginning, or at least at the 'Athenian' beginning, as opposed to the 'Hierosolymic' beginning, with the 'divine' Plato and his Symposium. Then work your way through the history of thought, philosophical and theological. One good guide in Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros.

But to have the time and energy for this you will have limit your consumption of media dreck, not to mention your tweeting, facebooking, and what all else.

NOTES

1 Of course, sexual intercourse involving one or more humans is never a mere exchange of bodily fluids. Even among sub-human animals, sexual intercourse is never purely hydraulic in nature: sentience is involved and various emotions. Filling my gas tank in the usual manner would be an example of a purely hydraulic exchange. Insofar as humans approach the hydraulic in their 'love'-making, humans degrade themselves. This degradation is a free act possible only because humans are spiritual animals. An animal consumed by lust cannot degrade himself, but a man can. We could say that when a man tries to become less than an animal he proves that he is more than one.

Names on Grave Stones

The names on grave stones are proper names for a time, while the memories of survivors provide reference-fixing context. But with the passing of the survivors the names revert to commonality. After a while the dead may as well lie in a common grave. 

What lies below the stone is not Patrick J. McNally, but a Patrick J. McNally.  And not even this; rather, the bodily remains of a Patrick J. McNally.  The person has fled or no longer exists.

Continence

The Catholic Church is in sad shape. Have you heard a good sermon lately? I could do better off the top of my head, and I am a very poor public speaker.

Here are some notes for a sermon I will never give, unless this weblog is my pulpit.

Remind people of the importance of continence both for their happiness here below, and for the good of their souls. Distinguish the following sorts of continence: mental (control of thoughts), emotional (control and custody of the heart), sensory-appetitive (custody of the eyes together with sexual restraint). Explain the importance of containing the outgoing flow, whether mental, emotional, or sensory-appetitive, and the misery consequent upon incontinence.

Illustrate by adducing the sad case of Bill Cosby.

Explain the key words and phrases. Don't use words like 'adduce.'  Attention spans in these hyperkinetic times are short, so keep it short.

The abdication of authorities has lead to the dumbing-down of the masses. Don't expect much.

The Antithesis of Obstruction

Andrew C. McCarthy:

The “collusion” narrative was a fraud, plain and simple. We know that now. Hopefully, it won’t take another six months to grasp a second plain and simple truth: Collusion’s successor, the “obstruction” narrative, is a perversion.

[ . . .] 

To be clear, the Russia investigation is not a fraud. The Trump collusion narrative is. Russia did try to interfere in our election, as it always does. And there were associates of Trump’s who had business with Russian interests. Nothing unusual about that either. No one had shadier business with Kremlin cronies than Bill and Hillary Clinton. The difference is that the Clintons did collude in the Russian regime’s acquisition of American uranium assets. There is no evidence that Trump colluded in Russia’s election meddling. To stoke suspicions to the contrary was fraudulent.

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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia

Punch Brothers, Rye Whisky

Lonely Heartstring Band, Ramblin' Gamblin' Willy

Bonnie Owens, Philadelphia Lawyer

Cowboy Jack Clement, A Girl I Used to Know

Bobby Bare, Lullabies, Legends, and Lies

Brewer and Shipley, One Toke Over Line. Forgot how good this song is!

The Flying Burrito Brothers, To Ramona.  A very nice cover of a song from Dylan's fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan.

John Fogerty and the Blue Ridge Rangers, You're the Reason

The Springfields, Silver Threads and Golden Needles

Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Roving Gambler.  'Ramblin' Charles Adnopoz' lacking the requisite resonance for a follower of Woody Guthrie, this Jewish son of a New York M.D. wisely changed his name. 

Joan Baez, Rock Salt and Nails 

Patsy Cline, She's Got You

Simon and Garfunkel, The Dangling Conversation.  A lovely song, if a bit pretentious.  Paul Simon was an English major.

And we spoke of things that matter
With words that must be said.
Can analysis be worthwhile?
Is the theater really dead?

Beatles, We Can Work It Out.  Listen for the time signature change from 4/4 to 3/4. Knowing a little music theory adds to one's enjoyment.

Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, You Really Got a Hold on Me

Barbara Lynn, You'll Lose a Good Thing.  Her moves and appearance are reminsicent of Jimi Hendrix — or the other way around.  Check out how she strums that left-handed Telecaster.

EmmyLou Harris, Save the Last Dance for Me.  That's one big guitar.

Marty Robbins, Blue Spanish Eyes.  What a wimpy guitar!

Dalida, O Sole Mio.  Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan!  Che bella donna!

Melina Mercouri, Never on Sunday.  Ditto!

Nana Mouskouri, Farewell Angelina.  One of Bob Dylan's most haunting songs.  Hats off in homage to the angel-throated ladies such as Nana and Joan, but nothing touches the mood & magic of Dylan's spare mid-60s renditions such as this one.

Freddy Fender, Cielito Lindo.  Tex-Mex version of a very old song.

Marty Robbins, La Paloma.  Another old song dating back to 1861. 

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Votes by Non-Citizens May Have Cost Trump the 2016 Popular Vote

On 10 December of last year in an entry entitled 'Post-Truth' I wrote the following:

For the Left, Donald Trump is the prime post-truther, the post-truth poster boy if you will, the prima Donald of the practice of post-truth. Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post doesn't expect him to truth up anytime soon. "Indeed, all signs are to the contrary — most glaringly Trump’s chock-full-­of-­lies tweet that 'I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.' "

A very stupid example, Ms. Marcus!  There is not even one lie in the tweet, let alone a bunch of them.  Although verifiable in principle, Trump's tweet is unverifiable in practice.  Trump had no solid evidence for the truth of his assertion.  Still, it could be true.  Don't forget the 'necro-vote' (a word I just coined) and the illegal vote. Trump's epistemic 'sin' was not that he stated what is not the case with the intention to deceive but that he confidently asserted something for which he had insufficient evidence.  He pretended to know something he could not know.  Very annoying, and possibly a violation of a Cliffordian ethics of belief, but not a lie.  

So he didn't lie.  What he did was close to what Harry Frankfurt defines as bullshitting in On Bullshit, a piece of close analysis, fine, not feculent, that was undoubtedly more often purchased than perused. The bullshitter doesn't care how things stand with reality. The liar, by contrast, must care: he must know (or at least attempt to know) how things are if he is to have any chance of deceiving his audience.  Think of it this way: the bullshitter doesn't care whether he gets things right or gets them wrong; the liar cares to get them right so he can deceive you about them. 

So you could fairly tax Trump in this instance with bullshitting.  He shot his mouth off in a self-serving way without much concern over whether what he said is true.  But why pick on Trump?

Because you are a leftist and thus a purveyor of double standards.

Obama bullshits with the best of them.  A prime example was his outrageous claim that 99.9% of Muslims reject radical Islam. It is false and known to be false. (You can check with PEW research if you care to.)   Now was Obama lying in this instance or bullshitting? A lie is not the same thing as a false statement.  Let us be perhaps excessively charitable: Obama made a false statement but he had no intention of deceiving us because he did not know the truth.  (Compare: G. W. Bush was wrong about the presence of WMDs in Iraq, but he did not lie about them:  he was basing himself on the best intelligence sources he had at the time.)

But that Obama is pretty clearly bullshitting is shown by the cliched and falsely precise 99.9% figure.  The whole context shows that Obama doesn't care whether what he is saying is true.  He said it because it fits his narrative: Islam is a religion of peace; we are not in a religious war with Islam; Muslims want all the same things we want, blah, blah, ad nauseam.  The difference between this case and the Trump tweet is that we know that Obama was wrong, whereas we don't know that Trump was wrong.

So once again we have a double standard.  Trump is 'post-truth'; but Obama and Hillary are not?

So that's what I said back in December. But now we have evidence that Trump was right:

We don't know the exact number of illegal votes. No one does. But the data that are available suggest that the number of illegal votes was substantial — probably in the millions, as Trump said — and likely had a significant impact on the election's outcome.

Even Democrats should find this troubling; every vote cast by a noncitizen voter negates the vote of a citizen voter. It's that simple. It's time the Democratic Party started living up to its name and stop encouraging noncitizens and illegal aliens to vote in our election.

But of course the Democrats will not live up to their name, being elitists and globalists; and of course they are not troubled by the votes of non-citizens. The best proof of this is their opposition to photo ID at polling places. Their intention is transparent: to win by any means, legal or illegal.

Mexican vote

 

Does Your Disagreement Give Me Good Reason to Question My Position?

In general, no. For you may be foolish or ignorant or otherwise incompetent with respect to the subject matter under discussion. Or you may be morally defective: a bully, a blowhard, a bullshitter, a quibbler, a sophist.  But suppose none of these predicates attach to you.  Suppose you are my moral and intellectual peer, and what's more, a competent practitioner in the discipline or subdiscipline which is home to the thesis we are disputing. Thus we are both competent, and we are equally competent. And suppose I believe you to be as intellectually honest and as competent as I am.

Suppose further that I have given careful thought to my thesis and have advanced it in respectable, peer-reviewed journals.

If you disagree with me, does this fact supply a good reason for me to question my thesis?  Ought I question it? Or would I be justified in ignoring your disagreement?

We note that this is a meta-question that sires a meta-disagreement.  This meta-disagreement is between the Conciliationist and the Steadfaster.

I am a Conciliationist. Thus I tend to think that your disagreement with me (given the stipulations above) ought to give me pause. It ought to cause me to re-examine my view and be open to the possibility of either rejecting it or withholding assent from it.  It ought to undermine my epistemic self-confidence. I tend to think I would be intellectually amiss, less than intellectually honest, were I simply to dismiss your disagreement. I tend to think I would be unjustifiably privileging my own point of view, preferring it over yours simply because is is mine. This seems wrong to me given that we are trying to arrive at the objective and impersonal truth.  Truth cannot be mine or yours.

The Steadfaster stands fast in the face of disagreement. Whereas the Conciliationist allows the fact of disagreement to undermine his epistemic self-confidence, the Steadfaster takes the fact of disagreement to undermine his prior conviction that his interlocutor is as morally and intellectually capable as he initially thought he was. So when you disagree with me, I question whether I am right. But when I disagree with you, you question my competence, rationality, probity, etc.

But now a puzzle arises. If I am a Conciliationist, then my position would seem to require that I question my Conciliationism due to the fact that the Steadfaster disagrees with me.  (Assume that the Steadfaster is as morally and intellectually well-endowed as I am and that I believe him to be such.)

It seems that the consistent Conciliationist cannot be steadfast in his Conciliationism given that there are Steadfasters out there who are, and whom he believes to be, his moral and intellectual equals.  So what should our Conciliationist do? Should he:

  • Suspend judgment and neither affirm nor deny Conciliationism?
  • Make an exception for the Conciliationst thesis itself by steadfastly adhering to it ar the meta-level while remaining otherwise a Conciliationist?
  • Reject Conciliationism and become a Steadfaster?
  • Do something else?
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