Maverick Philosopher – Page 363 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Should Liberals Buy Guns?

It might not be in their best interest. Buy guns and ammo and the accessories and you support those industries and the lobbying efforts of the National Rifle Association. The NRA, however, played a key role in getting Trump elected. The NRA takes decidedly anti-leftist stands on crime and the nanny-statism liberals hold dear.

This puts liberals in a delightful bind. Delightful to us, that is. Fearing 'fascism,' they are now buying guns as numerous news stories have reported, but in so doing they shoot themselves in the foot, figuratively speaking.

Do you liberals really want concealed-carry reciprocity? Trump is for it and so is the NRA.

There is a parallel here with liberals' new-found love of federalism. As William McGurn has recently noted,

For both historical and philosophical reasons, federalism runs counter to the progressive instinct. Those on the left like government, and their preferred legislature is the Supreme Court. (Brilliant! Emphasis added.)

Fearing Trumpian 'fascism,' our liberal pals are now getting excited about states rights despite their long-standing mendacious insinuation that all talk of states rights can only mean a return to Jim Crow and the lynching of blacks.

UPDATE 3/24. A Friendly Warning to Liberals

A gun is not a talisman. Its mere presence won't protect you. To paraphrase Col. Jeff Cooper, owning a gun no more makes you armed than owning a guitar makes you a musician. You will need to get training. In the course of this training and numerous trips to the shooting range and gun stores for ammo, etc. you will find yourself associating whether you like it or not with rednecks, country folk, blue collar types, cops, ex-cops, military, ex-military, church-goers and other subspecies of the people Obama derisively referred to as "clingers" and Hillary as "deplorables."

The danger here is that you will learn that, in the main, these are decent people. Your liberal bigotry fueled by hate and ignorance will stand refuted by experience. This may cause such painful cognitive dissonance that you may no longer be able to remain a bien-pensant librul.

You have been forewarned.

Why Are Lawyers So Unhappy?

Martin P. Seligman explains. Seligman! Now there's an aptronym for you. Selig is German for happy, blessed, blissful, although it can also mean late (verstorben) and tipsy (betrunken). So Seligman is the happy man or happy one. Nomen est omen?

Give some careful thought to what you name your kid. 'Chastity' may have an anti-aptronymic effect. As for anti-aptronyms, I was introduced a while back to a hulking biker who rejoiced under the name of 'Tiny.' A student of mine's name for me was 'Smiley' to underscore my serious-as-cancer demeanor.

I Renew My Vow

My traffic has been insanely high over the past week or so. Can I now make money by selling advertising? But I stand by my pledge, and if I ever violate it you may shoot me.

My pledge: You will never see advertising on this site. You will never see anything that jumps around in your visual field. You will not be assaulted with unwanted sounds. I will not load crap into your computer. I will not beg for money with a 'tip jar.' This is a labor of love and I prize my independence.

The rest of the pledge.

Terrorism and the ‘Bath Tub’ Argument

Defeatist Londoners and other appeasers are settling down to the 'new normal': slaughter, including beheadings, on the streets of great and not-so-great cities.

But what's the big deal? In yesterday's London incident only four were killed and only a few more injured. Compare terror deaths with bath tub deaths and you will see that the likelihood of getting whacked by a jihadi is vanishingly small as compared to bath tub deaths or traffic fatalities or gun deaths.

I refute this specious reasoning in a couple of posts. See Thinking Clearly about Terrorist and Non-Terrorist Gun-Related Deaths in which I counter the Unsinn of Robert Paul Wolff, the guy over at The Stoned Philosopher The Philosopher's Stone.

Responses to Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option

A tip of the hat to Karl White for sending us to Nine Most Intelligent Takes on Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option. I haven't yet read the book, though it ought to be arriving today. (What sort of 'ought' is that?)

Nor have I read the above-linked responses. So I don't know whether they are the most intelligent or if they are all, or even any of them, intelligent. You decide.

Keep Calm and Ostrichize On

George Neumayr's piece begins:

In 2006, Melanie Phillips wrote a book called Londonistan: How Britain Is Creating a Terror State Within. She argued that Britain was a sitting duck for Islamic terrorists, owing to its idiotic embrace of political correctness, multiculturalism, and religious relativism.

And ends:

Keep calm and propagandize on — that’s the attitude in Sadiq Khan’s London, where terrorism, as he put it last year, some months after his election as mayor, is “part and parcel of living in a big city.”

Khan's attitude is defeatist. Was terrorism "part and parcel of living in a big city" twenty years ago? There are plenty of stateside defeatists too, and some call themselves 'conservative.' But we got lucky last November and the deplorable Hillary went down in defeat, and with her the then-regnant mentality of Barack Hussein Obama.

It may be too late for the UK and Europe. But it is not too late for us.

Just Over the Transom from David Gordon

Dear Bill,

I hope that you are well.

Your post on a bad reason for thinking atheism is not a religion was excellent. I'm taking the liberty of sending a link to a review of mine that argues along the same lines as you do: Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies. By George H. Smith. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1991. 324 pp.

Best wishes,

David

It would be intolerably self-serving of me to say that great minds think alike, so I'll just say that sincere truth-seekers sometimes converge in their views. One thing I learned from Dr. Gordon's review is that George H. Smith is the (contemporary) source of the idea that atheism ought to be defined, not as the denial of the existence of God, but as mere lack of God-belief.

What Explains The Left’s Anti-Trump Hysteria?

El Rushbo explains. (I believe this is the first time I have linked to Limbaugh in 13 years of blogging.)

What Does America First Mean?

America First does not mean that that the USA ought to be first over other countries, dominating them. It means that every country has the right to prefer itself and its own interests over the interests of other countries. This is compatible with respecting other countries' interests and right to self-determination.

So America First has nothing to do with chauvinism which could be characterized as a blind and intemperate patriotism, a belligerent and unjustified belief in the superiority of one's own country. America First expresses an enlightened nationalism which is obviously compatible with a sober recognition of national failings.

An enlightened nationalism is distinct from nativism inasmuch as the former does not rule out immigration. By definition, an immigrant is not a native; but an enlightened American nationalism accepts legal immigrants who accept American values, which of course are not the values of the Left or the values of political Islam.

An enlightened nationalism is not isolationist. What it eschews is a fruitless meddling and over-eager interventionism. It does not rule out certain necessary interventions when they are in our interests and in the interests of our allies.

So America First is not to be confused with chauvinism or nativism or isolationism.

It is also not to be confused with xenophobia. The America Firster has no irrational fear of persons or things foreign. The same holds for every enlightened nationalist.

An enlightened nationalism is not a form of idolatry. 'America First' is not in competition with 'God First.' The principles belong to different orders. The first is a 'horizontal' principle defined over countries; the second is a 'vertical' principle having to do with countries and God. Obviously the following two propositions are logically consistent:

1) Every country has the right to prefer itself and its own interests over the interests of other countries.

2) No country is an appropriate object of worship; only God is worthy of worship.

Finally, an enlightened nationalism is not white-supremacist. I will now quote Rabbi Aryeh Spero, not only because he makes good points, but to distance myself from those Alt-Rightists who are anti-semitic and white-supremacist:

It is not “white supremacism” when people with self-respect display love and admiration for their background and history, wish to defend it, and are proud of it. It is normal and healthy. The opposite is rootlessness. Nor are sincere calls for the maintenance of Western civilization and the Judeo-Christian ethos, as liberals today accuse, “code words for racism”.

The purpose of the shaming we now see coming from liberals against fellow Americans is to muzzle us, so that what we believe is no longer able to be heard or transmitted. It is an enforcement of our political impotence. Longer term, the never-ending demonization is designed to end our civic and religious heritage. Through left-wing bullying and scorn, our heritages are being replaced by the new theologies of progressivism and non-distinctiveness.

That's right; I quibble only with the good rabbi's misuse of 'theology.' Just as progressivism is not a religion, as I have lately argued ad nauseam, it is also not a theology. 'Theology' refers either to God's knowledge of himself, which lies beyond our ken, or to our attempted knowledge of God. But progressivism has no truck with God, being secularist and atheist in its core forms.

You should read all of Rabbi Spero's piece.

Coming Together and Walling Off

Is it an unalloyed and exceptionless good that people be 'brought together'? Not even the Facebook CEO thinks so. Mark Zuckerberg touts his social media site as bringing people together. How sweet. Yet he has had a huge wall built around his Hawaiian compound. Apparently, many of those who engineer 'bringing together' are very special people who are not keen on being brought together with those they bring together.

And then there is the current pope, Bergoglio the Benighted. Safely and comfortably ensconced within the walls of the Vatican, he condemns the Great Wall of Trump, opining that what we need are bridges, not walls.

How about some bridges into the Vatican to make it easy for jihadis to gain access?

The New Monastics of the Mind

My man Hanson with another fascinating column. Excerpts:

Monasteries of the mind are an effort to reconnect with the past and disengage psychologically from the present. For millions of Americans, their music, their movies, their sports, and their media are not current fare. Instead, they have mentally moved to mountaintops or inaccessible valleys, where they can live in the past or dream of the future, but certainly not dwell in the here and now.

Count me in. (I have also been known to hole up physically in inaccessible valleys for weeks at a time.) But why? Several reasons, one of them being the lamestream media:

Monastics are tuning out the media. Listening to Brian Williams warn of fake news would be like paying attention to Miley Cyrus’s reminder about the need for abstinence. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who is often said to be the ethical conscience of the paper’s op-ed page, recently begged the IRS to commit a felony by sending him Trump’s tax returns. He went so far as to provide his own address to facilitate the crime: “But if you’re in IRS and have a certain president’s tax return that you’d like to leak, my address is: NYT, 620 Eighth Ave., NY NY 10018.”

Someone belatedly might have gotten the message. Rhodes scholar Rachel Maddow got a hold of two pages from Trump’s 2005 tax return. On MSNBC she went the full Roswell-UFO mode in hyping the scoop until she finally grasped that a twelve-year-old-tax return revealed that her Trump-as-Snidely-Whiplash had paid a greater tax (percentage-wise and absolutely) than “you didn’t build that” Barack Obama paid. Such an inadvertent demonstration is not the purpose for which a Rachel Maddow was hired.

If Paul Krugman can win the Nobel prize, and Bill Clinton and Rachel 'Mad Dog' Maddow are Rhodes Scholars, then those awards have become well-nigh meaningless.

A Bad Reason for Thinking that Atheism is not a Religion

Atheism is not a religion. But the following is not a good reason for thinking so:

Atheism (and here I mean the so-called “weak atheism” that does not claim proof that god does not exist), is just the lack of god-belief – nothing more and nothing less. And as someone once said, if atheism is a religion, not collecting stamps is a hobby. That really ought to end the discussion right there. Clearly, a mere lack of belief in something cannot be a religion.

Right, a mere lack of belief in something cannot be a religion. But atheism is not a mere lack of belief in something. If atheism is just the lack of god-belief, then tables and chairs are atheists. For they lack god-belief. Am I being uncharitable?

Suppose someone defines atheism more carefully as lack of god-belief in beings capable of having beliefs. That is still unacceptable. Consider a child who lacks both god-belief and god-disbelief. If lacking god-belief makes him an atheist, then lacking god-disbelief makes him a theist. So he is both, which is absurd.

Obviously, atheism is is not a mere lack of belief, but a definite belief, namely, the belief that the world is godless. Atheism is a claim about the way things are: there is no such thing as the God of Judaism, or the God of Christianity, or the God of Islam, or the gods of the Greek pantheon, or . . . etc. The atheist has a definite belief about the ontological inventory: it does not include God or gods or any reasonable facsimile thereof such as the Plotinian One, etc.

Note also that if you deny that any god exists, then you are denying that the universe is created by God: you are saying something quite positive about the ontological status of the universe, namely, that it does not depend for its existence on a being transcendent of it. And if it does not so depend, then that implies that it exists on its own as a brute fact or that it necessarily exists or that it causes itself to exist. Without getting into all the details here, the point is that if you deny that God exists, this is not just a denial of the existence of a certain being, but implies a positive claim about the ontological status of the universe. What's more, if there is no creator God, then the apparent order of the universe, its apparent designedness, is merely apparent. This is a positive thesis about the nature of the physical universe.

Atheism, then, is not a mere lack of god-belief. For it implies definite positive beliefs about reality as a whole and about the nature and mode of existence of the physical universe.

Why then is atheism not a religion? No good purpose is served by using 'religion' to refer to any set of action-guiding beliefs held with fervor and commitment. For if one talks in that hopelessly loose way, then extreme environmentalism and Communism and leftism are religions.

Although it is not easy to craft a really satisfactory definition of religion, I would say that all and only religions affirm the existence of a transcendent reality, whether of a personal or impersonal nature, contact or community or identification with which is the summum bonum and the ultimate purpose of human existence. For the Abrahamic faiths, Yahweh, God, Allah is the transcendent reality. For Taoism, the Tao. For Hinduism, Brahman. For (Mahayana) Buddhism, the transcendent state of nirvana. Since atheists precisely deny any such transcendent reality, contact with which is our highest good and ultimate purpose, atheism is not a religion.

"But aren't militant atheists very much like certain zealous religionists? Doesn't militant atheism function in their lives much as religion functions in the life of the religiously zealous?" No doubt, but if one thing is like another, that is not to say that the one thing is the other or is a species of the other.

And another thing. If atheism is not a religion, then, while there can be atheist associations, there cannot be, in any serious sense of the word, an atheist church.

Seriousness as Camouflage of Nullity

Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind, Harper, 1955, p. 61, #93:

The fact of death and nothingness at the end is a certitude unsurpassed by any absolute truth ever discovered. Yet knowing this, people can be deadly serious about their prospects, grievances, duties and trespassings. The only explanation which suggests itself is that seriousness is a means of camouflage: we conceal the triviality and nullity of our lives by taking things seriously. No opiate and no pleasure chase can so effectively mask the terrible truth about man’s life as does seriousness.

Summary

It is certain that we become nothing at death. We all know this. Yet we take life with utmost seriousness. We are aggrieved at the wrongs that have been done to us, and guilty at the wrongs we have done. We care deeply about our future, our legacy, and many other things.

What explains our intense seriousness and deep concern given (i) the known fact that death is annihilation of the person and (ii) the fact that this unavoidable annihilation renders our lives insignificant and not an appropriate object of seriousness?

There is only one explanation. The truth (the conjunction of (i) and (ii)) is terrible and we are loathe to face it. So we hide the triviality and nullity of our lives behind a cloak of seriousness. We deceive ourselves. What we know deep down we will not admit into the full light of consciousness.

Evaluation

There is an element of bluster in Hoffer's argument. It is not certainly known that death is annihilation, although it is reasonably conjectured. But even if death were known to spell the end of the person, why should this render our lives insignificant? One could argue, contra Hoffer, that our lives are significant in the only way they could be significant, namely, in the first-personal, situated, and perspectival way, and that there is no call to view our lives sub specie aeternitatis. It might be urged that the appearance of nullity and insignificance is merely an artifact of viewing our lives from outside.

So one rejoinder to Hoffer would be: yes, death is annihilation, but no, this fact does not render life insignificant. Therefore, there is no tension among:

1) Death is annihilation of the person.

2) Annihilation implies nullity and insignificance.

3) People are serious about their lives.

We don't have to explain why (3) is true given (1) and (2) since (2) is not true.

A second type of rejoinder would be that we don't need to explain why (3) is true given (1) and (2) because (1) is not known to be true. This is the line I take. I would argue as follows

A. We take our lives seriously.

B. That we take them seriously is prima facie evidence that they are appropriately and truly so taken.

C. Our lives would not be serious if death were annihilation. Therefore:

D. Death is not annihilation.

This argument is obviously not rationally compelling, but it suffices to neutralize Hoffer's argument. The argument is not compelling because once could reasonably reject both (B) and (C). Here is Hoffer's argument:

A. We take our lives seriously.

C. Our lives would not be serious if death were annihilation.

~D. Death is annihilation. Therefore:

~B. That we take our lives seriously is not evidence of their seriousness, but a means of hiding from ourselves the terrible truth.

Hoffer and I agree about (C). Our difference is as follows. I am now and always have been deeply convinced that something is at stake in this life, that it matters deeply how we live and comport ourselves, and that it matters far beyond the petty bounds of the individual's spatiotemporal existence. Can I prove it? No. Can anyone prove the opposite? No.

Hoffer, on the other hand, is deeply convinced that in the end our lives signify nothing despite all the sound and fury. In the end death consigns to meaninglessness a life that is indeed played out entirely within its paltry spatiotemporal limits. In the end, our care comes to naught and seriousness is but camoflage of our nullity.

I can't budge the old steveodore and he can't budge me. Belief butts up against belief. There's no knowledge hereabouts.

So once again I say: In the last analysis you must decide what to believe and how to live. Life is a venture and and adventure wherein doxastic risks must be taken. Here as elsewhere one sits as many risks as he runs.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: An Appeal to Obstructionist Dems

Wilbert Harrison, Let's Work Together. Canned Heat cover. The original beats all covers.

Youngbloods, Get Together

Jackie De Shannon, Put a Little Love in Your Heart

Jackie De Shannon, What the World Needs Now is Love. Love trumps hate, Nancy Pelosi.

And while we've got this cutie (Jackie, not Nancy!) cued up: When you Walk in the Room. Needles and Pins. Bette Davis Eyes. Kim Carnes' 1981 version was a drastically re-arranged cover.

Chuck Berry dead at 90.

Jerry Coyne Talks Sense for a Change!

Here:

It’s time that angry liberals stop calling every Republican a misogynist, a Nazi, or a white supremacist. On left-wing websites everywhere, these terms are being dispensed like gumballs from a machine. If we really want to take back the country, we have to deal with issues. Name-calling may make us feel good, but it’s not going to change the country. Buckling down and working for your ideas may not succeed, either, for the three branches of government are all moving rightward. But political action has a better chance of succeeding than does slander.

My opinion of Coyne has gone up a notch. But it remains relatively low. Here are my Coyne entries.