A must read by Rod Dreher. Contains excerpts from the autobiography of Armando Valladares, a Cuban dissident who spent 22 years in Castro's horrific gulag.
More by and about Valladares here.
‘Discernable’ or ‘Discernible’?
The latter. My man Hanson this morning:
Examine a coastal Democratic establishmentarian, and there is little discernable difference in his lifestyle, income, or material tastes from those conservatives (usually poorer) whom he accuses of all sorts of politically incorrect behaviors.
I should think a conservative would want to resist all pointless innovations. The correct spelling points back to the Latin. Leibniz spoke of the identitas indiscernibilium not the identitas indiscernabilium.
I want the link to the Latin maintained out of a sort of salutary piety for our tradition.
This is why I write 'tranquillity' rather than 'tranquility.'
Pedantic punctilios? No doubt, which is why I will not draw my weapon if you disagree.
Now go read Hanson's excellent column which is more important than my picayune points supra.
Why the Left Loves Murderous Totalitarians
Finally, Castro’s death and the outpouring of praise from his fans should remind us about the essence of the Cold War: it will never really be over, because it was always more than a geopolitical struggle between two nation-states. It was and is a struggle between those who value the liberty of the individual above all else versus those who embrace utopian dreams of a state than can solve all problems and make everyone happy, as long as the “right people” are in charge.
I pity people who celebrate the life of Fidel Castro in a knee-jerk reaction to salve their consciences for years of having committed themselves to failed and morally bankrupt ideas. They are not ignorant or stupid: they know Castro was a murderous tyrant who built a slave-state and ruined his country and has handed on that legacy to his brother who is even now planning to leave it to their heirs, helped along by the foolish policies of the American president and others in the West who always think their goodwill gestures and magnanimity will bring everyone around to a better way. Pity them or not, however, we cannot absolve them of accommodating the Castro brothers’ crimes.
Fidel Castro was a Mass Murderer
Imagine having seven pints of your blood forcibly extracted prior to being executed for your political dissent. You are not allowed to face the firing squad with dignity, but murdered while dazed and confused from blood loss. And yet the Left sings the dictator's praises. Here:
Castro’s body count varies depending on who you ask. The Cuba Archive Project has one of the most reliable data sets. The group’s records cover a period from May 1952 to the present. In order to be counted, the stories of each victim must be verified by two independent sources. To date, the Archive attributes some 10,723 deaths to the regime. Including nearly 1,000 deaths linked to “disappearances,” more than 2,000 extrajudicial killings, and over 3,100 people killed by firing squad. Some 100 minor children have been murdered by the regime via beating, the withholding of medical attention, and other methods. In addition to these killings, some 78,000 people are estimated to have died while trying to flee the country.
To those unconvinced by mass murder that Castro was a lamentable dictator, consider his government’s practice of forced blood donation. This can range from taking a person’s blood forcibly without their consent to coercing individuals to offer their blood.
The Cuba Archive has credible information on at least 11 cases of forced blood extraction prior to execution. According to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of States (OAS) 1967 report regarding the practice at Havana’s La Cabaña prison, an average of seven pints of blood were forcibly taken from prisoners on their way to be executed, causing “cerebral anemia and a state of unconscious paralysis.” (For perspective, the average adult has around 10 pints of blood in their body.) Victims would then be taken to the firing squad on a stretcher.
The Cuban government would then sell the blood to the North Vietnamese for around $50 a pint.
Today, Cubans are required to “donate” blood before even minor medical procedures. Year-round media campaigns encourage citizens to donate in an effort to “save lives.” In reality, the Cuban government has kept up with its history of exporting blood products. According to Cuba’s Oficina Nacionel de Estadísticas (National Office of Statistics), the country exported some $622.5 million—an average of $31 million per year—of blood products between 1995 and 2014. (It’s worth noting that these numbers may very well be understated. Other products made from blood derivatives may not be classified as blood products when exported.)
Obama’s ‘Legacy’: Subversion and Racialization of the Rule of Law
Or at least this one of his wonderful 'legacies.' Heather Mac Donald:
President Obama welcomed Black Lives Matter activists several times to the White House. He racialized the entire criminal-justice system, repeatedly accusing it of discriminating, often lethally, against blacks. At the memorial service for five Dallas police officers gunned down in July 2016, Obama declared that black parents were right to fear that “something terrible may happen when their child walks out the door”—that the child will be shot by a cop simply for being “stupid.”
Obama put Brittany Packnett, a leader of the Black Lives Matter movement, on his President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Packnett’s postelection essay on Vox, “White People: what is your plan for the Trump presidency?” is emblematic of the racial demonology that is now core Democratic thinking. Packnett announces that she is “tired of continuously being assaulted” by her country with its pervasive “white supremacy.” She calls on “white people” to “deal with what white people cause,” because “people of color have enough work to do for ourselves—to protect, free, and find joy for our people.”
Packnett’s plaint about crushing racial oppression echoes media darling Ta-Nehesi Coates, whose locus classicus of maudlin racial victimology, Between the World and Me, won a prominent place on Obama’s 2015 summer reading list. Coates has received almost every prize that the elite establishment can bestow; Between the World and Me is now a staple of college summer reading lists.
According to Coates, police officers who kill black men are not “uniquely evil”; rather, their evil is the essence of America itself. These “destroyers” (i.e., police officers) are “merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling of black bodies.” In America, Mr. Coates claims, “it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.”
Coates’s melodramatic rhetoric comes right out of the academy, the inexhaustible source of Democratic identity politics. The Democratic Party is now merely an extension of left-wing campus culture; few institutions exist wherein the skew toward Democratic allegiance is more pronounced. The claims of life-destroying trauma that have convulsed academia since the election are simply a continuation of last year’s campus Black Lives Matter protests, which also claimed that “white privilege” and white oppression were making existence impossible for black students and other favored victim groups. Black students at Bard College, for example, an elite school in New York’s Hudson Valley, called for an end to “systemic and structural racism on campus . . . so that Black students can go to class without fear.” If any black Bard student had ever been assaulted by a white faculty member, administrator, or student, the record does not reflect it.
These claims of “structural racism and institutional oppression,” in the words of Brown University’s allegedly threatened black students, overlook the fact that every selective college in the country employs massive racial preferences in admissions favoring less academically qualified black and Hispanic students over more academically qualified white and Asian ones. Every faculty hiring search is a desperate exercise in finding black and Hispanic candidates whom rival colleges have not already scooped up at inflated prices. Far from being “post-racial,” campuses spend millions on racially and ethnically separate programming, separate dorms, separate administrators, and separate student centers. They have created entire fields devoted to specializing in one’s own “identity,” so long as that identity is non-white, non-male, or non-heterosexual. The central theme of those identity-based fields is that heterosexual, white (one could also add Christian) males are the source of all injustice in the world. Speaking on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer show in the wake of Trump’s election, Emory philosophy professor George Yancy, author of Look, A White!, called for a nationwide “critique of whiteness,” which, per Yancy, is at the “core side of hegemony” in the U.S.
Are You Surprised that Trump was Elected?
You shouldn't be. The election result is in part a massive repudiation of the insanity of the Left of which there is new evidence almost every day. A couple of recent examples: The flag incident at Hampshire College; FDNY's hiring of ex-cons for diversity.
Ah yes, Diversity! The goddess before whom the loons of the Left genuflect when they are not genuflecting before that god of diversity, Barack Hussein Obama, the self-diverse apotheosis of diversity, both black and white, he who brought the races together. What a legacy!
Does Deflationism Rule Out Relativism?
This post floats the suggestion that deflationism about truth is inconsistent with relativism about truth. Not that one should be a deflationist. But it would be interesting if deflationism entailed the nonrelativity of truth.
There is a sense in which deflationary theories of truth deny the very existence of truth. For what these theories deny is that anything of a unitary and substantial nature corresponds to the predicate 'true' or 'is true.' To get a feel for the issue, start with the platitude that some of the things people say are true and some of the things people say are not true. People who say that Hitler died by his own hand in the Spring of 1945 say something true, while those who say that no Jews were gassed at Auschwitz say something that is not true. Given the platitude that there are truths and untruths, classically-inclined philosophers will inquire: What is it that all and only the truths have in common in virtue of which they are truths? What is truth? What is the property of being-true?
A deflationist is one who denies that there is any property of truth, or at least, any property of truth robust enough to support a substantive traditional-type inquiry into its nature. Truth is either not a property, or it is a rather 'thin' property about which nothing very interesting can be said. An example of an interesting theory would be one that identifies truth with some epistemic/doxastic property such as warranted assertibility, or rational acceptability, or rational acceptability at the ideal limit of inquiry, or with a relation of coherence among beliefs, or with a relation of correspondence to facts, or with what is conducive to our flourishing (the Jamesian good by way of belief), or with that which enhances the feeling of power, or with what God decides, etc. For the classically-inclined, truth is a deep topic; for the deflationist it is very thin beer.
The deflationist, then, is denying that truth has a unitary and substantial nature into which it would make sense to inquire. There is no Truth with a capital 'T.' Does it follow that the deflationist is committed to relativism about truth? Must he say that there is no such thing as objective correctness?
It seems not. For although the deflationist denies Truth, he need not deny truths. There are truths galore on the views of prominent deflationists; it is just that they have nothing non-linguistic in common in virtue of which they are true. The deflationist tendency is to say that there is no more to Truth than is captured in such equivalences as:
Sentence 'S' (in language L) is true iff S
and
The proposition that p is true iff p.
One version of deflationism is Quine's disquotationalism according to which the function of the truth-predicate is to remove the quotation marks from a quoted sentence. Thus "'Snow is white' is true" says exactly what 'Snow is white' says, namely, that snow is white. And "'Grass is green' is true" says exactly what 'Grass is green' says, namely, that grass is green. And so on. There is nothing common to these sentences in virtue of which they are true. 'True' is just a device of disquotation; it does not pick out a genuine property.
It is easy to see that there is nothing here that is inconsistent with the absolutness of snow's being white or of grass's being green, etc. What's more interesting is that deflationary theories of truth would seem to rule out alethic relativism. Suppose a Nietzschean maintains that truth is the property of being power-enhancing, a property of those beliefs that enhance the power of the one who holds them. Deflationism rules out this substantive theory of truth along with every other substantive theory of truth. For if deflationism is true, then Truth has no nature; it is in a sense nothing at all. As such, it cannot be identified with the property of being power-enhancing.
This looks to be a general result. For truth to be relative, it would have to be identified with some relative property such as acceptability or rational acceptability, or rational acceptability by some ideally situated cognizers, or whatever. But such an identification could be made only if truth has an analyzable nature. On deflationism, however, truth lacks a nature. So truth on deflationism is non-relative. Indeed, this seems to be a consequence of the above equivalence schemata. For the schemata imply that every proposition, if true, is true simpliciter, which rules out any proposition's being true-for-X, for some relativizing factor X.
To sum up.
No deflationary theory of truth is a substantive theory of truth. All relativistic theories are substantive theories. Ergo, no deflationary theory of truth is a relativistic theory of truth.
A Question About Alethic Relativism
Vlastimil V. inquires:
When someone says that (R) truth is relative,
a) … what's the most clear way to understand R?
I suppose he means something else than that people disagree, also something else than that truth is seldom certain.
b) … what's the most clear way to criticize R?
BV: (R) is a substantive and highly controversial thesis about the nature of truth. So it is not to be confused with the Moorean fact or datum that different people often have different beliefs about one and the same topic. Nor is it to be confused with any epistemological thesis about the knowledge of truth such as the thesis that nothing is known with certainty. For this latter thesis is consistent with truth being absolute. Fallibilism and absolutism are consistent. And of course, to hold as I do that truth is absolute (nonrelative) is not to hold that every truth is necessary. If a proposition is true, then it is absolutely true whether it is contingent or necessary. No matter how paltry the proposition — I had gyro meat with my eggs this morning — if true, then absolutely true.
Note that I would not speak, redundantly, of absolute truth were it not for the mischief caused by those who speak, incoherently, of relative truth. I would simply speak of truth. Truth is truth. There is no such animal as relative truth.
VV: Suppose the alethic relativist is fine acknowledging that, given R, (R1) R itself is a relative truth — as well as R1 (or any further meta-claim R2, R3, etc.). Once you provided an interesting retort: the alethic relativist "cannot say that … nonrelativism is only relatively true. If he said that, he would be assuming that relativism is nonrelatively true …" I don't follow this implication, so I would appreciate your further elaboration.
BV: If (R) is true, then it is either absolutely true or relatively true. If the former, then self-refererential inconsistency and self-refutation. So the relativist is forced to retreat, on pain of inconsistency, to (RR): It is relatively true that every truth is relative. But then I object that this cannot have any general or global application or relevance. "Fine, truth is relative for you and your pals, but this has nothing to do with me, and so I may reasonably ignore your quirky local view."
The point here is that the relative relativist cannot exclude the nonrelativist view: he must admit that it is possible that nonrelativism (NR) be nonrelatively true. But then the relative relativist seems to fall into contradiction inasmuch as he must embrace both limbs of the following inconsistent dyad:
It is possible that (NR) be true in every locality
It is impossible that (NR) be true in every locality.
Our relative relativist must embrace the first limb since he cannot logically exclude the possibility of the truth of (NR). And he must embrace the second limb because (NR) and (RR) cannot both be true in the relative relativist's locality.
The relative relativist confuses truth with local understanding. The relative relativist is a slippery fellow. It is not clear what he is up to, though one senses that he is up to no good. Is he simply changing the subject by speaking of local understanding rather than truth? Is he making an eliminativist move by denying that there is truth? Is he trying to reduce truth to local understanding? These are all dead ends.
VV: Also, once you wrote: "The aletheic relativist either asserts his thesis (R) as absolutely true or as relatively true. If the former, his thesis is self-refuting. If the latter, then his thesis avoids self-contradiction only to face a dilemma: either relative-truth is the same as the property of being-believed, or it is not. If the former, then the relativity of truth boils down to an uninteresting triviality. If the latter, then it remains wholly unclear what could be meant by the property of relative-truth, and the thesis (R) perishes of semantic indeterminacy."
What I'm wondering here about is whether the alethic relativist really cannot specify R non-trivially yet consistently.
BV: The following is an uninteresting triviality: one and the same proposition can be believed by one person but not believed by another. Let the proposition be: Hillary lied about Benghazi. Speaking loosely, once could say that the proposition is true-for Tom but not true-for Chelsea. This sloppy way of talking suggests that to be true = to be believed by someone. Now if the property of being true = the property of being believed by someone, then alethic relativism becomes trivially true.
But the thesis of althetic relativism is not trivially true. So what is truth for the alethic relativist if it is not the property of being believed by someone?
My challenge to the relativist: Tell us what you mean by 'truth' such that truth can be coherently conceived to be relative. If you cannot do this then you have no thesis.
Fidel Castro, Hero of the Left
●He turned Cuba into a colony of the Soviet Union and nearly caused a nuclear holocaust.
●He sponsored terrorism wherever he could and allied himself with many of the worst dictators on earth.
●He was responsible for so many thousands of executions and disappearances in Cuba that a precise number is hard to reckon.
●He brooked no dissent and built concentration camps and prisons at an unprecedented rate, filling them to capacity, incarcerating a higher percentage of his own people than most other modern dictators, including Stalin.
●He condoned and encouraged torture and extrajudicial killings.
●He forced nearly 20 percent of his people into exile, and prompted thousands to meet their deaths at sea, unseen and uncounted, while fleeing from him in crude vessels.
●He claimed all property for himself and his henchmen, strangled food production and impoverished the vast majority of his people.
●He outlawed private enterprise and labor unions, wiped out Cuba’s large middle class and turned Cubans into slaves of the state.
●He persecuted gay people and tried to eradicate religion.
●He censored all means of expression and communication.
●He established a fraudulent school system that provided indoctrination rather than education, and created a two-tier health-care system, with inferior medical care for the majority of Cubans and superior care for himself and his oligarchy, and then claimed that all his repressive measures were absolutely necessary to ensure the survival of these two ostensibly “free” social welfare projects.
●He turned Cuba into a labyrinth of ruins and established an apartheid society in which millions of foreign visitors enjoyed rights and privileges forbidden to his people.
●He never apologized for any of his crimes and never stood trial for them.
Ron Radosh on Tom Hayden
The times they are a changin'. Former commie Ron Radosh on Tom Hayden, life-long leftist, who died in October at 76.
Plato on Thales and the Thracian Maid
Paul Manata reminded me of the source of the story about Thales and the servant girl from Thrace.
"Thales was studying the stars and gazing into the sky, when he fell into a well, and a jolly and witty Thracian servant girl made fun of him, saying that he was crazy to know about what was up in the heavens while he could not see what was in front of him beneath his feet." (Theaetetus 174a)
I checked the reference and Paul got it right. He was inspired to provide the quotation upon reading my 'bad drivers' post below.
The whole context surrounding 174a is just marvellous, but then so is all of Plato. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, "Philosophy is Plato, and Plato philosophy." (I'd better check the quotation!)
Addendum
Sed Contra sends this from Aristotle's Politics:
The story goes that some people reproached Thales for being poor, on the grounds that it showed his philosophy was useless. But because of his knowledge of the stars, he realized there would be a bumper crop of olives in the following year. So, while it was still winter, he raised a little money and used it to secure all the olive presses in Miletus and Chios for future lease. He got them at a low rate because no one bid against him. When the olive season came, and the demand for olive presses was suddenly very heavy, he was able to sub-lease them at whatever rate he chose. He made a lot of money, thereby showing that philosophers could easily become wealthy if they wished, but that this is not something they care much about. (I.11 1259a)
Saturday Night at the Oldies: ‘Easy’ Songs
Electric Flag, Groovin' is Easy
Eagles, Take it Easy. A great road song. This one goes out to Kathy H. who objected to these lines:
Well, I'm a standing on a corner
In Winslow, Arizona
Such a fine sight to see
It's a girl, my lord, in a flat bed Ford
Slowin' down to take a look at me.
Eagles, Peaceful Easy Feeling
The Essex, Easier Said Done
Linda Ronstadt, It's So Easy. The old Buddy Holly tune.
Marty Robbins, Am I That Easy to Forget? A country classic. Here is George Jones' version.
Byrds, The Ballad of Easy Rider
Frank Sinatra, Nice 'n' Easy
Ringo Starr, It Don't Come Easy
And that just scratches the surface. My main principle of selection? I have to like the song.
The Horror of Death and its Cure
There is dying, there is being dead, and there is the momentary transition from the one to the other.
While we rightly fear the suffering and indignity of dying, especially if the process is drawn out over weeks or months, it is the anticipation of the moment of death that some of us find horrifying. This horror is something like Heideggerian Angst which, unlike fear (Furcht), has no definite object. Fear has a definite object; in this case the dying process. Anxiety is directed — but at the unknown, at nothing in particular.
For what horrifies some of us is the prospect of sliding into the state of nonbeing, both the sliding and the state. Can Epicurus help?
If the Epicurean reasoning works for the state of being dead, it cannot work for the transition from dying to being dead. Epicurus reasoned: When I am, death is not; when death is; I am not. So what is there to fear? If death is the utter annihilation of the subject of experience, then, after death, there will be nothing left of me to experience anything and indeed nothing to be in a state whether I experience it or not. Clearly, a state is a state of a thing in that state. No thing, no state.
This reasoning strikes me as cogent. On the assumption that physical death is the annihilation of the person or self, then surely it is irrational to fear the state one will be in when one no longer exists. Again, no thing, no state; hence no state of fear or horror or bliss or anything. Of course, coming to see rationally that one's fear is irrational may do little or nothing to alleviate the fear. But it may help if one is committed to living rationally. I'm a believer in the limited value of 'logotherapy' or self-help via the application of reason to one's life.
I suffer from acrophobia, but it hasn't kept me away from high places and precipitous drop-offs on backpacking trips. On one trip into the Grand Canyon I had to take myself in hand to get up the courage to cross the Colorado River on a high, narrow, and swaying suspension bridge. I simply reasoned the thing out and marched briskly across staring straight ahead and not looking down. But then I am a philosopher, one who works at incorporating rationality into his daily life.
Why then do so many find the Epicurean reasoning sophistical? To Philip Larkin in "Aubade" it is "specious stuff":
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear — no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
It seems clear that our boozy poet has failed to grasp the Epicurean reasoning.
Still, there is the moment of death, the moment in which the self helplessly dissolves, knowing that it is dissolving. My claim is that it is this loss of control, this ego loss, that horrifies us. Ever since the sense of 'I' developed in us we have been keeping it together, maintaining our self-identity in and through the crap storm of experience. But at the moment of dying, we can no longer hold on, keep it together. We will want to cling to the familiar, and not let go. This I suggest is what horrifies us about dying. And for this horror the reasoning of Epicurus is no anodyne.
So I grant that there is something quick and specious about the Epicurean cure. If one is rational, it has the power to assuage the fear of being dead, but not the fear of dying, the fear of ego loss.
I consider it salutary to cultivate this fear of dying. It is the sovereign cure to the illusions and idolatries of worldliness. But the cultivation is hard to accomplish, and I confess to rarely feeling the horror of dying. It is hard to feel because our natural tendency is to view everything without exception objectively, as an object. The flow of intentionality is ever outward toward objects, so much so that thinkers such as John-Paul Sartre have denied that there is any subject of experience, any source of the stream of intentionality. (See his The Transcendence of the Ego.)
Everyone knows that one will die; the trick, however is not just to think, but to appreciate, the thought that I will die, this unique subjective unity of consciousness and self-consciousness. This is a thought that is not at home in the Discursive Framework, but straddles the boundary between the Sayable and the Unsayable. My irreducible ipseity and haecceity of which I am somehow aware resists conceptualization. Metaphysics, just as much as physics, misses the true source of the horror of death. For if metaphysics transforms the I or ego into a soul substance, then it transforms it into an object. (Cf. the Boethian objectifying view of the person as an individual substance of a rational nature.) An immaterial object is still an object. As long as I think of myself from the outside, objectively, from a third-person point of view, it is difficult to appreciate that it is I, the first person, this subjective center and source of acts who will slide into nonbeing.
Now we come to "that vast moth-eaten musical brocade," religion, "created to pretend we never die." Although this is poetic exuberance and drunken braggadocio, there is a bit of truth that can be squeezed out of Larkin's effusion. The religious belief in immortality can hide from us the horror and the reality of death. It depends on how 'platonizing' the religion is.
Christianity, however, despite its undeniable affinities with Platonism (as well appreciated by Joseph Ratzinger, the pope 'emeritus,' in Introduction to Christianity), resolutely denies our natural immortality as against what is standardly taken to be the Platonic view. On Christianity we die utterly, and if there is any hope for our continuance, that hope is hope in the grace of God.
Is there then any cure for the horror of death? In my healthy present, my horror is that of anticipation of the horror to come. The real horror, the horror mortis, will be upon us at the hora mortis, the hour of death, when we feel ourselves sliding into the abyss.
In extremis, there is only one cure left, that of the trust of the little child mentioned at Matthew 18:3. One must let oneself go hoping and trusting that one will get oneself back. Absent that, you are stuck with the horror.
Nothing would be more foolish and futile than to take the advice of a different drunken poet, and "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." The dim light of the ego must die to rise again as spirit. In fact, it is the ego in us that 'proves' in a back-handed sort of way that we are spiritual beings. Only a spiritual being can say 'I' and saying it and thinking it isolate himself, distancing himself from his Source and from other finite selves even unto the ultimate Luciferian conceit that one is self-sufficient.
Contingent and Necessary
That we exist is contingent, that we won't necessary.
(To spoil the aphorism by translating it into the patois of 'possible worlds': we exist in some but not all possible worlds; but we are mortal in every world in which we exist.)
The Passion of Martin Scorsese
Not everything in the NYT is leftist crap. The new Scorsese effort is based on the novel “Silence,” by Shusaku Endo.
My copy should be arriving today. A tip of the hat to Karl White for informing me of it.
“The novel poses a very profound theological question,” Peter C. Phan, a Jesuit theologian at Georgetown who was born in Vietnam, told me. “The question is this: Are we allowed to do an essentially evil act to obtain a good result?