Maverick Philosopher – Page 415 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Trump versus Hillary: Abstain or Take a Stand?

Robert Royal, writing in The Catholic Thing:

Democrats advance a woman, a serial liar, a self-proclaimed feminist who trashed multiple women for political gain, an ideological ambulance chaser who will follow votes anywhere, who compromised state secrets and amassed a fortune while serving in the Cabinet, partly through suspect dealings with donors in foreign nations.

Republicans, fed up with their flaccid leaders, advance a man whose whole life speaks: no fixed principles, crony capitalism, megalomania, religious hypocrisy, authoritarianism, bullying, innocence of the Constitution and the simplest functioning of our government (he thinks judges signs bills) – and no political experience.

[. . .]

I won’t indulge in a categorical judgment for now: that would be to give in to the very passions of the moment that I find mortally dangerous. But if things continue as they are . . . I’m thinking it’s best if I simply don’t vote for president. Or write in someone sane, and not wholly on the make.

While I respect Royal's position, I say one must take a stand. Granted, both candidates are very bad, and for the reasons Royal cites in addition to others. But Hillary is worse. For conservatives to abstain because of Trump's manifest negatives is folly. But why is Hillary worse than Trump?

Hillary is Obama in a pant suit. She will continue his "fundamental transformation of America." Like Obama, she is a destructive leftist. She must be stopped. Therefore, conservatives must vote for the Republican nominee whoever it is.

To spell it out a bit:

A. Trump might appoint conservatives to the Supreme Court. But we KNOW that Hillary won't. This reason by itself ought to incline you to take a stand against the leftist candidate. I don't need to explain to my astute readers how important the composition of SCOTUS is. The composition of SCOTUS 'trumps' in long-term importance the identity of POTUS, if you will excuse the pun (and even if you won't.)

B. It is a very good bet that Trump will put a severe dent in the influx of illegal aliens across the southern border. (Forget his bluster about making Mexico pay for the wall.) But we KNOW that Hillary will do nothing to stem the illegal tide. If anything she'll encourage it because in her cynical eyes they are 'undocumented Democrats.' The strategy of the Left is to alter the demographics of the USA in such a way that conservatives are permanently rendered politically ineffective.

C. A third thing Trump might very well do is stop the outrage of sanctuary cities. But we KNOW Hillary won't. By the way, what do sanctuary cities provide sanctuary from? The rule of law.

D. A fourth thing Trump can be expected to do is enforce civil order and free speech rights in the face of such disorderly elements as the members of Black Lives Matter. These liars have targeted the police and are actively working to undermine the rule of law. They disrupt speakers. One even disrupted a speech by Bernie Sanders! Hillary is in bed with them. She repeats all the leftist lies about Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, 'mass incarceration,' 'white privilege,' and so on. And what is most despicable is that she does it cynically for her own personal advantage.

E. A fifth thing Trump might do is defend religious liberties. We KNOW that Hillary won't. Never forget that the Left is anti-religion and has been since 1789. Part of the reason for this is that the Left is totalitarian: it can brook no competitors to State power. This is why it must destroy belief in God and in the family. The god of the leftist is the State, the apparatchiki of the latter being the State's 'priesthood.'

F. A sixth thing Trump might do is defend Second Amendment rights. We KNOW that Hillary won't. She is a mendacious 'stealth ideologue' who won't admit that she is for Aussie-style confiscation, but that is what the liberty-basher and Constitution-trasher is for. She realizes that guns in the hands of citizens are a check on her leftist totalitarianism.

Add these reasons together and you have a strong cumulative-case argument for the preferrability of Trump over Hillary. There are other reasons I haven't mentioned.

Here is the situation. If it comes down to Trump versus Hillary, then you face a lousy choice between two awful candidates. So you must vote for the least awful of the two. And that is Trump. Alles klar?

"But why not vote for neither?"

The short answer is that the Left is totalitarian. You can't withdraw from politics, because they won't let you. And again, we know that Hillary is a leftist who will try to extend the reach of government into every aspect of our lives. You must take a stand.

You must realize that politics is a practical business. It always involves concrete choices among or between sub-optimal candidates. If you refuse to vote, you willy-nilly lend support to Hillary and her ilk and her agenda. You are a fool if you let the best become the enemy of the good, or in the present situation, the good become the enemy of the least bad.

Can Evil be Eradicated?

To be precise, my question is this:

Is there one root of all evil such that this root is (i) empirically identifiable, and (ii) eliminable by human effort alone? Can we humans locate and remove the one source of all evil?

My claim is that an affirmative answer is at once both false and extremely dangerous. ‘Root’ in Latin is radix, whence ‘eradicate,’ to uproot, and ‘radical.’ A radical is one who goes to the root of the matter. But some of our dear radicals make the mistake of thinking that there is one empirically identifiable root of all evils, one root the eradication of which will solve all our problems. Thinking that there is such a root, they are liable to ignore the real root, the one that cannot be empirically identified, and cannot be eradicated, the one that is operative in them. Here are my theses:

1. There is no one root of all evil that is empirically identifiable or isolable in experience. Thus one cannot locate the root of all evil in the Jews, or in the bourgeoisie, or in capitalism, or in corporations, or in ‘globalization,’ or in the infidel, or in the ‘Zionist entity’ or in 'racism,' or in religion, or in 'white privilege.' I’ll even concede that it cannot be located in liberals and socialists and hate-America leftists.

2. The attempt to eradicate evil by eliminating some empirically identifiable entity or group of people must fail given the truth of (1), and must lead to greater evil since genocide, forced collectivization, jihad, suicide bombing of innocents, etc. violate moral laws. Nazis, Commies and Islamists become ever more evil in their attempt to locate and eradicate evil.

3. There is a root of all moral evil, namely, the human misuse of free will. Not free will itself, of course; the misuse thereof. We misuse our free will when we fail to subordinate its use to transcendent standards.

4. Free will, grounded as it is in our spiritual being, is not empirically identifiable: it cannot show up as an object among objects. This is a reason why materialists deny it. And this is why (3) does not contradict (1). Since moral evil cannot exist without free will, to deny free will is to deny moral evil.

5. Free will is not subject to our freedom. I am not free to become unfree. I cannot freely decide to become a deterministic system, though there are times when I would definitely like to! I am ‘condemned to be free’ to use a Sartrean phrase. Being part of our nature, free will cannot be eradicated without eradicating us. It follows (though the inference needs more defense than I can give it here) that the root of all moral evil – the human misuse of free will – cannot be uprooted. Not even God can uproot it. For if God eliminated the human misuse of free will, he would thereby eliminate human free will itself, and us with it. This is because he could not prevent us from freely doing evil (in thought, word, or deed) without removing free will from us, which is the main respect in which we are god-like, imago dei.

6. The upshot is that we must learn to live with evil and not try to eliminate it. Of course, we must do what we can to limit the spread of evil in the world. We do well to start with ourselves by opposing our own evil thoughts and desires, words and actions. After we have made some headway with this, we can then worry about others and ‘society.’ What we cannot do, and must not try to do, is to locate evil outside ourselves so as to eradicate it. Its root, the human misuse of free will, cannot be eradicated, and we are all more or less evil. Although people are not equally good or evil, we all possess elements of both.

7. We cannot by our own efforts eliminate the evil that is in us. And we cannot eliminate the evil that is outside us and is outside us because it was first in us. (Evil thoughts and words are the seeds of evil deeds.) Homo homini lupus is never so true as when man tries to redeem himself. The Communists murdered 100 million in the 20th century in an attempt to eliminate the evils of class conflict, war, and economic catastrophe. They broke a lot of eggs for a nonexistent omelet. There is either no redeemer or the redeemer is divine. Nietzsche’s “Will is the great redeemer” is nonsense. But that’s a topic for another occasion.

8. 'Progressives' as they like to call themselves mistakenly think, as John Gray points out, that "evil can be vanquished." They are meliorists who, if they believe in evil at all, believe that it "is not an inbuilt human flaw, but a product of defective social institutions, which can over time be permanently improved."

That is a great illusion, a murderous illusion.

"Man is neither an angel nor a beast, and it is unfortunately the case that anyone trying to act the angel acts the beast." (Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Krailsheimer tr., p. 242)

Word of the Day: Levigate

To grind into a smooth powder.

Joe Biden, Exemplary Catholic

From The Catholic Thing:

. . . the University of Notre Dame ha[s] awarded its prestigious 2016 Laetare Medal to Vice President Joe Biden – a man who is both a Catholic and at the same time one of the nation’s most conspicuous defenders of abortion rights and same-sex marriage.

Disgusting. The solution? Revolt of the alumni. The greedy, overpaid, cowardly, p.c.-whipped administrators will knuckle under if the alumni withhold funds.

Two 17-Syllable Shorts

How real to each
His problems seem
While those of others
Are like a dream.

Unjust we are
And will remain
Unless we work free
Of ego's game.

Data on the Persecution of Christians

Here

While on Ego Surfari . . .

. . . I turned up this delightful tidbit in Gilleland the Erudite's archive of arcana from 2006:

Bill Vallicella (aka Maverick Philosopher) quotes the Latin phrase "Post coitum omne animal triste est," translates it as "After sexual intercourse every animal is sad," and remarks "The universal quantifier causes me some trouble." A variant of the phrase gives exceptions to the general rule: "Triste est omne animal post coitum, praeter mulierem gallumque," every animal except woman and rooster. Or should that be "Gallum," Frenchman?

Can Love be Commanded?

And one of them, a doctor of the Law, putting him to the test, asked him, "Master, which is the great commandment in the Law?" Jesus said to him, "'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind.' This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like it, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets." (Matthew 22:35-40)

Can love be reasonably commanded? Love is an emotion or feeling. As such it is not under the control of the will. And yet we are commanded to love God and neighbor. How is this possible? An action can be commanded, but love is not an action. Love is an emotional response. So how can love be commanded?

In the case of loving God, there is not only the problem of how love can be commanded, but also the problem of how one can love what one doesn't know. Some people are such that to know them is to love them. Their lovableness naturally elicits a loving response. But apart from the mystical glimpses vouchsafed only to some and even to them only rarely and fitfully, God is not known but believed in. He is an object of faith, not of knowledge. (If you say that God is known by description via theistic 'proofs,' my response will be that such knowledge is not knowledge of God but knowledge that something or other satisfies the description in question.) How can we love God if we are not acquainted with God? Genuine love of God is love de re, not de dicto.

I won't be discussing the second problem in this entry, that of how one can love what one doesn't know, but only the first, namely: How can love be commanded, whether it be the love of God or the love of neighbor?

Here is quick little modus tollens. If love can be commanded, then love is an action, something I can will myself to do; love is not an action, not something I can will myself to do, but an emotional response; ergo, love cannot be commanded.

One way around the difficulty is by reinterpreting what is meant by 'love.' While I cannot will myself to love you, I can will to act benevolently toward you. And while it makes no sense to command love, it does make sense to command benevolent behavior. "You ought to love her" makes no sense; but "You ought to act as if you love her" does make sense. There cannot be a duty to love, but there might be a duty to do the sorts of things to and for a person that one would do without a sense of duty if one were to love her.

The idea, then, is to construe "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" as "Thou shalt act towards everyone as one acts toward those few whom one loves" or perhaps "Thou shalt act toward one's neighbor as if one loved him."

The above is essentially Kant's view as reported by William E. Mann, God, Modality, and Morality, pp.236 ff. It makes sense. But how does it apply to love of God?

Perhaps like this. To love God with one's whole heart, mind, and soul is to to act as if one loves God with one's whole heart, mind, and soul. But how does one do that? One way is by acting as if one loves one's neighbor as oneself. Another way, and this is my suggestion, is by living the quest for God via prayer, meditation, and philosophy.

Is There Any Place for Gentlemen in Post-Consensus Politics?

We are in the age of post-consensus politics. We Americans don't agree on much of anything any more. As our politics comes more and more to resemble warfare, the warrior comes more and more to replace the gentleman.

Here is the best description of a gentleman I have encountered:

The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others, rather than his own; and who appears well in any company, a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe. -– John Walter Wayland

By this definition, Trump is no gentleman; he is rather the anti-gentleman. But a gentleman among thugs is a loser. You cannot appeal to the higher nature of a thug; he has none. So you need someone who can repay the leftist in his own Alinskyite coin. You need a man who will get into the gutter and fight the leftist with his own weapons. You need a man who will not shrink from the politics of personal destruction preached by V. I. Lenin and used so effectively by his successors in the Democrat Party.

Herein an argument for Trump. I am beginning to think that he alone can defeat the evil Hillary. Ted Cruz is a brilliant man compared to whom Trump is a know-nothing when it comes to the law, the Constitution, and the affairs of state, and Cruz is a better man than Trump; but the Texan is a senator and thus part of the Republican establishment against which there is justified rebellion.

Personality-wise, too, Cruz is not that attractive to the average disgruntled voter. He is not enough of a regular guy. And being a better man than Trump he probably won't descend deep enough into the gutter to really annihilate Hillary as she so richly deserves. Trump can mobilize Joe Sixpack and Jane Lipstick. These types don't watch C-SPAN or read The Weekly Standard. They can't relate to the bow-tie brigade over at National Review. They are heartily sick and tired of the empty talk of the crapweasels* of the Republican establishment. They want action.

_______________

*I borrow this delightful bit of invective from the fiery Michelle Malkin.

Which is Worse: Trump or the Republican Establishment?

The latter argues John Hawkins.

Leftists and Underdogs

Here is an extreme example of the leftist's reflexive love of underdogs qua underdogs. A Muslim terrorist stabs an Israeli in the neck. The Israeli pulls the knife out of his neck and stabs the terrorist to death with it. Now anyone who is morally sane will cheer the Israeli for his effective and morally legitimate self-defense. But a left-wing group took the side of the Muslim terrorist! How typical.

Peace Now is a leftist anti-Israel group funded by the EU, George Soros and the usual international gang of creeps and cretins. Its opposition to self-defense against Islamic terrorism is so extreme that it even condemns a stabbing victim for fighting back against his killer.

If Donald Trump is a sort of neo-Calliclean who celebrates the winner qua winner, regardless of how he came to be a winner, the typical leftist is the neo-Calliclean's opposite number who celebrates the loser qua loser, regardless of how he came to be a loser.

Is One a Fool to Take Politics Seriously?

Some think so. The following from Thomas Mann's Diaries 1918-1939, entry of August 5, 1934:

A cynical egotism, a selfish limitation of concern to one's personal welfare and one's reasonable survival in the face of the headstrong and voluptuous madness of 'history' is amply justified. One is a fool to take politics seriously, to care about it, to sacrifice one's moral and intellectual strength to it. All one can do is survive, and preserve one's personal freedom and dignity.

I don't endorse Mann's sentiment but I sympathize with it. Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. Imagine the effect that must have had on a man of Mann's sensitivity and spiritual depth. You witness your country, the land of Kant and Schiller, of Dichter und Denker, poets and thinkers, in Heinrich Heine's phrase, transformed into a land of Richter und Henker, judges and hangmen.

Does Evil Prove the Nonexistence of God?

I'll grant you that it does if you grant me that truth, existence, order, conscience and twenty of so other phenomena prove the existence of God. And let's not leave out the moral heroism of Maximilian Kolbe.

You can reasonably ask how there could be a God given the fact of natural and moral evil. You can also reasonably ask how there could not be a God given the transcendent moral heroism and selflessness of Kolbe and others like him.

I'll grant you that evil argues the nonexistence of God if you grant me that evil also argues the existence of God. (Click on the first hyperlink and locate the argument from evil for the existence of God.)

My point is that there are no rationally compelling arguments for or against the existence of God.

The Central Axiom of Partisan Politics

According to Charles Krauthammer (Things That Matter, Crown Forum, 2013, p. 64),

To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.

Robert Paul Wolff unwittingly provides corroboration:

On Easter Sunday, it is only fitting that the reliably despicable Ross Douthat should once again rise from the dead with an incoherently dreadful column on Piketty. I will not try to summarize it. As Aristotle observed [I think], shit has no form, and hence cannot easily be apprehended by reason. You may read it for yourself. I take Douthat's column as a good sign, a harbinger of Spring. When the rats on the sinking ship of capitalism pause in their scramble down the hawsers to acknowledge the reemergence of Marx from the dustbin of history [how's that for a mixed metaphor?], there is hope on this annual celebration of resurrection.

Note that Wolff does not address the content of Douthat's essay, though he does have the decency to link to it. What he does is portray Douthat as a reliably despicable zombie and rat, a shill for capitalism, who has penned an incoherently dreadful column, a piece of shit beneath the apprehension of reason.

Well thank you Professor Wolff for this wonderful Easter Sunday illustration of the Central Axiom and for reminding us once again of how dangerous you leftists are, and, indirectly, how important our Second Amendment rights are.