Doubting no more confers dubitability upon that which is doubted than believing confers credibility upon that which is believed.
The Left’s Hatred of Conservative Talk Radio
At the moment the MavPhil commentariat includes a couple of sharp young philosophers whose views are to the Right of mine. My brand of conservatism takes on board what I consider to be good in the old liberal tradition. Their brand looks askance at paleo-liberalism and sees it as leading inevitably to the hard leftism of the present day. So a fruitful intramural debate is in progress, and I thank these gents for their commentary. Who knows? Perhaps they will shift me a bit in their direction.
I am re-posting the following 2010 entry so that the young guys can tell me what they think, especially with regard to the Horowitz quotation below. I have bolded the sentence that I expect will be the cynosure of their disapprobation.
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The qualifier 'conservative' in my title borders on pleonasm: there is is scarcely any talk radio in the U.S. worth mentioning that is not conservative. This is part of the reason the Left hates the conservative variety so much. They hate it because of its content, and they hate it because they are incapable of competing with it: their own attempts such as Air America have failed miserably. And so, projecting their own hatred, they label conservative talk 'hate radio.'
In a 22 March op-ed piece in the NYT, Bob Herbert, commenting on the G.O.P., writes, "This is the party that genuflects at the altar of right-wing talk radio, with its insane, nauseating, nonstop commitment to hatred and bigotry."
I find Herbert's vile outburst fascinating. There is no insanity, hatred, or bigotry in any of the conservative talk jocks to whom I listen: Laura Ingraham, Dr. Bill Bennett, Hugh Hewitt, Mike Gallagher, Dennis Prager or Michael Medved. There is instead common sense, humanity, excellent advice, warnings against extremism, deep life wisdom, facts, arguments, and a reasonably high level of discourse. Of the six I have mentioned, Prager and Medved are the best, a fact reflected in their large audiences. Don't you liberals fancy yourselves open-minded? Then open your ears!
So what is it about Herbert and people of his ilk that causes them to react routinely in such delusional fashion?
It is a long story, of course, but part of it is that lefties confuse dissent with hate. They don't seem to realize that if I dissent from your view, it doesn't follow that I hate you. It's actually a double confusion. There is first the confusion of dissent with hate, and then the confusion of persons and propositions. If I dissent from your proposition, it does not follow that I hate your proposition; and a fortiori it doesn't follow that I hate the person who advances the proposition. This double confusion goes hand in hand with the strange notion that the Left owns dissent, which I duly refute in a substantial post.
I leave you with a quotation from David Horowitz, Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey (Spence, 2003), p. 273, emphasis added:
The image of the right that the left has concocted — authoritarian, reactionary, bigoted, mean-spirited — is an absurd caricature that has no relation to modern conservatism or to the reality of the people I have come to know in my decade-long movement along the political spectrum — or to the way I see myself. Except for a lunatic fringe, American conservatism is not about "blood and soil" nostalgia or conspiracy paranoia, which figure so largely in imaginations that call themselves "liberal," but are anything but. Modern American conservatism is a reform movement that seeks to reinvent free markets and limited government and to restore somewhat traditional values. Philosophically, conservatism is more accurately seen as a species of liberalism itself — and would be more often described in this way were it not for the hegemony the left exerts in the political culture and its appropriation of the term "liberal" to obscure its radical agenda.
One more thing. You can see from Herbert's picture that he is black. So now I will be called a racist for exposing his outburst. That is right out of the Left's playbook: if a conservative disagrees with you on any issue, or proffers any sort of criticism, then you heap abuse on him. He's a racist, a sexist, a xenophobe, a 'homophobe,' a bigot, a religious zealot . . . .
A Reason to Curtail Immigration from Muslim Lands
"Overwhelming percentages of Muslims in many countries want Islamic law (sharia) to be the official law of the land, according to a worldwide survey by the Pew Research Center." Inform yourself.
Recognizing Microagressions and the Messages They Send
A remarkable document. Tell me what you think.
To understand the Left you must understand that central to their worldview is the hermeneutics of suspicion which is essentially a diluted amalgam of themes from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.
Thus nothing has the plain meaning that it has; every meaning must be deconstructed so as to lay bare its 'real meaning.'
Suppose I say, sincerely, "The most qualified person should get the job." To a leftist that means: "People of color are given extra unfair benefits because of their race."
Or suppose I describe a black malefactor as a thug. What I have actually said, according to the hermeneutics of suspicion, is that the malefactor is a nigger. But 'thug' does not mean 'nigger.' 'Thug' means thug. There are thugs of all races.
Leftists often call for 'conversations' about this or that. Thus Eric Holder famously called for a 'conversation' about race. But how can one have a conversation — no sneer quotes — about anything with people who refuse to take what one sincerely says at face value?
I now hand off to Dennis Prager, American Universities Begin to Implode.
Don’t Say ‘Turkey Day’
Say 'Thanksgiving' and give thanks. You don't need to eat turkey to be thankful. Gratitude is a good old conservative virtue. I'd expatiate further, but I've got a race to run. You guessed it: a 'turkey trot.'
Of Books and Gratitude
Occasionally, Robert Paul Wolff says something at his blog that I agree with completely, for instance:
To an extent I did not anticipate when I set out on life’s path, books have provided many of the joys and satisfactions I have encountered. I am constantly grateful to the scholars and thinkers who have written, and continue to write, the books from which I derive such pleasure, both the great authors of the past . . . and those less exalted . . . .
Gratitude is a characteristically conservative virtue; hence its presence in Wolff softens my attitude toward him.
As Wolff suggests, our gratitude should extend to the lesser lights, the humbler laborers in the vineyards of Wissenschaft, the commentators and translators, the editors and compilers and publishers. Beyond that, to the librarians and the supporters of libraries, and all the preservers and transmitters of high culture, and those who, unlettered themselves in the main, defend with blood and iron the precincts of high culture from the barbarians who now once again are massing at the gates.
Nor should we forget the dedicated teachers, mostly women, who taught us to read and write and who opened up the world of learning to us and a lifetime of the sublime joys of study and reading and writing.
Attitude, Gratitude, Beatitude
Happy Thanksgiving to all my Stateside readers.
The attitude of gratitude conduces to beatitude. Can it be said in plain Anglo-Saxon? Grateful thoughts lead one to happiness. However you say it, it is true. The miserable make themselves miserable by their bad thinking; the happy happy by their correct mental hygiene.
Broad generalizations, these. They admit of exceptions, as goes without saying. He who is afflicted with Weilian malheur or clinical depression cannot think his way out of his misery. Don't get hung up on the exceptions. Meditate on the broad practical truth. On Thanksgiving, and every day.
Liberals will complain that I am 'preaching.' But that only reinforces my point: they complain and they think, strangely, that any form of exhortation just has to be hypocritical. Besides not knowing what hypocrisy is, they don't know how to appreciate what actually exists and provably works. Appreciation is conservative. Scratch a liberal and likely as not you'll find a nihilist, a denier of the value of what is, a hankerer after what is not, and in too many cases, what is impossible.
Even the existence of liberals is something to be grateful for. They mark out paths not to be trodden. And their foibles provide plenty of blog fodder. For example, there is the curious phenomenon of hypocrisy-in-reverse.
A Case for Open Immigration?
The events of the day, and the presence of some sharp commenters, prompt me to repost the following entry which first appeared in these pages on 3 July 2010.
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Spencer Case sent me a link to a short op-ed piece by Michael Huemer who teaches philosophy at the University of Colorado. Huemer's thesis is that
. . . U.S. immigration policy is fundamentally unjust. It disregards the rights and interests of other human beings, merely because those persons were born in another country. It coercively imposes clear and serious harms on some people, for the sake of relatively minor or dubious benefits for others who happened to have been born in the right geographical area.
Huemer's argument stripped to essentials and in his own words:
1. It is wrong to knowingly impose severe harms on others, by force, without having a good reason for doing so. This principle holds regardless of where one's victims were born or presently reside.
2. The U.S. government, in restricting immigration, knowingly and coercively imposes severe harms on millions of human beings.
3. The U.S. government has no good reason for imposing such harms on potential immigrants.
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4. It follows that U.S. immigration policy is morally wrong.
Before addressing Huemer's argument, some preliminary points need to be made.
A. First, a difficult issue such as the one before us cannot be resolved via some quick little argument like the above. Numerous considerations and counter-considerations come into play.
B. Here is a consideration in the light of which Huemer's argument has an aura of the fantastic. The U. S. is a welfare state. Now no welfare state can hope to survive and meet it commitments to provide all sorts of services at taxpayer expense if it opens its borders wide. Without trying to estimate the tsunami of humanity that would flood into the country from all sides were immigration restrictions removed, it is clear that open borders is a wildly impractical proposal. And note that this impracticality itself has moral ramifications: if bona fide citizens have been promised that they will be taken care of by some such system as Social Security into their old age, and the government reneges on its promises because of an empty treasury, then the rights of the retirees will have been violated — which is a moral issue.
If state functions were stripped down to 'night watchman' size as certain libertarians would advocate, then perhaps an open borders policy would be workable; but obviously such a rollback of governmental powers and functions has no chance of occurring. Let the quixotic rollback occur; THEN and ONLY THEN we can talk about open borders. Meanwhile we do have border control, half-hearted as it is. It is not obviously unjust to those who immigrate legally to allow others in illegally?
C. An open borders policy is impractical not only for the reason mentioned, but for many others besides. I catalog some of them in Immigration Legal and Illegal.
Now to Huemer's argument.
I see no reason to accept premise (2) according to which the U. S. government imposes severe harms on people by preventing them from immigrating. Suppose you have foolishly gone into the desert without proper supplies. You soon find yourself in dire need of water. Coming upon my camp, you enter it and try to take my water. I prevent you from doing so. Have I harmed you? I have not inflicted any harm upon you; I have merely prevented you from getting something you need for your well-being. But you have no right to my water, even if I have more than enough. If you steal my supplies, you violate my property rights; I am therefore morally justified in resisting the theft. You are morally obliged to respect my property rights, but I am under no moral obligation to give you what you need, especially in light of the fact that you have freely put yourself in harm's way.
Similarly, the U. S. government does not harm those whom it does not allow to enter its territory, for they have no right to enter its territory in the first place, and in so doing violate the property rights of the U. S.
Once this is appreciated it will also be seen why (3) is false. The U. S. does have a good moral reason to prevent foreigners from entering its territory, namely, to prevent them from violating the property rights of the U. S.
Now at this point I expect someone to object as follows. "I grant you that illegal aliens are not justified in violating private property rights, but when they cross public lands, travel on public roads, use public facilities, etc. they are not violating any property rights. The U. S. has no property rights; there are no public property rights that need to be respected."
This objection is easily rebutted. It is based on a false analogy with unowned resources. An incursion into an uninhabited region not in the jurisdiction of a state does not violate property rights. But the public lands of the U. S. are within the jurisdiction of the U.S. These lands are managed and protected by the state which gets the werewithal of such management and protection, and in some instances, the money to pay for the original acquisition, from coercive taxation. Thus we taxpayers collectively own these lands. It is not as if the land, roads, resources and the like of the U.S. which are not privately owned are somehow open to anyone in the world who wants to come here. Just as an illegal alien violates property rights when he breaks into my house, he violates property rights when he breaks into my country. For a country belongs collectively to its citizens, not to everyone in the world.
The fundamental point is that foreigners have no right to immigrate. Since they have no such right, no moral wrong is done to them by preventing them from immigrating even though they would be better off were they to immigrate. Furthermore, the U.S. government and every government has not only the right, but also the moral obligation, to control its border for the the good of its citizens. After all, protection from foreign invasion is one of the legitimate functions of government.
Why Defend Tolerance and not Intolerance?
Jacques commented:
. . . I'm reluctant to say that tolerance needs defending more than intolerance.
The Muslim world is intolerant of many things that should be tolerated, such as 'paganism' and atheism. But then, the Muslim world is also rightly intolerant of all the worst things about our culture. They don't tolerate blasphemy-for-the-sake-of-blasphemy. If halfwits with 'education' degrees want to teach their young children that it's great to be 'gay' or 'trans', and maybe they should try it out, Muslims will not stand for it. They don't tolerate rape and murder just because stopping it would have 'disparate impact' across races. Don't we want to defend their intolerance in these respects?
[. . .]
I basically agree with Jacques although the penultimate sentence of the above quotation needs to be toned down and qualified. But it is certainly true that "the Muslim world is also rightly intolerant of all the worst things about our culture." I have argued this myself:
Thursday, February 10, 2011
What Do We Have to Teach the Muslim World? Reflections Occasioned by the Death of Maria Schneider
I was one of those who saw "Last Tango in Paris" when it was first released, in 1972. I haven't seen it since and I don't remember anything specific about it except one scene, the scene you remember too, the 'butter scene,' in which the Marlon Brando character sodomizes the Maria Schneider character. Maria Schneider died last week at 58 and indications are that her exploitation by Brando and Bertolucci scarred her for life.
Islamic culture is in many ways benighted and backward, fanatical and anti-Enlightenment, but our trash culture is not much better. Suppose you are a Muslim and you look to the West. What do you see? Decadence. And an opportunity to bury the West.
If Muslims think that our decadent culture is what Western values are all about, and something we are trying to impose on them, then we are in trouble. They do and we are.
Militant Islam's deadly hatred of us should not be discounted as the ravings of lunatics or psychologized away as a reflex of envy at our fabulous success. For there is a kernel of insight in it that we do well to heed. Sayyid Qutb , theoretician of the Muslim Brotherhood, who visited the USA at the end of the '40s, writes in Milestones (1965):
Humanity today is living in a large brothel! One has only to glance
at its press, films, fashion shows, beauty contests, ballrooms,
wine bars and broadcasting stations! Or observe its mad lust for
naked flesh, provocative pictures, and sick, suggestive statements
in literature, the arts, and mass media! And add to all this the
system of usury which fuels man's voracity for money and engenders
vile methods for its accumulation and investment, in addition to
fraud, trickery, and blackmail dressed up in the garb of law.
A wild exaggeration in 1965, the above statement is much less of an exaggeration today. But setting aside the hyperbole, we are in several ways a sick and decadent society getting worse day by day. On this score, if on no other, we can learn something from our Islamist critics. The fact that a man wants to chop your head off does not mean that he has nothing to teach you. We often learn more from our enemies than from our friends. Our friends often will spare us hard truths.
Companion post: What Ever Happened to Linda Lovelace?
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Jacques' challenge to me I take to be the following: Why do you defend tolerance and not intolerance when, as ought to be obvious to any sensible person, there are things that we ought to tolerate and things that we ought not tolerate? Equivalently, why is tolerance in general better than intolerance in general? An anonymous commenter adds support to Jacques' challenge:
All sides can say "it is important that the right kinds of things are tolerated and important that the wrong kinds of things are not tolerated". Isn't that the only sense in which you, or anyone, is a proponent of "tolerance"?
I don't think so. In order to determine what is tolerable and what is not we must inquire, we must examine, we must canvass various options. For this we need the help of others. We need to read their writings and hear their voices. We need access to a broad base of historical and other knowledge. We ought therefore to tolerate a wide variety of views in order to understand the issues and possibly arrive at the truth about them.
We don't know what all to tolerate and what all not to tolerate. Should we allow (tolerate) immigration from Muslim lands at the present time? That is a serious question. The answer is not obvious. If you claim to know the answer you are blustering. This is a legitimate topic of open inquiry. Among the conditions of the possibility of open inquiry is toleration of opposing points of view.
So, even to get clear about what toleration is and is not, to get clear about its limits, to get clear about how it gears into other values, to get clear about what our first-order moral commitments ought to be, we need a space in which there is the free exchange of ideas, a space that is possible only under the aegis of toleration, and not in the precincts of Islamic fundamentalism or Leftism.
Suppose you say to me, "Look, free exchange of ideas is just one more thing that we ought to tolerate; but that is not a reason to defend tolerance in general rather than intolerance." Well, I think it is. For how do you know that free exchange of ideas ought to be tolerated? That is something that needs to be investigated. Tolerance is the space within which alone these questions can be addressed and possibly resolved (though I am not sanguine about resolutions); as such, tolerance and its conditions are not just further things that ought to be tolerated.
Leftist Insanity Update
Every day brings further evidence that contemporary liberals have lost their minds.
A yoga class has been cancelled at the University of Ottawa on the ground that participants are complicit in 'oppression' and 'cultural genocide.' By the way, we are talking about hatha yoga here which is essentially just stretching.
So you might think that re-labelling the course 'Stretching' would solve the problem. But no!
This is a good place to observe that stretching is an essential ingredient in a balanced physical fitness program along with aerobic exercise (walking, hiking, running, biking, etc.), anaerobic work (weight-lifting), and activities that maintain good hand-eye coordination (tennis, pickleball, etc.) The Maverick recommends a four-pronged approach.
Why is Canada such a Pee Cee place? I should think that with all that rugged country up there, those vast empty expanses, and the ass-freezing temperatures a tougher breed of cat would live there and not a bunch of pc-whipped pussies.
Another 'interesting' development is the assault on free speech. According to Pew Research, 40% of millennials think it acceptable to limit speech offensive to minorities.
Trouble is, almost anything will be found offensive by the members of some minority or other. Some blacks have shown themselves to be absurdly sensitive to the slights they imagine embedded in such words and phrases as 'niggardly,' 'denigrate,' 'black hole,' and 'watermelon.'
Some take offense at 'chink in the armor.' But if 'chink in the armor' is about Asians, then the Asians in question would have to be rather tiny to hang out interstitially in, say, a coat of mail.
Why not take offense at 'chunk'? Someone might get it into his Pee Cee head that a chunk is a fat chink.
There is no end to this madness once it gets going, which is why we sane and decent people need to mock and deride liberals every chance we get. Mockery and derision can achieve what calm reasoning cannot.
One cannot reason with those who are permanently in a state of self-colonoscopy.
Finally, this outrage at Mizzou against Thomas Jefferson.
Political Correctness Can Get You Killed
The truth is PC doesn't hack it in war. PC is a rich liberal's plaything, a luxury item. It works best as a subject for ridicule on South Park. And it's not the way we really think. It's the way we pretend we think. So just who is it that is blowing innocent people to smithereens in Paris, Beirut, Sharm, and Mali, and who knows where else next? Zen Buddhist monks? The Little Sisters of the Poor?
Everybody knows who it is. Islam has a big problem and although people want to be polite or deliberately lie about it to look "good" to their neighbors or to their cousins at the Thanksgiving table, when they get into a voting booth, many of them are guiltily going to be pulling the lever for someone with the you-know-what to put an end to this global homicidal insanity – and it's not going to be John Kasich or Rand Paul or Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. It's going to be Donald Trump. And if not Donald, possibly Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz, both of whom seem to be able to find Raqqa on a map. And none of these people are racists, not even faintly, no matter what some NBC reporter wants to imply.
Are Values Objective? Can Values be Universal but Non-Objective?
Commenting on a recent post of mine, Malcolm Pollack takes issue with the notion that values are objective. While granting that there are objective truths, he denies that there are objective values because of a theory of value that he holds according to which values have their origin in valuing beings and merely reflect the needs and interests of these valuing beings.
The wider context of the debate is the assault upon Western values by those who would infiltrate our societies and foist Islamic values upon us. I had made the claim that in defending the values of the West we should insist that these are not just values for us in the West but are values for all. In this sense these values are universal and valid for all human beings even though not universally recognized as valid for all human beings, and even though they were first 'sighted' in the West. I pointed out that values could be universal without being universally recognized. That is indisputably true. What is not indisputably true, however, is the claim that there are objective values. If there are objective values, then these values are universal, i.e., valid for all. Does the converse also hold? Is it also true that if there are universal values, then they are objective? I don't think so. It may well be that some values are universal despite their being non-objective.
What I am going to argue is that, even if one were to concede what I don't concede, namely, that there are no objective values, it still would not follow that that there are no universal values. But first we need to discuss the question of the objectivity of values and give some examples of the values that we are concerned with.
I claim that there are some objective values. Malcolm claims that there are no objective values. He doesn't deny that are values, and I am confident that he and I agree on what some of the Western values are; what he denies is that these values are objective values. But first some examples of Western values.
Open inquiry I take to be an example of a Western value. Inquiry is open to the extent that it is not interfered with by religious or political authorities. The value of open inquiry presupposes the values of knowledge and truth. Inquiry is a value because knowledge is a value, and knowledge is a value because truth is a value. But the pursuit of truth via inquiry requires the free exchange of ideas. So freedom of expression is a value, whether in speech or in writing. Connected with this is the value of toleration. We tolerate other voices and opposing points of view because their consideration is truth-conducive. There are of course other values championed in the West such as equality of rights. But I will take as my central example the value of truth.
When I say that truth is a value I mean that truth is something that has value. I mean that truth is a valuable item. In general we ought to distinguish between an item that has value and its property of being valuable. And neither is to be confused with an act of valuation or with a disposition to evaluate.
The question, however, is whether truth is objectively valuable or else valuable only relative to beings having interests and needs.
In this discussion 'truth' is to be taken extensionally as referring to truths (the propositions, beliefs, judgments . . . that are true) and not intensionally as referring to that property in virtue of which truths are true. Now on to Malcolm's axiological theory.
Malcolm writes:
Where do values come from? In general values represent some interest of their owner, and such interests range from such hard-wired preferences as biological survival and the survival of our offspring, to whether one roots for the Yankees or the Red Sox. In particular, many of the most important valuations humans make have a social context; in addition to valuing such obvious things as food, pleasure, comfort, sex, and shelter, humans tend to value those things that elevate their status in their group, and that help their group compete with other groups. Indeed, for creatures like us, social values can often trump more personal interests — because if your group is wiped out, you are too. Humans will make tremendous personal sacrifices both for the well-being of the group, and to attain and signal high status in whatever way it is acquired and displayed.
[. . .]
Let me put this another way: for a fish, a pre-eminent “value” is to be, at all times, fully immersed in water. This is not the case for a cat. Human groups may not differ from each other as much as fishes and cats do — but they differ enough, I think, that one group’s cherished value can be another’s damnable sin.
Let's examine this admittedly plausible view. The idea is that nothing is valuable or the opposite, in itself or intrinsically. If a thing is valuable, it is valuable only relative to a being who wants, needs, or desires it. If a thing lacks value, it lacks value only relative to a being who shuns it or is averse to it. In a world in which there are no conative/desiderative beings, nothing has or lacks value. Such a world would be value-neutral. This is plausible, is it not? How could an object or state of affairs have value or disvalue apart from a valuer with specific needs and interests? (As Malcolm might rhetorically ask.)
Imagine a world in which there is nothing but inanimate objects and processes, a world in which nothing is alive, willing, striving, wanting, needing, desiring, competing for space or scarce resources. In such a world nothing would be either good or bad, valuable or the opposite. A sun in a lifeless world goes supernova incinerating a nearby planet. A disaster? Hardly. Just another value-neutral event. A re-arrangement of particles and fields. But if our sun went supernova, that would be a calamity beyond compare — but only for us and any other caring observers hanging around. For we are averse to such an event — to put it mildly — and this aversion is the ground of the disvalue of our sun's going supernova, just as our need for light and a certain range of temperatures is what confers value upon our sun's doing its normal thing.
An axiological theory like this involves two steps. The first step relativizes value claims. The second step provides a naturalistic reduction of them.
First, sentences of the form 'X is good (evil)' are construed as elliptical for sentences of the form 'X is good (evil) for Y.' Accordingly, to say that X is good (evil) but X is not good (evil) for some Y would then be like saying that Tom is married but there is no one to whom Tom is married.
The second step is to cash out axiological predicates in naturalistic terms. Thus,
D1. X has value for Y =df X satisfies Y's actual wants (needs, desires)
D2. X has disvalue for Y =df X frustrates Y's actual wants (needs, desires).
It is clear that on this theory value and disvalue are not being made relative to what anyone says or opines, but to certain hard facts, objective facts, about the wants, needs, and desires of living beings. That we need water to live is an objective fact about us, a fact independent of what anyone says or believes. Water cannot have value except for beings who need or want it; but that it does have value for such beings is an objective fact.
The needs of fish and the needs of cats are objective facts about fish and cats respectively; but the value of being totally immersed in water at all times is a value only for fish, not for cats. It follows on the axiological theory we are considering that values are relative: they are relative to the needs and interests of evaluators.
Does it follow from this that no value is universal? No. (Recall that 'universal' in this discussion of Western values in the context of the civilizational struggle between the West and the Islamic world means 'valid for all human beings.' It does not mean 'universally recognized.') It doesn't follow because a value could be non-objective in that it is necessarily tied to the needs/interests of evaluating beings and thus relative to beings having these needs/interests while also being universal. This will be the case with respect to all values that originate from needs that all humans possess. Thus being fully immersed in water at all times (without special breathing apparatus) is a universal disvalue for all human beings. And ingesting a certain amount of protein per week is a universal value.
There are also universal values for all living things, or at least for all terrestrial living things. For they all need our sun's light and a certain range of temperatures. The corresponding value is a value for all terrestrial biota despite the fact that this value is not universally recognized by these organisms. So once again a value can be non-objective, universal, and not universally recognized. Indeed, not even universally recognizable. For there is no possibility that an amoeba recognize the value of what it needs to exist.
As for the fish and the cats, they both need oxygen and they both get oxygen, but in different ways via gills and lungs respectively. So getting oxygen is a universal value for the union of the set of fish and the set of cats, and this despite the fact that this value is not only not universally recognized by these critters, but not recognized by them at all. The point I have just made is of course consistent with the fact that being fully immersed in water at all times is a value for fish but not for cats on the axiological theory under examination. (Note that it is not only not a value for cats, but a disvalue for them.)
As for truth, we presumably agree as to the first-order claim that truth has value. And I hope we can agree also on the first-order claim that truth trumps human feelings, that truth is of higher value than that no injury to human feelings occur, though I cannot expect any contemporary liberal to perceive this. The dispute occurs at the meta level: given that X (e.g. truth) has value, what is it for X to have value?
Suppose that values are non-objective: they merely reflect the interests and needs of evaluators. Given that truth is a value, the ground of truth's being valuable is that we need truth. And we do need it, and not only for the life of the mind. We need it to live well as animals. Truth is conducive to human flourishing, indeed, to a human existence that is not nasty, brutish, and short. Since we all need truth, truth is a universal value. Thus it is a value even for those who do not value it: it is a value even for those who are unwilling or unable to recognize its value for us.
Conclusion
After thinking the matter through once again in the light of Malcolm's comments, I stand by what I said earlier:
The values of the West are universal values. They are not Western values or Caucasian values except per accidens. They are universal, not in that they are recognized by all, but in that they are valid for all. If a proposition is true, it is true for all including those who are unwilling or unable to recognize its truth. If a value is valid or binding or normative it is these things for all including those who are unwilling or unable to recognize its validity.
What I didn't realize at the time I wrote this was that the quoted paragraph is consistent both with my view that values are objective and with those views according to which values reflect the interests and needs of evaluators.
On my view, the universality and intersubjective validity of values is secured by their objectivity. On a view like that of Malcolm's, the universality of (some) values is secured by the objective fact that all the members of a class of evaluators share the need that is 'father' to the value. Thus all human beings, and indeed all intelligent beings, need truth to flourish, whence it follows that this value is universal even if non-objective.
What is crucial here is the distinction between a value's being universal and a value's being universally recognized. This distinction 'cuts perpendicular' to the distinction between objective and non-objective values. The Islamic world, benighted and backward as it is, either will not or cannot recognize certain values that are conducive to human flourishing, all human flourishing, including the flourishing of Muslims.
The message we need to convey to the Muslims and to the leftists who will listen is not that Western values are superior because they are Western but that they are best conducive to everyone's flourishing even that of Muslims and leftists. We have to convince them that we are not out to foist 'our' values on them, but to get them to recognize values that are valid for all.
So You’re Getting a Ph.D.?
Welcome to the worst job market in America. Extracts:
As late as 1970, more than two-thirds of faculty positions at U.S. colleges and universities were tenure-line, but now the percentages are reversed, with 1 million out of the estimated 1.5 million Americans teaching college these days classified as “contingent” faculty, the overwhelming majority of them working part-time. Parents who have shelled out or borrowed the more than $60,000 per year that it can now cost to attend an elite private college may be shocked to learn that their young Jayden or Sophia isn’t actually being taught by the Nobel Prize-winners advertised on the faculty but by shabbily attired nomads with ancient clattering cars who are wondering how to get the phone bill paid. Some adjuncts have successfully unionized. In 2013 adjuncts at the University of Oregon won the right to a boost in base pay, regular raises, health insurance, and the ability to qualify for multiyear contracts. That still didn’t erase—and perhaps set in stone—their second-class faculty status, and they still would earn tens of thousands of dollars less than the greenest assistant professor.
Explanations for this two-tier phenomenon abound. Marc Bousquet, now an associate professor of film and media at Emory University, contended, in his 2008 book, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation, that the problem was the “corporatization” of the university. Bousquet argued that formerly high-minded academia figured out that it was actually a business. Like the rest of American businesses during the 1980s and 1990s, Bousquet argued, universities adopted outsourcing as their most profitable economic model, transforming their historic teaching mission into a form of low-wage, gig-economy service employment in which the majority of the instructors, like Uber drivers, are responsible for their own overhead.
An alternative and less class-warfare-driven theory came from Benjamin Ginsberg, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University. In his 2011 book, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, Ginsberg targeted administrative bloat as the culprit for the massive shrinkage in tenure-line faculty from the 1970s onward, even as college tuition costs were rising exponentially. He pointed out, for example, that between 1998 and 2008, America’s colleges increased their spending on administration by 36 percent while boosting their spending on instruction by only 22 percent. In an adaptation of his book for the Washington Monthly Ginsberg wrote: “As a result, universities are now filled with armies of functionaries—vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, provosts, associate provosts, vice provosts, assistant provosts, deans, deanlets, and deanlings, all of whom command staffers and assistants—who, more and more, direct the operations of every school.”
[. . .]
In the end, though, the best course for Ph.D.s facing underemployment—as most do—is probably a version of William Pannapacker’s “Just Don’t Go”: Take the supply-and-demand problem into your own hands, and just say no to adjuncting and its Dickensian miseries. This past April Jason Brennan, a philosophy professor at Georgetown and a self-described libertarian, incurred the Internet wrath of the famously left-leaning adjunct-advocacy community by proclaiming that “it’s hard to feel sorry for [adjuncts].” There’s no reason for them “to wallow in adjunct poverty,” Brennan wrote, pointing out that they could “quit any time and get a perfectly good job at GEICO.”
In a phone interview, Brennan said, “So many people consistently make bad decisions. The system isn’t going to deliver more tenure-track jobs. A small number of people will, and the rest get kicked out for good. Most people won’t get what they want. There just isn’t that much money.”
Related: Should You Go to Graduate School in Philosophy? I give a nuanced answer.
The Professor-Student 'Non-Aggression Pact' I confess an instance of abdication of authority.
The Academic Job Market in the 'Sixties. Robert Paul Wolff tells it like it was and I throw in my two cents.
Paris and the Fall of Rome
An important essay by Niall Ferguson. The meat of the article (emphases and parenthetical material added):
Let us be clear about what is happening. Like the Roman Empire in the early fifth century, Europe has allowed its defenses to crumble. As its wealth has grown, so its military prowess has shrunk, along with its self-belief. It has grown decadent in its shopping malls and sports stadiums. At the same time, it has opened its gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without renouncing their ancestral faith.
The distant shock to this weakened edifice has been the Syrian civil war, though it has been a catalyst as much as a direct cause for the great Völkerwanderung [migration of the tribes/peoples] of 2015. As before, they have come from all over the imperial periphery — from North Africa, from the Levant, from South Asia — but this time they have come in their millions.
To be sure, most have come hoping only for a better life. Things in their own countries have become just good enough economically for them to afford to leave and just bad enough politically for them to risk leaving. But they cannot stream northward and westward without some of that political malaise coming along with them. As Gibbon saw, convinced monotheists pose a grave threat to a secular empire.
It is conventional to say that the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Europe are not violent, and that is doubtless true. But it is also true that the majority of Muslims in Europe hold views that are not easily reconciled with the principles of our modern liberal democracies, including those novel notions we have about equality between the sexes and tolerance not merely of religious diversity but of nearly all sexual proclivities. And it is thus remarkably easy for a violent minority to acquire their weapons and prepare their assaults on civilization within these avowedly peace-loving communities.
I do not know enough about the fifth century to be able to quote Romans who described each new act of barbarism as unprecedented, even when it had happened multiple times before; or who issued pious calls for solidarity after the fall of Rome, even when standing together in fact meant falling together; or who issued empty threats of pitiless revenge, even when all they intended to do was to strike a melodramatic pose.
I do know that 21st-century Europe has only itself to blame for the mess it is now in. For surely nowhere in the world has devoted more resources to the study of history than modern Europe. When I went up to Oxford more than 30 years ago, it was taken for granted that in the first term of my first year I would study Gibbon. It did no good. We learned nothing that mattered. Indeed, we learned a lot of nonsense to the effect that nationalism was a bad thing, nation-states worse, and empires the worst things of all.
“Romans before the fall,” wrote Ward-Perkins in his “Fall of Rome,” “were as certain as we are today that their world would continue for ever substantially unchanged. They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency.”
Rabid Dogs, Syrian Terrorists, and Ben Carson
Dr. Ben Carson, the pediatric neurosurgeon who is running for president, is now in trouble with the politically correct for referring to Syrian terrorists as rabid dogs. The comparison is perfectly apt, and only a fool or a liberal could take offense at it. A Syrian terrorist is not 'rabid' in that he is Syrian; he is 'rabid' in that he is a terrorist.
Note the double standard involved here. Carson compares Muslim terrorists to rabid dogs. But Muslims refer to ALL Jews as the sons and daughters of pigs and monkeys. Where is the outrage of the squishy-headed libs and lefties over this, something that is objectively offensive?
But as I have said many times before, there would be nothing left of a Left made bereft of its double standards.