J. J. Cale has died at the age of 74. Better known to musicians than to the general public, Cale was the writer behind such songs as Eric Clapton's After Midnight and Lynyrd Synyrd's Call Me the Breeze. Here he is on Mama Don't.
The summer of 1963 — 50 years ago! — featured an amazing number of great tunes in several different genres. Here is a sample from the Billboard Top 100.
Those were just some of the songs from that summer of '63, the summer before the JFK assassination. It was a hopeful time, race relations were on the mend. But then everything fell apart and here we are 50 years later in the midst of serious national decline with a incompetent race-baiting leftist occupying the White House.
Would you please start a series of posts akin to the "Saturday Night at the Oldies" except about books? A few books presented every week, each with a one sentence description, from as wide a thematic range as possible — fiction, history, philosophy, biography and others. I would profit from it immensely, as would many others.
An excellent idea. So, in keeping with my masthead motto "Study everything," here are (some of) my recent reads. Disclaimer: Much of what follows are quick bloggity-blog remarks scribbled mainly for my own use. They are not intended as balanced reviews.
1. Hugh J. McCann, Creation and the Sovereignty of God (Indiana University Press, 2012).
I am finishing a review article about this book for American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. Three sentences from the introduction: "Hugh McCann is an old pro in action theory and the philosophy of religion whose expertise is well-displayed in the eleven chapters of his magisterial Creation and the Sovereignty of God. [. . .] McCann’s central conviction is that God is absolutely sovereign, so much so that God is not only sovereign over the natural order, but also over the moral order, the conceptual order, and the divine nature itself. [. . .] The book can be summed up by saying that it is a detailed elaboration in all major areas of the consequences of the idea that God is absolutely sovereign and thus unlimited in knowledge and power.
2. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow's Heart: A Son's Memoir (Bloomsbury 2013). Held my attention to the end. A son comes to grips with his relation to his famous conservative father. I found the son's uncritical liberalism annoying in places.
3. Colin McGinn, Problems in Philosophy: The Limits of Inquiry (Blackwell, 1993). One-sentence summary: The central problems of philosophy have naturalistic solutions, but we are prevented by our cognitive architecture from ever knowing them. Here is Peter van Inwagen's review. (A tip of the hat to sometime MavPhil commenter, Andrew Bailey, for making PvI materals available online.)
4. Marcia Clark (with Teresa Carpenter), Without a Doubt (Viking, 1997). Marcia Clark was the lead prosecutor in the ill-starred O.J. Simpson trial. Simpson was accused of first-degree murder in the brutal deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, but acquitted. Clark's side of the story. I'm at p. 159 of 486 pp.
5. Dominick Dunne, Another City, Not My Own: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir (Crown, 1997). Another book about the Trial of the Century as Dunne calls it (the Simpson murder trial) by the late novelist, socialite, reporter, and gossip. Aficionados of that vast, sprawling monstrosity know as the City of the Angels will find this and the previous title of interest. I'm from there, so that helps explain my interest.
6. Aurel Kolnai (1900-1973), Ethics, Value, and Reality: Selected Papers of Aurel Kolnai (Hackett, 1978). I thank my young friend Kid Nemesis for bringing Kolnai's work to my attention. One of the ten papers collected here is Kolnai's seminal "Forgiveness" (orig. in Proc. Arist. Soc. 1973-74). David Wiggins and Bernard Williams co-author a useful introduction to Kolnai's life and work.
7. Josef Pieper, Hope and History: Five Salzburg Lectures, tr. D. Kipp (Ignatius, 1994, orig. publ. as Hoffnung und Geschichte by Koesel-Verlag in 1967). The German Thomist meditates on hope with the help of Kant, Teilhard de Chardin, Franz Kafka, and the Marxist Ernst Bloch. Pieper very politely criticizes Bloch's Marxist idiocies which cumlinate in the simultaneously outrageous and hilarious Ubi Lenin, ibi Jerusalem!
8. Ralph C. Wood, Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Eerdman's 2004). A study of themes from the work of a Catholic novelist in the fundamentalist South.
9. Daniel C. Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (W. W. Norton 2013). Is Dennett a philosopher or a pseudo-philosopher? He is undoubtedly brilliant, as brilliant as he is sophistical, snarky, and unserious. I find the man and his works repellent. But Colin McGinn, atheist, naturalist, and apparently also a liberal, I find simpatico. McGinn is a real philosopher! You want to know my criteria? Some other time. My Dennett drubbings are here.
Correction. Monterey Tom correctly points out that " the title 'Trial of the Century' should go either to the Hiss Case or the Rosenberg case, both of which had social and political ramifications far beyond the mere sensationalism of the Simpson fiasco. The only reason why so few college graduates, even graduate students specializing in national security affairs, are familiar with the Hiss and Rosenberg cases is that both trials disprove one of the essential tenets of PC, namely that there never were any Communists in the first place. Of course, only a system as twisted as PC could require people to believe at the same time that while there never were any Communists they were good people."
Why not, given the incorrigible stupidity of reactionary liberals? Krauthammer:
But Detroit is an object lesson not just for other cities. Not even the almighty federal government is immune to Stein’s Law. Reactionary liberalism simply cannot countenance serious reform of the iconic social welfare programs of the 20th century. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are pledged to their inviolability. President Obama will occasionally admit that, for example, Medicare cannot go on as is, but then reverts to crude demagoguery when Republicans propose a structural reform, such as premium support for Medicare or something as obvious as raising the retirement age to match increasing longevity.
On the contrary. Obama added one enormous new entitlement (Obamacare) and, in his last State of the Union address, proposed yet another (universal preschool).
Another old post from my first weblog, written 16 August 2004. I'd best capture these old posts before Google pulls the plug.
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My tendency as a conservative is to see moral equivalence between Communism and National Socialism. This equivalentism is reflected in my occasionally calling Communists ‘Commies.’ This offends some, but if National Socialists may be called ‘Nazis,’ then fair play would demand that Communists may be called ‘Commies.’ Note also that if one calls National Socialists ‘Nazis,’ one obscures the fact that they are socialists – which is precisely something they have in common with Communists. Both systems are totalitarian and tend to dissolve the individual into the social whole. And both systems confuse this dissolution with salvation. Genuine salvation, however, is salvation of the individual in his unique individuality, not salvation from the individual by dissolution into the collective.
Slavoj Zizek, who is most decidely on the Left, denies the moral equivalence of the two movements. In On Belief (Routledge 2001, p. 39), we read:
…the Communist project was one of common brotherhood and welfare, while the Nazi project was one of domination. So when Heidegger alluded to the ‘inner greatness’ of Nazism betrayed by the Nazi ideological peddlers, he attributed to Nazism something that effectively holds only for Communism: Communism has an ‘inner greatness,’ an explosive liberatory potential, while Nazism was perverted through and through, in its very notion: it is simply ridiculous to conceive of the Holocaust as a kind of tragic perversion of the noble Nazi project – its project WAS the holocaust.
The obvious response to this is that there is no difference that makes a moral difference between a movement that calls for genocide –- the extermination of Jews and non-Aryans generally –- and a movement that calls for ‘classicide,’ the extermination of an entire class of people, the bourgeoisie. Extermination is extermination: you are equally dead if you are murdered for belonging to an ethnic group or to a socioeconomic class. Contra Zizek, the Communist project was not one of “common brotherhood” but of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” – a notion that expresses a desire for domination just as surely as Nazi racism does. It is certainly clear that in practice Communism did not promote “common brotherhood” – unless you think that brotherhood is compatible with the murder of 100 million people. (This is the standard figure given for the number of those murdered by Communists in the 20th century. See The Black Book of Communism.) But my main point is that, regardless of practice, Communist theory does not aim at “common brotherhood,” but at the extermination of all who oppose Communist ideas. There is nothing liberal – in the classical sense –about Communism: they will not tolerate a diversity of views, but send you to a gulag for ‘re-education’ – or liquidation.
Zizek is aware of something like this objection and addresses it in an endnote which I reproduce verbatim:
So what about the ‘revisionist’ argument according to which the Nazi elimination of the racial enemy was just the repetitive displacement on the racial axis of the Soviet Communist elimination of the class enemy? Even if true, the dimension of displacement is crucial, not just a secondary negligible feature: it stands for the shift from the SOCIAL struggle, the admission of the inherently antagonistic character of social life, to the extermination of the NATURALIZED enemy which, from outside, penetrates and threatens the social organism.” (On Belief, p.154, n.34)
Slicing through the obfuscatory Continental verbiage, we may take Zizek to be saying that the moral difference between Commies and Nazis is that the former see the fundamental struggle as a class struggle within society, while the latter see it as a struggle between society and an external natural threat. But this does nothing to show the moral superiority of Commies to Nazis; all it does is reiterate a well-known non-moral difference between the two. Explaining how the two totalitarian systems differ does nothing to show that one is morally superior to the other.
The plain truth of the matter is that both totalitarian systems are morally reprehensible. That they are reprehensible in different ways and by different methods is entirely consistent with their moral equivalence. Zizek is committing the elementary mistake of inferring a normative difference from a non-normative one. But our Continental brethren are not known for their clarity of mind.
It is difficult to get lefties to appreciate the moral equivalence of the two totalitarian movements because there is a tendency to think that the Commies had good intentions, while the Nazis did not. But this is false: both had good intentions. Both wanted to build a better world by eliminating the evil elements that made progress impossible. Both thought they had located the root of evil, and that the eradication of this root would usher in a perfect world. It is just that they located the root of evil in different places. Nazis really believed that Judentum ist Verbrechertum, as one of their slogans had it, that Jewry is criminality. They saw the extermination of Jews and other Untermenschen as an awful, but necessary, task on the road to a better world. Similarly with the Commie extermination of class enemies.
This may well be the best column Victor Davis Hanson has written. He meticulously documents the widespread lying, prevarication, and other offenses against truth among our elites, offers a diagnosis, and then addresses the question, Why not lie? Here is his beautiful answer:
I end with three reasons to tell the truth. The majority has to tell the truth — to the IRS, to the police, to the DA, to the census — if a consensual society is to work. You readers tell the truth so that the society can survive an Eric Holder or Mike Barnicle. Average people must speak honestly or our elites’ lies will overwhelm, even destroy us. If 100 million tell the IRS lies during audits or take the 5th Amendment, our voluntary tax system collapses. We can take only so many Lois Lerners.
Two, this often sordid, sometimes beautiful world is not the end. There is transcendence. Lies damage our soul. Selling out in the here and now has consequences later on. If you are religious, your immortal soul is lost. If you are not, at least consider that your legacy, heritage, and remembrance are forever ruined. Ask the ghost of Stephen Ambrose. What good was all that money, all those interviews if based on a lie? All the insight and delight that he brought millions of readers was tarnished. And for what, exactly?
Third, we must strive to be tragic heroes, perhaps not as dramatic as Ajax, not as cool as Shane. Would you rather have been Ethan Edwards or Will Kane or have run Lehman Brothers in 2008? Sometimes, in less dramatic fashion, the choices are that Manichean.
We must try to tell the truth, not doctor films, edit tapes, erase talking points, or lie before Congress, fabricate heroic war records, or invent false sources. Again, why? Because we seek to do the right thing with the full resignation that in the here and now we will often still lose and will lose often and gladly telling the truth.
“We always lose,” says Chris at the end of the The Magnificent Seven after he did the right thing. Or to paraphrase the cinematic T.E. Lawrence about Auda Abu Tayi, we will not lie, as do our elites, because it is simply “our pleasure”[32] not to.
The second reason is the best, though I would add that legacy counts for little: the vast majority of us will be forgotten and our works with us. We will be lucky to end up footnotes in unread archives, archives themselves slated for eventual deletion. This world is a vanishing quantity and we who for a time strut its stage even more so.
Care of the soul is the solid reason to love and honor truth.
The pugnacious Irishman* can be obnoxious at times, and he does on occasion get things wrong (see my articles below), but the man is inspiring in his civil courage as here where he speaks truth to power.
As a reader commented,
Hanson is reasonable, no doubt; and Bill O'Reilly is often a blowhard–but his so-called "Talking Points Memo" last night [Monday 22 July] was very good. As you know, when black "leaders" say that we need a "conversation" about race, they mean that we should meekly listen as they espouse their grievances against white society. No figure in mainstream media would dare say what what O'Reilly said last night, but he said it, all of it true and good, and he did not pull any punches.
O'Reilly works himself into a fine lather by the end of his memo, but there is a place for righteous indignation. As useful as are the dispassionate analyses of Victor Hanson et al., there is a time for passion and finger-pointing. The mendacious race-hustlers and grievance-mongers from the president on down need to be confronted and denounced. There is also a place for mockery and derision. Here is where comedians such as Dennis Miller are very effective.
By the way, and this would make a fascinating separate post, I have heard Buddhists claim that there is absolutely nothing worth getting upset over. Well, when I am lucidly dreaming I tell myself that: enjoy the show; it's only a dream; there's nothing to get upset over. If this world were a dream, then the Buddhist advice would be good. If and only if.
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*I allow myself a bit of literary license. O'Reilly is an American of Irish extraction, not, strictly speaking, an Irishman. Note that I did not write that he is an 'Irish-American.' Liberals talk in that hyphenated way. If you are a conservative, if you have sense, don't talk like a liberal. (Have I ever said this before?)
Black man shoots and kills white 'child' and is acquitted. The Zimmerman case with colors reversed. Here is how the piece ends:
This is what’s wrong with the culture of New York State. Our state values victims over victors. It enshrines passivity over direct action to preempt or thwart criminal activity. It excuses the acts of teenaged thugs, revising history to absolve them of blame for their petty crimes, while pillorying good citizens who dare to defend themselves with legally permitted arms.
In a state with the strictest gun control in the union, to own a legal handgun is no small thing. Roderick Scott is a decent person who did everything legally and correctly… yet in the minds of many, he is the villain simply because he dared not to do nothing. Had this shooting occurred in another state with less liberal hand-wringing underlying its legal code, it’s possible Roderick Scott would never have stood trial. It is, quite frankly, a miracle that the jury — deadlocked just a few hours before it came to the “not guilty” verdict — eventually granted Scott his life back.
Fortunately, Roderick Scott is not bitter. “I feel that justice was served today,” he said after his legal ordeal.
His lawyer was diplomatic but more pointed: “I just want to say that I hope this case sends a message to families out there to watch their kids, to know where they are and what they are doing.”
That lawyer’s message is clear: If your kids live like garbage, trade in garbage, and contribute nothing to their community but garbage, they very well may die like garbage. If that happens they have no one to blame but themselves… though their parents ought to think good and hard about whether they share responsibility.
Exactly right. Live like a punk, die like a punk. Equal justice for all, no matter what the race or ethnicity. No excuses for blacks.
Another fine column by Victor Davis Hanson. He takes Obama and Holder to task and relates the attacks his parents and he himself have suffered at the hands of blacks.
. . . Trayvon Martin would not have been shot. On the other hand, had he been unarmed, it is highly likely that Zimmerman would be either dead or permanently injured.
So much for the fallacious 'disproportionality argument.'
If you attack me with deadly force and I reply with deadly force of greater magnitude, your relative weakness does not supply one iota of moral justification for your attack, nor does it subtract one iota of moral justification from my defensive response. If I am justified in using deadly force against you as aggressor, then the fact that my deadly force is greater than yours does not (a) diminish my justification in employing deadly force, nor does it (b) confer any justification on your aggression.
Suppose a knife-wielding thug commits a home invasion and attacks a man and his family. The man grabs a semi-automatic pistol and manages to plant several rounds in the assailant, killing him. It would surely be absurd to argue that the disparity in lethality of the weapons involved diminishes the right of the pater familias to defend himself and his family. Weakness does not justify.
The principle that weakness does not justify can be applied to the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict from the summer of 2006 as well as to the Israeli defensive operations against the terrorist entity, Hamas. The principle ought to be borne in mind when one hears leftists, those knee-jerk supporters of any and every 'underdog,' start spouting off about 'asymmetry of power' and 'disproportionality.' Impotence and incompetence are not virtues, nor do they confer moral justification or high moral status, any more than they confer the opposite.
There is an old joke that goes "the Anglo-Saxon philosopher will accuse the continental of being insufficiently clear, while the continental philosopher accuses the Anglo-Saxon of being insufficiently."
Over lunch a while back, a young friend asked me what I thought of Zizek. "Not much," was my reply. Here is a bit of justification, an old post (20 September 2004) from my first weblog.
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Slavoj Zizek in On Belief (Routledge, 2001, pp. 143-144) has this to say:
What is perceived here as the problem is precisely the Christian universalism: what this all-inclusive attitude (recall St. Paul’s famous "There are no men or women, no Jews and Greeks") involves is a thorough exclusion of those who do not accept inclusion into the Christian community. In other "particularistic" religions (and even in Islam, in spite of its global expansionism), there is a place for others, they are tolerated, even if they are condescendingly looked upon. The Christian motto "All men are brothers," however, means ALSO that "Those who are not my brothers ARE NOT MEN." [Emphasis in the original.] Christians usually praise themselves for overcoming the Jewish exclusivist notion of the Chosen People and encompassing all of humanity – the catch here is that, in their very insistence that they are the Chosen People with the privileged direct link to God, Jews accept the humanity of the other people who celebrate their false gods, while Christian universalism tendentially [sic! tendentiously?] excludes non-believers from the very universality of humankind.
What a delightfully seductive passage!
What Zizek is saying here is that the Christian universalism expressed by "All men are brothers" excludes non-Christians from the class of human beings. Zizek supports this surprising assertion with an argument. Made explicit, the argument is that
1. All men are brothers Therefore 2. All who are not my brothers are not men. But 3. All who are not Christians are not my brothers. Therefore 4. All who are not Christians are not men.
Having made Zizek’s argument explicit, we can easily see what is wrong with it. The problem is (3). Without (3), one cannot validly infer the conclusion (4). But (3) is false: no Christian holds that all who are not Christians are not his brothers; they are his brothers whether or not they accept Christianity. For whether or not they accept Christianity they are sons of a common Father, God. Or if you insist that (3) is true, I will say that there is an equivocation on ‘brother’ as between (2) and (3). In one sense, two people are brothers if they have a common father. In this sense, all men are brothers if they have a common father, i.e., God. In a second sense, two people are brothers if they are members of a common organization or religion. Two teamsters, for example, are union brothers even if they do not share a common earthly father. The same for two members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
In sum, Zizek makes a highly dubious assertion and then tries to support it with a worthless argument.
It is important to see that he really is giving an argument in the above passage, but that, like many Continentals, he argues in a slip-shod, half-baked way. It’s as if he wants the advantange of an argument without having to do the hard analytic work. In this regard, the above passage is characteristic of a lot of Continental philosophy.
