Christopher Hitchens, Mortality, Twelve, 2012, p. 91:
If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.
Witty unto the end. But in the end, what does wit get you? One last vain flash of brilliance and then extinction — or judgment.
1. There is the fear of nonbeing, of annihilation. The best expression of this fear that I am aware of is contained in Philip Larkin's great poem "Aubade" which I reproduce and comment upon in Philip Larkin on Death. Susan Sontag is another who was gripped by a terrible fear of annihilation.
There is the fear of becoming nothing, but there is also, by my count, five types of fear predicated on not becoming nothing.
2. There is the fear of surviving one's bodily death as a ghost, unable to cut earthly attachments and enter nonbeing and oblivion. This fear is expressed in the third stanza of D. H. Lawrence's poem "All Souls' Day" which I give together with the fourth and fifth (The Oxford Book of Death, ed. D. J. Enright, Oxford UP, 1987, pp. 48-49).
They linger in the shadow of the earth.
The earth's long conical shadow is full of souls
that cannot find the way across the sea of change.
Be kind, Oh be kind to your dead
and give them a little encouragement
and help them to build their little ship of death.
For the soul has a long, long journey after death
to the sweet home of pure oblivion.
Each needs a little ship, a little ship
and the proper store of meal for the longest journey.
3. There is the fear of post-mortem horrors. For this the Epicurean cure was concocted. In a sentence: When death is, I am not; when I am, death is not. Here too the fear is not of extinction, but of surviving.
4. There is the fear of the unknown. This is not a fear with a definite object, but an indefinite fear of one-knows-not-what.
5. There is the fear of the Lord and his judgment. Timor domini initium sapientiae. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." (Proverbs 9:10, Psalms 111:10) A certain fear is ingredient in religious faith. Ludwig Wittgenstein was one who believed and feared that he would be judged by God. He took the notion of the Last Judgment with the utmost seriousness as both Paul Engelmann and Norman Malcolm relate in their respective memoirs. In 1951, near the end of his life, Wittgenstein wrote,
God may say to me: I am judging you out of your own mouth. Your own actions have
made you shudder with disgust when you have seen other people do them." (Culture and Value, p. 87)
Wittgenstein had trouble with the notion of God as cosmic cause, but had a lively sense of God as final Judge and source of an absolute moral demand.
6. Fear of one's own judgment or the judgment of posterity.
There is so much to learn from the Trayvon Martin affair. One 'take-away' is the importance of self-control. If Martin had been taught, or rather had learned, to control himself he would most likely be alive today. But he didn't. He blew his cool when questioned about his trespassing in a gated community on a rainy night. He punched a man in the face and broke his nose, then jumped on him, pinned him down, and told him that he was going to die that night. So, naturally, the man defended himself against the deadly attack with deadly force. What Zimmerman did was both morally and legally permissible. If some strapping youth is pounding your head into the pavement, you are about to suffer "grave bodily harm" if not death. What we have here is clearly a case of self-defense.
Does race enter into this? In one way it does. Blacks as a group have a rather more emotional nature than whites as a group. (If you deny this, you have never lived in a black neighborhood or worked with blacks, as I have.) So, while self-control is important for all, the early inculcation of self-control is even more important for blacks.
Hard looks, hateful looks, suspicious looks — we all get them from time to time, but they are not justifications for launching a physical assault on the looker. The same goes for harsh words.
If you want to be successful you must learn to control yourself. You must learn to control your thoughts, your words, and your behavior. You must learn to keep a tight rein on your feelings. Unfortunately, liberals in positions of authority have abdicated when it comes to moral education. For example, they refuse to enforce discipline in classrooms. So liberals, as usual, are part of the problem.
But that is to put it too mildly. There is no decency on the Left, no wisdom, and, increasingly, no sanity. For example, the crazy comparison of Trayvon Martin with Emmet Till. But perhaps I should put the point disjunctively: you are either crazy if you make that comparison, or moral scum.
This morning the Typepad version of Maverick Philosopher shot past the two million pageview mark. This, the third main version of MavPhil, commenced operations on 31 October 2008. The first main version took off on 4 May 2004.
To be exact, total pageviews at the moment are 2,000,523. That averages to 1161.74 per day with recent averages well above that. Total posts come to 4433, total comments to 6502.
I thank you for reading.
My pledge: You will never see advertising on this site. You will never see anything that jumps around in your visual field. I will not beg for money with a 'tip jar.' This is a labor of love and I prize my independence.
I also pledge to continue the fight, day by day, month by month, year by year, against the hate-America, race-baiting, religion-bashing, liberty-destroying, fascists of the Left. As long as health and eyesight hold out.
I will not pander to anyone, least of all the politically correct.
And I won't back down. Are you with me?
Robert Paul Wolff here vents "a rage that can find no appropriate expression" over "The judicially sanctioned murder of Trayvon Martin . . . ."
"Meanwhile, Zimmerman's gun will be returned to him. He would have suffered more severe punishment if he had run over a white person's dog."
What fascinates me is the depth of the disagreement between a leftist like Wolff and a conservative like me. A judicially sanctioned murder? Not at all. A clear case of self-defense, having nothing objectively to do with race, as I have made clear in earlier posts. And please note that "Stand Your Ground" was no part of the defense. The defense was a standard 'self defense' defense. Anyone who is not a leftist loon or a black race-hustler and who knows the facts and the law and followed the trial can see that George Zimmerman was justly acquitted.
Wolff ought to be proud of a judicial system that permits a fair trial in these politically correct times. But instead he is in a rage. What would be outrageous would have been a 'guilty' verdict.
Was the blogger at Philosopher's Stone a stoned philosopher when he wrote the above nonsense? I am afraid not. And that is what is deeply disturbing and yet fascinating. What explains such insanity in a man who can write books as good as The Autonomy of Reason and In Defense of Anarchism?
Does the good professor have a problem with Zimmerman's gun being returned to him after he has been cleared of all charges? Apparently. But why? It's his property. But then Wolff is a Marxist . . . .
It is sad to see how many fine minds have been destroyed by the drug of leftism.
Piers Morgan and many others think that someone ought to 'pay' for Trayvon Martin's unfortunate death, and that that person ought to be George Zimmerman. Morgan demands justice for Trayvon and thinks that this can be achieved only be convicting Zimmerman of some crime. But what murk and muddle in Morgan's mind makes him think this?
I conjecture that he is failing to distinguish among three senses of 'responsibility,' the causal, the legal, and the moral.
There is no doubt that Zimmerman caused, and is therefore causally responsible for, Martin's death. There was no 'whodunit' aspect to the trial. It is clear 'whodunit.' But it doesn't follow that the Hispanic is either legally or morally responsible for the black youth's death. As we saw from the trial, Zimmerman was acquitted. There simply was not the evidence to convict him of murder two or manslaughter. To say it one more time: the probative standard is set very high in criminal cases: the accused must be shown to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Zimmerman was found to be not legally responsible and so not subject to any legal sanctions.
What's more, the judgment was correct. To be found not guilty is not the same as to be not guilty –remember the O. J. Simpson case — but in the Zimmerman case he was not only found not guilty, but in reality is not guilty, as any objective observer should be able to see.
But suppose you disagree with the last thing I said, namely, that Zimmerman is not guilty of the crimes with which he was charged. Still, that doesn't matter for practical purposes. The jury has spoken and we all must accept the result, just as we must in the Simpson case.
The result, again, is that Zimmerman is not legally responsible for Martin's death. I conjecture that Morgan cannot grasp this because he fails to distinguish causal from legal responsibility.
Does Zimmerman bear any moral responsibility for Martin's death? Some will say that he does and some that he doesn't. But it doesn't matter for practical purposes. All that matters is that Zimmerman was acquitted in a fair trial.
It is worth saying again that the purpose of a criminal trial is not to secure justice for the victim. If that were the purpose, every such trial would have to end in a 'guilty' verdict. The sole purpose of a criminal trial is to secure justice for the accused. Nobody can be made to 'pay' for Martin's death since the only person who could is not guilty of any wrongdoing. Zimmerman was merely defending himself against a deadly attack. If anyone is to blame for Martin's death, it is Martin himself for attacking Zimmerman.
In case you missed it last night, here is Larry Elder attempting to pound some sense into the the benighted Piers Morgan.
Nothing, as Michelle Malkin explains:
So, what exactly do Stand Your Ground laws have to do with Zimmerman and Martin? Absolutely nothing, of course. Outside your own home, common principles of self-defense dictate that unless you have reasonable fear of deadly force or harm, you must flee if possible rather than use deadly force. But a “duty to retreat” rests on the ability to retreat. And “duty to retreat” was irrelevant in Zimmerman’s case because — pinned to the ground with Martin on top of him, bashing his head on the concrete — he was unable to retreat.
Retortion is the philosophical procedure whereby one seeks to establish a thesis by uncovering a performative inconsistency in anyone who attempts to deny it. If, for example, I were to assert that there are no assertions, the very act of making this assertion would show it to be false: the performance of assertion is 'inconsistent' with the truth of the content asserted. (The scare quotes signal that this 'inconsistency' is not strictly logical since strictly logical inconsistency is a relation that holds between or among propositions. A speech act, however, is not a proposition, though its content is.)
Can a similar retorsive argument be mounted against Zeno's denials of motion and plurality?
The retorsive argument might proceed as follows. For Zeno to convey his Parmenidean thoughts to us he must wag his tongue and draw diagrams in the Eleatic sand. Does he thereby prove the actuality and thus the possibility of motion and fall into performative inconsistency? The answer depends on how we understand the purport of the Zenonian argumentation.
A. If Zeno's arguments are taken to show that motion conceived in a certain way does not exist, then the wagging of the tongue, etc. is 'consistent' with the proposition that motion conceived in that way does not exist, and the retorsive argument fails. For example, suppose one maintains that for a particle P to be in motion (relative to a reference-frame) is for P to occupy continuum-many different positions at continuum-many different times (relative to that reference-frame). This popular 'At-At' theory of motion requires the denseness of physical time and physical space. Now if it turns out that motion so conceived does not exist, it may still be the case that motion conceived in some other way does exist, and that Zeno's tongue-wagging and diagram-drawing is motion under that competing conception. The competing conception might, for example, deny the denseness of space or of time, or both.
B. If Zeno's arguments are taken to show that motion no matter how it is conceived does not exist, and is a mere illusion bare of all reality, then the retorsive argument refutes him. For then the moving of his tongue is 'inconsistent' with the truth of 'Nothing moves.' By moving his tongue, pulling his beard, flaring his nostrils, adjusting his toga, and pounding the lectern, he demonstrates the empirical reality of motion, a reality that is prior to, and neutral in respect of, all conceptions of this reality.
Although the retorsive argument works against a Zeno so interpreted, this interpretation is uncharitable in the extreme. Read charitably, Zeno is not claiming that motion and plurality are mere subjective illusions, but rather that they are something like Leibnizian well-founded phenomena (phaenomena bene fundata) or intersubjectively valid Kantian Erscheinungen. They are not mere illusions, but they are not ultimately real either.
C. If Zeno's arguments are taken to show that motion and plurality are intersubjectively valid appearances, but not ultimately real, then they are being taken to show that motion conceived in a certain way, as belonging to ultimate reality, does not exist. This view of motion seems 'consistent' with the motions required to convey Zenonian argument.
My verdict, then, is that retortion does not refute a Zeno charitably interpreted.
Why are liberals such reflexive defenders of underdogs qua underdogs? Here is a clue: The Converse Callicles Principle: Weakness Does not Justify.
This is good. By Peter Machera, former professor of English at New Mexico State University. The 'former' comports well with the intelligence and honesty of the piece which ends thusly:
It’s almost startling to see individuals on television who are intelligent, articulate and fight for a worthy cause. We have plenty of smart people deceiving the public, but not much of the sort who actually speak truth to power, and this is what the O’Mara-West defense team represents, considering the power structures they were up against.
In the end, the jury made the only sensible decision. However, speaking on “Meet the Press,” the Rev. Al Sharpton reminds us ominously that the advocates for Trayvon have not “exhausted their legal options.” One can just hope that Mr. O'Mara and Mr. West will continue to play the virtuous lawyers against the cynical — and significant — political forces that oppose them.
Here is what I said about O'Mara a few days ago:
The state had no case whatsoever as became very clear early on from the testimony of the state's own witnesses. Objectively speaking, it was all over after John Good's cross-examination by the magnificent Mark O'Mara. He impressed the hell out of me: calm, clear, respectful, logical, thorough, low-keyed, bluster-free. A patient, relentless, digger for the truth. Good was impressive as well. That segment of the trial made me very proud of our system.
Hats off to Hentoff for a fine explanation in this 5:56 minute YouTube video of what is so wrong and dangerous and unconstitutional about 'hate crime' legislation. (via Malcolm Pollack)
One of my persistent themes is that conservatives must not talk like liberals, thereby acquiescing in the linguistic hijacking that liberals routinely practice, and putting themselves at a disadvantage in the process. Conservatives must insist on standard English and refuse to validate the Left's question-begging epithets. Only the foolish conservative repeats such words and phrases as 'homophobe,' 'Islamophobe,' and 'social justice.'
For example, if you employ 'homophobe' and cognates, then you are acquiescing in the false notion that opposition to homosexual practices (which is consistent with respecting homosexual people) is grounded in an irrational fear, when the opposition is not based in fear, let alone in an irrational fear.
So I was slightly annoyed to see that Peter Wehner in a recent otherwise excellent Commentary piece used 'racial profiling.' I've heard other conservatives use it as well.
As I argued yesterday, there is no such thing as racial profiling. Now I add the following.
Why say that Trayvon Martin was racially profiled by Zimmerman when you could just as well say that he was gender profiled or age profiled or behavior profiled? Old black females walking down the street are not a problem. But young black males cutting across yards peering into windows can be a big problem.
Zimmerman profiled Martin for sure, and he was justified in doing so. We all profile all the time. But he didn't racially profile him any more than he age or gender or behaviorally or sartorially profiled him. (Martin wore a 'hoodie' and he had the hood pulled up thereby hiding part of his face.)
As I said yesterday,
Race is an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile. A profile cannot consist of just one characteristic. I can profile you, but it makes no sense racially to profile you. Apparel is an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile. I can profile you, but it makes no sense sartorially to profile you.
[. . .]
There is no such thing as racial profiling. The phrase is pure obfuscation manufactured by liberals to forward their destructive agenda. The leftist script requires that race be injected into everything. Hence 'profiling' becomes 'racial profiling.' If you are a conservative and you use the phrase, you are foolish, as foolish as if you were to use the phrase 'social justice.' Social justice is not justice. But that's a separate post.
I saw Mr. Blow and his lovely wife on TV last night. A charming couple. I mean that sincerely. But when I read his columns I am reminded that we live in the Age of Feeling, as Dennis Prager calls it. There is no thinking in Blow's op-ed pieces for The New York Times, only emoting. Add 'Blow' to the list of aptronyms. His latest is The Whole System Failed Trayvon Martin. I was tempted to sort through the nonsense it contains, but thought better of it. Time is short and some writings are beneath refutation.
Blow has a skull full of mush, but at least he is articulate. The real problems of the black community lie much deeper, not in any systemic or institutional racism — the imputation of which to our great country is just slanderous nonsense — but in a culture that produces people like Rachel Jeantel who belong to a seemingly unassimilable indigenous subculture. A fellow blogger points to the genetic factors involved, remarking that the culture that produces a Jeantel is itself produced by Jeantels. I responded that the genetics are given, while the social and cultural factors are malleable. I don't want to believe that a person like her cannot be taught to read, write, and speak basic English.
And while we are on the topic of Ms. Jeantel, she explains here that Zimmi simply failed to appreciate the cultural context in which he was being "whoop-assed." How insensitive of him! Had he been able properly to contextualize the beat-down, he surely would not have 'smoked' the poor boy.
James Anderson responds here to my critique of his and Greg Welty's The Lord of Non-Contradiction: An Argument for God from Logic.
Professor Anderson's combox is open.
One of the tactics of leftists is to manipulate and misuse language for their own purposes. Thus they make up words and phrases and hijack existing ones. 'Racial profiling' is an example of the former. It is a meaningless phrase apart from its use as a semantic bludgeon. Race is an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile. A profile cannot consist of just one characteristic. I can profile you, but it makes no sense racially to profile you. Apparel is an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile. I can profile you, but it makes no sense sartorially to profile you.
Let's think about this.
I profile you if I subsume you under a profile. A profile is a list of several descriptors. You fit the profile if you satisfy all or most of the descriptors. Here is an example of a profile:
1. Race: black
2. Age: 16-21 years
3. Sex: male
4. Apparel: wearing a hoodie, with the hood pulled up over the head
5. Demeanor: sullen, alienated
6. Behavior: walking aimlessly, trespassing, cutting across yards, looking into windows and garages, hostile and disrespectful when questioned; uses racial epithets such as 'creepy-assed cracker.'
7. Physical condition: robust, muscular
8. Location: place where numerous burglaries and home invasions had occurred, the perpetrators being black
9. Resident status: not a resident.
Now suppose I spot someone who fits the above profile. Would I have reason to be suspicious of him? Of course. But that's not my point. My point is that I have not racially profiled the individual; I have profiled him, with race being one element in the profile.
Blacks are more criminally prone than whites.* But that fact means little by itself. It becomes important only in conjunction with the other characteristics. An 80-year-old black female is no threat to anyone. But someone who fits all or most of the above descriptors is someone I am justified in being suspicious of.
There is no such thing as racial profiling. The phrase is pure obfuscation manufactured by liberals to forward their destructive agenda. The leftist script requires that race be injected into everything. Hence 'profiling' becomes 'racial profiling.' If you are a conservative and you use the phrase, you are foolish, as foolish as if you were to use the phrase 'social justice.' Social justice is not justice. But that's a separate post.
Addendum. There is also the liberal-left tendency to drop qualifiers. Thus 'male' in 'male chauvinism' is dropped, and 'chauvinism' comes to mean male chauvinism, which is precisely what it doesn't mean. So one can expect the following to happen. 'Racial' in 'racial profiling' will be dropped, and 'profiling' will come to mean racial profiling, which, in reality, means nothing.
___________________
* See here:
Any candid debate on race and criminality in this country would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes. African-Americans constitute about 13% of the population, yet between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the U.S. The black arrest rate for most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes—is typically two to three times their representation in the population. [. . .]
"High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination," wrote the late Harvard Law professor William Stuntz in "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice." "The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control of city governments."
