"No man speaketh safely but he that is glad to hold his peace. " (Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Chapter XX.)
Excellent advice for Christian and non-Christian alike. Much misery and misfortune can be avoided by simply keeping one's mouth shut. That playful banter with your female student that you could not resist indulging in – she construed it as sexual harrassment. You were sitting on top of the world, but now you are in a world of trouble. In this Age of Political Correctness examples are legion. To be on the safe side, a good rule of thumb is: If your speech can be misconstrued, it will be. Did you really need to make that comment, or fire off that e-mail, or send that picture of your marvellous nether endowment to a woman not your wife?
Part of the problem is Political Correctness, but another part is that people are not brought up to exercise self-control in thought, word, and deed. Both problems can be plausibly blamed on liberals. Paradoxically enough, the contemporary liberal promotes speech codes and taboos while at the same time promoting an absurd tolerance of every sort of bad behavior. The liberal 'educator' dare not tell the black kid to pull his pants up lest he be accused of a racist 'dissing' of the punk's 'culture.'
You need to give your children moral lessons and send them to schools where they will receive them. My mind drifts back to the fourth or fifth grade and the time a nun planted an image in my mind that remains. She likened the tongue to a sword capable of great damage, positioned behind two 'gates,' the teeth and the lips. Those gates are there for a reason, she explained, and the sword should come out only when it can be well deployed.
The good nun did not extend the image to the sword of flesh hanging between a man's legs. But I will. Keep your 'sword' behind the 'gates' of your pants and your undershorts until such time as it can be brought out for a good purpose.
Many of the questions that philosophers ask have the form, What is (the nature of) X? What is knowledge? What is consciousness? What is the self? What is free will? What is causation? What are properties? What is motion? Time? Existence? . . .
These are typical philosophical questions that arise from what appear to be plain facts: we know some things but not others; we are sometimes conscious; one's uses of the first-person singular pronoun refer to something; things exist and some of these things move and they couldn't move if there weren't time, and some of the moving things causes changes in other things, and there couldn't be change unless things had different properties at different times . . . . And so on.
Now it is notorious that philosophers disagree about the answers to these questions. For example, some say that propositional knowledge is justified true belief, which implies that knowledge includes belief, while others maintain that knowledge excludes belief: if a person knows that p, then he does not believe that p. Still others maintain that knowledge is consistent with disbelief: some of the things people know are not believed by them. All three positions have been represented by competent practitioners. But the contending parties, while agreeing that there is propositional knowledge, cannot agree on what it is.
Or consider causation. Philosophers who agree that some of the event sequences in the world are causal and even agree on what causes what, cannot agree on what causation is: there are regularity theories, transfer theories, counterfactual theoris, nomological theories and others.
But you haven't fathomed the depth of philosophical disagreement until you appreciate that the disagreement goes far deeper than perennial disagreement about the answers to questions like the foregoing. For questions of the form What is the nature of X? typically presuppose the existence of X. When one asks what properties are one typically presupposes that there are some. For example, what motivates my question about properties might be my encounter with the blueness of my coffee cup. One cannot ask what causation is unless one has encountered instances of it. And it is spectacularly obvious that if nothing existed, then there would be nothing to ask about and no one to ask the question, What is existence?
The truly awful and abysmal depth of philosophical disagreement is first descried when you appreciate that philosophers sometimes disagree about the very existence of what they ask about.
To the outsider it might appear that certain of these denials are unserious or sophistical or just plain crazy. Perhaps some of them are. But others are motivated and argued. Some philosophers, for example, deny that there are selves. They have arguments. Here is one: (i) Only that which can be singled out in experience can be rightly said to exist; (ii) the self cannot be singled out in experience; ergo, etc. I don't buy the argument, but it has some plausibility, and some philosophers swear by it, philosophers who are neither unserious nor sophistical nor crazy.
Here is another eliminativist argument that convinces some competent practioners:
1. If beliefs are anything, then they are brain states;
2. Beliefs exhibit original intentionality;
3. No physical state, and thus no brain state, exhibits original intentionality;
Therefore
4. There are no beliefs.
I reject this argument by rejecting (1). I would run the argument in reverse, arguing from the negation of (4) to the negation of (1) via (2) and (3). But that's not my present point. My point is to illustrate the depth of philosophical disagreement.
If you deny that there is consciousness, then I will show you the door: you are either stupid or unserious or a sophist or crazy or something equally distasteful. For consciousness is immediately given. You experience consciousness by feeling pain or seeing red. But if you deny that there are beliefs, I will be more respectful. I occurrently believe that my wife is now at a movie. But is the belief-state (which is distinct from its content) an introspectible item, a phenomenological datum, in the way a sensory quale is? No. Do I introspect my self as in the state of belief? No: the self does not appear to introspection, hence it does not appear in this state or that. What appears phenomenologically is only the content: that my wife is at the movies. One goes beyond the given if one maintains that beliefs are mental states. (For details, see An Argument for Mental Acts)
So the eliminativist about beliefs as mental states cannot be as easily given the boot as the consciousness denier.
My present theme is the misery of philosophy. As one my aphorisms has it, "Philosophy is magnificent in aspiration, but miserable in execution." The magnificence, however, cannot be denied. For our sinking into the abyss of interminable disagreement is the night side of our noble quest for the light of truth, a light that philosophy strives after, but apparently cannot attain by its own efforts.
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.
