Maverick Philosopher – Page 578 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Benedict XVI: “A Conservative Not in Favor of Reforms”

A Fox News anchor's reportage from earlier today betrays presumably inadvertent bias. The anchor said that Pope Benedict XVI is "a conservative not in favor of many reforms." A reform is not merely a change, but an improvement. The Wikipedia article gets it right: "Reform means the improvement or amendment of what is wrong, corrupt, unsatisfactory, etc."

"A conservative not in favor of reforms" therefore implies that conservatives are not in favor of the improvement or amendment of what is wrong, corrupt, unsatisfactory, etc. And to describe the current pontiff using the phrase in question is to imply that he is not in favor of improvement or amendment of what needs improving or amending.

The Fox News anchor could have avoided the biased formulation by reporting what is true in neutral language, e.g., "The Pope, being a conservative, is skeptical of changes." Or something like that.

Conservatives tend to resist change. That is not to say that conservatives are opposed to what they take to be ameliorative changes. For a conservative, there is a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional beliefs and practices. Note the adjective 'defeasible.' Liberals, being more open to change, lack this presumption in favor of the traditional.

The paragraph I just wrote is an example of neutral writing. It does not take sides; it merely reports a salient difference between conservatives and liberals.

As I have said many times, language matters. It is particularly important that conservatives not adopt the slovenly speech habits of liberals. Much of liberal-left phraseology is rigged to beg questions and shut down debate. That is exactly the purpose of such coinages as 'homophobe' and 'Islamophobe.' To call a person who argues that radical Islam is a serious threat to the West and its values an 'Islamaphobe,' for example, is to deflect attention from the objective content of his utterances so as to focus it on his mental state. Since a phobia is an irrational fear by definition, calling someone an Islamophobe is a way of refusing to engage the content of his utterances. It is a form of the genetic fallacy.

If you are a conservative, don't talk like a liberal!

For example, why do conservatives like O'Reilly and Hannity and Giuliani and a score more play the liberal game and speak of 'assault weapons'? Can't they see that it is an emotive phrase used by the Left — the positions of which are mainly emotion-driven — to appeal to fear and make calm discussion impossible?

Note the difference between 'semi-automatic long gun' and 'assault weapon.' Suppose you did a poll and asked whether ordinary citizen should be permitted to own assault weapons. I am quite sure that you would find that the number answering in the negative would be greater than if you framed the question correctly and non-emotively as "Do you think ordinary citizens should be permitted to own semi-automatic long guns?"

And why does Bill O'Reilly say things like,"Obama is for social justice? 'Social justice' is lefty-talk. it sounds good, but if the folks knew what it meant they would oppose it. See What is Social Justice?

It is the foolish conservative who acquiesces in the slovenly and question-begging speech patterns of liberals.

An Apology to the Shade of William Safire

Language matters, but so does accurate quotation. I thank the illustrious Mr. Lull for his contributions to the high level of quality control here at MavPhil.

Dear Bill,

William Safire came up with a list of what he called "fumblerules." "A fumblerule contains an example contrary to the advice it gives . . . ."* Among them is "Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague."** I think that that fumblerule's what Mr Hitchens misquoted.

Best,
Dave

=====
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fumblerules
**Mr Safire's fumblerules are widely quoted on the web. I checked on this particular one in his book Fumblerules : a lighthearted guide to grammar and good usage (New York : Doubleday, 1990), page [149], and I've quoted it as it appears there.

From: William F Vallicella

To: Dave Lull

Sent: Monday, February 11, 2013 1:27 PM
Subject: Safire Quotation

Dear Dave,

I recently quoted William Safire as having written, "Avoid stock expressions like the plague." I think I got this quotation form Hitchens' final book. Since I object to the passing off of bogus quotations, can you tell me where Safire wrote the above, if he did?

Regards,

Bill V.

Why the Government Underreports the Inflation Rate

An excerpt from an instructive article:

Of course, the low inflation rate also provides the government with breathing room on the fiscal side. Low inflation keeps a limit on the increases that federal agencies are required to pay out to beneficiaries of programs such as Social Security. With the budget so tightly constrained by huge deficits, the low inflation data is essential to government planners.

More chicanery can be seen on the unemployment front. The government currently claims the unemployment rate to be at just 7.9 percent. But when calculating unemployment using the pre-Clinton methodology, SGS finds it to be around 22 percent. SGS does not exclude, as the government does now, all those who have left the workforce out of despair of finding a job, or those who who have accepted part time jobs in lieu of full time employment.

A world of politically manipulated 'official' statistics and misleading Government statements makes investment decisions more difficult. The result is that, despite falsely negative 'real' short-term interest rates and an abundance of debased cash, consumers and corporations continue to hoard cash. While the Dow has in fact surged in nominal terms, the leading U.S. equity funds continue to show significant outflows of investment funds. Rising stock prices have not convinced many Americans to get into the game. This should provide needed perspective on the current media euphoria.

A healthy skepticism about big government is as reasonable as a healthy skepticism about big business.

How to Get Rich Quick!

John Blofeld, Beyond the Gods: Buddhist and Taoist Mysticism (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1974), p. 153:

For the sake of wealth, people already well above the poverty line slave all their lives, not realising that withdrawal from the rat-race would immediately increase rather than diminish their wealth. Obviously anyone who finds the full satisfaction of all his material desires well within his means can be said to be wealthy; it follows that, except by the truly poor, wealth can be achieved overnight by a change of mental attitude that will set bounds to desires. As Laotzu put it, "He who is contented always has enough."

Reminded of the Eternal

We are 'reminded' (Plato) of the eternal both by the most transient and the least transient of things. The most transient teaches the ultimate ephemerality of all things finite. The least transient teaches that it is no substitute for the eternal.

William Safire

He is supposed to have said somewhere, "Avoid stock expressions like the plague."

Ah yes, the perils of giving writing advice. Even the great Orwell stumbles.

Voter Fraud

Liberals oppose photo ID at polling places because it would 'disenfranchise' all the blacks and others among us who somehow live without ID whose votes liberals need. And anyway, voter fraud never happens — except when it does.

The Great Blizzard of ’78 Remembered

I had an odd schedule in those days. I hit the sack at four in the afternoon and got up at midnight. I caught the last trolley of the night to the end of the line, Boston College station. Got off, hiked up the hill to my office where I worked all night on my dissertation while listening to a classical music station out of Waltham, Mass. Then I prepared my lectures, taught a couple of classes, went for a run, played a game of chess with my apartment-mate, Quentin Smith, and was in bed by four again. That was my schedule early fall '77 to late spring '78every single day holidays included.

That's how I got my dissertation done. I ruthlessly cut out everything from my life except the essential. I told one girlfriend, "See you at my dissertation defense." She later expressed doubts about marrying a man given to occasional interludes of "hibernation." Another girlfriend complained that I kept "odd hours." True enough. And I still do. I don't get up at midnight any more. I get up at 2 AM. I've become a slacker.

One night in early February the snow was coming down pretty thick as I caught the last trolley of the night. The trip up the hill to my office was quite a slog. A big drift against the main door to Carney Hall made it diffcult to get the door open. But I made it inside and holed up in my windowless office for two or three days as the Great Blizzard of '78 raged. I got a lot of work done and finished the dissertation on schedule.

The Impermanence of the Impermanent and the Permanent

The most ephemeral and fragile of things are yet not nothing: a wisp of cloud, a passing shadow, a baby whose hour of birth is its hour of death. And such seemingly permanent fixtures of the universe as Polaris are yet not entirely being. Both the relatively impermanent and the relatively permanent point beyond themselves to the absolutely permanent. Each is, absolutely considered, impermanent. No finite fixture is finally fixed.

Simone Weil puts the thought like this:

Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity. (Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, p. 97)

Her formulation, however, is defective: stars are born and die. They are not utterly permanent. They too are impermanent. Under the aspect of eternity, the different time scales of Alpha Ursae Minoris and a bear cub mean nothing.

Morality, Religion, Law

The positive law codifies moral judgments the chief vehicle of which is religion. Attacks on religion therefore tend to undermine morality, and with it, the rule of law and respect for the rule of law. Is this thesis supportable?

Religion could be kept private and out of the public square. Many think that it should be. But law can't: the whole point of law is to set forth prescriptions and proscriptions for the behavior of citizens, especially in their relations to one another. The suggestion that religion be relegated to the private sphere is not incoherent. The suggestion that law be so relegated surely is.

Law, however, presupposes morality: the positive law is largely a codification of our moral judgments as to the permissible, the impermissible, and the obligatory. We have laws against drunk driving, for example, because of our antecedent conviction that it is morally wrong to act in ways that needlessly endanger ourselves and others. The legal rests on the moral: legal normativity is grounded in moral normativity. If a law is genuinely normative, then it derives that normativity from a sound moral basis; otherwise the law is merely the say-so of legislators and not deserving of respect, though it might be something to fear. But while the legal rests on the moral, it must not be conflated with it. One proof of this is that laws can be morally evaluated. Morally sane people have no trouble pronouncing certain laws immoral. One thinks of the Nuremberg Laws of the Third Reich. It would be no defense of these laws to insist that they were legal and enacted according to all the relevant protocols of the judicial system then and there in effect. 'Illegal law' is a contradition in terms. 'Immoral law' is not. The positive law is subject to moral evaluation.

Now the chief vehicle of morality for most people is and has been for centuries religion. The Ten Commandments, for example, are to be found in the Old Testament, and are at the ethical center of both Judaism and Christianity. There is much more to both religions than their respective ethical teachings, and there is much more to their ethical teachings than the Decalogue; but the latter is surely at the center of the ethical doctrine of both religions.

Attacks on religion, therefore, are indirect attacks on the morality of which religion is the vehicle, as well as indirect attacks on the law that codifies the morality.

Consider drunk driving again. It is illegal. And it ought to be: its legal impermissibility is morally defensible. To mount a moral defense of the law you have to argue from some moral principle or principles. Ultimately you will be arguing from "Thou shalt not kill," one of the Ten Commandments. Because we judge it immoral to take innocent human life, we also judge it immoral (thought not as immoral) to recklessly endanger human life as drunk drivers do.

"But couldn't one keep the moral prohibitions against killing, stealing, lying, etc. as a basis of public policy while relegating the religious 'packaging' to the private sphere?"

There are two questions here. The deeper one concerns the foundation of morality. To put it graphically, can the normativity of Judeo-Christian ethics survive the death of God? That may not be the best way to frame the question, but it conveys its flavor. My present concern, however, is with a less deep question: Does it make sense to attack the main means for the majority of people to acquire moral formation and guidance?

You know what my answer is.

Truth and Truthfulness

The bathroom scale doesn't lie, but it doesn't tell the truth either. It is either accurate or inaccurate. Only a spiritual being can be either deceptive or truthful.

I cannot lie by simply saying something false. I must have the intention to deceive. That is perfectly clear. Rather less obvious is that to tell the truth it does not suffice to say something true: I must also have the intention to be truthful.

"He told the truth but he wasn't being truthful" is not a contradiction. This is no more a contradiction than "He said something false but he wasn't intending to deceive." But how could one tell the truth without being truthful? One way is by saying something that happens to be true while intending to deceive. Another way is by saying something true to distract the hearer from the salient issue. A third way is by saying something true but omitting other truths relevant to the contextualization and understanding of the first.

Suppose the following sentence is true: "Jane shot Sam several times in the chest with a .45 caliber pistol after he came at her with a knife threatening to rape her." Someone who assertively utters the first independent clause while omitting to utter the second has said something true without being truthful.

In sum, one can say what is false without being untruthful and one can say what is true without being truthful.

Persons, not propositions, are truthful or the opposite. Propositions, not persons, are true or the opposite.

And yet there is some connection between truth and truthfulness.

Here is a mere outline of an argument. In a world without mind there could be no truth. For truth is some sort of correspondence or adequation of mind and world. There are no free-floating truths, no Wahrheiten an sich. Truth is moored in mind. But truth is absolute: it transcends the contents and powers of finite minds. The true is not what you or I believe or what all of us believe. Nor is the true the believable. The true is not the rationally acceptable, not even the rationally at the ideal limit of inquiry. The true is not the warrantedly assertible. There no viable epistemic/doxastic analysis of the truth predicate. And yet truth involves mind. Enter divine mind. The truth is grounded in the divine truthfulness. In God, truth and truthfulness colaesce.

Well, I warned you that it was a mere outline. Brevity is the soul of blog.

Realpolitik

The weak invite attack. That is a law of nature. Nations are in the state of nature with respect to each other. Talk of international law is empty verbiage without an enforcement mechanism. There is none. Or at least there is none distinct from every extant state. The same goes for diplomacy. There needs be a hard fist behind the diplomat's smiling mask. There had better be iron and the willingness to shed blood back of that persona.

Or as Herr Blut-und-Eisen himself is reported to have said, "Diplomacy unbacked by force is like music without instruments."

Plantinga Receives Rescher Prize

David J. Theroux would have me link to his Philosopher Alvin Plantinga Receives Prestigious Rescher Prize. I am happy to do so.

Feminism as Masculinism

I just heard Dennis Prager say that feminism is misnamed and ought to have been called 'masculinism.' He continued, "There is no celebration of the feminine in feminism." I remember having a similar thought back in 1973 when Playgirl Magazine first appeared. My thought was that there is nothing liberating in women imitating the worst features of men.

One ought to distinguish, however, between equity and gender feminism. See The Absurdity of Gender Feminism. There are undoubtedly good aspects of the former, pace certain conservative extremists.

Measurement by Regrets

We are measurable by the nature of our regrets. What do you regret? Not having drunk enough good wine? Not having amassed more wealth? Not having given in to the temptation to commit adultery with willing women or men in faraway places? Or is it rather your intellectual mistakes and moral failures that you regret?

We can be measured by the nature of our regrets as much as by the altitude of our aspirations.