More on my Non-Identity With My Living Body

Maximilian J. Nightingale writes:

You laid out this syllogism in a recent post:

My living body will  become a dead body; 
I will never become a dead body;
therefore, I am  not identical to a living body.

It seems to me that if "becoming" means the same thing in both the first and the second premises, then one must say that both Bill and his living body will become a dead body, or that neither will.  It seems that where a living body used to be, a dead body will begin to be.  So also, it seems that where Bill used to be, a dead body will begin to be.

I don't see that the reader has refuted the argument.  Yes, 'becomes' means the same in both premises. 

Now the first premise is true:   It is clear that one day my living body will undergo a radical change and become a dead body: the same body that today is alive will on a future date no longer have the property of being alive but will instead have the property of being dead.  (I am assuming some 'normal' way of dying, as opposed to being instantaneously annihilated in a nuclear blast.  More on this in a moment.)  This is an alterational change: one and the same body will exist at different times in different states, first alive, then dead.  So it is not the case, as the reader claims, that "where a living body used to be, a dead body will begin to be."  That would be an existential change, not an alterational one.  It is not the case that a dead body will begin to be; one and the same body will go from being alive to being dead.

The second premise is also true.  When my body dies, I will cease to exist; but when my body dies it won't cease to exist: it will continue to exist for a while as a corpse.  This is an existential change in me, not an alterational change:  I will cease to exist.  It is not the case that I will change in respect of the property of being alive.

Therefore, I cannot be identical to my living body.  'Will no longer exist' is true of me, but not true of my body. 

"But what if you are annihilated in an explosion so that there is no corpse?"  At this point the argument takes a modal turn.  Even if my body does not continue to exist after I cease to exist, it could;  but it is not possible that I continue to exist after I cease to exist.  So again we have a difference in properties and non-identity.

I have been assuming mortalism, the doctrine that I cease to exist when my body dies.  If mortalism is false, and I exist even after the death of my body, then a fortiori I am not identical to my living body.

Obama: Fiscally Clueless

Here.

You say the Republicans are not much better?  I don't disagree.  But think of it this way. 

A jackass and an elephant are heading for a cliff, a fall from which will be fatal.  The jackass, being a jackass, is moving faster towards disaster.  The elephant is moving slower.  You must choose to ride on one or the other.  Upon which animal would you prefer to be mounted?

Obama is an utterly clueless jackass.  With a 'Ryanized' Romney there is some hope that we can avert disaster or at least postpone it.

Am I a Body or Do I Have a Body?

In his latest and last book, Mortality, Christopher Hitchens writes, "I don't have a body, I am a body." (86) He goes on to observe that he has "consciously and regularly acted as if this was [sic] not true."  It is a curious fact that mortalists are among the worst abusers of the fleshly vehicle.  But that is not my theme.

Is a person just his body?  The meditation is best conducted in the first person: Am I just my body?  Am I identical to my body?  Am I one and the same with my body, where body includes brain?  Am I such that, whatever is true of my body is true of me, and vice versa? Let's start with some 'Moorean facts,' some undeniable platitudes.

1. I am not now identical to a dead body, a corpse.  There is, no doubt, a dead body in my future, one with my name on it.  But that lifeless object won't be me.  I will never become a corpse.  I will never be buried or cremated.  I am not now and never will be identical to a dead body.  For when the corpse with my name on it  comes to exist, I will have ceased to exist; and when I cease to exist, it will still exist.  This property difference via the Indiscernibility of Identicals entails the non-identity of me and 'my' corpse. 

'My' corpse is the corpse that will come into existence when I cease to exist, or, if mortalism is false, when I am separated from my body.  Strictly speaking, no corpse is my corpse: hence the scare quotes around 'my.'  But I can speak strictly of my body: my body is the body that is either identical  to me, or is related to me in some 'looser' way. 

2.  I am obviously not identical to a dead body.  And I have just argued that I will never become identical to a dead body.  Am I  then identical to a  living body?  Not if the following syllogism is sound: My living body will become a dead body;  I will never become a dead body; therefore, I am not identical to a living body. 

This argument assumes that if x = y, then whatever is true of x is true of y, and vice versa.  Little is self-evident, but surely this principle is self-evident.  There is something true of my living body that is not true of me, namely 'will become a dead body.'  Therefore, I am not identical to a living body.  And since the only living body I could be identical to if I were identical to a living body would be my living body, I am not identical to my living body.  Of course, I have a living body in some to-be-explored sense of 'have'; the point is that I am not identical to it.

3. Consider now the following rather more plausible identity claim:  I am (identically) a self-conscious animal.  Let's unpack this.  I am a living human animal that says 'I' and means it; I am a thinker of I-thoughts, an example of which is the thought *I am just a self-conscious animal.*  I am self-aware: aware of myself as an object, both as a physical object, a body, through the five outer senses, and as psychological object, a mind, through inner sense or introspection.  Both my body and my mind are objects for me as subject.  As such a self-aware animal, I am aware of being different from my body.  In some sense I must be different from my body (and my mind) if  they are my objects.  'My objects' means 'objects for me as subject.'

Now if you were paying attention you noticed that I made an inferential move the validity of which demands scrutiny.  I moved from

a. I am aware of being different from my body

to

b. I am different from my body.

The materialist is bound to resist this inference.  He will ask how we know that the awareness mentioned in (a) is veridical.  Only if it is, is the inference valid.  He will suggest that it is possible that I have an non-veridical, an illusory, awareness of being different from my body.  I can't credit that suggestion, however.  It cannot be an illusion that I am different from anything I take as object of awareness including my brain or any part of my brain.  That is a primary and indubitable givenness. Awareness is by its very nature awareness of something: it implies a difference between that which is aware, the subject of awareness, and the object of awareness.  Without that difference there could be no awareness of anything.  If the self-aware subject were identical to that object which  is its animal body, then the subject would not be aware of the body. 

4.  Will you say that the body is aware of itself? Then I will ask you which part of the body is the subject of awareness.  Is it the brain, or a proper part of the brain?  When I am aware of my weight or the cut on my arm, is it the brain or some proper part of the brain that is aware of these things?  This makes no sense.  My brain is no more the subject of awareness than my glasses are.  My glasses don't see the wound; I see the wound by the instrumentality of the glasses.  Similarly, my brain doesn't see the wound; I see the wound by the instrumentality of the brain (and the visual cortex, and the optic nerves, and the glasses, etc.)  The fact that my visual awareness is causally dependent on my having a functioning brain does not show that my brain or any part of it is the subject of awareness.  I am not identical to my brain or to any bodily thing.

5.   Who or what asks the question:  Am I identical to this body here?  Does the body ask this question?  Some proper part of the body such as the brain?  Some proper part of this proper part?  How could anything physical ask a question?

"Look, there are are certain physical objects that ask themselves whether they are identical to the physical objects they are, and entertain the (illusory) thought that they might not be identical to the physical objects they are."

This little materialist speech is absurd by my lights since no physical object — as we are given to understand 'physical object' by physics — could do such a thing.   If you insist that some physical objects can, then you have inflated 'physical' so that it no longer contrasts with 'mental.' 

So with all due respect to the late Mr Hitchens, brilliant talker about ideas whose depth he never plumbed, I think there are very good reasons to deny that one is identically one's body.

Further questions:  If I am not identical to any physical thing, can it be inferred that I am identical to some spiritual thing?  If I am not identical to my body or any part thereof, do I then have a body, and what exactly does that mean? 

A Free Press?

Victor Davis Hanson:

There is not really any free press anymore, but instead a Ministry of Truth, in which PBS, NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, Newsweek, Time, AP, McClatchy, and Reuters are de facto extensions of the Obama campaign — far more highbrow and adept in disguising their partisanship than an overt Hannity or Limbaugh. Their “journalists” are fed favorable administration leaks when in the old days they had to sue to publish a hit piece. They care little whether ambassadors are left unguarded, or that the U.S. suffers the most costly attack on its air assets since Vietnam, or that administration officials offer lies about Libya that they know cannot be true.

"Ministry of Truth" is an allusion  to an eponymous agency in Orwell's 1984.   Hannity and Limbaugh announce their conservative tilt; the lamestream media shills mendaciously refuse to admit their bias.

Does God Give His Existence Meaning?

Chad McIntosh writes,

Your post We Cannot Be the Source of Our Own Existential Meaning touches on a puzzle that I’ve been wrestling with for several years now. I’d greatly appreciate your thoughts on the following.

Like you, I think meaning is bestowed, or endowed, by agents. However, I may hold a stronger view, which is captured by what I call the Endowment Thesis:

(ET) Any object x has meaning iff x has meaning by virtue of being endowed meaning by one or more agents.

BV:  In the post in question I did not endorse the thesis that meaning is bestowed by agents; I made the conditional claim that if existential meaning is bestowed by each upon himself, then the identification of existential meaning with subjectively bestowed meaning collapses into an elimination of existential meaning.  But your (ET) is plausible and its consequences are worth exploring.

(In fact, I normally state ET as true of value, not meaning. But I think ET holds for both value and meaning. But I’ll follow your post and state the puzzle with meaning instead of value). 

BV:  I think existential meaning has both a teleological and an axiological side.  Thus a meaningful life is a purpose-driven life, but not every purpose-driven life is meaningful: the purpose must have positive intrinsic value. If someone sets himself as the central  task of his life the  parsing of every sentence in Moby Dick, his life has purpose; but since the value of such an accomplishment is questionable, the same goes for the meaningfulness of a life consecrated to such a task.   See Teleological and Axiological Aspects of Existential Meaning.

The puzzle arises when we stipulate that x is God, God has meaning (or is a meaningful being, has a meaningful existence), and that God is the sole inhabitant of a world. So: God has meaning iff God has meaning by virtue of being endowed meaning by one or more agents.

There are two ways this could work: Either God, as a single agent, endows himself meaning, or God is in some way more than one agent (God is whole of which agents are parts—as agents, the parts can endow each other value, and God has meaning by virtue of each of the parts having meaning).

Now, both possibilities seem to require us to say that God does not have meaning logically prior to being endowed meaning (which leads me to think you may reject ET).

BV:  Yes.  Neither God nor Socrates can bootstrap himself into existence.  And it seems that the same goes for meaningfulness: neither can bootstrap his existence into meaningfulness.  So what I argued in my post with respect to finite agents like us holds also for God.  It cannot be the case that God gives his existence meaning. Not even God can be a subjectivist about existential meaning!

But the former possibility—where God has meaning by virtue of endowing himself meaning—requires making sense of endowing oneself meaning, which you—as well as I—find problematic. I have my own objections to this possibility, but I’m curious to what you think of it. Assuming (ET) is true, can God sans creation endow himself meaning (or value)? Would your arguments in the post apply to God with equal force here?

BV: Yes, it seems to me that the arguments apply to God with equal probative force.

Also, I hope we can bracket divine simplicity for the sake of the argument. Thoughts?

BV:  These considerations seem to add up to an argument against your (ET).  The universal quantifier 'any' causes trouble.  But surely some (many, most)  objects are such that their meaning, value, and purpose are not had by them intrinsically but are bestowed upon them by one or more agents acting individually or collectively.  I may assign a rock the purpose of being a paper weight, a purpose that it does not have intrinsically, and to a book that has collectively been assigned a purpose I can add an idiosyncratic purpose such as serving as a door stop or to fuel a fire.  I can use a topographical map to swat a fly, and a flyswatter to scratch my back or direct an orchestra.  Or consider the value of water.  That value, it seems, is not intrinsic to water, but it is also not assigned by me or you or all of us collectively.  But it is relative to our physical need for the stuff.  Water is not intrinsically valuable, else it would be good for electronic gear, paper, and fires.

So it seems safe to say that some purposes, values, and meanings are relative to agents even if those agents don't have the power to assign them arbitrarily.

As for God, he is a counterexample to (ET).  God does not have a purpose because he assigns himself one; he is intrinsically purposive, intrinsically good, intrinsically valuable, intrinsically meaningful.  This intrinsicality would be nicely underpinned by the divine simplicity, but it is not clear that one needs that doctrine to underpin it. 

Now suppose there is no God.  Then human existence is ultimately (as opposed to proximately) meaningless, purposeless, and valueless. But we have the sense that  it is none of these.  This sense gives us reason to seek God, even though it does not furnish materials for a compelling proof of the existence of God.

I have gone out on a limb here, which will afford you an opportunity to practice your sawing skills.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Forgotten Folkies

The Highwaymen were a 'collegiate folk ' outfit that had a big hit in 1961 with Michael Row the Boat Ashore.  Listening to it now after many years, I had forgotten how beautiful it is.  1962 brought them their second hit, Cotton Fields.  The tune is a Leadbelly cover and has been covered in its turn by the Springfields, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Beach Boys, and others.

The Springfields were how Dusty Springfield got her start.  Silver Threads and Golden Needles is another great tune they did.  It is a Wanda Jackson cover and was covered in its turn by Linda Ronstadt.

And while we're on the topic of implements of sewing, we can't go wrong with Jackie De Shannon's Needles and Pins (1963).

If you remember Joe and Eddie, There's a Meetin' Here Tonight, I'll buy you a bowl of menudo at Tres Banderas cantina, Apache Junction, Arizona. Meet me there in an hour. 

We Cannot Be the Source of Our Own Existential Meaning

Some say that life has no meaning except the meaning that we, individually, give it.  Thus the meaning of my life is the meaning I give my life, and the meaning of your life is the (perhaps different) meaning that you give your life, and that, apart from these individual projects of meaning-bestowal, one's life has no meaning.  Thus meaning does not come from God or der Fuehrer or il Duce or the government (as some contemporary liberals seem to think) or the state or society or other people, or anything exogenic, but comes, if it comes at all, from the wellsprings of one's own selfhood.

One could call this subjectivist theory  an identity theory of existential (as opposed to linguistic) meaning:  there is such a thing as the meaning of an individual human life, but what that meaning is is identical to the meaning the individual in question gives to its life.  By contrast, an eliminativist theory of existential meaning would have it that there is no such thing as existential meaning.

Now it seems to me that the subjectivist identity theory just sketched is untenable, precisely for the reason that it cannot be kept from collapsing into an eliminativist theory.  (This is a special case of how identity theories, which attempt to reduce A to B without denying the existence of A,  often collapse into eliminativist theories. See here and here for more on the general issue.) 

Note that if I must first give my life meaning, if it is to have some, then it has no meaning prior to and independent of my giving it meaning.  And yet I must exist prior (both logically and temporally) to the decisions, resolutions, declamations, and whatnot whereby I give my life meaning.  This implies that the acts of meaning-bestowal and the subject whose acts they are, exist meaninglessly.  These acts, however, are mine, and their subject is me.  It follows that my existence and my acts of meaning-bestowal are meaningless. 

The attempted identification of meaning with subjectively bestowed meaning collapses into an elimination of meaning.

What we have here is a 'bootstrap problem.'  Just as I cannot bootstrap myself into existence, i.e., cause my own existence (since that would require me to exist before I exist), I cannot bootstrap my existence into meaningfulness, i.e., bring it about that my existence has meaning.  Just as I cannot exist before I exist, I cannot have meaning before I have meaning.  I cannot be the source of my own meaning.

If the only meaning my existence has is the meaning I give it, then that I exist at all is meaningless.

Obama: A Prediction Come True

On 6 November 2008, I wrote into my journal:

The Irony of the Obama Victory.  The presidency was handed to him by the financial crisis.  But his policies will exacerbate it.

I was right.  I now predict that if he is re-elected, four more years of his policies will bring us to financial ruin.  Mark my words.

The man is not only incompetent and inexperienced but unserious.   Here he is on Letterman admitting that he doesn't know what the national debt is.  He obviously doesn't understand the gravity of the situation, or his own partial responsibility for it in irresponsibly pushing another entitlement, popularly known as ObamaCare, when the problem of the long-term solvency of the existing entitlements  has not been addressed.  Instead, he blames his predecessor while manically digging the hole deeper.

The Wit and Mortality of Christopher Hitchens

HitchensI just breezed through a quick first reading of Christopher Hitchens' Mortality (Twelve, 2012).  The slim volume ends with some fragmentary notes of characteristic wit scribbled near the end.  My favorites:

Amazing how heart and lungs have held up: would have been healthier if I'd been more sickly. (88)

I'm not fighting or battling cancer — it's fighting me.  (89)

Brave? Hah! Save it for a fight you can't [can?] run away from. (89)

If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does. (91) 

Larkin good on fear in "Aubade," with implied reproof to Hume and Lucretius for their stoicism. Fair enough in one way: atheists ought not to be offering consolation either. (92)

I reproduce Philip Larkin's poem in my Philip Larkin on Death.

What is Left for Philosophy to Do?

Much of what was once in the province of philosophy now belongs to the sciences.  Might it be that eventually everything once claimed by philosophy will be taken over by special sciences?  I recently took Lawrence Krauss to task here and here for his latest scientistic outburst according to which philosophical problems, "when the grow up, leave home." He maintains that all answerable questions belong in the domain of empirical science.  Is that right?   Is it true that, eventually, there will nothing left for philosophy to do?  Or are there certain problems and questions that will remain specifically philosophical?  I suggest that in the following four areas philosophy has and will retain its proprietary rights in perpetuity.

A. Metaphilosophical Questions.  Let us first note that the questions raised in my introductory paragraph belong to philosophy.  They are questions about philosophy.  All such metaphilosophical questions belong to philosophy.  The philosophy of science (religion, law, etc.) is not part of science (religion, law, etc.), but the philosophy of philosophy is a branch of philosophy. There is simply no more encompassing rational discipline than philosophy.  So right here we have a number of questions that do not belong to any empirical science or to any formal science such as mathematics either. (Whether or not you want to call mathematics science, it is certainly not empirical science.)

Consider the question of scientism.  When properly employed, the term 'scientism'  means the following.

Scientism is a philosophical thesis that belongs to the sub-discipline of epistemology. It is not a thesis in science, but a thesis about science.  The thesis in its strongest form is that the only genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge, the knowledge generated by the (hard) sciences of physics, chemistry, biology and their offshoots. The thesis in a weaker form allows some cognitive value to the social sciences, the humanities, and other subjects, but insists that scientific knowledge is vastly superior and authoritative and is as it were the 'gold standard' when it comes to knowledge. On either strong or weak scientism, there is no room for first philosophy, according to which philosophy is an autonomous discipline, independent of natural science, and authoritative in respect to it. So on scientism, natural science sets the standard in matters epistemic, and philosophy’s role is at best ancillary.  Not a handmaiden to theology in this day and age; a handmaiden to science.

The question whether scientism is true is a philosophical question that cannot by its very nature be answered by any empirical science.  Not only is this question not discussed in any physics or chemistry or biology text, it is not a question to the answering of which observation and experiment are at all relevant.  The question whether the only genuine knowledge is scientific knowlerdge is not an empirical question.  It is not like the question whether high sodium intake is a contributing factor in hypertension or whether galactic recession is taking place.

Those who champion scientism are doing philosophy whether they know it or not, and presupposing that there are specifically philosophical theses. For scientism is a philosophical thesis.  Not only is scientism a philosophical thesis, it is an untenable philosophical thesis (as I argue here)  the critique of which belongs to philosophy.  Both the forwarding of the thesis and its evaluation as untenable are specifically philosophical activities.  One of the perennial tasks of philosophy is the debunking of bad philosophy or pseudo-philosophy of the sort produced by ignorant people like Krauss.

B. Normative Questions.  There are normative questions of various sorts in logic, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, and politology.  Empirical investigation cannot answer normative questions.  Consider the theory of the state.  A good chunk of it will be covered by political science which, perhaps, is independent of philosophy.  Political science studies the types, characteristics, institutions, and  genesis of states and other political entities as they actually exist.  It is a non-normative enterprise devoted to facts and their explanation.  It will of course treat of the norms embedded in laws and institutions but will study these norms as facts.  One can study the content of legal prescriptions and proscriptions under bracketing of their rightness or wrongness.  To do so is to study them as facts.  Thus one could study the content of the Nazi state's Nuremberg Laws without raising the question of their justice or injustice. Questions about the moral legitimacy of a given state or of any state are quite different from the factual questions treated in political science: they are normative questions belonging  to political philosophy.  If I study the structure of the Nazi state and its institutions and hierarchies I am doing political science.  But if I argue that the Nazi state was a criminal state or an unjust state then I have moved into the normative dimension and am doing political philosophy.

Or consider logic.  It does not reduce to the psychology of reasoning, let alone to the neurobiology underlying reasoning.  It is a normative discipline concerned, not with how we think as a matter of fact, but how we ought to think if we are to arrive at truth.  Similar considerations  hold for epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics.  Suppose you disagree with what I just said about logic. Then we have a dispute in the philosophy of logic, and once again philosophy is seen to be indispensable. 

3. Critical Questions.  One can raise critical questions about religion, mysticism, law, science and other sectors of culture.  A critique of religion, for example, aims to separate out the true from the false and the beneficial from the harmful in religion.  It aims to evaluate religion as a cultural form.  This is different from the descriptive study of extant religions.  A critique of Buddhism, for example, goes beyond a study of characteristic Buddhist beliefs and practices; it is concerned to evaluate these beliefs and practices in the light of such criteria as logical coherence, truth, and whether they help or hinder human flourishing.  Such an evaluation is obviously a specifically philosophical enterprise.  It cannot be supplanted by the sociology or psychology of Buddhism.  Suppose it is established that Buddhism appeals to people of a certain psychological make-up or social class. That is an interesting fact, but is irrelevant to the question whether Buddhism is wholly or in part logically coherent, true, or conducive to human flourishing.  The critique of Buddhism, and of any religion, belongs to philosophy.  And the same goes for the critique of mysticism, law, and the rest.

4.  Metaphysical Questions.  These are non-normative but also non-empirical questions.  They have no place within the province of any empirical science.

There are the questions of general metaphysics or ontology.  Among them: questions about existence, identity, properties, relations, modality.  Consider these two claims:

a. Principle of the Rejection of Nonexistent Objects:  Necessarily, for any x, if x has properties, then x exists.

b. Principle of the Rejection of Unpropertied Objects: Necessarily, for any x, if x exists, then x has properties.

I say both are true propositions of general metaphysics.  They are items of knowledge about the structure of any possible world, and therefore items of knowledge about the structure of the actual world.   But we do not know them by any empirical method: they do not belong in an empirical science.

The principles are not truths of pure logic either.  For their negations are not logical contradictions.  They are irreducibly ontological truths.  The belong to metaphysca generalis or ontology.

The Meinongians deny (a).  Where does the dispute about (a) belong?  In physics?  You would have to be as thoughtless as Krauss to maintain such a thing.  It belongs nowhere else but in philosophy.

There are also the questions of special metaphysics, among them, questions about God, the soul, the freedom of the will, and the relationof mind and body.

The Schizoid Left: OK to Bash Mormons and Christians but not Muslims?

Many liberals in the West have become, and many more are becoming, radical leftists out to subvert the very principles that they as leftists supposedly support. Thus arises the phenomenon of the schizoid Left. For example, from the time of the French Revolution on, the Left has been anti-clerical and ever more anti-religious. But now we witness the bizarre spectacle of leftists aligning themselves with, or at least not opposing, the most extreme type of religious fundamentalism on the face of the earth.
They never miss an opportunity to bash Christians and Mormons, but are deeply offended by the amateurish Innocence of Muslims.  Bret Stephens:

The film, the [Obama] administration says, is "hateful and offensive" (Susan Rice), reprehensible and disgusting" (Jay Carney) and, in a twist, "disgusting and reprehensible" (Hillary Clinton). Mr. Carney, the White House spokesman, also lays sole blame on the film for inciting the riots that have swept the Muslim world and claimed the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his staff in Libya.

So let's get this straight: In the consensus view of modern American liberalism, it is hilarious to mock Mormons and Mormonism but outrageous to mock Muslims and Islam. Why? Maybe it's because nobody has ever been harmed, much less killed, making fun of Mormons.

For a second example of schizoid leftism, consider that lefties traditionally display a prominent libertine and bohemian wobble. Why then do they cozy up to, or at least not resolutely oppose, Islamic fanatics who murder homosexuals, stone adulterers, and circumcise females?

Third, the Left, as part of the Enlightenment project, supposedly champions science over superstition. Yet, in the last 400 years or so, scarcely anything of any scientific value has emanated from the Islamic world. (Bernard Lewis is the man to read on this. ) The same goes for philosophy. Tiny Israel in the mere 64 years of its existence has cranked out more genuine philosophy that the whole of the Islamic world has in 400 years. So what does the Left do? It waxes anti-Semitic and pro-Islamic.

The nihilism of the hard Left — its denial of value and true being to anything that actually exists and provably works — may be turning in upon itself. Unable to destroy Western civilization under its own steam, it aligns itself with Islamists, who, were they to attain power, would of course mercilessly
exterminate all leftists. A curious sort of Selbstaufhebung.

For a leftist, the end justifies any and all  means, including ignoring the very real threats of militant Islam while demonizing Christians who pose no threat to speak of.  For  full documentation, see David Horowitz, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, Regnery 2004. 

Why There Cannot Be a Decent Left

Ronald Radosh ends his piece as follows:

The truth is that the Left in the West, including our own Left, is largely anti-American, favorable to extremist radical social movements, and sees any one or group who is not on its side as not only incorrect, but morally evil. The answer to Michael Walzer’s own query is still the same: it would be nice if there was a decent Left, but its small and ineffectual numbers prove that its creation is something that will never take place.

Cf. Michael Walzer, Can There Be a Decent Left?

On ‘Spirituality’ and ‘Religion’

Nathaniel Torrey writes to request a link to his post, The Dalai Lama and the Non-Religion of the Future.  I am pleased to do so.  His thoughts are in line with the ones I expressed in a 25 September 2010 entry,

On 'Spirituality'

The trendy embrace the term 'spirituality' but shun its close cousin, ‘religion.’ I had a politically correct Jewish professor in my kitchen a while back whose husband had converted from Roman Catholicism to Judaism. I asked her why he had changed his religion. She objected to the term ‘religion,’ explaining that his change was a ‘spiritual’ one.

How typical.  Being a good host, I didn't lay into her as I probably should have for her  'spiritual' good.

Etymologically, ‘religion’ suggests a binding, a God-man ligature, so to speak. But trendy New Age types don’t want to be bound by anything, or submit to anything. I suggest that this is part of the explanation of the favoring of the S word over the R word. Another part of the explanation is political. To those with a Leftward tilt, ‘religion’ reminds them of the Religious Right whose power strikes them as ominous while that of the Religious Left is no cause for concern.

A third part of the explanation may be that religion is closely allied with morality, while spirituality is often portrayed as beyond morality with its dualism of good and evil. One of the worst features of New Age types is their conceit that they are beyond duality when they are firmly enmired in it. Perhaps the truly enlightened are beyond moral dualism and can live free of moral injunctions. But what often happens in practice is that spiritual aspirants and gurus fall into ordinary immorality while pretending to have transcended it. One may recall the famous cases of Rajneesh and Chogyam Trungpa. According to one report, ". . . Trungpa slept with a different woman every night in order to transmit the teaching to them. L. intimated that it was really a hardship for Trungpa to do this, but it was his duty in order to spread the dharma."

With apologies to the shade of Jack Kerouac, you could say that that gives new meaning to 'dharma bum.'