The Noble and the Base

If a noble man becomes aware of my moral defects, he is saddened, disappointed, disillusioned perhaps.  But the base man reacts differently: he is gleeful, pleased, reassured. "So he isn't better than me after all! Good!"

The noble seek those who are above them so that they can become like them.  The base deny that anyone could be above them.

Nausea at Existence: A Continental Thick Theory

A reader wants me to comment on the analytic-Continental split.  Perhaps I will do so in general terms later, but in this post I will consider one particular aspect of the divide that shows up in different approaches to existence.  Roughly, Continental philosophers espouse the thick theory, while analytic philosophers advocate the thin theory.  Of course there are exceptions to this rule: Your humble correspondent is an analytic thick theorist and so is Barry Miller.  Whether there are any Continental thin theorists I don't know.

Why should analytic philosophers prefer the thin theory?  Part of the reason, some will say, is that analysts tend to be superficial people: they are logically very sharp but woefully lacking in spiritual depth.   They are superficial specimens of what Heidegger calls das Man, the 'they': lacking authenticity, they float along on the superficies of things.  Bereft of  a depth-dimension in themselves, they are blind to the world's depth-dimension.  Blind to the world's depth-dimension, they are blind to existence.  A Heideggerian might say that they are not so much blind as forgetful: they have succumbed to die Vergessenheit des Seins.  The analysts, of course, will not  admit to any such deficiencies of sight or memory.  They will turn the tables and accuse Continentals such as Heidegger and Sartre of being muddle-headed mystics and obscurantists who commit school-boy blunders in logic.  (Carnap's famous/notorious attack on Heidegger is a text-book case.)

So we have a nice little fight going, complete with name-calling.  Perhaps a little exegesis of a passage from Sartre will help clarify the issue.  I have no illusions about converting any thin theorist.  I aim at clarity, not agreement.  I will be happy if I can achieve  an exact understanding of what we are disagreeing about and why we are disagreeing.  When that goal is attained we can cheerfully agree to disagree.

Nausea

So let's consider the famous 'chestnut tree' passage in Jean-Paul Sartre's novel, Nausea.  The novel's protagonist, Roquentin, is in a park when he has a bout of temporary aphasia while contemplating the roots of a chestnut true. Words and their meanings vanish. He finds himself confronting a black knotty mass that frightens him. Then he has a vision:

It left me breathless. Never, until these last days, had I understood the meaning of 'existence.' I was like all the others, like the ones walking along the seashore, all dressed in their spring finery. I said, like them, 'The ocean is green; that white speck up there is a seagull,' but I didn't feel that it existed or that the seagull was an 'existing seagull'; usually existence hides itself. It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you can't say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it. When I believed I was thinking about it, I must
[have] believe[d] that I was thinking nothing, my head was empty, or there was just one word in my head, the word 'to be.' Or else I was thinking . . . how can I explain it? I was thinking of belonging, I was telling myself that the sea belonged to the class of green objects, or that that green was a part of the quality of the sea. Even when I looked at things I was miles from dreaming that they existed; they looked like scenery to me. I picked them up in my hands, they served me as tools, I foresaw their resistance. But that all happened on the surface.

If anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered, in good faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form that was added to external things without changing anything in their nature. And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence
had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder — naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness. (p. 127 tr. Lloyd Alexander, ellipsis in original.)

This marvellous passage records Roquentin's intuition (direct nonsensory perception) of Being or existence. (It would be interesting to compare in a subsequent post Jacques Maritain's Thomist intuition of Being with Sartre's existentialist intuition of Being.) Viewed through the lenses of logic, 'The green sea exists' is equivalent to 'The sea is green' and 'The sea belongs to the class of green objects.' For the (standard)  logician, then, 'exists' and cognates is dispensable and the concept of existence is fully expressible in terms of standard logical machinery.  Anything we say using 'exists(s)' we can also say without using 'exist(s).  To give another example, 'Dragons do not exist' is logically equivalent to 'Everything is not a dragon.'  If we want, we can avoid the word 'exist(s)' and substitute for it some logical machinery: the universal quantifier and the tilde (the sign for negation) as in our last example.

But why would a man like Peter van Inwagen — the head honcho of the thin theorists — want to avoid 'exist(s)'?  Because he wants to show that existence is a thin notion: there is nothing more to it than can be captured using the thin notions of logic: quantification, negation, copulation, and identity.  He wants to show that there is no reason to think that there is any metaphysical depth lurking behind 'exist(s)' and cognates, that there is no room for a metaphysics of existence as opposed to a logic of 'exist(s)'; nor room for any such project as Heidegger's fundamental ontology (Being and Time) or Sartre's phenomenological ontology (Being and Nothingness).

And why does the thin theorist go to all this deflationary trouble?  Because he lacks this sense or intuition of existence that philosophers as diverse as Wittgenstein, Maritain, and Sartre share, a sense or intution he feels must be bogus and must rest on some mistake.  He fancies himself the clear-headed foe of obfuscation and he sees nothing but obfuscation in talk of Being and existence.

But as I have been arguing ad nauseam (so to speak) over many a blog post, published article and book, sentences like 'The sea is green' presuppose for their truth that the sea is an existing sea. Compare the reference above to an existing seagull. And, as Sartre has Roquentin says, "usually existence hides itself." It hides itself from all of us most of the time when we are immersed in what Heidegger calls average everydayness (alltaegliche Durchschnittlichkeit, vide Sein und Zeit), and existence hides itself from the logician qua logician all the time. For all of us most of the time, and for logicians all of the time, existence is "nothing, simply an empty form."

In fact, that is a good statement of the thin theory:  existence is nothing at all, apart from an empty logical form.  Sea, seagull, bench, tree, root  — but no existence of the sea, of the seagull, of the bench, etc.  Sea, seagull, bench, tree, root, and some logical concepts.  That's it.

"Usually existence hides itself."  This invites mockery from the thin theorists.  What?  Existence plays hide-and-seek with us?!  [Loud guffaws from the analytic shallow-pates.]  To the existence-blind it must appear a dark and indeed incomprehensible saying.  But  of course to the blind that which is luminous must appear dark.  Perhaps we can recast Sartre's loose and literary formulation in aseptic terms by saying that existence is a hidden and taken-for-granted presupposition of our discourse that for the most part remains hidden and taken-for-granted. Let me explain.

'The sea is green' and 'The green sea exists' are logically equivalent.  But this equivalence rests on a tacit presupposition, namely, that the sentences are to be evaluated relative to a domain of existing items.  The reason we can make the deflationary move of replacing the latter sentence with the former is because existence is already present, though hidden,  in 'The sea is green.'   'The sea is green' can be parsed as follows: The sea is (exists) & the sea (is) green, where the parentheses around 'is' indicate that it functions as a pure copula, a pure predicative link and nothing more.  The parsing makes it clear that the 'is' in 'The sea is green' exercises a dual function: it is not merely an 'is' of predication: it is also an 'is' of existence.  Therefore, translation of 'The green sea exist' as 'The sea is green' does not eliminate existence as the thin theorist falsely assumes.

In material mode, the point is that nothing can have a property unless it exists.   The sea cannot be green or slimy or stinky unless it exists.  This existence of the sea, seagull, etc., however, is a presupposition that remains hidden as long as we comport ourselves in Heidegger's "average everydayness" manipulating things for our purposes but not wondering at their very existence.  We have to shift out of our ordinary everyday attitude in order to be struck by the sheer existence of things.  Perhaps the thin theorist is incapable of making that shift.  But he really doesn't need to if he has followed my reasoning.

What the thin theorist  does is to substitute logical Being for real Being. Note that I am not endorsing Sartre's theory of real Being: that it is an absurd excrescence, de trop (superfluous), unintelligible, etc. What I am endorsing is his insight that real Being is extralogical, that it is not a thin notion exhausted by the machinery of logic.  Thus I am endorsing what is common to Sartre, Maritain, Wittgenstein, and others, namely, that existence is real not merely logical.

But what if you are one of those sober types who has never experienced anything like Heideggerian Angst or Sartrean nausea or Wittgenstein's wonder at the existence of the world? Well, I think you could still be brought by purely discursive methods to understand how existence cannot reduce to a purely logical notion. We shall see.  

Who Built the Internet? Obama’s Straw Man Fallacy

This just over the transom:

With respect to your post about how "you didn't build this blog" — really bad example. You built the blog, but Big Government built the internet that allows you to transmit it it to potentially billions of people. So, it's exactly an illustration of what Obama was talking about — you and businesses and everyone are dependent on public infrastructure for rich and fruitful lives.

It's an excellent example.  You must be a liberal.  Here is what Obama said:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

Let's go through this sentence by sentence.

1. It is true that we have all been helped by others and that no one's success is wholly a matter of his own effort.  "No man is an island."  No one pulls himself  up by his own bootstraps.    But of course no conservative denies this.  Not even libertarians deny it.  What Obama is doing is setting up a straw man that he can easily knock down.  He imputes a ridiculous view to the conservative/libertarian and then makes the obvious point that the ridiculous view is ridiculous.

2. Not everyone is lucky enough to have great teachers, but most of us have had some good teachers along the way. Sure.  But there is no necessary connection to Big Government.  I went to private schools: elementary, high school, college, and graduate school.  And my teaching jobs were all at private schools.  Obama falsely assumes that only government can provide education.  That is not only a false assumption but a mendacious one as well.  Obama is certainly aware that there are alternatives to public education such as home-schooling and private schools.  There is also autodidacticism: Eric Hoffer, the 'longshoreman philosopher,' didn't even go to elementary school.  A relative taught him to read when he was very young but beyond that he is totally self-taught. Of course, he is a rare exception.

There is also the question whether the federal government has any legitimate role to play in education even if one  grants (as I do) that state and local governments have a role to play.  It is simply nonsense, though in keeping with his Big Government agenda, for Obama to suggest that we need the federal government to provide education.  It is also important to  point out that the federal Department of Education, first set up in the '60s, has presided over a dramatic decline in the quality of education in the U. S.  But that is a huge separate topic.

3. With respect to roads and bridges and infrastructure generally, it is ridiculous to suggest that these products of collective effort are all due to the federal government or even to state and local government.  Obama is confusing the products of collective effort wth the products of government effort.  It is a silly non sequitur to think that because I cannot do something by myself that I need government to help me do it.    One can work with others without the intrusion of government.  He is also confusing infrastructure with public infrastructure.  The first is a genus, the second a species thereof. 

4. How did the Internet begin?  This from a libertarian site:  "The internet indeed began as a typical government program, the ARPANET, designed to share mainframe computing power and to establish a secure military communications network."  So the role of the federal government in the genesis of the Internet cannot be denied.

But what do we mean by 'Internet'?  Those huge interconnected mainframes?  That is the main chunk of Internet infrastructure.  But don't forget the peripherals.  For the blogger to use that infrastructure he first of all needs a personal computer (PC).  Did Big Government provides us with PCs?  No.  It was guys like Jobs and Wozniak tinkering in the garage.  It was private companies like IBM.  And let's not forget that it was in the USA and not in Red China or the Soviet Union or North Korea that PCs were developed.  Would Jobs and Wozniak and Gates have been motivated to do their hard creative work in a state without a free economy?  Did any commie state provide its citizens with PCs?  No, but it did provide them with crappy cars like the Trabant and the Yugo.  Germans are great engineers.  But Communism so hobbled East Germany that the Trabant was the result.

How do you hook up the PC to the Internet?  Via the phone line.  (Telephony, by the way, was not developed by the government.  Remember Alexander Graham Bell and his associates?)  To convert digital information into analog information  transmissible via phone lines and back again you need a modulator-demodulator, a modem.  Who gave us the modem?  Government functionaries?  Al Gore?  Was Obama the mama of the modem?  Nope.  Dennis C. Hayes invented the PC modem in 1977.  In the private sector.

Back in the day we operated from the  C prompt using DOS commands.  That was before the GUI: graphical user interface.  Who invented that?  Credit goes to a number of people working for Xerox, Apple, and Microsoft.  All in the private sector.

And then there is Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML).  Who invented that and with it the World Wide Web (WWW)?  Tim Berners-Lee in the private sector.    The WWW is not the same as the Internet.  The WWW is a huge collection of interconnected hypertext documents accessible via the Internet.   The government did not give us the WWW.

Returning now to the blog that I built.  I built the blog, but I didn't build the Typepad platform that hosts the blog. Did Al Bore or any other government functionary give us Typepad or Blogger? No.  That too is in the private sector.

And then there are the search engines.  Did the government give us Google?

Obama is a mendacious no-nothing, a disaster for the country, and the emptiest of empty suits.  Just read his awful speech.  You liberals need to wise up. If you vote for him, you will seal your own doom and get what you deserve for being stupid. 

There is Beauty in the World

I look out my study window, over the Superstition ridgeline, and marvel at the beauty of the roseate stratonimbus of sunrise.  There is beauty in the world and we do well to appreciate it.  There is also beauty and nobility in human nature.  It peeps out now and again.  A young man took a bullet during the Aurora massacre to shield his girlfriend.

It can be a moral challenge to avoid misanthropy.  But avoid it we must.  The timber of humanity, though crooked, is nonetheless mostly sturdy and termite-free.  Or is the rosiness of this Arizona sunrise biasing me toward too optimistic a view?

The hardest task in the world is to achieve a just view of things and people and their good and evil.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Youth and Old Age

Let's get off to a rousing start with The Who's famous generational anthem, aptly entitled My Generation.  "Things they say seem so cold, I hope I die before I get old."  Rather on the sweeter side, Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys wonder what it'll be like when I Grow Up to be a Man.  The same wonderful harmonies are also in evidence in this great Beach Boys cover of  I'm So Young. 

Ricky Nelson, Young World.  Sonny James, Young Love.  Lovin Spoonful, Younger Girl.  Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, Young Girl.  Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, Little Children.  Janis Ian, Society's Child.  Social commentary from a precocious 16 year old in '67.  Joan Baez sings Bob Dylan's, Forever Young.

But the young become old . . .

Bob Seger, Old Time Rock and Roll. "Call me a relic, call me what you will/Say I'm old-fashioned, say I'm over the hill/Today's music ain't got the same soul/ I like that that old time Rock and Roll." Neil Young, Old Man.  Howlin' Wolf, Goin' Down Slow.  "I've had my fun, if I don't get well no more."  Bob Dylan, Not Dark Yet (but it's gettin' there). George Harrison, All Things Must Pass.  Bob Dylan, See that My Grave is Kept Clean.

R.I.P. Kitty Wells (1919-2012), Making Believe (1955). Heartaches by the Number.

The Three Greatest Scams of Our Time

Here.  Excerpt:

These three chimeras [the Palestinian faux “narrative,” the environmental craze, and the Obama myth] generally manifest the morbid sense of victimhood and hatred of the modern West that is the most contemptible and dangerous feature of our contemporary world. Israel is a tiny outpost of enlightened modernity that the world wants to see snuffed out and replaced by medieval barbarism and tribal fanaticism; the global warming hoaxers want to roll back technological progress to a condition like that well before the industrial revolution, even before the rise of agrarian societies; and Barack Obama is the first president of the United States who actually despises—and has stated overtly his desire to “fundamentally transform”—the founding principles and way of life of the freest and most dynamic society ever known.

What sustains these programs of dissolution is not truth but a semblance of truth rooted in fantasy, misrepresentation, invention, and dinning repetition. Serious critique and sincere skepticism are dismissed as mere conspiracy, as disrupting the recitals we have come dotingly to believe in. Myth is received as reality and “narrative” euchres objective analysis and the pursuit of fact. In our fable-ready time, the real story is the story itself. This is where we are today. Where we will be tomorrow does not inspire confidence.

Barack the Magic Suit: A Political Fairy Tale

A short video by Andrew Klavan.  Here is an essay by him which ends like this:

He has no clue how things actually work. Even if socialism did work, it would be wrong because it would strip people of the fruits of their labor and the property rights on which liberty depends. Thankfully, it doesn’t work, which makes the moral issue moot. But Obama has no clue of what’s been tried and found wanting. He surrounds himself with ideologues and tunes out anyone who’s ever made an honest dime in the real world. Thus every single idea the “progressive” president puts forward is a regressive throwback to notions that have been failing miserably for more than seventy years. The stuff he believes is just plain dopey. He thinks technology is the cause of unemployment. He does not understand that only private jobs create the wealth that makes public jobs possible. He thinks that wind and solar energy should be subsidized and fossil fuel production suppressed. He insists on bringing the European social model to the U.S. even as the model implodes in front of our eyes.

So go ahead, tell me that Mitt Romney is rich and I should hate him for it. Tell me that he’s white and I should hate him for that. Tell me that his wife rides horses or that he said something nasty when he was fifteen or that — omigod! — he’s a Mormon. Whatever his foibles and flaws, it seems pretty clear that Romney has the character to be president. Barack Obama has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he does not. 

Some Man is White Because a White Man Exists

(Theme music: Ballad of a Thin Man)

Phoenicians and Londoners agree that 'Some F is a G' and 'An FG exists' are logically equivalent.  Thus, 'Some man is white' is logically equivalent to 'A white man exists.'  But I take a further step: some man is white because a white man exists, where 'because' expresses the asymmetrical relation of metaphysical grounding.   London Ed refuses to take this step and finds my position unintelligible.  He objects:

Now I agree that if 'a white man exists' has a different meaning from 'some man is white', then the question of whether some F is a G because some FG exists, is an intelligible one. But it is not intelligible if they have the same meaning, as London 'thin' theorists claim. After all, the statement

(1) Some man is white because some man is white

is not intelligible. Nor is

(2) Some man is white because the sentence 'quidam homo est albus' is true

For the Latin sentence 'quidam homo est albus' means the same as 'some man is white'. The one sentence translates into the other. So there is no meaningful 'because' here. So why does Maverick think that

(3) Some man is white because some white man exists.

is intelligible? He says as much in his comment #6. So does he think that 'some man is white' has the same meaning as 'a white man exists'? Surely not, for the reasons stated here. But if the meaning is different, what is that difference?

I agree with Ed that if 'Some man is white' and 'A white man exists' have exactly the same meaning, then 'Some man is white because a white man exists' is unintelligible.  That's entirely clear.  So I have to show that the two sentences — call them the some-sentence and the existence-sentence — do not have the same meaning.

We agree that the two sentences have the same truth-conditions.  But sameness of truth-conditions does not entail sameness of meaning.  'X is triangular' and 'x is trilateral' have the same truth-conditions but not the same meaning.  So I hope that Ed is not inferring sameness of meaning from sameness of truth-conditions.

Or maybe Ed thinks that the thin theorist stipulatively defines 'exist(s)' in terms of the particular quantifier.  If that is what the thin theorist is doing, then I grant that the existence-sentence and the some-sentence have the same meaning.  For then they are arbitrarily stipulated to have the same meaning. But then the thin theory is wholly without interest.  Substantive philosophical questions cannot be answered by framing stipulative definitions.  The substantive question is: What is the nature of existence?  If the thin theory is worth discussing it is the theory that "existence is what existential quantification expresses" (Quine), that existence is wholly understandable in  terms of such purely logical notions as the particular quantifier and identity.  Thus Quine explicates 'a exists' in terms of '(Ex)(x = a).'  That existence is a purely logical notion is what I most strenuously deny.

What positive reason is there for thinking that the two sentences have different meanings? Well, 'A white man exists' says all that 'Some man is white' says, but it says more: it makes explicit that there are one or more existing items that are such that they are both human and white.  The existence-sentence is richer in meaning than the some-sentence.  It makes explicit that the item that is both human and white exists, is not nothing, is mind-independently real — however you want to put it.

Or perhaps we could put it this way.  The some-sentence abstracts from the existential aspect of the existence-sentence and so does not capture the whole of its meaning.

Do the gods love the pious because it is pious, or is the pious pious because the gods love it?   That, Ed agrees, is an intelligible question.  And so I take it he agrees that there is a relation we can call metaphysical grounding which is neither logical not causaI.   I say it's the same with the existence problem.  One can intelligibly ask whether some F is G because an FG exists, or vice versa. 

My answer is that existence is metaphysically prior to somemess, and metaphysically grounds it. 

Philosophy is a Useless Major; All Praise to Philosophy

Here is a list of the most useful and useless college majors:

The top 10 most useful college majors:
1. Nursing
2. Mechanical engineering
3. Electrical engineering
4. Civil engineering
5. Computer science
6. Finance
7. Marketing and marketing research
8. Mathematics
9. Accounting
10. French, German, Latin and other common foreign languages.

The top 10 most useless college majors:
1. Fine Arts
2. Drama and theater arts
3. Film, video and photographic arts
4. Commercial art and graphic design
5. Architecture
6. Philosophy and religious studies
7. English literature and language
8. Journalism
9. Anthropology and archeology
10. Hospitality management

Philosophy comes in at #6 of the useless.  Those who fill their belly from teaching philosophy (or rather from conducting philosophy classes, which is not the same) will be strongly tempted to defend philosophy by arguing that it really is useful after all.

I say that's a mistake.  I take the classical line.  Of course philosophy is useless, and therein lies its nobility and dignity.  The merely utile is ancillary to the non-utile.  Failure to appreciate this shows a lack of nobility of soul.  What follows is the meat of my Should One Stoop to a Defense of Philosophy?

What I object to . . . is the notion that philosophy needs to justify itself in terms of an end external to it, and that its main justification is in terms of an end outside of it. The main reason to study philosophy is not to become a more critical reasoner or a better evaluator of evidence, but to grapple with the ultimate questions of human existence and to arrive at as much insight into them as is possible. What drives philosophy is the desire to know the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. Let's not confuse a useful byproduct of philosophical study (development of critical thinking skills) with the goal of philosophical study. The reason to study English literature is not to improve one's vocabulary or to prepare for a career as a journalist.   Similarly, the reason to study philosophy is not to improve one's ability to think clearly about extraphilosophical matters or to acquire skills that may prove handy in law school.

Philosophy is an end in itself. This is why it is foolish to try to convince philistines that it is good for
something. It is not primarily good for something. It is a good in itself. Otherwise you are acquiescing in the philistinism you ought to be combating. Is listening to the sublime adagio movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony good for something? And what would that be, to impress people with how cultured you are?

To the philistine's "Philosophy bakes no bread" you should not respond "Yes it does," for such responses are patently lame. You should say, "Man does not live by bread alone," or "Not everything is pursued as a means to something else," or "A university is not a trade school."  You should not acquiesce in the philistine's values and assumptions, but go on the attack and question his values and assumptions.  Put him on the spot.  Play the Socratic gadfly.  If a philistine wants to know how much you got paid for writing an article for a professional journal, say, "Do you really think that only what one is paid to do is worth doing?" 

Admittedly, this is a lofty conception of philosophy and I would hate to have to defend it before the uncomprehending philistines one would expect to find on the typical Board of Regents. But philosophy is what it is, lofty by nature, and if we are to defend it we must do so in a way that does not betray it.

It might be better, though, not to stoop to defend it at all, at least not before the uncomprehending.  It might be better to show contempt and supercilious disdain. Not everyone can be reasoned with, and part of being reasonable is understanding this fact.

Profiling, Prejudice, and Discrimination

Everybody profiles.  Liberals are no exception.  Liberals reveal their prejudices by where they live, shop, send their kids to school and with whom they associate.  

The word 'prejudice' needs analysis.  It could refer to blind prejudice: unreasoning, reflexive (as opposed to reflective) aversion to what is other just because it is other, or an unreasoning pro-attitude toward the familiar just because it is familiar.  We should all condemn blind prejudice.  It is execrable to hate a person just because he is of a different color, for example. No doubt, but how many people do that?  How many people who are averse to blacks are averse because of their skin color as opposed to their behavior patterns? Racial prejudice is not, in the main, prejudice based on skin color, but on behavior. 

'Prejudice' could also mean 'prejudgment.'   Although blind prejudice is bad, prejudgment is generally good.  We cannot begin our cognitive lives anew at every instant.  We rely upon the 'sedimentation' of past exerience.  Changing the metaphor, we can think of prejudgments as distillations from experience.  The first time I 'serve' my cats whisky they are curious.  After that, they cannot be tempted to come near a shot glass of Jim Beam.  My prejudgments about rattle snakes are in place and have been for a long time.  I don't need to learn about them afresh at each new encounter with one. Prejudgments are not blind, but experience-based, and they are mostly true. The adult mind is not a tabula rasa.  What experience has written, she retains, and that's all to the good.

So there is good prejudice and there is bad prejudice.  The teenager thinks his father prejudiced in the bad sense when he warns the son not to go into certain parts of town after dark.  Later the son learns that the old man was not such a bigot after all: the father's prejudice was not blind but had a fundamentum in re.

But if you stay away from certain parts of town are you not 'discriminating' against them?  Well of course, but not all discrimination is bad. Everybody discriminates.  Liberals are especially discriminating.  The typical Scottsdale liberal would not be caught dead supping in some of the Apache Junction dives I have been found in.  Liberals discriminate in all sorts of ways.  That's why Scottsdale is Scottsdale and not Apache Junction. 

'Profiling,' like 'prejudice' and 'discrimination,' has come to acquire a wholly negative connotation.  Unjustly.  What's wrong with profiling?  We all do it, and we are justified in doing it.  Consider criminal profiling.

It is obvious that only certain kinds of people commit certain kinds of crimes. Suppose a rape has occurred at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth. Two males are moving away from the crime scene. One, the slower moving of the two, is a Jewish gentleman, 80 years of age, with a chess set under one arm and a copy of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed under the other. The other fellow, a vigorous twenty-year-old, is running from the scene.

Who is more likely to have committed the rape? If you can't answer this question, then you lack common sense.  But just to spell it out for you liberals: octogenarians are not known for their sexual prowess: the geezer is lucky if he can get it up for a five-minute romp.  Add chess playing and an interest in Maimonides and you have one harmless dude.

Or let's say you are walking down a street in Mesa, Arizona.  On one side of the street you spy some fresh-faced Mormon youths, dressed in their 1950s attire, looking like little Romneys, exiting a Bible studies class.  On the other side of the street, Hells Angels are coming out of their club house.  Which side of the street would you feel safer on?   On which side will your  concealed semi-auto .45 be more likely to see some use?

The problem is not so much that liberals are stupid, as that they have allowed themselves to be stupefied by that cognitive aberration known as political correctness.

Their brains are addled by the equality fetish:  everybody is equal, they think, in every way.  So the vigorous 20 year old is not more likely than the old man to have committed the rape.  The Mormon and the Hells Angel are equally law-abiding.  And the twenty-something Egyptian Muslim is no more likely to be a terrorist than the Mormon matron from Salt Lake City. 

Are the Pyramids of Egypt Slated for Destruction?

This is one of the statues of Buddha that the Taliban dynamited in 2001:

Bamiyan-buddha2Will the Pyramids of Egypt meet the same fate at the hands of similar miscreants?  See Victor Davis Hanson, Blowing Up History.

Of the world religions, "the religion of peace" is uniquely violent. 

Having said that, I must be an 'Islamophobe' right?

Wrong.  My fear of radical Islam is entirely rational.

A phobia is by definition an irrational fear.  Leftists introduced 'Islamophobia' as a semantic bludgeon to silence their opponents and prevent honest debate.  That is why it is utterly stupid for any conservative to use this word.  If you are a conservative, don't talk like a liberal!  Language matters.