Another outstanding column by Victor Davis Hanson.
Hats Off to Hentoff: Abortion and Obama
It is often assumed that opposition to abortion can be based only on religious premises. This assumption is plainly false. To show that it is is false, one need merely give an anti-abortion argument that does not invoke any religious tenet, for example:
1. Infanticide is morally wrong.
2. There is no morally relevant difference between abortion and
infancticide.
Therefore
3. Abortion is morally wrong.
Whether one accepts this argument or not, it clearly invokes no religious premise. It is therefore manifestly incorrect to say or imply that all opposition to abortion must be religiously-based. Theists and atheists alike could make use of the above argument.
And as a matter of fact there are pro-life atheists. Nat Hentoff is one. In The Infanticide Candidate for President, he takes Barack Obama to task:
But on abortion, Obama is an extremist. He has opposed the Supreme
Court decision that finally upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban
Act against that form of infanticide. Most startlingly, for a
professed humanist, Obama — in the Illinois Senate – also voted
against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. I have reported on
several of those cases when, before the abortion was completed, an
alive infant was suddenly in the room. It was disposed of as a
horrified nurse who was not necessarily pro-life followed the
doctors' orders to put the baby in a pail or otherwise get rid of
the child.
Internet Crackpots and the Perils of Autodidacticism
One of the (very minor) drawbacks of having a Web presence is that one becomes the target of crackpot e-mail from people like this. He describes himself as an autodidact, thereby illustrating the perils of autodidacticism.
And yet some negotiate the straits of autodidacticism quite well, Eric Hoffer for example. In general, however, he who educates himself has a fool for a pupil. That being said, I advise a modicum of skepticism concerning academic credentials.
If you expect to have 'cred' in the 'sphere, it helps to have established credibility in peer-reviewed venues. Some of my publications are listed here, at PhilPapers.
It comes as no great surprise that the crackpot in question is an anti-Semite.
The Voter Photo Identification ‘Issue’
Some positions are so absurd as to be beneath refutation. To respond reasonably to the unreasonable lends them a veneer of credibility to which they are not entitled. Mockery, derision, and ridicule are often much more appropriate and effective. Oftentimes, all it takes is a cartoon to refute a stupid liberal. By the way, this voter ID 'issue' — pseudo-issue, actually — is a perfect example of the lunacy of contemporary liberalism. But it is worse than lunacy given that the motive (not the reason, they have none) is to encourage voter fraud. For a leftist, the end justifies the means. Does it take fraud to win? Then you commit fraud.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: ‘Green’ Songs
I was going to cover 'strange' songs tonight, but then I remembered it is St. Patrick's Day.
Remember The New Christy Minstrels? Here is Barry Maguire belting out their 1963 hit,
Green, Green." It was sanitized, well-scrubbed hootenany stuff like this that caused a lot of my generation to pick up guitars and then find our way back to the more authentic material. Check out this video of a live performance at an Arizona university. This was before the '60s became the '60s. But by '65 the cultural as opposed to the calendrical '60s had arrived with a vengeance and the same Barry Maguire came out with The Eve of Destruction. Topical songs and social protest came to displace songs about Tom Dooley and workin' on the railroad . . . .
Joan Baez, Green, Green Grass of Home. Red Foley does a great job with this 'green' song.
Hoyt Axton, Greenback Dollar. Here is the Kingston Trio's cleaned-up collegiate version. Fretkillr's killer amateur version is modelled on Hoyt Axton's.
Hoyt Axton, Greensleeves
Jim Lowe, Green Door, 1956.
Roy Buchanan, Green Onions. A guitar-slinger's version.
Finally, a song about the lean green.
And now to bed.
Via Platonica Versus Via Aristotelis
I have spoken more than once of the fruitful tension between Athens (philosophy) and Jerusalem (Biblical revelation). But there is also a tension, and it is also a fruitful one, within Athens. It is depicted, if such a thing can be depicted at all, in Raphael's School of Athens. Take a gander at the close-up below. Plato points up, Aristotle, the younger man, points down. The Forms are, in a manner of speaking, up yonder in a topos ouranos, in a heavenly place; his star pupil would, again in a manner of speaking, bring them down to earth. In a terminology I do not wholly endorse, Plato is an extreme, while Aristotle is a moderate, realist.
The vitality of the West is due, in part, to the fruitful tension between Athens and Jerusalem. And much of the vitality of philosophy derives from the fruitful tension between the Platonic and Aristotelian ways of thinking, not just as regards the problem of universals, but on a wide range of issues.
In the Arena
Say what you want about politicians, they are in the arena taking the heat, under their own names, unlike the wordslingers, too many of them hiding behind pseudonyms, who snipe from the sidelines:
It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat. (Theodore Roosevelt, "Citizenship in a Republic," Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910.)
A Philosopher’s Last Words
What I haven't been able to learn by living I now hope to learn by dying.
God Did a Good Job
Too good of a job, perhaps: the world is so well made that it appears not to have been made at all.
Why Are We Here?
We are not here to improve the world but to be improved by it.
Cooperation and Competition
Liberals tend to oppose cooperation to competition, and vice versa, as if they excluded each other. "We need more cooperation and less competition." One frequently hears that from liberals. But competition is a form of cooperation. As such, it cannot be opposed to cooperation. One cannot oppose a species to its genus.
Consider competitive games and sports. The chess player aims to beat his opponent, and he expects his opponent to share this aim: No serious player enjoys beating someone who is not doing his best to beat him. But the competition is predicated upon cooperation and is impossible without it. There are the rules of the game and the various protocols governing behavior at the board. These are agreed upon and respected by the players and they form the cooperative context in which the competition unfolds. We must work together (co-operate) for one of us to emerge the victor. And in this competitive cooperation both of us are benefited.
Is there any competitive game or sport for which this does not hold? At the Boston Marathon in 1980, a meshuggeneh lady by the name of Rosie Ruiz jumped into the race ahead of the female leaders and before the finish line. She seemed to many to have won the race in the female category. But she was soon disqualified. She wasn't competing because she wasn't cooperating. Cooperation is a necessary condition of competition.
In the business world, competition is fierce indeed. But even here it presupposes cooperation. Fed Ex aims to cut into UPS' business – but not by assassinating their drivers. If Fed Ex did this, it would be out of business. It would lose favor with the public, and the police and regulatory agencies would be on its case. The refusal to cooperate would make it uncompetitive. 'Cut throat' competition does not pay in the long run and makes the 'cut throat' uncompetitive.
If you and I are competing for the same job, are we cooperating with each other? Yes, in the sense that our behavior is rule-governed. We agree to accept the rules and we work together so that the better of us gets the appointment. The prosecution and the defense, though in opposition to each other, must cooperate if the trial is to proceed. And similarly in other cases.
Is assassination or war a counterexample to my thesis? Suppose two warring factions are 'competing' for Lebensraum in a no-holds-barred manner. If this counts as a case of competition, then this may be a counterexample to my thesis. But it is not that clear that the Nazis, say, were competing with the Poles for Lebensraum. This needs further thought. Of course, if the counterexample is judged to be genuine, I can simply restrict my thesis to forms of competition short of all-out annihilatory war. Or I could say that rule-governed competition is a species of cooperation.
Competition, then, contrary to liberal dogma, is not opposed to cooperation. Moreover, competition is good in that it breeds excellence, a point unappreciated, or insufficiently appreciated, by liberals. This marvellous technology we bloggers use every day — how do our liberal friends think it arose? Do they have any idea why it is so inexpensive? Competition!
Not only does competition make you better than you would have been without it, it humbles you. It puts you in your place. It assigns you your rightful position in life's hierarchy. And life is hierarchical. The levellers may not like it but hierarchies have a way of reestablishing themselves.
Existence and Property-Possession
Necessarily, whatever exists has properties, and necessarily, whatever has properties exists. So, necessarily, x exists iff x has properties. But it does not follow that existence is the property of having properties. Why not?
Peter and Paul differ in their existence. But they don't differ in point of having properties. They have different properties, of course, but they don't differ in respect of the property of having properties. So singular existence (the existence in virtue of which each is and is not nothing) is not identical to the property of having properties.
And yet very competent philosophers make this mistake. To name names: Dallas Willard, J. P. Moreland, J. K. Swindler.
One source of the mistake (though it might not be the source of the mistake in any of the above-mentioned) is the confusion of (broadly logical) equivalence with identity. Necessarily, x is triangular iff x is trilateral: there is no broadly logically possible world in which the extensions of the terms differs. But it doesn't follow that triangulariy = trilaterality. They are distinct properties despite their being necessarily coextensive.
So from the fact that nothing can exist without having properties, and nothing can have properties without existing, pace Meinong, it does not follow that to exist = to have properties.
Besides, is it not obviously circular to say that the existence of a is its having properties when a cannot have properties without existing? Think about it.
Leftism Not a Religion
Dennis Prager often says that leftism is a religion. That is a sloppy use of language. Leftism is an anti-religious political ideology that functions in the lives of its adherents much like religions function in the lives of their adherents. To call leftism a religion only sires confusion. It is enough to say it is like a religion in certain key respects.
Or you could say that leftism is an ersatz religion for leftists. 'Ersatz' here functions as an alienans adjective. A substitute for religion is not a religion.
It is also important to observe that conservatism for irreligious conservatives does not typically function as an ersatz religion for them. That would make a nice separate post.
Resemblance is not identity. Language matters.
The Divine Job Description
For Spencer who, though he no longer believes that the Mormon God concept is instantiated, yet believes that as a concept it remains a worthy contender in the arena of God concepts.
What jobs would a being have to perform to qualify as God?
I count four sorts of job, ontological, epistemological, axiological, and soteriological, the first two more 'Athenian,' the second two more 'Hierosolymic.' The fruitful tension between Athens and Jersualem is a background presupposition. (The tension is fruitful in that it helps explain the vitality of the West; its lack in the Islamic world being part of the explanation of the latter's inanition.) This macro-tension between philosophy and Biblical revelation is mirrored microcosmically in human beings in the tension, fruitful or not, between reason and faith, autonomy and authority. (Man is a microcosm as Nicholas Cusanus maintained.)
1. Ontological Jobs. Why does anything exist at all? To be precise: why does anything contingent exist at all? A God worth his salt must play a role, indeed the main role, in any explanation. In brief: the reason why contingent beings exist is because God, a necessary being, (i) created them out of nothing and (ii) maintains them in existence. God is thus the unsourced source of all finite and contingent existents. Maybe nothing does this job. It might be that the existence of contingent beings is a factum brutum. But nothing could count as God that did not do this explanatory job. Or at least so I claim.
But I hear an objection. "Why couldn't there be a god who was a contingent being among contingent beings or even a contingent god among a plurality of contingent gods?" I needn't deny that there are such minor deities, not that I believe in any. I needn't even deny that they could play an explanatory role or a soteriological role. (I discuss soteriology in #4 below.) My argument would be that they cannot play an ultimate explanatory role or an ultimate soteriological role. Suppose a trio of contingent gods, working together, created the universe. I would press the question: where did they come from? If each of these gods is possibly such as not to exist, then it is legitimate to ask why each does exist. And if each is contingent and in need of explanation, then the same goes for the trio. (Keep your shirts on, muchachos, that is not the fallacy of composition.)
If you say that they always existed as a matter of brute fact, then no ultimate explanation has been given. Suppose time is infinite in both directions and x exists at every time. It doesn't follow that x necessarily exists. To think otherwise would be to confuse the temporal with the modal. An ultimate explanation must terminate in a being whose existence is self-explanatory, where a self-explanatory being is one that exists as a matter of metaphysical necessity and thus has no need of explanation in terms of anything distinct from it.
"Perhaps an ultimate explanation in your sense is not to be had." Well then, the ontological job — the job of explaining why anything contingent exists at all — won't get done, and there is no God. Here I may be approaching a stand-off with my interlocutor. I say: nothing counts as God unless it does all four types of job, including the ontological job. My opponent, however, balks at my criterion. He does not see why the God-role can be played only by an absolutely unique being who exists a se and thus by metaphysical necessity.
If you believe in a contingent god or a plurality of contingent gods, and stop there, then I can conceive of something greater, a God who exists of metaphysical necessity and who not only is one without a second, but one without the possibility of a second. But this just brings us back to the Anselmian conception of God as 'that than which no greater can be conceived,' God as the greatest conceivable being, or the maximally perfect being, or the ens reallisimum/perfectissimum, etc. This conception of deity is very Greek and very unanthropomorphic residing as it does in the conceptual vicinity of the Platonic Good and the Plotinian One. But that is what I like about it and my interlocutor doesn't. It's inhuman, 'faceless,' impersonal, he complains. I prefer to say that God is transpersonal and transhuman — not below but beyond the personal and the human. As I have said before, religion is about transcendence and transformation, not about a duplicate world behind the scenes, a hinterworld if you will. Whatever God is, he can't be a Big Guy in the Sky. And whatever survival of bodily death might be, it is not the perpetuation of these petty selves of ours. An immortality worth wanting is one in which we are transformed and transfigured. The proper desire for immortality is not an egotistical desire but a desire to be purged of one's egotism.
2. Epistemological Jobs. What accounts for the intelligibility of the world and what is its source? A God worth his salt (salary) must play a role, indeed the main role, in any explanation of why the world can be understood by us. The explanation, in outline, is that the world is intelligible because it it is the creation of an intelligent being. As an embodiment and expression of the divine intelligence of the intellectus archetypus it is intelligible to an intellectus ectypus. Maybe the world has no need of a ground or source of its intelligibility. Or maybe we are the source of all intelligibility and project it outward onto what is in itself devoid of intelligibility. But if the world is intelligible, and if this intelligibility is not a projection by us, and if the world has a ground of its intelligibility, then God must play a role, the main role, in the explanation of this intelligibility. Nothing could be called God that did not play this role.
Now if God is the ultimate source of intelligibility and the ultimate ground of ontic truth and, as such, the ultimate condition of the possibility of propositional truth as adequatio intellectus ad rem, then he cannot be just one more intelligible among intelligibles any more than he can be just one more being among beings. A God worthy of the name must be Being itself (self-existent Existence) and Intelligibility itself (self-intelligent Intelligibility), and ontological truth. And so God could not be a contingent being, or a material being, or a collection of contingent material beings. He couldn't be what Mormons apparently believe God to be.
3. Axiological Jobs. By a similar pattern of reasoning, I would argue that nothing could count as God that did not function as the unsourced source of all goodness and the ultimate repository of all value. God is not just another thing that has value, but the paradigm case of value.
4. Soteriological Jobs. Every religion, to count as a religion, must include a doctrine of salvation, a soteriology. Religions exist to cater to the felt need for salvation. It is not essential to a religion that it be theistic, as witness the austere forms of Buddhism, but it is essential to every religion as I define the term that it have a soteriology. A religion must show a way out of our unsatisfactory predicament, and one is not religious unless one perceives our life in this world as indeed a predicament, and one that is unsatisfactory. Sarvam dukkham! as the First Noble Truth has it. I would go a step further and add that out unsatisfactory predicament is one that we cannot escape from by our own power. Self-power alone won't cut it; other-power is also needed. 'Works' are not sufficient, though I suspect they are necessary.
When it comes to salvation we can ask four questions: of what? from what? to what? by what? Here is one possible answer. Salvation is of the soul, not the body; from our unsatisfactory present predicament of sin, ignorance, and meaninglessness; to a state of moral perfection, intellectual insight, peace, happiness, and meaning; by an agent possessing the power to bring about the transformation of the individual soul. God is the agent of salvation. To be worth his salt he must possess the power to save us. Since the only salvation worth wanting involves a complete overhaul and cleansing of our present wretched selves, this God will have to have impressive powers. He cannot be a supplier of material or quasi-material goodies in some hinterworld in which we carry on in much the same way as we do here, though with the negatives removed. The crudest imaginable paradise is the carnal paradise of the Muslims with its 72 black-eyed virgins who never tire out the lucky effer; but if I am not badly mistaken, Mormon conceptions are also crudely materialistic and superstitiously anthropomorphic to boot.
What I'm driving towards is the thesis that a God who can play the ultimate soteriological role cannot be some minor deity among minor deities who just happens to exist. He must be a morally perfect being with the power to confer moral perfection. This moral and soteriological perfection would seem to require as their ground ontological and epistemological perfection. Not that I have quite shown this . . . .
Why Leftists Hate Apostates
David Horowitz, Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey (Spence Publishing, 2003), pp. 274-276:
The radical commitment is less a political than a moral choice. Leaving the faith is a traumatic experience because it involves an involuntary severing of communal ties. That is why “political correctness” is a habit of the progressive mind — it is the line of fear that holds the flock in check. No greater caution exists for those tempted to leave the faith than the charge of “selling out.” Prior to the temptation, leaving the faith is inconceivable, a sign that one is no longer a good person. Only pathological behavior — a lust for money or some other benefit — could explain to a leftist the decision to join the opposition. To the progressive mind, no decent person could ever freely make such a choice. Even in the post-communist world, the most untheoretical progressive remains in this way a vulgar marxist despite all that has historically transpired. The fact that Peter [Collier] and I actually lost opportunities for personal gain as a result of our change of heart made no impression on out former comrades, who labeled us "renegades" and accused us of selling out just the same.