The Little Red Blog

A Good Day for Bullies

Pondering the results of the Mueller Report earlier today (No collusion! No decision about obstruction of justice! Goodbye and thanks for all the fish!), I was distracted by the NCAA basketball game between Duke and Central Florida. The game came down to the final possession, with Central Florida getting two shots at the basket; if either had gone in, they would have pulled off an incredible upset. The first shot bounced off the rim; the second shot rolled tantalizingly around the rim and then spun out. Central Florida players fell to the court in anguish and disbelief, while Duke players celebrated. To paraphrase an old poem: There is no joy in Orlando; the mighty Knights' last shot rimmed out. 

That’s the way the ball bounces, and close doesn’t count. Duke was lucky to win, just as Donald Trump is lucky that Robert Mueller is a professional, by-the-book prosecutor rather than a partisan witch-hunter. Anyone with the least bit of an axe to grind against Trump could have found plenty of cause to charge him, but Mueller kept to a strict standard of prosecutable evidentiary proof; my guess is he probably hewed to an even higher standard than usual, because charging a sitting President with criminal offenses is a weighty matter indeed. In any case, just as Central Florida fans must have been thinking that the ball just had to go into the basket at game's end, so too did millions of us believe that Mueller's report just had to inculpate Donald Trump of myriad offenses: in both instances, only to look on in stunned disbelief as things did not work out the way we expected. 

Duke-haters, of whom there are plenty, consider the Blue Devils to be the bullies of college basketball. In which case, today was a good day for bullies; both Duke and Donald Trump escaped by the skin of their teeth. I happen to be a Duke fan, so I breathed a sigh of relief when their game ended (though I also applauded Central Florida's effort). I am not, however, a fan of Donald Trump; and I would rather not say what I breathed (or said) when I heard the summary of Mueller’s report.

I wish this were the end of all things Trump/Russia-related, but of course it won’t be. Congressional investigations will continue, and prosecutors at the Southern District of New York will pursue possible financial crimes by the Trump organization and its various confederates. Just as Republicans refused to let go of Benghazi, Democrats will keep after Trump, which of course is their legal right and (perhaps) moral obligation; and the country will remain bitterly divided.

God only knows what America will be like by the year 2024, when Trump concludes his second term; the prospect is too dispiriting to think about right now. I feel, at this moment, in some small way what Aubrey Dawkins must feel, the Central Florida basketball player whose last second tip-in somehow failed to drop through the hoop: "disappointed" doesn't quite cover it, while "devastated" may be right for Dawkins but is a bit much for me. I don't know what the word is; if it comes to me, I'll let you know.

I learned these lessons early in life: the ball doesn’t always bounce your way, you have to live with the ref's calls, and the good guys don’t always win. I also learned the stubbornly hopeful mantra, Wait until next year!

We'll get them next year, alright--unless we don't, and then god help us all.

Sunday Sermon

Ernest Gordon (1979, The Princeton Seminary Bulletin):

What is called humanism today is a faith as old as history. It is faith in human perfectibility and the ability of the few to manufacture the just and orderly society in strictly one-dimensional terms…

Although [humanism] is as old as society, a popular presumption is that it was invented at the Renaissance, whenever you choose to date it. According to [such] historical distortions, humanity was in darkness until the 16^th Century. Then the life and the light repressed and dimmed by Christianity were set free. Since then we’ve gone steadily forward and upward through the Age of Reason, to the Age of Technology, and thus to the utilitarian Brave New World of the 20^th Century when humanity has come of age and so shocked God that he has most conveniently died. Instead of the heavens declaring the glory of God, they are now filled with [satellites] spying on fellow humanists.

The thinking humanist rejects such glib optimism. Instead, he or she is aware of the agony and tragedy of fellow human beings in godless existence. Cast into [the] prison house of freedom, we have to manufacture our own meaning. This is a lonely and exhausting business, for there isn’t all that much to work on in ourselves. It takes good health, a good bank balance, a good job, and a good [spouse] for most humanists to maintain a degree of optimism…Bertrand Russell [said] that it took more faith to accept a happy end for mankind on the evolutionary scale than it did to accept the Christian faith.

Russell had already declared his own position in A Free Man’s Worship when he wrote that what we value as the spiritual and personal life is nothing but “the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms.” Therefore, “Man’s achievements must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins…only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”

Walter T. Stace [wrote] of the reality of secular despair in his 1951 Atlantic Monthly article, “Man Against Darkness,” in which he pointed out that the ruin of moral principles and all values went along “with the ruin of the religious vision.” He concluded, “It would therefore look as if the early death of our civilization were inevitable.”

I think he was right in his prophecy…the consciousness of our civilization is being saturated with the agony of secular humanism. There is little point in reinforcing this agony by fulminating against it. We have to be concerned and sympathetic for those who are locked into such a faith…secular humanism may claim to affirm man, but it ends by denying him.

Are we to ease the boredom of existence by soma, drug-induced ecstasies, sexual orgasms, and political fantasies? Are we to escape into the shadows of illusion? How easy it is these days to find gurus who will lead you into the shades of ecstasy for a reasonable fee! Are we to rule or dominate others? Kindly and benevolently, of course?! It is a big temptation, particularly for you who are being so well educated. Who needs God when we have the experts? Or who needs God when we have technocracy?

I am compelled to say that secular humanism inevitably manifests itself in the superman as it is expressed in the Fuehrer, the guru, the system, the process, the intellectual. That is why secular humanism destroys human dignity with the same breath that it avows it.

Today's Modest Proposal

While waiting to find out if Robert Mueller’s report reveals our President to be criminal or merely grossly corrupt, astonishingly venal, and utterly unsuited for his office: let’s talk about something else.

Pace Elizabeth Warren, we are not going to abolish the Electoral College anytime soon. However, it would be easy enough for the states, acting on their own, to remedy the main problem with the College, which is its “winner take all” nature.

As things currently stand, a candidate who wins a state by a single vote is awarded all of that state’s electors; the losing candidate gets no electoral votes at all, whether in Montana (with three electoral votes at stake) or in California (with fifty-five).

The simple solution is to require each state to award its electoral votes in proportion to the outcome of its popular vote—e.g. if candidate A receives 52% of the vote in California, then she will receive 28.6 of California’s fifty-five electoral votes; candidate B, having received 48% of the popular vote, will receive 26.4 electoral votes. (In Montana, those same percentages would translate into 1.56 and 1.44 electoral votes, respectively.)

There will be some math involved, but it won’t rise to the level of rocket science; electoral shares could be rounded to either one or two decimal places (as above). Third-party candidates will shave off fractions of the vote total—again, based on the percentage of actual votes they receive: if candidate C receives 1% of the vote in, say, Montana, then he will be awarded .03 (1%) of Montana’s three electoral votes. If candidate D manages to get 5% of the popular vote in Texas, then she receives 1.9 of the state’s 38 electoral votes.

Rather than turning narrow popular majorities (or pluralities) into electoral landslides, electoral votes need to reflect the popular vote. There is no reasonable justification for the current system in which a candidate who wins 49.9 of the votes cast in any given state receives no votes at all from that state in the Electoral College; awarding each state’s electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote will more accurately express the (divided) will of the voters.

I leave it to astute political scientists (and math wizards) to calculate what affect this will have on campaigning patterns, on campaign spending, and on the importance of “battleground” states that currently alchemize (as they did, notoriously, in the 2016 election) relatively thin margins of victory into electoral gold. There is simply no scenario in which candidates will (or should) devote a great deal of time or money to sparsely populated states like Montana or Wyoming; those of us who live in such places might well be grateful for the lack of attention.

The caveat in all this is that no individual state is likely to enact such electoral reform on its own; doing so would be a form of unilateral electoral disarmament. Therefore, a constitutional amendment will almost certainly be required, which puts this idea pretty much in the same boat as Senator Warren’s call to abolish the Electoral College completely.

Back, I suppose, to the drawing board…hey, has anyone leaked anything at all yet about the Mueller report? What’s this I hear about federal troops being in place around Mar-a-Lago? Is it true that Trump is on the run in a white Bronco with Al Cowlings at the wheel? If the report is exculpatory, will Trump take back all his anti-Mueller “witch hunt” tweets? Will the Deep State be rehabilitated? 

To paraphrase a Chinese slogan: Let a thousand pardons bloom...

Today's Blinks: Mind Fixers & Class Warfare

At the Atlantic, Gary Greenberg’s “Psychiatry’s Incurable Hubris” posits that “The biology of mental illness is still a mystery, but practitioners don’t want to admit it.” Reviewing Anne Harrington’s new book, MIND FIXERS: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness, Greenberg writes:

The pathological basis of almost all mental disorders remains as unknown today as it was in 1886—unsurprising, given that the brain turns out to be one of the most complex objects in the universe. Even as psychiatrists prescribe a widening variety of treatments, none of them can say exactly why any of these biological therapies work.

Greenberg’s last claim is wrong on its face; many psychiatrists are more than happy to explain why and how treatments work. The problem is that their explanations, on close examination, are not particularly convincing; their confidence, which can border on arrogance, seems misplaced.

According to Greenberg, the main flaw in Harrington’s book is her “commitment to restraint” when it comes to criticizing psychiatric researchers and practitioners. He would prefer that she sound the alarm about what he sees as a dangerous (if profitable) bit of pseudo-scientific chicanery:

Harrington’s dispassion as she chronicles the rise and fall of various biological theories of mental illness will make this book of value to historians of medicine…But her restraint carries a risk: that she will underplay the significance of the troubles she is reporting.

By virtue of its focus on our mental lives, and especially on our subjective experience of the world and ourselves, psychiatry, far more directly than other medical specialties, implicates our conception of who we are and how our lives should be lived. It raises, in short, moral questions. If you convince people that their moods are merely electrochemical noise, you are also telling them what it means to be human, even if you only intend to ease their pain.

 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/mind-fixers-anne-harrington/583228/

At The American Conservative, Peter Van Buren makes the astonishing claim that Americans on the political Left are so enamored of “identity politics” that they cast a blind eye to wealth inequality and class differences. In “America’s Apartheid of Dollars,” Van Buren informs us that we should “Forget race: the real dividing line is class, with identity politics there to distract us into submission.”

Van Buren joins Tucker Carlson among commentators on the Right who are now urging us toward, rather than cautioning us against, class warfare. Van Buren is correct that “identity politics” is used to distract from economic issues; he's just mistaken about who's doing the distracting. "Identity politics” is the epithet du jour used on the Right to shift the battleground from economics to culture: those scary Leftists aren’t just planning to confiscate your hard-earned dollars and give them to the poors, they’re forcing you to make cakes for their gay orgies,  forcing your grandchildren to share bathrooms with icky deviants, and calling themselves "Alexandria" and "Beto" when their real names are Sandy and Rick! 

Pace Mr. Van Buren, those of us on the Left are perfectly capable of walking to the beat of “identity politics” while chewing the gum of “entrenched inequality”; we’re even capable of showing the connections between those two things. The complications of race, gender, and sexuality do not eclipse issues of wealth and class privilege; they are part and parcel of them.

In any case, this passage from Van Buren’s article would pass muster in any left-wing periodical:

Color masks the lines that really matter, and those lines are all colored green. Since 1980, the incomes of the very rich (the 1 percent) have grown faster than the economy, about a 400 percent cumulative increase. The upper middle class (the 9.9 percent) kept pace with the economy. The other 90 percent fell behind. Race? You can be confident that the 1 percent are mostly white; likely the 9.9 percent, too. But the other 90 percent of America is every color. Whether your housing is subsidized via a mortgage tax deduction or Section 8, you’re still depending on the people in charge to allow you a place to live.

The birth lottery determines which of those three bands we’ll sink or swim together in, because there is precious little mobility. In that bottom band, 81 percent face flat or falling net worths (40 percent of Americans make below $15 an hour) and so aren’t going anywhere. Education, once a vehicle, is now mostly a tool for the preservation of current statuses across generations, to the point that it’s worth paying bribes for. Class is sticky.

Gosh—who’d have guessed? How come no one on the Left ever talks about this? Roll over, Liz Warren, and tell Bernie Sanders the news! If one were to be cynical, one could see a right-wing stratagem at work here: when Leftists talk about "identity politics," counter that the real issue is economic; and when Leftists talk about economics, start screaming about Venezuela (and "freedom"). 

Such misgivings aside, we welcome comrade Van Buren to the barricades. He can take the place of comrade Carlson, whom we have sent to a re-education camp for sensitivity training and a refresher course in basic human decency.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/americas-apartheid-of-dollars/

A Better Measure

James C. Scott, in his TWO CHEERS FOR ANARCHY, makes a modest proposal: why don’t we judge our institutions—schools, workplaces, governing bodies of all kinds—by an entirely different metric than the ones we commonly use (productivity, profit, and efficiency)? Instead of measuring our country's GDP (Gross Domestic Product), if we replace quantitative standards with qualitative ones and make the human person the measure, we might arrive at what Scott calls our “GHP" (for Gross Human Product):

What if we were to ask a different question of institutions and activities than the narrow neoclassical question of how efficient they are in terms of costs (e.g., resources, labor, capital) per unit of a given, specified product? What if we were to ask what kind of people a given activity or institution fostered? Any activity we can imagine, any institution, no matter what its manifest purpose, is also, willy-nilly, transforming people. What if we were to bracket the manifest purpose of an institution and the efficiency with which it is achieved and ask what the human product was?

Scott acknowledges that such a concept might defy our ability to measure it (“It is unlikely that we could devise a convincing comprehensive measure of, say, GHP, for gross human product, that would be comparable to the economists' GDP, gross domestic product, measured in monetary units”), but he believes it would be worth the effort:

If, undaunted by these difficulties, we decided to make a stab at it, we could, I think, identify two plausible approaches: one that would gauge how a work process enlarged human capacities and skills and one that took its bearings from the judgments of the workers themselves about their satisfaction. The former is, at least in principle, measurable, in ordinal terms of "more or less."

Factory work, for example, would be judged on its overall impact on the human persons doing the work. Does it improve their quality of life (apart from their income)? Does it add to their skills or to their overall knowledge? Does it make them better human beings, better citizens, or better neighbors? As Scott describes:

What if we were to apply the standard of human capacities and skills to the industrial assembly line? After five or ten years on the assembly line at Lordsville or River Rouge, what are the odds that the capacities and skills of a worker would have been substantially enlarged? Vanishingly small, I would suspect. In fact, the whole point of the time-and-motion analysis behind the division of labor on the line was to break down the work process into thousands of minute steps that could easily be learned. It was deliberately designed to eliminate the artisanal-craft knowledge, and the power this knowledge conferred on workers, that characterized the carriage-making era. The line was premised on a deskilled, standardized workforce in which one "hand" could be easily substituted for another. It depended, in other words, on what we might legitimately call the "stupidification" of the workforce…

Scott has no doubt what the outcome of such an evaluation would be:

Were we scoring assembly-line work by the degree to which it served to enlarge human capacities and skills, it would receive failing grades, no matter how efficient it was at producing cars. More than a century and a half ago, Alexis de Tocqueville, commenting on Adam Smith's classic example of the division of labor, asked the essential question: "What can be expected of a man who has spent twenty years of his life making heads for pins?"

The very nature of assembly-line labor, claims Scott, works against developing capacities necessary for citizenship: judgment, decision-making, mental flexibility, independence of mind, etc. Again, Scott explains:

If we were to apply the test of an enlarged capacity for democratic citizenship, it is obvious that the assembly line itself is a profoundly authoritarian environment where decisions are in the hands of the engineers and the substitutable units of the workforce are expected to do the work assigned them more or less mechanically. It never quite works out that way, but that's the imminent logic of the line. The line as a work process would have a negative "net democratic product."

Scott extends his thought experiment to another vital social institution, which itself bears some resemblance to a factory:

What if we asked the same questions of the school, the major public institution of socialization for the young in much of the world? Universal public education is, of course, designed to do far more than merely turn out the labor force required by industry. It is as much a political as an economic institution...the great tragedy of the public school system, however, is that it is, by and large, a one-product factory. 

What is this product? It is a certain form of analytical intelligence, narrowly conceived, which can, it is assumed, be measured by tests. We know, of course, that there are many, many skills that are valuable and important for a successful society that are not even remotely related to analytical intelligence, among them, artistic talent, imaginative intelligence, mechanical intelligence (the kind that [Henry] Ford's early workers brought with them from the farm), musical and dance skills, creative intelligence, emotional intelligence, social skills, and ethical intelligence. Some of these aptitudes find a place in extracurricular activities, especially sports, but not in the measured and graded activities on which so much now depends for students, teachers, and schools.

Characterizing our educational system as an academic “rat race,” Scott notes the discrepancy between those who excel at “a certain form of analytic intelligence” and those who do not (regardless of what other capacities they may have):

Those of us who [win] this race are the lifetime beneficiaries of opportunities and privileges that would not likely otherwise have come our way. We are also are likely to carry a lifetime sense of entitlement, superiority, accomplishment, and self-esteem that comes from this victory. Let us bracket, for the moment, the question of whether this dividend is justified and what it actually means in terms of our value to ourselves and others, and merely note that it represents a fund of social capital that adjusts the odds of financial and status mobility radically in our favor. This is a lifetime privilege extended to perhaps one-fifth at most of those the system turns out.

And what of the rest? What of the, say, 80 percent who in effect lose the race? They carry less social capital; the odds are adjusted against them. Perhaps as important is the fact that they are likely to carry a lifelong sense of having been defeated, of being less valued, of thinking that they are inferior and slow-witted. This system effect further adjusts the odds against them. And yet, have we any rational reason to credit the judgments of a system that values such a narrow band-width of human talents and measures achievement within this band by the ability to sit successfully for an exam?  

Those who do poorly on tests of analytical intelligence may be incredibly talented at one or more of the many forms of intelligence that are neither taught nor valued by the school system. What sort of a system is it that wastes these talents, that sends four-fifths of its students away with a permanent stigma in the eyes of society's gatekeepers, and perhaps in their own eyes as well? Are the dubious benefits of the privileges and opportunities accorded a presumed "analytical intelligence elite" by this pedagogical tunnel vision worth so much social damage and waste?

As presently constituted, schools, factories, and conventional top-down managerial regimes may well undermine our capacity for self-government:

Political philosophers as varied as Etienne de La Boetie and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were deeply concerned about the political consequences of hierarchy and autocracy. They believed that such settings created the personalities of subjects rather than citizens. Subjects learned the habits of deference. They were apt to fawn on superiors and put on an air of servility, dissembling when necessary and rarely venturing an independent opinion, let alone a controversial one. Their general demeanor was one of caution. While they may have had views of their own, even subversive ones, they kept such views to themselves, avoiding public acts of independent judgment and moral direction.

James Scott poses the question: “Do the cumulative effects of life within [a variety of] hierarchical institutions produce a more passive subject who lacks the spontaneous capacity for mutuality so praised by both anarchist and liberal democratic theorists?

Clearly, says Scott, we need to insist on public policies which “foster institutions that expand the independence, autonomy, and capacities of the citizenry.”  Instead of worrying about growing the economy, why don’t we focus on growing, and sustaining, human beings?

https://www.axelarnbak.nl/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/James-C.-Scott-Two-Cheers-for-Anarchism_-Six-Easy-Pieces-on-Autonomy-Dignity-and-Meaningful-Work-and-Play-Princeton-University-Press-2012.pdf

From the "Areo" Archives

In the way that one does these days, I recently stumbled across a website called Areo (not to be confused with Oreo). Here is its mission statement:

Areo is an opinion and analysis digital magazine focused on current affairs — in particular: humanism, culture, politics, human rights, science, and free expression.

Named after Milton’s speech in defence of freedom of speech, Areopagitica, Aereo publishes thoughtful essays from a variety of perspectives compatible with broadly liberal and humanist values. It places particular priority on evidence and reason-centered pieces. Our contributors are intellectually, professionally and ideologically diverse and include liberals, conservatives, socialists, libertarians, atheists, Christians, Muslims, Jews, and more. As much as possible, Areo aims to avoid polarizing tribalistic stances and prioritizes intellectual balance, charity, honesty and rigor. We believe in the unfettered freedom to explore, think, and challenge ideas and concepts, and we’re intent on taking part in the conversations that will shape our tomorrow.

Areo offers some interesting fare. For example, in “How French Intellectuals Ruined the West,” Helen Pluckrose explains Postmodernism’s baneful influence:

Postmodernism presents a threat not only to liberal democracy but to modernity itself. That may sound like a bold or even hyperbolic claim, but the reality is that the cluster of ideas and values at the root of postmodernism have broken the bounds of academia and gained great cultural power in western society. The irrational and identitarian “symptoms” of postmodernism are easily recognizable and much criticized, but the ethos underlying them is not well understood. This is partly because postmodernists rarely explain themselves clearly and partly because of the inherent contradictions and inconsistencies of a way of thought which denies a stable reality or reliable knowledge to exist. However, there are consistent ideas at the root of postmodernism and understanding them is essential if we intend to counter them. They underlie the problems we see today in Social Justice Activism, undermine the credibility of the Left and threaten to return us to an irrational and tribal “pre-modern” culture.

Given that neither I nor almost anyone I know have read a word of Michael Foucault, Jacques Derrida, or Jean-Francois Lyotard, it’s amazing that we have all been infected, apparently, with their relativism, their deconstructionism, and their seemingly absurd denials of the obvious:

[David Detmer] describes a bewildering conversation with postmodern philosopher, Laurie Calhoun: “When I had occasion to ask her whether or not it was a fact that giraffes are taller than ants, she replied that it was not a fact, but rather an article of religious faith in our culture.”

I’m hoping that a fuller account of the conversation would make Ms. Calhoun’s remark less risible.

In any case, Ms. Pluckrose finds in Postmodernism the root of both left-wing identity politics and right-wing “alternative facts”. I suspect she overstates the dangers of the former and misunderstands the sources of the latter, but her arguments are well marshalled and her conclusion ought not to be dismissed:

Our current crisis is not one of Left versus Right but of consistency, reason, humility and universal liberalism versus inconsistency, irrationalism, zealous certainty and tribal authoritarianism…Those of us who value liberal democracy and the fruits of the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution and modernity itself must provide a better option.

https://areomagazine.com/2017/03/27/how-french-intellectuals-ruined-the-west-postmodernism-and-its-impact-explained/

Also at Areo, Stephen Messenger asserts that many of our political conflicts result from our misunderstanding of human nature (by “human nature,” Messenger means human nature as described by people with whom he agrees):

The understanding of the social animal by the social animal is quite poor. Our failure to understand ourselves and each other leaves us grasping to imagine how it’s possible that other people can think so differently from ourselves. We’re left with almost no logical alternative but to conclude that they must be dysfunctional in some way. We’re far too quick to attribute views different from our own to low IQ, backwardness, bigotry, or a slew of phobias. Our ignorance of who and what we humans are and how we operate is one of the greatest single factors contributing to partisan divisiveness.

In other words: while we common folk attribute disagreements to other people’s ignorance, Messenger attributes our doing so to our ignorance. I’m not entirely certain that’s an advance.

It’s hard to disagree with Messenger’s basic contention: the better we understand human nature, the better politics (and culture) we can design. It seems a bit foolhardy, however, for Messenger to suggest that either “human nature” itself or the authorities he cites are uncontroversial.  Is "social engineering" futile just because some people say it is? What is the relative significance of nature, on the one hand, and nurture, on the other? How should we structure our hierarchy of moral values? Where do those values come from? 

Areo, for what it’s worth, seems to have a right-of-center vibe; or maybe it’s just the articles I happened to look at. In his essay, Messenger quotes the likes of Charles Murray and Thomas Sowell, which is not disqualifying but which does tend to suggest a conservative point of view. That said, I haven’t seen anything at Areo that I would dismiss as propaganda or mere talking points.

https://areomagazine.com/2018/05/12/understanding-human-nature-is-the-best-way-of-fixing-our-political-culture/comment-page-1/#comment-26266

Sunday Sermon

Max Horkheimer ("Theism and Atheism," 1963):

The upheavals [of the twentieth century] — the era of world wars, of nations awakening all over the globe, of stupendous population growth — can only be compared with the decline of antiquity or the middle ages. Christianity and theism in general are far more seriously called in question than in the Siècle des Lumières...Theology [has] had to adapt [to] structural changes in the social mechanism and to the related transformation of the family and the individual...

The changes with which Catholics and Protestants alike are trying to meet the threat in the developed countries are no less far-reaching than the most fundamental changes in the history of theology. Rome is both progressive and conservative. The new spirit seeks to improve the lot of the workers, to give them a share of the wealth in free countries and to liberate them from brutal suppression under backward dictatorships. Social movements are judged without hatred even when they derive from an anti-religious doctrine. Who could deny, we are asked in Pacem in terris, the papal encyclical, “that something good and worthy of recognition is to be found in such movements, as long as they conform to the law and order of reason and take into account the just demands of the human person?” The inevitability of social change is being acknowledged and affirmed. But tolerance of social progress is combined, by internal necessity, with the endeavor to salvage as many middle-class virtues as possible and to build them into the new order even at the risk of making quick adaptation to existing conditions impossible. It is by remaining within the tradition while giving it a new sense that the Church is trying to take an active part in shaping society.

[Rome's] efforts to keep up with the times appear modest when compared with the conclusions that Protestant theologians have already drawn. The latter have eliminated the possibility of any conflict not only with science — which science in its positivistic form has been avoiding in any case — but even with all moral principles, no matter what their content may be. Further, the assertion that God really exists as a person or even as a trinity — not to mention the other world — is [now] true only in a mythical sense. According to a popular work, Honest to God, by John Robinson, an Anglican bishop, which is now being debated in several countries, the whole conception of a God who “visited” the earth in the person of His Son is as mythical as the prince in the fairy tale. The “supernatural scheme” which includes for example the Christmas story and corresponding legends can, we are told, survive and take its place as a myth “quite legitimately.” The only reason why it ought to survive is that it points to the spiritual meaning of our lives.

Robinson is only putting into simpler words the thoughts of Paul Tillich and other philosophical theologians: the stories of the Bible are symbolic. When the New Testament tells us that God was in Christ and that the Word was God, this only means according to Robinson that God is the ultimate “depth” of our being, the unconditioned within the conditioned. The so-called “transcendent” — God, love, or whatever name we might give it — is not “outside” but is to be found in, with and below the Thou of all finite relationships as their ultimate depth, their ground, their meaning...However well-intentioned, the bishop’s words turn out to be mere verbiage, unctuous words which are nothing but well-worn cliches...

Truth — eternal truth outlasting human error — cannot as such be separated from theism...Without God one will try in vain to preserve absolute meaning. No matter how independent a given form of expression may be within its own sphere as in art or religion, and no matter how distinct and how necessary in itself, with the belief in God it will have to surrender all claim to being objectively something higher than a practical convenience. Without reference to something divine, a good deed like the rescue of a man who is being persecuted unjustly loses all its glory, unless it happens to be in the interest of some collective whole inside the national boundaries or beyond them. While the latest Protestant theologians still permit the desperate to call themselves Christians, they subvert the dogma whose truth alone would give their words a meaning. The death of God is also the death of eternal truth...

Protestant theologians, unconscious of this philosophical dilemma, try to rescue the idea that the life of each individual has its own meaning. It is essential for life in this world to mean something more than this world. What more? Their answer is: Love. The reason why love remains to determine what cannot be determined is obviously the memory of the Christian heritage. But love as an abstraction — as it appears in recent writings — remains as obscure as the hidden God whom it is supposed to replace. If its consequences for thought and action are not to be left entirely to chance, it is essential that the various implications contained in this principle be made explicit...Even the will to eradicate all hunger and injustice is still an abstraction, though it is already more concrete than empty talk about values, eternal meaning and genuine being.

The idea of a better world has not only been given shape in theological treatises, but often just as well in the so-called “nihilistic” works — the critique of political economy, the theory of Marx and Engels, psychoanalysis — works which have been blacklisted, whether in the East or in the West, and provoked the wrath of the mighty as the inflammatory speeches of Christ did among his contemporaries. The opposition between theism and atheism has ceased to be actual. Atheism was once a sign of inner independence and incredible courage, and it continues to be one in authoritarian or semi-authoritarian countries where it is regarded as a symptom of the hated liberal spirit. But under totalitarian rule of whatever denomination, which is nowadays the universal threat, its place tends to be taken by honest theism.

Atheism includes infinitely many different things. The term “theism” on the other hand is definite enough to allow one to brand as a hypocrite whoever hates in its name. When theism adopts eternal justice as a pretext for temporal injustice, it is as bad as atheism insofar as it leaves no room for thoughts of anything else. Both of them have been responsible for good and evil throughout the history of Europe, and both of them have had their tyrants and their martyrs. There remains the hope that, in the period of world history which is now beginning, the period of docile masses governed by clocks, some men can still be found to offer resistance, like the victims of the past and, among them, the founder of Christianity.

Even though Catholics and Protestants are nowadays ‘both on the defensive,' theism is again becoming an actual force in the period of its decline. This follows from the very meaning of “atheism.” Only those who used “atheism” as a term of abuse meant by it the exact opposite of religion. Those who professed themselves to be atheists at a time when religion was still in power tended to identify themselves more deeply with the theistic commandment to love one’s neighbor and indeed all created things than most adherents and fellow-travelers of the various denominations. Such selflessness, such a sublimation of self-love into love of others had its origin in Europe in the Judaeo-Christian idea that truth, love and justice were one, an idea which found expression in the teachings of the Messiah.

The necessary connection between the theistic tradition and the overcoming of self-seeking becomes very much clearer to a reflective thinker of our time than it was to the critics of religion in bygone days. Besides, what is called “theism” here has very little in common with the philosophical movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which went by that name. That movement was mostly an attempt to reconcile the concept of God with the new science of nature in a plausible manner. The longing for something other than this world, the standing-apart from existing conditions played only a subordinate part in it and mostly no part at all...

Nowadays atheism is in fact the attitude of those who follow whatever power happens to be dominant, no matter whether they pay lip-service to a religion or whether they can afford to disavow it openly. On the other hand, those who resist the prevailing wind are trying to hold on to what was once the spiritual basis of the civilization to which they still belong. This is hardly what the philosophical “theists” had in mind: the conception of a divine guarantor of the laws of nature. It is on the contrary the thought of something other than the world, something over which the fixed rules of nature, the perennial source of doom, have no dominion.

Saturday Briefs

In "Soul, Man" (at Claremont Review of Books), Glenn Ellmers writes about "the paradox of the soul," telling us that "The soul is the space where the light of philosophy shines." The occasion for Ellmers' meditation is the publication of David Bolotin's new translation of Aristotle's DE ANIMA. Evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of Bolotin's version, Ellmers says:

But why does any of this matter? Such is our modern confusion that many readers may be completely unaware even of the existence of a pre-Christian conception of soul, and wonder further why Aristotle’s commentary on this subject would be relevant to us today. Perhaps the answer lies in the most vital question one can ask of oneself: why am I alive? This can be understood as several different questions: In what sense am I a living creature, as opposed to a lifeless mass? Why is anything alive; how did life in the universe come to be at all? What am I alive for, to what end or purpose? Each of these inquiries—biological, ontological, and philosophical—can find answers, or at the least the beginnings of answers, by looking to the soul.

Ellmers summarizes Aristotle's view of the soul:

For all its astonishing complexity, the body is inert without the soul, which is the “source of motion,” the animating principle of our desires, choices, and actions. Motion, which includes growth and reproductive generation, is for him an essential feature of life. Generation points to every soul’s longing “to make another like itself [to] share in the eternal and divine insofar as they are able; for all things reach toward that.” This stretching toward “the immortal and everlasting” appears also in the soul’s capacity for contemplation, by which the soul is connected somewhat mysteriously to the “thinking” that is evident in the universe. Quite apart from any particular conception of God or an intelligent designer, the universe exhibits a coherent order, including the regular paths of the heavenly bodies and the various species of living organisms that eat, move, and perpetuate themselves in orderly ways. Aristotle considers all this to be evidence of a kind of cosmic “thought” in which the soul somehow shares or participates.

Ellmers' article is brief, but it serves both to introduce the basic issue and to recommend DE ANIMA as a starting point for study (those of a more scientific/skeptical mindset might prefer Owen Flanagan's THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL ).

https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/soul-man/

There may be no cure for stupid, but there is certainly a market for it.

Rupert Darwall (GREEN TYRANNY: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate-Industrial Complex) is not the first, nor will he be the last, to play the "Nazi" card in order to demonize political opponents or to associate contemporary progressives with 20th-century totalitarianism:

The Nazis’ profound hostility to capitalism and their identification with nature-politics led them to advocate green policies half a century before any other political party. As an approximation, subtract Nazi race-hate, militarism and desire for world conquest, then add global warming and Nazi ideology ends up looking not dissimilar to today’s environmental movement. From the vantage point of the second decade of the 21st century, it might come as a shock, but should not surprise that Hitler and the Nazis were the first to advocate large-scale renewable energy.

Some people--people who are not as insightful as Rupert Darwall--trace environmental concerns back to the 19th-century Romantic movement; to the likes of William Morris, John Muir, and John Ruskin; and, in America, to Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot. Some people, for that matter, even find in the Bible a warrant for caring for God's creation.

Mr. Darwall--like Jonah Goldberg and Dinesh d'Souza before him--is playing the ideological equivalent of "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon"; this game is called "Six Degrees of Adolf Hitler" and it's played by linking, by hook or by crook, current political ideas, statements, and policy proposals to ideas, statements, and policies undertaken by Hitler and the Nazis (it can also be played, with similar rules, as "Six Degrees of Joseph Stalin"). A typical move in this game is to demand, "You know who else was in favor of single-payer health care? Adolf Hitler!" Or, for example, coming from a six-year-old child, "You know who else insisted on washing his hands before he ate? Adolf Hitler!" ¹

With compelling logic like that, and with the market for stupid such as it is, Rupert Darwall's book is sure to be a best-seller.

https://www.encounterbooks.com/features/nazis-embraced-environmentalism/

¹ In fact, actual adults have been known to "argue" "Hitler was a vegetarian!" in an attempt to demonize the anti-meat crowd.

+++++++++++++++++

To end on a note of sanity: at The New York Review of Books, the philosopher Thomas Nagel discusses Christine Korsgaard's FELLOW CREATURES: Our Obligations to the Other Animals. So far as I know, neither Ms. Korsgaard nor Mr. Nagel invoke Adolf Hitler on this issue (You know who else was a vegetarian?); instead, each attempts carefully to explore the relevant ethical ground and to find their (and our) moral bearings.

Nagel explains:

Most people are not vegetarians: approximately 9.5 billion animals die annually in food production in the United States, and the carnivores who think about it tend to console themselves with the belief that the cruelties of factory farming are being ameliorated, and that if this is done, there is nothing wrong with killing animals painlessly for food. Korsgaard firmly rejects this outlook, not just because it ignores the scale of suffering still imposed on farmed animals, but because it depends on a false contrast between the values of human and animal lives, according to which killing a human is wrong in a way that killing an animal is not. Korsgaard deploys a complex account of morality to deal with this and many other questions.

After a long and mostly sympathetic (but not uncritical) examination of Korsgaard's book, Nagel concludes:

Moral disagreement is a constant feature of the human condition, as we struggle to find the right way to live. Whether we should kill animals for food is one of the deepest disagreements of our time; but we should not be surprised if the issue is rendered moot within the next few decades, when cultured meat (also called clean meat, synthetic meat, or in vitro meat) becomes less expensive to produce than meat from slaughtered animals, and equally palatable. When that happens, I suspect that our present practices, being no longer gastronomically necessary, will suddenly become morally unimaginable.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/03/21/christine-korsgaard-what-we-owe-a-rabbit/

 

Notes From The Hedge

Two items of interest from the archives at The Hedgehog Review...

Steve Lagerfeld ("In with the Out Crowd") casts a skeptical eye on America's "democratization of outsiderness":

Much of what social critics decry as rampant individualism in contemporary America is really rampant crowd behavior. It is herds of people busily declaring that they are not part of the herd. Whether you’re a Satanist or an alt-right activist, you sign up for a total lifestyle package that includes a limited menu of approved ideas, clothing styles, and other badges you can choose from to express your individuality. What you get in return is an intense sense of belonging and identity—we’re all pariahs here!

Rebels without a cause or, often, even a clue, the one thing we won't settle for is being "ordinary". When forced into comformity by the all too real pressures of daily life, we console ourselves with the knowledge that, deep down, we're shockingly unconventional; one of these days, perhaps, we'll remove our socially acceptable masks to reveal our true deviant identities!

Lagerfeld notes:

The contrarian’s great temptation is moral vanity, and what a sweet one it is...For some of us, there is nothing like the joy of being a pariah. There is no better place to be than on the wrong side, scorned, hated, and despised by people about whom you have exactly the same feelings. I’m right and they’re wrong. Their scorn is an intoxicating indicator of my own rightness and moral superiority.

For all that, Lagerfeld acknowledges that true contrarians are necessary and socially useful-- even though, he says, "the conventional wisdom is usually right." Wisdom, conventional or otherwise, can be refined by being challenged, and that is what contrarians are good at doing: "Genuine contrarians step off the common path, but their actions ultimately benefit the wider community. Because they stand alone, they face withering scrutiny. If they indulge in moral vanity, they pay a high price for it."

Alas, our faux contrarians (or "we faux contrarians") serve no such useful purpose:

Contrast that with the experience of the typical crowd contrarian. The very point of belonging to such a group is to seek safety in numbers, which shields crowd contrarians from the scrutiny and self-criticism that are essential checks on the contrarian impulse. And [if] the point of belonging to such a group is to celebrate one’s distance from the rest of society, what is the hope that your actions will somehow benefit others?

As Lagerfeld sees it, being contrarian only for the sake of being contrarian is both a rogue's game and a fool's errand:

Banding together is a healthy human impulse. Banding together in knots of narcissistic fury is not. The rise of contrarian crowds is a measure of our failure to create new, widely shared forms of belonging and community. Cultural innovation is the only answer to our plague of noxious crowds, and for that we must often turn to the contrarian minded, beginning with the brave dissenters who dare to speak truth to the power of their own ill-begotten crowds.

https://iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2018_Summer_Lagerfeld.php 

In "Virtue Signaling," B.D. McClay examines the trendy pejorative phrase "virtue signaling" to see what purpose (if any) it serves:

People being—for millennia, as the saying goes—social creatures, things begin to get muddy right around here. Anything can function as a signal, and to some extent does: the clothes you wear, your taste in books, the car you drive, the food you eat, the religion you practice, the organizations to which you give time and money, and so on. Unless you take great pains to make sure nobody ever sees you doing any of these things—which some people have been known to do—they’re all information by which other people judge you.

In other words, maybe you like the novels of Leo Tolstoy because they’re good; or maybe you like them because you’ve been told that’s what smart people like, and you want to be thought of as smart. But most likely, your reaction is an inscrutable mixture of the two, because your taste doesn’t exist in a vacuum but also is probably not purely developed for cynical reasons. And if every action you can take in a given situation can be a virtue signal—whether in accord with your principles or against them—then as a diagnostic tool, “virtue signaling” isn’t very useful.

"Virtue signaling" is the new "politically correct": a glib dismissal of statements, actions, or arguments with which you disagree but about which you prefer not to have an actual discussion. It's much easier to say "Oh, he's just being politically correct" or "That's just virtue signaling" than to debate an issue on its merits. As such, those scornful phrases are ad hominem attacks on other people's motives for saying or doing things; they are evasions of substantive conversations.

McClay acknowledges our propensity to signal virtue, among other things, but he also insists there's nothing wrong with doing so:

If actions are unavoidably performed before others, and the way we think about them is shaped by our culture, then all actions can be understood to be only performative; you wouldn’t do them if you had grown up in a different place with different parents and a different value system, and you wouldn’t do them if you thought they’d diminish your status or your standing as a good person. But what “virtue signaling” can’t admit into its framework, even though it should, is that most people act from mixed motives: They desire to do the right thing, and they also want people to think well of them.

Citing accusations by conservatives that “recycling is one of the left’s favorite sacraments” because it “helps overcome the guilt of consuming,” McClay explains:

The assumption here is that recycling does nothing and its merits (as an environmental practice) aren’t worth discussing. You recycle to look like somebody who cares about the environment, and you want to look like somebody who cares about the environment because caring about the environment is a thing good people do, and you want to look like a good person because, well, who knows? But you do.

To which accusations he responds:

Recycling doesn’t do that much, just as shorter showers do little to conserve water; the kind of actions needed to address environmental threats have to happen at a higher level. Buying free-range eggs doesn’t stop industrial farming. One set of parents choosing to send their child to an integrated school will not—by itself—integrate schools. Individual actions mean little when it comes to bigger changes. Recycling is instead a kind of internal prompt—you care about this, remember?

So, yes. That’s virtue signaling. But I would be loath to condemn taking small actions every day to remind yourself of a higher goal. An old Greek fellow named Aristotle seemed to think that building little habits was the only way one got to be virtuous at all. I’ll admit I’m dropping his name here as a way of signaling my education. But I also think he was on to something.

In recent years, conservatives, for whatever reasons, have turned ad hominem into a fine art. Besides their use of "virtue signaling" and "politically correct," they delight in accusing liberals of being "snowflakes" and/or "social justice warriors"; they make sneering references to "low-information voters" and (of course) to "fake news". It's almost as if they prefer name-calling to reasoned discussion--which, come to think of it, might help account for Donald Trump's popularity on the Right.

https://iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2018_Summer_McClay.php

"Conexit"?

Two recent articles at The American Conservative provide a window into current conservative thinking on the nature and future of American governance.

In "How Middle America Is to Be Dispossessed," Pat Buchanan assumes the role of a modern-day Paul Revere, riding through America warning "The voters are coming! The voters are coming!"

Pat Buchanan, you see, does not welcome "voters," many of whom are just dumb enough to vote for Democrats and most of whom are "tax consumers" and not "taxpayers" and therefore probably shouldn't be allowed to vote. Besides, who said this is a democracy, anyway? It's a republic, if we can keep it, and anyone who doesn't know that shouldn't be allowed to vote either.

The dodgy Democrats are engaged in a devious plot to franchise Americans:

In all but one of the last seven presidential elections, Republicans lost the popular vote. George W. Bush and Donald Trump won only by capturing narrow majorities in the Electoral College. Hence the grand strategy of the left: to enlarge and alter the U.S. electorate so as to put victory as far out of reach for national Republicans as it is today for California Republicans, and to convert the GOP into America’s permanent minority party.

Apparently it wasn't enough for us to extend the franchise to people who don't own property, to people who are neither educated nor informed, to women, and to people of color; now the Left wants to extend it to ex-felons, to adolescents, and to non-citizens. Who and what will they franchise next--pets? Trees? As yet undiscovered extraterrestrial life forms?

Pat Buchanan has seen the future of America, and it's California:

If the new U.S. electorate of, say, 2024, includes tens of millions of new voters —16- and 17-year-olds; illegal migrants; ex-cons; new legal immigrants from Asia, Africa and Latin America who vote 70 to 90 percent Democratic, the political future of America has already been determined. California, here we come.

The nefarious schemers will stop at nothing: "As a Democratic insurance policy, Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen has introduced a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College," Buchanan reports.

How did this whole "voting" thing get started, anyway? It's not in the Constitution. In fact, as Buchanan points out, it's practically un-American:

Ben Franklin told the lady in Philadelphia, "We have a republic, if you can keep it." Our elites today, however, ceaselessly celebrate "our democracy." Yet John Adams was not optimistic about such a political system: "Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy yet, that did not commit suicide." Thomas Jefferson, a lifelong believer in a "natural aristocracy" among men, was contemptuous: "A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51 percent of the people may take away the rights of the other 49." Madison wrote in Federalist 10, "democracies … have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."

When you think about it, as Pat Buchanan surely has, elections make no sense at all:

We do not select NFL coaches or corporate executives or college professors or generals or admirals by plebiscite. What is the empirical evidence that this is the best way to choose a president or commander in chief?

Buchanan's arguments could not be more timely. If our current system has produced President Trump--and it has--then there has to be a better way.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/how-middle-america-is-to-be-dispossessed/

Maybe we should give up on government altogether?

That is the compelling suggestion of Alexander William Salter, a professor at Texas Tech University. In "Why True Conservatism Means Anarchy," Professor Salter makes his case bluntly:

The state is a fundamentally anti-conservative force, and in order to preserve the good, true, and beautiful things in society, it’s got to go. In short, I argue that conservatives should seriously consider anarchism. ¹

He acknowledges the startling nature of his proposal:

I realize such a position seems absurd, at least on its surface. Conservatism has long held that the existing political order deserves respect precisely because it is the result of custom, habit, and experience. Massive changes in basic social institutions almost always create chaos. How then can one be both conservative and anarchist?

Salter answers his question at some length, concluding:

An anarchist is not one who opposes law and order. Nor is an anarchist a violent revolutionary. An anarchist opposes the specific institution that claims the right to provide these important social goods: the state. And a conservative anarchist opposes the state on the grounds that it, by its nature, is hostile to the goods and practices necessary not only for law and order, but also for a flourishing associational life on the part of its citizenry. Conservative anarchism is not a contradiction in terms, but a recognition that conservative goals are systematically disfavored by modern institutions of formal government.

One admires Professor Salter's candor: government, as currently constituted and currently disposed, does not serve "conservative goals," therefore, government must go. The very nature of the modern state makes it an anti-conservative institution; as Salter says, "The state is almost always at the forefront of social innovation. Precisely because of its monopoly on force, it is the perfect tool for radical reformers to employ as a means to advance their social engineering projects."

Salter believes that conservatives are beginning to see the light:

Conservatives have gradually come around to two troubling conclusions. The first is that, over time, they lose and progressives win. At best, conservatives temporarily stall progressives in their dismantling projects, but even when progressives win slowly, they are still winning. The second is that the Overton window shifts left with each passing generation, meaning conservatives are left scrambling to re-package their arguments in a form that is publicly acceptable, while progressives enjoy normative and cultural continuity. Given these facts, it’s no wonder that conservatives are left wondering why they can’t seem to hold the line, let alone advance.

Professor Salter sees no alternative but what might be called (by me) the "Benedict Arnold Option":

For the sake of preserving ordered liberty and protecting inherited faith and folkways, conservatives should reject the state’s legitimacy. Failure to do so is fighting a war on the enemy’s terms.

Salter provides no details--in this article, at least--regarding how conservatives should "reject the state's legitimacy": stop paying taxes? Stop voting? Refuse to fill out census forms? Refuse to obey traffic laws? Anarchy being what it is, the conservative revolt will probably vary from person to person; let a thousand conservative flowers bloom!

^{https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-true-conservatism-means-anarchy/}

If Messrs. Buchanan and Salter speak for contemporary conservatism, then the movement has come to this: an explicit rejection of democracy and a wholesale rejection of government itself--in the name, of course, of "ordered liberty" and "inherited faith and folkways". Conservatives believe themselves (perhaps correctly) to be on the losing side of an historical dynamic they see no way of changing or resisting; therefore, they would perforce be done with the whole devil's bargain of modernity.

Let's call this "Conexit" (for Conservative Exit) and let's wish them well. We'll miss them when they're gone, wherever it is they think they're going.

____________________________________

¹ Professor Salter has been banging his "conservative anarchy" drum for a while now:

^{https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2017/10/conservatism-seek-destroy-state-alexander-salter.html}

^{https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/is-democracy-to-blame-for-our-present-crisis/}