The Little Red Blog

Saturday Lecture: Christianity, Nihilism, and Ethics

“Religion is man’s great venture and man’s great, fatal failure.” (K.H. Miskotte)

K.H. Miskotte (from When the Gods Are Silent):

The gods are silent. The idea is still in the air, but it is mute. The shape lingers on the horizon but is suffused in a silent fog. The words still resound, as in a strange, unknown language or like a song from childhood; but they no longer speak the mystery to us. We no longer feel secure in the bosom of nature; we know that all things far and near do not speak, neither the Milky Way nor the electron. We are bound by the spell of things; the facts have us in their grip. We still feel an occasional prickle of dead before a higher power, but that power is voiceless, it no longer shows any signs of life.

Nihilism can be understood as a reaction to Christianity, which, after all, had increasingly put the stamp of the divine on worldly entities; in this sense it was the Enlightenment that inaugurated the process of nihilism in Europe. Then the Enlightenment itself strengthened ‘the agonizing feeling of the nothingness of science,’ for in a strange way understanding brings with it an emptying of life and initiative. According to Nietzsche, nihilism comes as a reaction to the mind’s habit of construing by means of value judgments an increasing number of areas and goals of life as being desirable and meaningful. But then, ‘The untenability of one interpretation of the world, upon which a tremendous amount of energy has been lavished, awakens the suspicion that all interpretations of the world are false. It makes no difference whether the question of meaning was a proper question to which previously we have given a false answer or whether it was a wrong question which must always be followed by a wrong answer.’

Nihilism may also take the form of saying, ‘There is no reality behind any faith or any ideal. There is nothing but an abyss of absurd existence. But hail to the summer, the sun, laughter; blessed be life and strength and women! We roam the world with hungry eyes to see everything we can; we want to fly to the moon; there is not enough time to enjoy to the full this terrible life!’ This kind of nihilism is genuine, warm, human, and understandable.

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{In which we are told that moral codes are made to be broken.}

“If someone asks me what he should do in a particular situation, I cannot tell him.”

John McConnachie (from Barthian Theology):

There is no such thing as a general ethic for man as to what he shall do, or not do, in all circumstances. Such a theory would presuppose an understanding of man as a being with definite plans and goals. But man does not have his life at his disposal in such a way. Man lives in a state of uncertainty in the face of what meets him from day to day, and every decision is a new decision. Ethical truth is distinguished from other forms of truth, such as mathematical truth, by the fact that it is never self-evident but becomes evident only in the concrete situation. The actuality of our present situation is always a decision which we have to make, and the ethical truth which appears is not a general truth but a particular truth. There is no such thing as ‘goodness’ in itself, nor is there any moral law as such.

There can be no such thing as a system of individual or social ethics. Neither is there any such thing as moral law as such. The idea of a ‘general’ ethics or a body of laws applicable to all circumstances of society can only lead to disillusionment and disaster. Ethics develops no program but deals from case to case. It uses no high-sounding language about the uplift of humanity or the creation of a better social order but gets down to real and simple things. A man knows only what he needs to do now, not what he may have to do in the next quarter of an hour.

Neither man nor the world can be improved, they can only be kept in check, and that with difficulty. To treat the Sermon on the Mount as a general ethics, or as a body of laws applicable to all circumstances of society, can only lead to disillusionment and disaster. This world cannot be ruled by the Sermon on the Mount; it is the ethics of the new man and of the new world, the ethics of the kingdom.

 

Friday Thought: "Error Has No Rights"

{The following is taken from a September 2021 blog post by Mark Shea. It reflects Mr. Shea’s opinions and not my own; but it is, I think, a helpful introduction to the controversial claim that “Error has no rights”. Whatever the epistemological validity of that assertion, in practice error is often in the eye of the beholder; truth and error are frequently found mixed in uncertain proportions; and a quick look back at either the Inquisition or Bolshevik-Soviet history shows what can happen when “Error has no rights” becomes state policy. In short, while I sympathize with Mr. Shea's outrage over the prevarications of the MAGA universe, I am not sure he has given this topic sufficient thought.}

Mark Shea:

“Error has no rights”: Medieval Christians deeply believed this formula. It fired any number of bonfires that consumed the bodies of heretics. It gave strength to the arms of men who racked people for teachings contrary to the Faith or dangerous to civil peace.

Because of this, postmodern minds tend to look back on the notion that Error Has No Rights with the serene assumption that arrogance and nothing but arrogance fueled it. They pride themselves today on their tolerance.

Or they have until recently. Now, postmodern minds have discovered that the medieval Christians were perfectly right: Error has no rights. Morons and liars who prattle, “I’m entitled to my opinion” as their all-excusing way of asserting the validity of their stupid claims, ignorant views, ill-informed blather, and murderous lies are, very simply, wrong. They may feel entitled. Indeed, fools feel nothing but entitled. But we are, in fact, not entitled to a counter-factual opinion–particularly when such opinions are deadly and dangerous. In such cases, fools are simply wrong. They may be ignorant, stupid, liars, barking nuts, or a mixture of the four. But the one thing they are not is entitled to their opinion if their opinion is contradicted by reality and fact.

As the incredible folly of postmodern MAGA commitment to lies, deceit, ignorance, stupidity, and folly is now making clear, we cannot repudiate without catastrophe the ancient truth that error has no rights. Precisely what the imbeciles braying, “I am entitled to my truth about vaccines being part of the Great Microchip Conspiracy” are demonstrating is that such lies have no right to equal standing with truth. Nobody has an obligation to platform them. Nobody has an obligation to listen to them. Everybody has an obligation to denounce, refute, ignore, and scotch the spread of them. And the state, depending on the gravity of the lie in question, has an obligation to penalize and punish those responsible for creating and spreading them.

That does not mean auto-de-fe’s and the rack. But it does absolutely mean that you don’t get to “Teach the Controversy” about the Flat Earth in science class as though the sphericity of the earth is one valid view among many. It means that if you spread idiocy about windmill cancer, you don’t get to be an oncologist no matter how entitled you feel.

It means that if you spread misinformation about a pandemic, you should be punished and penalized and made to suffer for your crimes against the common good, whether by expulsion from social media, or fines, or jail, or crushing insurance costs, or other penalties–no matter how entitled you feel. It means that if you harass gun massacre victims, you should lose your job and your media platform and be bled white financially to compensate for your crime against them–no matter how entitled you feel.

It means that if you commit a treasonous insurrection or act as accomplice to it, you should go to prison–no matter how entitled you feel. It means that if you lie about Dominion voting systems corrupting the election without a shred of evidence–they can and should sue you for a billion dollars–no matter how entitled you feel. Reality does not care about your sense of entitlement to an opinion. You have no right to a lie. Error has no rights.

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Error Has No Rights - Stumbling Toward Heaven (markpshea.com)

Mark Shea is a Catholic author and blogger whose latest book, The Church’s Best-Kept Secret: A Primer on Catholic Social Teaching, was published in September 2020 by New City Press.

Saturday Lecture: The Concern for Victims

{Rene Girard is something of a cult figure whose followers see him as having been granted prophetic insight into history. I do not share their enthusiasm, and I generally find their claims at best unpersuasive and at worst incoherent. The footnotes to the excerpt below are mine, not Girard’s, and they hint at my disagreements with him.}

“Our [modern] world did not invent compassion, but it has universalized it.” (Rene Girard)

Rene Girard (from I See Satan Fall Like Lightning):

Our society is the most preoccupied with victims of any that ever was. Even if our concern is insincere, the phenomenon is unprecedented. No historical period, no society we know, has ever spoken of victims as we do. We can detect in the recent past the beginnings of the contemporary attitude, but everyday new records are broken. We are all actors as well as witnesses in a great anthropological first.

Examine ancient sources, inquire everywhere, dig up the corners of the planet, and you will not find anything anywhere that even remotely resembles our modern concern for victims. The China of the Mandarins, the Japan of the samurai, the Hindus, the pre-Columbian societies, Athens, republican or imperial Rome—none of these were worried in the least little bit about victims, whom they sacrificed without number to their gods, to the honor of the homeland, to the ambition of conquerors, small or great.

An extraterrestrial who heard our words on the subject without knowing anything about human history would no doubt imagine that there existed, somewhere in the past, a society very superior to ours in terms of compassion. This imagined society must have been so attentive to the sufferings of the unfortunate that it left an undying memory among human beings such that we make it into the fixed star about which our obsession with victims turns. Only our nostalgia for such a society would enable this alien to understand our severity toward ourselves, the bitter reproaches we make to ourselves, on behalf of victims.

Of course, this ideal society has never existed. The world in which we live day by day usually doesn’t furnish us with satisfying material for condemning ourselves. ¹ But that doesn’t keep us from repeating, with a hue and a cry against the contemporary world, accusations we know to be false. Never was a society, we often hear, more indifferent to the poor than ours. ² Yet how could this be, since the idea of social justice, as imperfectly realized as it may be, is found nowhere else. It is a quite recent invention. ³

To speak as I do is not to exonerate our world of all blame. I share the conviction of my contemporaries about its guilt, but I am trying to discover the perspective from which we condemn ourselves. I think we have excellent reasons to feel guilty, but they are not the ones we state.

To justify the curses we rain upon ourselves, it is not enough to realize that we are the richest and best equipped of all societies in history. The rich and powerful were not lacking even in the most miserable societies, and they showed utter indifference to the countless victims about them. Our world must be under an injunction it imposes on itself. The generations preceding us heard the same summons, but it wasn’t nearly as loud and urgent. The more we go back in time, the weaker the summons sounds. This suggests that in the future it will become even louder. Since we cannot pretend to hear nothing, we condemn our deficiencies, but we don’t know why or in the name of what. We pretend to believe that what summons us is something everyone has always heard; but in reality we are the only ones who hear it.

What we now call ‘human rights’ is the acknowledgement that every individual and every group can become the scapegoat of their community. The emphasis on human rights amounts to a formerly unthinkable effort to control the hitherto uncontrollable process of scapegoating. The most effective power of transformation is not revolutionary violence but the modern concern for victims. Today, that concern is unifying the world for the first time in history.

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René Girard - Wikipedia Although not a theologian, Rene Girard (1923—2015) had, and continues to have, enormous impact on Christian theologians. His anthropological theories regarding what he called “mimetic desire” and the “scapegoat (or “victim”) mechanism” led him to an unorthodox defense of the meaning (and truth) of Christianity. Like any author, Girard has his critics, including some who claim that “his reading of Judeo-Christian texts vis-à-vis other religions leaves something to be desired.”  I should note that Girard's praise for the modern world stemmed from his belief that, despite its secular trappings, the modern West is a product of Christianity and that its values are inherently Christian values; in this view, the world is being gradually Christianized without even realizing it. 

¹ Girard’s “world” may have been very different from mine, or from yours. On a daily basis, I can see around me reason to blame myself for my absence of compassion and generosity. I can also see abundant evidence that human beings treat each other shamefully; if we are less cruel than in the past—and I say “if”—it is not by all that much.

² I have never heard that said. I have, however, heard it said that no society has ever been as rich as ours, and yet we allow poverty to persist.

³ “Recent” is a relative term. The Hebrew prophets, among others, were notoriously outspoken about social justice. The Book of Job, for that matter, was written from the standpoint of the victim—at least until the contrived ending added to soothe conventional piety.

                    If everyone blames you, but you didn't do anything wrong:                                                                      you might be a scapegoat.

 

Sunday Sermon: Soap, Soup, and Salvation

[If Alex Chilton's Big Star is the greatest band that never made it big, Lone Justice isn't far behind.] 

Soap, Soup, and Salvation 

All ill-fated sorts
Who sleep on doorsteps and in alleyways
Take a stumble to the corner
There's heavenly music playin'

No more taking recreation
With your dark defeated friends
They who seek the consolation of the bottle
Never win

Soap, soup and salvation
Tired hearts sing in jubilation
Restoration at the rescue mission
Soap, soup and salvation

Well, Brother Randall is a bit
Long winded and a little loud
And as he pounds the pulpit
The sweat flies from his brow

Making sure none are caught slumbering
In this mournful motley crowd
For the ones that stay awake
Are therefore graciously endowed with...

Soap, soup and salvation
Tired hearts sing in jubilation
Restoration at the rescue mission
Soap, soup and salvation

Procter & Gamble
Campbell's gospel
Watch Brother Randall wave that bible

Bein' drunk and hungry
Seemed like more fun cause
They don't feed no one
Til' all this preachin's done, oh no

I just thought I heard the choir singing
My old favorite song
That old harmony is still familiar
Though it's been so long

Lonely faces, and empty glances
They surround me everywhere
But those sweet angelic voices
Are now rising through the air...

"When the roll is called up yonder"
"When the roll is called up yonder"
"When the roll is called up yonder"
"When the roll is called up yonder, I'll be there"
With...

Soap, soup and salvation
Tired hearts sing in jubilation
Restoration at the rescue mission
Soap, soup and salvation
With...

Soap, soup and salvation
Tired hearts sing in jubilation
Restoration at the rescue mission
Soap, soup and salvation

Soap, soup and salvation

(Written by Maria McKee; performed/recorded by Lone Justice)

Lone Justice album version: (60) Soap, Soup And Salvation - YouTube

Lone Justice live version: (60) Lone Justice - Soap, Soup And Salvation - YouTube

Deuteronomy (Part Two): Purge the Evil from Among You

{In which Pascal the existential Russian blue cat continues his beef with Dennis Prager over the scriptural book of Deuteronomy. While Prager praises the book to the skies and declares it to be the word of God Himself, Pascal finds it alternately an embarrassment and an outrage.}

Perhaps because the LORD of Israel knew that the devil is in the details, Deuteronomy contains a surprisingly detailed penal code. For instance, “If two men are fighting,” it decrees, “and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity.” A reader is left to wonder how often that sort of thing happened that it had to be explicitly proscribed.

If pity was out, fairness was in: ^“Parents are not to be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their parents; each will die for their own sin.” The LORD was not opposed to capital punishment; He only wanted the actual offender to be the one executed. Christians may wonder, did Paul or Augustine neglect this Deuteronomic passage when they authored the doctrine of Original Sin? Also, the LORD also said, via Moses and earlier in Deuteronomy, “I am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the third and the fourth generation…” What, we might ask, gives?

Such quibbles aside, there is much to admire about the Deuteronomic code, e.g., the law that states, “On the testimony of two or three witnesses a person is to be put to death, but no one is to be put to death on the testimony of only one witness. The hands of the witnesses must be the first in putting that person to death, and then the hands of all the people.” The insistence on multiple witnesses was a moral and legal advance; requiring the testifying witnesses to get their hands dirty when it came administering punishment was a stroke of genius, though not one we would likely approve of today.

Over and over, Israel was enjoined by Moses (aka God): “You must purge the evil from among you.” Error was to have no rights, as the Catholic Church later declared; sin was contagious, much like mold, and it therefore had to be eradicated. Desperate times called for desperate measures; after everything the LORD had done to rescue His Chosen People from captivity and to award them land already occupied by other people, He was not about to tolerate any backsliding.

Moving on: as is clear from our contemporary culture wars, marriage and marital issues have always been of concern to God. Surprisingly, according to Deuteronomy, divorce was acceptable to the LORD, but remarrying your ex- was expressly forbidden:

“If a man marries a woman who becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house,  and if after she leaves his house she becomes the wife of another man,  and her second husband dislikes her and writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house, or if he dies, then her first husband, who divorced her, is not allowed to marry her again after she has been defiled. That would be detestable in the eyes of the Lord. Do not bring sin upon the land the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance.” ¹

It is not clear if the woman’s defilement stems from having married a second time or from having been divorced a second time; either way, she was off-limits to her original spouse.  

In addition, certain marital duties were to be taken seriously:

If brothers are living together and one of them dies without a son, his widow must not marry outside the family. Her husband’s brother shall take her and marry her and fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law to her.  The first son she bears shall carry on the name of the dead brother so that his name will not be blotted out from Israel. However, if a man does not want to marry his brother’s wife, she shall go to the elders at the town gate and say, “My husband’s brother refuses to carry on his brother’s name in Israel. He will not fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law to me.” Then the elders of his town shall summon him and talk to him. If he persists in saying, “I do not want to marry her,” his brother’s widow shall go up to him in the presence of the elders, take off one of his sandals, spit in his face and say, “This is what is done to the man who will not build up his brother’s family line.” That man’s line shall be known in Israel as The Family of the Unsandaled. ²

Hell hath no fury like a widow scorned by her brother-in-law! We have no idea how many men in Israel became un-sandaled (de-sandaled?), nor do we know how the spurned widow was able to remove the man’s sandal in the first place. The spitting seems unnecessary, but who are we to question the LORD?

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¹ This was before Jesus improved his Father’s moral code and prohibited divorce entirely.

² “Nor shall the pumps work,” added Moses, “for the vandals will have taken the handles.”

Deuteronomy: The Board Game

Sunday Sermon: "Fear of Beggars"

Kelly Johnson, from Fear of Beggars:

“Even in the relief of common beggars we shall find that we are more frequently influenced by the desire of getting rid of the importunities of a disgusting object than by the pleasure of relieving it. We wish that it had not fallen in our way, rather than rejoice in the opportunity given us of assisting a fellow creature. We feel a painful emotion at the sight of so much apparent misery; but the pittance we give does not relieve it. We know that it is totally inadequate to produce any essential effect. We know, besides, that we shall be addressed in the same manner at the corner of the next street; and we know that we are liable to the grossest impositions. We hurry therefore sometimes by them and shut our ears to their importunate demands.” (Thomas Malthus)

Beggars do a reasonable thing: needing something and seeing someone one who might have it, they ask for it. Put that way, the act is simple enough. Yet Malthus' description of the encounter remains a distressingly accurate account of how many people react when faced with beggars. Beggars alarm and disturb us. Like Malthus, the clergyman and economist, we find ourselves unable to act well, and can only try to remove ourselves from the offensive situation as quickly as possible.

A case in point: what happens when, walking through Grand Central Station, I see a man holding a sign that reads, "I am at your mercy"?  My normal perception of myself as reasonably just and kind is thrown into Protean contortions. If he is "at my mercy," then what am I? Am I the ruthless victor in a war of all against all? Am I nobility strolling through a world of misery, barely aware of the suffering that makes my life possible? Am I a sucker, the target of a scam that is working only too well, or an enabler, funding a soul's self-destruction? Am I, in fact, in some kind of danger? Or are the beggar and I both flotsam in an economic system which throws some of us on a sunny shore and drowns others, and against which resistance only increases the danger for all of us? I would gladly spot a friend some cash, perhaps a great deal of cash, but what will I do with the intimacy of this request from a stranger? Anyway, who says he is at my mercy, and not at our mercy? What about all the other people passing by without responding?

The cumulative effect of all this uncertainty about self and society is anxiety, confusion, and avoidance. Shopping malls provide merchants and shoppers a sphere free of this moral complexity, and laws controlling the location and behavior of beggars have been championed and denounced across the U.S., from California to Vermont and Florida, over the past decades. In 1988, Mayor Koch [of New York City] set off a storm of debate when he urged New Yorkers not to give to beggars on the grounds that giving only encouraged beggars and attracted more to the same behavior. Refusing to give would force the beggars to seek more acceptable ways to get their living. Koch added that those who were troubled in conscience by refusing a beggar should see their priest.

People have a visceral reaction to beggars, and not merely to stench or disfigurement, but to begging itself. Although most people recognize [in theory] that all of us are in some respects dependent upon each other, the sight of a stranger asking for help outside the public order of rights and the private affection of the family shakes us. Uncertainty about the beggar's honesty and civility, concern that giving alms to one somehow makes things worse for others (or may lead to endless demands), and knowledge that the pittance given is ineffective and may be only a sop to appease the giver's conscience, have together undermined, without destroying, the traditional image of almsgiving as virtuous. The anxiety remains.

Ethicists, as often as anyone else, get trapped at traffic lights where beggars hold up signs, yet whether to give to beggars does not figure as a significant problem in contemporary works on economic ethics. Why the silence?

Beggars implicitly raise questions about the nature and limits of property rights; the efficacy and virtue of almsgiving; the uses of social control and surveillance to differentiate needy from greedy beggars; the possibility of genuine altruism; the material meaning of `dignity'; the moral importance of productivity; the distinction between public and private behaviors; the working of justice among strangers; and the relationships of system and person or intention and effect. Beggars stand in an untidy corner of ethics. The presence of beggars raises questions that societies would sometimes prefer not to address.

The role of beggars in challenging the invisibility of poverty, disregard for the poor, and the nature of property rights is real. The phrase "the fear of beggars" has meaning from two directions. On the one hand, beggars have fears: not only of cold, hunger, and sickness, but also of being alone, of being beaten, of losing those last few precious belongings, of being stripped of any possibility of self-determination. But there are also many fears from the other side, from those who meet beggars on our streets: fears that the beggar might turn violent; that neither giving nor refusing will be morally satisfactory; that behind one beggar stand a thousand others, whose needs will overwhelm any generosity; that the beggar sees an alarming truth about humanity, about me: that had things gone differently, that beggar could have been any one of us.

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Kelly Johnson. The Fear of Beggars: Stewardship and Poverty in Christian Ethics (Eerdmans Ekklesia Series), Kindle Edition.

See also: Overcoming the Fear of Beggars | Catholic Moral Theology

Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

{Note: I did not have time to include cabbages or kings. I promise to get to them another time.}

At Current Affairs, Rob Larson calls attention to the logical incongruity of celebrating private affluence while demanding public austerity: “Conservatives who brag at breakfast about the market showering us with wealth will decline at dinner to admit that means there is in fact money for universal health care, a crash decarbonization plan, and free higher education.” ¹ Larson reminds readers of “the traditional socialist idea that capitalism builds up the powers of economic production to relieve the scarcity of traditional society, enabling the material abundance needed for organized workers to take charge of its tremendous power. Marx believed capitalism developed our productive capacities so that we could then enjoy socialist abundance.” ² “Socialist abundance,” however, is considered an oxymoron by those who equate Socialism with Bolshevism and who think that single-payer healthcare is the same as the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Cambodia.

Conservatives pontificate that you can’t solve problems by throwing money at them—unless the problems involve urban crime, border security, or projecting American power abroad. As Larson notes, the American military budget for the coming fiscal year is almost $750 billion, more than is spent by any ten other nations combined. The cost of President Biden’s ill-fated “Build Back Better” legislation has been variously estimated between $2 trillion and $5 trillion over ten years; even the high-end figure, though, would be dwarfed by a decade of military spending. ³

One might almost feel a twinge of sympathy for the cognitive dissonance conservatives must endure. “You’re a conservative, writing starry-eyed market worship,” Larson writes. “Free enterprise lets you do anything you want, makes your dreams come true, creates “stupendous growth” in the standard of living. You’re just consumed with telling the world about the giant bounty held up by the Atlas of the market. Then the moment some bastard socialist brings up universal health care or student loan forgiveness, you transform into the most miserly penny-pinching austerity-monger.”

To paraphrase the immortal Robert Goodloe Harper, “Millions for defense, but not one penny for social programs!”

Trillions and Trillions: The Selective Blindness on Endless Economic Growth ❧ Current Affairs

¹ Of course, conservatives will argue that spending on collective needs will destroy the individual incentives upon which capitalism is based; it will also, they say, reward freeloaders and undermine the moral economy.

² It will no doubt come as a shock to American conservatives that Marx praised the capitalist engine; he just wanted to turn control of it over to those who were digging up the coal and shoveling it into the engine.

³ Keep in mind that our current military spending is, technically, part of a “peacetime” budget. God forbid there should be a war!

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At Aeon, philosopher Andy West applies Simone de Beauvoir’s “ethics of ambiguity” to the very real world of prison. Having taught philosophy in prison—including the same prison where his uncle was incarcerated—West observes:

Contradiction is a norm in my working day. In my classroom, the men’s gallows humor often makes me laugh and makes my stomach turn at the same time. I cannot tell if their jokes protect the soul or further brutalize it. On the wing, I meet people who have experienced so much abuse and pain in their early life, it’s hard not to think that when they committed their crimes they were merely being acted upon by their trauma. Yet I know that denying their agency altogether would only further dehumanize them. Once, I said to my class that I thought prisons did more harm than good, that they punished those who were most vulnerable, and that if we showed more care towards people who had committed crimes then we would see more people grow and change. A few of the men shook their heads. One of them said to me: ‘Prison has become too cushy. It should be tougher. Take people’s tellies away. Make them not want to come here.’ He and I looked at each other both thinking there was something the other couldn’t see.

West’s essay, like all the best philosophy, is more memoir and personal meditation than it is detached observation. In discussing the need “to understand both the hurts of the victim and the vicissitudes that lead the perpetrator to his crime,” he turns to Beauvoir: “If you were to ask Beauvoir for an exhaustive account of how to live in ambiguity, she would say that was like asking a painter: ‘By what procedures does one produce a work whose beauty is guaranteed?’ There is no fixed recipe. It is our responsibility to try and find out for ourselves. This may leave us uneasy about how we should live our lives. But we should be reassured by our anxiety; it is a sign that we are more than just a serious person. ‘Morality,’ Beauvoir said, ‘resides in the painfulness of an indefinite questioning.’”

Reading Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘Ethics of Ambiguity’ in prison | Aeon Essays

Gary Saul Morson, Professor of Arts & Humanities at Northwestern University and an acknowledged expert on Russian history, makes the case that, whatever our feelings about the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, neither the Russian people nor Russian culture should be swept, even temporarily, into the dustbin of history. As Morson explains:

Even at the height of the Cold War, no one thought of banning Russian literature, art, or music. Quite the contrary; that is when Russian studies first flourished in America. Russian language began to be widely taught, in secondary schools as well as colleges, and the National Defense Foreign Language Act included Russian as a “critical language” to be supported. The very fact that the U.S.S.R. was perceived as a mortal enemy meant that Americans should know more, not less, about Russian culture. And it was also hoped that great literature and art, which everyone could share, might bring people together. ¹

Unfortunately, Morson’s legitimate concerns about people overreacting, or reacting in unhelpful ways, to headline events turns into a predictable screed against “cancel culture” in general. People are outraged by Putin’s invasion and frustrated at the Western world’s seeming inability to stop it. Outraged people will say, and even do, outrageous things; pointing that out is not to excuse such things, but merely to put them in context. Morson is quite correct in urging us not to throw out, boycott, or ostracize Russian culture, but I wish he would keep that issue separate from his ongoing “culture war” offensive.      

The Cancellation of Russian Culture | Gary Saul Morson | First Things

¹ Morson here presents a sanitized view of the Cold War's domestic front.  Moreover, the "cultural outreach" approach he cites was championed by American liberals and was opposed, often vitriolically, by the same kind of conservatives who are in the ideological trenches with Morson today. 

On "Morality" and "Apocalypse Porn"

{Each of today's brief readings is provocative in its own way; 'Caveat lector,' as always.}

Forget morality, says a professor at the University of Toronto. Moral philosophy is bogus, and Professor Ronnie de Sousa should know, having taught classes in moral philosophy over the years. Writing at Aeon, he informs us that the entire enterprise of “morality” is a sham:

Morality is a shadow of religion, serving to comfort those who no longer accept divine guidance but still hope for an ‘objective’ source of certainty about right and wrong. Moralists claim to discern the existence of commands as inescapable as those of an omniscient and omnipotent God. Those commands, moral philosophers teach, deserve to prevail over all other reasons to act – always, everywhere, and for all time.

To which reasoning Professor de Sousa replies, “Not so fast”. He suggests, rather than allowing ourselves to be bullied by moralists (of whatever sort), “When making choices, we should consider our reasons without asking what is ‘morally right’.” This blatantly counterintuitive proposal need not open the door to license or to moral anarchy; we can still act rationally even if we forego cloaking our reasons under the guise of “moral imperatives”. De Sousa continues:

As the philosopher Joel Marks has argued before me, to renounce morality is to wake up to the fact that in every choice we are governed by desires. Some desires are for something we just want for itself; others are for ways or means of satisfying those. All constitute or are grounded in reasons to act. Those reasons can be almost exactly those that move a moralist. I have perfectly good reasons for my desire not to cause harm, not to act unfairly, or to be kind. These reasons derive both from my first-order reasons and from my reflection on them. They matter not because of morality, but because I care.

Since God is dead, it makes perfect sense to bury alongside him the kind of “totalizing morality” he represented, along with the elaborate system of carrots and sticks, some in this world and some in the next, that sustained that system for millennia. That, at least, is Professor de Sousa’s modest proposal; make of it what you will.

Five reasons why moral philosophy is distracting and harmful | Aeon Essays

At Spiked, Brendan O’Neill unloads on purveyors of what he calls “Apocalypse porn”: those who provide us images of raging wildfires and disastrous floods, accompanied by doomsday warnings about climate change. As O’Neill explains:

Like all scolds, the eco-apocalypstas seem to take pleasure in telling the rest of us that we’re doomed, that the planet will be consumed by heat death if we don’t alter our habits. ‘With raging wildfires, floods and pandemics, it seems like End Times – and it’s our own damned fault’, says a writer for the Hill. ‘Immediate repentance’ is required, says the Guardian, sticking with the frankly mad religious view of floods and fires as violent rebukes for humankind’s eco-sins. And of course, the ‘immediate repentance’ that is required is not saying the rosary a couple of times – it’s ‘immediate and deep emissions cuts’. What about the people of China, India and Brazil who still haven’t achieved our standard of living and who must emit a great deal more carbon in order to do so, I hear you ask? Don’t be silly. They don’t matter. The world’s on fire.”

O’Neill goes on to decry “the sheer opportunism, the speed with which every natural calamity – regardless of whether it can actually be linked to climate change – is politicized and exploited. Every fire and flood is turned into a horror film that the West’s bored middle classes then use to promote their drab green agenda.”

Politicized? O’Neill seems to be of two minds on that matter, dismissing the “drab green agenda” as a politicization of natural disasters while himself claiming that the problems we face are not about climate change but about political malfeasance:

“If the Greek fires are down to the hubristic excesses of modern man, then we don’t need to talk about EU austerity and how it impacted on the Greek public sector, including its capacity to fight fires. It’s not Brussels’ fault – it’s your fault for driving to Sainsbury’s in a diesel car twice a week. Likewise, Erdogan’s failure to prepare for the wildfires in Turkey gets buried by the global media’s obsessive belief that every fire is a warning from Gaia. And the fact that the floods in Europe seem to have been exacerbated by poor planning is just casually pushed aside, buried under the guff about Poseidon’s wrath and End Times. No wonder German ministers are happy to talk up the eco-apocalypse – it takes attention away from their own failures of vision and infrastructure.”

Are not those failures of planning and preparation themselves the result of governments not taking seriously the warnings about climate change and its consequences? O’Neill does not say, perhaps because he knows the answer. It is climate activists who have begged national and global leaders to act, both to mitigate the greenhouse warming and to invest in resources and infrastructure to deal with what we know is coming. If Greek, Turkish, German, and American leaders have not responded with an adequate sense of urgency, perhaps it is because people like Brendan O’Neill keep downplaying, and even mocking, environmental concerns.

Finally, O’Neill plays the “everything is actually getting better” card: “As Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out, ‘Ever fewer people die from climate-related catastrophes.’ Even as the human population has quadrupled over the past century, deaths from climate disasters ‘have dropped 20-fold’. The death risk from natural calamities or extreme weather has fallen 99 per cent since the 1920s.” To which I can only offer in rebuttal this quote from Mark Twain: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Just because we now have more and better lifeboats does not mean we should dismiss the impending deluge; catastrophism may not help, but neither will complacency.

Apocalypse porn - spiked (spiked-online.com)

Sunday Sermon: Money Changes Everything

Wilhelm Weitling, from Humanity: How It Is and How It Should Be (1838):

Those who are satisfied are happy! But one can be satisfied, if one leads a carefree life and has friends, one can live carelessly if one knows that each of all has as much as he needs; and friends are chosen and found only among those who have the same fate with us. So the same situation of life for all causes carefree life and friendship, thus the happiness of all. If you now want to bring about the state of general happiness, seek that everyone has and enjoys as much as, and no one more than, he needs.

So long as there are still people who are deprived of them, all works that are not necessary for the existence and welfare of all are useless. What is the use of all the luxury articles for the majority, luxuries they have processed with such extraordinary diligence but which they cannot have? The multitude of the workers, through whom the most necessary work is facilitated, all have to live; for everyone wants to protect himself from the weather and the cold, to clothe and nourish himself. Now reckon with the myriad of wealthy idle people, and those who are at their service to indulge their comforts, just like the bayonets to protect their injustice, and you must marvel at the enormous number of poor people who are deprived of useful employment, and whose work someone else must take over.

But these enemies of humanity are not content with using all your spiritual and bodily powers as their sole prerogative; their greed also denies you the same enjoyment of the goods of life, of which the greatest and best share, as they have established it in their artificial, fraudulent, so-called bourgeois order, is claimed by them for themselves, or for those for whom they work voluntarily or forced. That is why the basic needs of life have been ignored and your wages have been set up in such a way that you can only ever have little. You would not be given anything, but then you might die, and they would have to work; and that is unbearable to them.

The cause of these perpetual bad times is the unequal possession of goods and the unequally despised work for their production; and the means of maintaining this horrible disorder is money. If there were no more money from today, the rich and the poor would soon be allowed to live among each other in a community of goods. But so long as there is still money, according to the present meaning of the word, the world will never become free. How much misery and misfortune has not been suffered by humanity since its introduction. Make an enumeration of all the vices and faults of humanity, and you will realize that the majority, the most horrible, the most deplorable of them would not exist without money; and with its removal, and the introduction of the community of goods, those faults would disappear. 

The moral corruption brought about by the inequality of the estates also contributes to increasing the misery of humanity. The nobility carries its nose higher than the merchant, who thinks more than the craftsman, the direct tax-paying master believes to be more than the worker they all despise, and so again everyone in any position who has something more than the other. Even the worker, when he has put on a new garment, the other worker who does not have it is not decent. It is very sad that such cases occur even among you workers. If you knew that you were the most useful people of the earth, you would have the courage to look proudly at the oppressors and fools, instead of trying to imitate them in their vices. A man who is devoted to the splendor of the garment would not be well placed to preach fellowship of goods.

Moderation is the preserver of all good order and the basic condition of the community of goods. If you live moderately, and like to help the needy, your words will be like a fruitful rain over a dry land. But the state in which we now live is the state of the most extravagant immorality. Some work little or nothing, and revel in abundance, while the other works disproportionately, and often even has to do so. This immorality is the destroyer of all earthly happiness and the most irreconcilable enemy of the community of goods. The community of goods is not a privilege, but it is the Common right of society to live safely in permanent prosperity. You have wishes that you would like to see fulfilled; you will soon seek this good, soon that good, that will either help your need or secure your prosperity. You are working and struggling to strive for what you long for; and hope and patience never leave you.

By retaining money, in the present meaning of the word, the unequal enjoyment, like the unequal burden of labor, is unworkable. Diversity of estates, lack and abundance, with their burdens, all this remains the same; and that is what the people of the money systems want, because it is enjoyable for them to have more than another brother, and too hard for them to share the same table with a craftsman or a farmer.

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Wilhelm Weitling (1808 – 1871) was a German tailor, inventor, radical political activist and one of the first theorists of communism. Weitling gained fame in Europe as a social theorist before he emigrated to the United States. His written works include The Poor Sinner’s Gospel; in addition to his extensive political writing, Weitling was a successful inventor of attachments for commercial sewing machines, including devices for double-stitching and the creation of buttonholes. He participated in the experimental German-American settlement of Communia, Iowa; he died in New York City. [Wilhelm Weitling - Wikipedia]

"To an ice floe--go!"

{The title of this post borrows from Whittaker Chambers' 1957 review of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, in which Chambers wrote: "From almost any page of the book, a voice can be heard, commanding: 'To a gas chamber--go!'"} 

American conservatives are surpassingly fond of the late Austrian economist F.A. Hayek, whose 1944 book The Road to Serfdom became a surprise best-seller and quickly attained the status of a right-wing classic. A copy of Hayek’s masterpiece can be found, usually unread, on the bookshelf of every genuine conservative, next to Democracy in America and the Federalist Papers (also unread). ¹

Hayek, however, was too interesting a thinker to be reduced to an intellectual icon. For one thing, as my recent post “Losing Our Nonfactual Beliefs” indicated, he was an agnostic, which put him at odds with the religious elements of the modern conservative movement. His agnosticism prevented him from believing in “God-given” rights; in fact, he rejected the idea that people have any “natural” rights at all. Rights, according to Hayek, arise (or evolve) out of social interactions and are part of the rules which humans design for those interactions. The only rights anyone has are those that a given society, through its laws and customs, recognizes and is willing to enforce.

That said, Hayek offered plenty of red meat for his conservative followers. His final book, The Fatal Conceit, was a direct attack on socialism and on its view of human nature, which he traced back to the baleful influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

In any society, conflict between an individual's emotions and what is expected of him in an extended order is virtually inevitable: innate responses tend to break through the network of learnt rules that maintain civilization. It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who first provided literary and intellectual credentials for reactions that cultivated people once dismissed as simply uncouth. Regarding the natural (read `instinctual') as good or desirable is, in his work, an expression of nostalgia for the simple, the primitive, or even the barbarian, based on the conviction that one ought to satisfy his or her desires, rather than to obey shackles allegedly invented and imposed by selfish interests. In a milder form, disappointment at the failure of our traditional morality to produce greater pleasure has recently found expression in the nostalgic idea that “small is beautiful” or in complaints about the “joyless economy,” as well as in much of the literature of “alienation”.

The invocation of “traditional morality” always meets with approval from those on the Right, as does the dismissal of “alienation” as a symptom of selfishness.

On the other hand, The Fatal Conceit contains passages that may take conservatives aback. This next passage, for example, would not pass muster with either the Family Research Council or the Idaho Republican Party:

Mere existence cannot confer a right or moral claim on anyone against any other. Persons or groups may incur duties to particular individuals; but as part of the system of common rules that assist humankind to grow and multiply, not even all existing lives have a moral claim to preservation. A practice that seems so harsh to us—e.g., wherein some Eskimo tribes leave senile members to die at the beginning of their seasonal migration—may well be necessary for them to bring their offspring to the next season. And it is at least an open question whether it is a moral duty to prolong the lives of suffering incurables as long as modern medicine can.

Death panels? Did Friedrich Hayek advocate death panels? Was he in favor of rationing end-of-life healthcare? Worse, was he some sort of moral relativist who, confronted with barbaric tribal customs, simply shrugged and asked, “Who are we to judge?”

Unlike contemporary conservatives, Hayek did not fetishize human life; instead, he subjected it to a rigorous cost/benefit analysis. He believed that those who do not contribute in some measure to society are nothing but “parasites” who have neither any rights in society nor any entitlement to its benefits. ¹ In Hayek’s somewhat Dickensian view (“Are there no workhouses?”), such useless eaters can either get with the program, fend for themselves, or die and reduce the surplus population:

Such questions arise even before we ask to whom such claims can be validly addressed. Rights derive from systems of relations of which the claimant has become a part through helping to maintain them. If he ceases to do so or has never done so (or nobody has done so for him) there exists no ground on which such claims could be founded.

Relations between individuals can exist only as products of their wills, but the mere wish of a claimant can hardly create a duty for others. Only expectations produced by long practice can create duties for the members of the community in which they prevail, which is one reason why prudence must be exercised in the creation of expectations, lest one incur a duty that one cannot fulfill.  

According to Hayek, the bestowing of rights and benefits on persons who do little more than take up space and who do nothing to justify their existence or to earn their place in this crowded world is the fundamental error of socialism:

Socialism has taught many people that they possess claims irrespective of performance, irrespective of participation. In the light of the morals that produced the extended order of civilization, socialists in fact incite people to break the law. Those who claim to have been `alienated' from what most of them apparently never learnt, and who prefer to live as parasitic dropouts, draining the products of a process to which they refuse to contribute, are true followers of Rousseau's appeal for a return to nature, representing as the chief evil those institutions that made possible the formation of an order of human coordination.

Hayek insisted that those who do not or will not play society’s game(s) should not look to society for succor:

I do not question any individual's right voluntarily to withdraw from civilization. But what `entitlements' do such persons have? Are we to subsidize their hermitages? There cannot be any entitlement to be exempted from the rules on which civilization rests. We may be able to assist the weak and disabled, the very young and old, but only if the sane and adult submit to the impersonal discipline which gives us means to do so. ³

In his summation, Professor Hayek chastised his fellow academics for indoctrinating their students with the ill-conceived theories of the past:

It would be quite wrong to regard such errors as originating with the young. They reflect what they are taught, the pronouncements of their parents - and of departments of psychology and sociology of education and the characteristic intellectuals whom they produce - pale reproductions of Rousseau and Marx, Freud and Keynes, transmitted through intellects whose desires have outrun their understanding.

I have, you may surmise, some serious disagreements with Hayek, but to give him his due, I cannot think of a better statement of the human dilemma: "our desires outrun our understanding". To know that may be the beginning of wisdom.

____________________________________________

¹ I say this from personal experience, having once, long ago, joined the Conservative Book Club and having received those volumes among my initial choices. I believe I also received James Burnham’s The Suicide of the West and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. It was, as I say, long ago, and I was young.

² Of course, one first must define “contribution to society”. You could argue that the chronically unemployed, those on the dole, and the incarcerated all contribute, if only in a perverse way: they serve as cautionary examples, as role models in reverse, and as living proof of the wages of sin. Parasites and losers give the Solid Citizens of the world someone to look down on, someone to whom they can feel superior, and someone to point to as scapegoats for society’s imperfections.  

³ Caution: to acknowledge society’s responsibility to “assist the weak” is to create a loophole big enough for Leviathan itself to slip through and a slope so slippery not even Nancy Kerrigan at her best could maintain her balance.