The Little Red Blog

Wednesday with Pascal: What Is Language For?

{The following essay was left on my doorstep in a manila envelope. I presume it comes from Pascal the self-exiled existential Russian blue cat, but who knows? I publish it here without claiming to know what its author is going on about or why, much less what it means.}

“Words convey reality.” (Josef Pieper)

“Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.” (Quotation attributed to Desmond Tutu)

What do we talk about when we talk about, well, anything? Or, put differently, what is the purpose of language? The philosopher Josef Pieper claimed that “Word and language form the medium that sustains the common existence of the human spirit. The reality of the word makes existential interaction happen. If the word becomes corrupted, human existence itself will not remain untainted.”

Well, we certainly don’t want that!

In his essay “Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power,” Pieper took up Plato’s arguments (and George Orwell’s) against sophistry and the deliberate misuse of language. The Sophists who drew Plato’s ire were, according to Charles Kahn, “itinerant educators, the first professors of higher learning, who appeared in Greece in the middle and later fifth century bc. The Sophists succeeded in earning very large sums for their instruction. They lectured on many subjects, including the new natural philosophy, but their most important teaching was in rhetoric, the art of influencing political assemblies and law courts by persuasive speech. In conservative circles their great influence was regarded with hostility, as corrupting the young.” ¹

Plato criticized the Sophists for, among other things, profiting from their alleged wisdom. “Money and mind are incommensurable,” agreed Josef Pieper. Plato also accused Sophists of “corrupting the language,” by which he meant manipulating it, distorting it, using it tendentiously.  The Sophists “cultivated language with exceptional awareness of linguistic nuances,” conceded Pieper, “and with utmost formal intelligence.” They did so, however, without scruple; “They pushed verbal constructions to crafty limits, thereby corrupting the meaning and dignity of their words.”

In other words, Plato was shocked, shocked I tell you, to discover that language could be used to deceive as well as to enlighten, to conceal as well as to reveal, to mislead as well as to guide. Or perhaps he was shocked only to discover that the Sophists could get away with their sophistry, could earn a living from it, could be applauded for it, could even gain something of a following. For Plato, Sophists were not disinterested seekers of Truth; they were intellectual hustlers, self-serving profaners of language, and they were nowhere near as smart as they pretended to be. Like poets, Sophists would not have been allowed in Plato’s ideal republic.

In fairness, it should be noted that Plato himself, outlining his fanciful republic, promoted lying as a matter of public policy. According to Malcolm Schofield:

Socrates' introduction of the Republic's notorious “noble lie” comes near the end of Book 3. “We want one single, grand lie,” he says, “which will be believed by everybody - including the rulers, ideally, but failing that the rest of the city.” ‘Grand lie’ or ‘noble lie’? G. R. F. Ferrari has a good note on the issue: “The lie is grand or noble by virtue of its civic purpose, but the Greek word can also be used colloquially, giving the meaning 'a true-blue lie,' i.e., a massive, no-doubt-about-it lie.” ²

Schofield continues:

The noble lie is to serve as charter myth for Plato's good city: a myth of national or civic identity - or rather, two related myths, one grounding that identity in the natural brotherhood of the entire indigenous population (they are all autochthonous, literally born from the earth), the other making the city's differentiated class structure a matter of divine dispensation (the god who molds them puts different metals in their souls). If people can be made to believe it, they will be strongly motivated to care for the city and for each other.

Whereas Plato scolded the Sophists for cynically manipulating language, turning philosophy into little more than verbal one-upmanship, he, by contrast, advocated lying to establish and preserve public order and the common good. Plato’s ends justified his means, or so he thought. As Hegel observed, “All the evil deeds in this world since Adam and Eve have been justified with good reasons.”

Since even Plato accepted the necessity of lying, Josef Pieper, with his "immaculate correspondence" theory of language, was a voice crying in the wilderness. “We speak in order to identify and describe what is real,” Pieper insisted, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, e.g., we also speak just to be polite, or to break an awkward silence, or to hear ourselves talk, or to amuse, or to distract, or to silence someone else—we speak for all sorts of reasons, not only to “identify and describe what is real”.

Pieper was not naïve. Though he insisted, “We can talk only about reality, nothing else,” he added, “Of course, there is always the possibility of lying, of falsifying!” Lying, he wrote, is a corruption of reality which, “disconnected from the roots of truth, pursues some ulterior motives.” Pieper did not stop (in the essay, at least) to consider whether ulterior motives could ever be legitimate; he merely asserted that lying (or even the clever use of “sophisticated language”) “invariably turns into an instrument of power, something it has been, by its very nature, from the start.”

What Pieper, who was a man of acute intelligence, must have known is that language itself, “by its very nature,” is and always has been “an instrument of power”. As a Christian philosopher, Pieper knew that God spoke creation into existence; he knew that Adam and Eve were undone by a lie compounded by more lies; and he knew that language, at one time a unifying factor, was deliberately “confused” by God to arrest, or at least to inhibit, human achievements. Even human names contained power, which is why they were often jealously guarded: the “man” with whom Jacob wrestled at the Jabbok would not give his name, even under duress. The God who spoke with Moses also refused: when asked his name, he evasively answered, “I am who I am.”

Language has always been about power: the power to create, the power to control, the power to unite, the power to divide, the power to deceive, etc. One can sympathize with Josef Pieper’s desire to combat the misuse of language, especially given the propaganda so characteristic of twentieth-century institutions. Pieper urged us to be cautious, to be skeptical, about the language with which we were increasingly bombarded; we should be “anti-sophistic,” he said, in opposing “anything that could destroy or distort the nature of the word as communication or its unbiased openness to reality. Opposition is required against every partisan simplification, every ideological agitation, every blind emotionality; against seduction through well-turned but empty slogans, against autocratic terminology with no room for dialogue, against personal insult as an element of style, against categorical conformism, and against categorical non-conformism: do we need to go on?”

Now, if only we could agree on the meaning of any of that—but we won’t. We can’t. We have no way to rise above our competing subjectivities. We will go on using language as we have always used it: as a weapon as much as a tool, as a divider and not a uniter, as another arrow in our rhetorical quiver, as a subterfuge, as a rationale, as an incendiary device. Our language, like everything else about us, will remain imperfect; language, no matter how we choose to deploy it, will not save us. Our problems go deeper than that.  

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Josef Pieper - Wikipedia Pieper’s best-known book is Leisure, the Basis of Culture

Josef Pieper quotes are from Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power

Charles Kahn quote is from Sophists - Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Malcolm Schofield quotes are from The Noble Lie (Chapter 6) - The Cambridge Companion to Plato's Republic

¹ Conservatives to this day do not trust higher education, infected as it is with woke relativism, Critical Theory, and postmodern linguistic turns. O ye vile corrupters of youth!

² What we might today call, “The Big Lie”.

Today's Curmudgeon

There is a new curmudgeon in town: his name is Alexander Zubatov. An attorney by profession, Zubatov moonlights as a polemicist, his polemics having graced the pages of The Imaginative Conservative and The Federalist, among other publications. Zubatov is an alumnus of Yale University, though he boycotted his 20-year class reunion there to protest “woke” shenanigans on campus (to my knowledge, the reunion proceeded without him).    

The following should serve as an introduction to Zubatov’s oeuvre. In “How Do We Save Our Souls from the Modern World?” Zubatov laments the decline/demise of “high culture,” by which he does not mean the turned-on culture of the Sixties. “Mass culture” has not had a thrashing this severe since the heyday of Neil Postman and Walker Percy. Have at it, Mr. Zubatov:

Mass culture is largely a twentieth-century development, and it found its first and firmest stronghold in the U.S. Its causes can be debated and range from greater mass liberty, literacy, cosmopolitanism, and spending power to the increasing inaccessibility of high art, culminating in Modernism, but above all, it is a manifestation of our growing existential vacuum. While high culture is meditative, requiring time and contemplation to work its magic, in our accelerating society, hardly anyone has the time or desire to read Proust’s 4,000-page masterpiece or even a one-page poem that might require hours, days or months of immersive musing to resonate. We have lost the capacity for this kind of immersive contemplation, and expect communication to be brief, punchy and immediately impactful.

Mass culture caters to this craving for instant gratification. It has less in common with art than it does with amusement parks, sideshows and circus acts. It stands in relation to art in something like the relationship that pornography bears to romance. It offers quick highs, cheap thrills, big bangs, and a lot of action, violence, sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. The problem is not sex and violence and the like per se, but that, in the context of mass culture, these become ends in themselves, conveying no deeper value.

Porn, drugs, junk food, much of the internet and technology enabling instantaneous communication, video games and mass culture of all sorts that skips right to the punchline are what the Nobel-prize winning ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen referred to as “supernormal stimuli” that exaggerate natural effects we have evolved to crave. When we are routinely subjected to such stimuli, we screw up our reward system, unbalancing us and leading to addiction. In essence, we begin to crave more and more until we are finally left benumbed. ¹

The predictable result of mass culture—dressed in jeans, G-strings or drag, Big Gulp and a grease-stained carton of fries in hand—unceremoniously barging in on the ball, pumping up the volume, putting on some twerkable tunes and getting a good old food fight going, with the whole shebang cheerily chaperoned all the while by those who were supposed to be serving as gatekeepers and guardians, is that art and high culture are well on their way to being thoroughly devalued. If Hamlet and Real Housewives or Beethoven and Beyoncé are conceived of as no more than alternative pastimes, a mere matter of “different strokes for different folks,” then we are at a point where the distinction between art and entertainment has effectively vanished, and with it, our last great refuge and potential source of individual and collective meaning and purpose without which man is little better than a pig wallowing in the small tract of mud within which it happens to find itself plopped. ²

It is hard not to admire Zubatov’s all-encompassing, all-purpose vitriol and the take-no-prisoners swagger with which he dispenses it. Though he is associated with today’s political Right, Alexander Zubatov seems to be a curmudgeon for all seasons, and we can never have too many of those.

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How Do We Save Our Souls From the Modern World? ~ The Imaginative Conservative

 ¹ I sympathize with the “supernormal stimuli” thesis and with concerns about the dangers posed by the phenomenon itself. Modern society is a high-speed, hyperactive, humanly manipulated environment in which citizens are constantly exposed to demagogic imagery and emotional overload, often in the name of “entertainment” but always in pursuit of profit. 

² “It is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied,” said John Stuart Mill, to which Jeremy Bentham replied, “Not if you're a pig.”

Monday Musings

You knew I was a snake when you elected me. (Donald Trump, allegedly) 

If, despite the last four years and despite everything we know (and have always known) about Donald Trump, you are still considering voting for the Republicans’ Trump/Pence/Satan ticket, Timothy Snyder (at Commonweal) wants you to consider this:  

A vote for Trump is a vote for spiritual self-annihilation. 

That cannot be good. Consider, then, the alternative: 

Joe Biden is not a perfect candidate, but he is a candidate who supports democracy: the American dignity of representing oneself, and the American aspiration to see our values and interests prevail in our government. If our democracy dies, a Biden voter will be able to say to herself that she did the right thing, did what was possible, did not give in. A Biden voter can speak proudly about America’s past as a democracy, will preserve the moral resources to resist authoritarianism, and might at some later point contribute to a resurrection of the republic. 

The choice is yours, America; please choose wisely. 

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/not-normal-election  

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The late Hannah Arendt did not live to see the rise of Black Lives Matter, but Mark Mitchell thinks she had BLM’s number anyway: 

Modern sophists, Hannah Arendt argued, take [sophistry] a step further: “The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.” In other words, modern sophists are revolutionaries and not merely manipulators of language. They are not primarily seeking to win an argument through deception; instead, they are true believers seeking to dismantle the world and replace it with an artificial creation of their own. 

BLM has been accused of being a Marxist/anarchist organization, but “sophists” is a novel charge. Mitchell deconstructs the devious rhetorical tropes deployed by BLM: 

The name itself is a stroke of rhetorical genius, roughly akin to the question: Have you stopped beating your wife? To answer either “yes” or “no” is perilous. So, too, with BLM. Consider the minefield implied in the question: Do you support Black Lives Matter? Any decent person will agree with the literal meaning of the phrase itself, “black lives matter” — but it takes serious and thoughtful effort to affirm that, while of course black lives matter, the organization called Black Lives Matter is a neo-Marxist movement intent on the fundamental transformation of society. The rhetorical power of the name makes such parsing difficult. It also induces an element of fear, for to oppose Black Lives Matter opens one to the criticism that he denies the truth that black lives matter. The two are emphatically not the same, but the rhetorical conflation makes separating them difficult, potentially dangerous — and absolutely necessary. 

Has Mark Mitchell ever critically parsed the “rhetorical power” (not to say, sophistry) of the anti-abortion movement, which cloaks itself with the term “pro-life,” implying that those who endorse a woman’s right to choose are opposed to life? Has he objected to such loaded terms as “Big Government,” “death tax,” or “death panels”? I suspect he has not, nor will he ever. 

BLM has also invented something it likes to call “systemic racism,” a heretofore unheard-of concept which Mitchell is not buying: 

Black Lives Matter and other revolutionary groups have gained significant rhetorical advantage by claiming that racism is systemic.”  They insist that racism is embedded “in the DNA” of all American social, cultural, and political systems. If that is the case, then individuals who affirm the moral equality of all people and seek to live their lives according to that standard are nevertheless deeply entwined in racist structures. They are racists and don’t even know it.  

Mitchell is incorrect; to be part and parcel of “racist structures” is not the same as being “racist”. That is precisely what makes systemic racism so invidious; even people of good will who do not have a racist bone in their body are implicated in it—just ask Atticus Finch.   

They have benefited from racist “systems” and therefore are guilty. They must be punished and re-educated. Racist systems must be destroyed. The rhetoric of “systemic” racism makes race guilt unavoidable and revolution increasingly possible. Race guilt is antithetical to reconciliation, peace, or justice. It provides a rhetorical cudgel with which to dominate opponents, and revolution is the means to destroy the current order and usher in a Marxist-utopian paradise. 

That is all patent nonsense. “Guilt” is not the issue, “re-educated” is a loaded term, and only an historical ignoramus (which Mitchell is not) thinks that Marxism is a threat in 21st-century America. Loose talk of “revolution” may please some at both extremes of our political spectrum, but revolution itself is not in the cards or even on the table—except, of course, as rhetoric and metaphor: in other words, as marketing.   

Political conservatives have done an admirable job in recent decades controlling our political discourse with phrases like “socialized medicine,” “Deep State,” “government takeover,” “government schools,” “Cancel Culture,” and—one of their best efforts--“politically correct,” aimed always at supposedly intolerant liberals (aka Cultural Marxists and Social Justice Warriors). Today, “Black Lives Matter,” both as a slogan and as a movement, seems to resonate with a good portion of the American people; and Mark Mitchell is reduced to denouncing its rhetoric rather than its ideas.    

Sophistry, as Mitchell knows, is in the eye of the beholder; and when it comes to sophists, it takes one to know one. 

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/10/11/black_lives_matter_and_the_rhetoric_of_revolution_144418.html  

What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love, and Social Justice? (Part 2)

"Nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.” (F.A. Hayek)

You might think that only rogues and scoundrels would oppose Social Justice, but you would be mistaken, as the quote (above) from F.A. Hayek demonstrates. For another example, the late theologian Michael Novak, steeped as he was in the tradition of Catholic “social thought,” nevertheless found the idea of “social justice” annoyingly vague. Moreover, he suspected the motives as well as the reasoning of those who claimed to believe in it:

"...whole books and treatises have been written about social justice without ever defining it. It is allowed to float in the air as if everyone will recognize an instance of it when it appears. This vagueness seems indispensable. The minute one begins to define social justice, one runs into embarrassing intellectual difficulties. It becomes, most often, a term of art whose operational meaning is, “We need a law against that.” In other words, it becomes an instrument of ideological intimidation, for the purpose of gaining the power of legal coercion."

Unfortunately for Novak’s argument, his complaints about “social justice” could also apply to the basic term “justice,” a term which itself famously leads to “embarrassing intellectual difficulties,” as Socrates and his various interlocutors discovered. We cannot define “justice” with any precision; attempting to do so inevitably forces us to use equally imprecise words like “fairness” or “deserves”. “Justice” and “injustice” are not like “up” and “down”; one person’s “justice” is another person’s “oppression”. ¹ The uncomfortable reality is that all law is, or can be viewed as, “an instrument of ideological oppression” enforced by “the power of legal coercion,” although making that argument is unlikely to help your chances in any court.

Novak’s objections to “social justice,” then, were not really about its conceptual ‘vagueness’ but about his ideological opposition (he was a committed social, cultural, and economic conservative) to the progressive policies and perspectives which “social justice” advocates tend to promote. ² Social Justice Warriors aren’t the only ones who come to the table with an agenda.

More recently, Australian academic Ben O’Neill wrote (for the Mises Institute) about “The Injustice of Social Justice”. O’Neill offered a brief but full-throated libertarian manifesto; “Since the program of social justice inevitably involves claims for government provision of goods, paid for through the efforts of others,” he explained, “the term actually refers to an intention to use force to acquire one's desires. Not to earn desirable goods by rational thought and action, production, and voluntary exchange, but to go in there and forcibly take goods from those who can supply them!” ³

One can dispute O’Neill’s claim that “social justice inevitably involves” forcible takings; sometimes it means demanding a seat at the table, being listened to, and being treated with respect, none of which necessarily takes anything away from anyone else (you can always just get a bigger table). It is undeniable, however, that some of the “program of social justice” involves redistribution of resources, some of which were forcibly and unjustly taken in the first place—but libertarians prefer not to get bogged down in the historical record, the invocation of which they see as a ploy to rationalize injustices in the present.

O’Neill objects as well to what he considers the misuse of the language of “rights”:

The notion of "rights" is a mere term of entitlement ⁴ indicative of a claim for any possible desirable good, no matter how important or trivial, abstract or tangible, recent or ancient. It is merely an assertion of desire, and a declaration of intention to use the language of rights to acquire said desire.

His objection is bolstered by his entirely different idea of what constitutes “rights”:

An actual right is a moral prerogative derived from the application of moral philosophy to the nature of man. The term is a term of philosophy designating an actual moral principle, a principle that should be derived objectively by an examination of the nature of morality and the nature of man. Rights are not mere subjective constructs, as they are so often treated. Rather, they are objective principles validated by moral philosophy (in particular, by political philosophy, which is the sub-branch of moral philosophy that deals with the morality of the use of force).

It may be that in Ben O’Neill’s native land of Australia, rights are considered “objective principles validated by moral philosophy,” but in America, rights are “validated” by political deliberation encoded into law (including our founding Constitution) and interpreted by courts. Rights are neither objective principles nor “mere subjective constructs”; they are collective achievements which have been fought for (literally, at times) over the centuries.  

O’Neill is correct that “rights talk” is often used as part of a rhetorical strategy. Since rights are, practically speaking, what a given society (its populace, its government, and its courts) accepts as rights, establishing or securing them often requires argument and persuasion. In America, our Constitution specifies and guarantees certain rights while leaving the door open for the assertion and protection of others—if our assertions convince our fellow citizens and/or the courts. When we speak about “rights,” we are trying to convince our fellow citizens, the government, or the courts that our claims or our actions are valid, or that someone else’s claims or actions are not valid.

In other words, there is nothing wrong with “rights talk”; it is how we define, clarify, extend, modify, and defend our rights. The alternative, as history demonstrates, is violence.

_____________________________________

https://mises.org/library/injustice-social-justice

¹ In its infinite wisdom, Wikipedia explains “justice”:

“Justice, in its broadest sense is the principle that people receive that which they deserve; with the interpretation of what then constitutes "deserving" being impacted upon by numerous fields, with many differing viewpoints and perspectives, including concepts of moral correctness based on ethics, rationality, law, religion, equity, and fairness. Consequently, the application of justice differs in every culture.”

² Decades before Novak, F.A. Hayek (The Road to Serfdom) made much the same argument. Hayek “rejected the very idea of social justice as meaningless, self-contradictory, and ideological, believing that to realize any degree of social justice is unfeasible, and that the attempt to do so must destroy all liberty.” Hayek’s argument hinged, to some extent, on his contention that the concepts of “justice” and “injustice” apply only to individual moral agents. “Society,” according to Hayek (and Margaret Thatcher), is a convenient fiction devoid of moral agency; as such, it cannot be judged “just” or “unjust”. With all due respect, that conclusion is preposterous on its face; social arrangements and institutions do not exist in a realm somehow removed from ethical and moral consideration. When one’s conclusion is so far astray, one should go back and check one’s premises; in this case, Hayek failed to note that “individual moral agents” sometimes decide, and act, collectively and that the “justice” of such decisions and actions is open to debate.     

³ “Force,” as it is used here, includes the force of law and especially the force of tax law: taxation, in the libertarian view, is theft. The elasticity of words like "force" and "compel" enables libertarians and conservatives to call government regulations "tyranny" and to equate (as did Ronald Reagan) "single-payer healthcare coverage" with totalitarianism. 

⁴ “Term of entitlement” should not be confused with the classic tear-jerker “Terms of Endearment”; nor should O’Neill’s pejorative use of the phrase distract us from the fact that libertarianism’s basic premise is that individuals are entitled to what they produce, what they earn, what they have worked for, etc. To put it another way: libertarians believe that individuals have a right to keep what is theirs. “Entitlement” and “right” are at the heart of the libertarian ethic. 

Baby, Don't Fear the Postmodernists

{More of my haphazard thoughts about postmodern Social Justice/Identitarian politics; I’ll get back to Russian history shortly.}

According to its critics, the postmodern Social Justice movement fosters a divisive “identitarian” politics; moreover, it has taken on some of the more unwelcome characteristics and practices of religion (sacred texts, dogmas and creeds, orthodoxy and heresy, intolerance, excommunication and anathema, etc.). Those are not the SJW movement’s only faults, but they are prominent among them.

Let us start, then, with “identity”. A young Alasdair MacIntyre (twenty-three at the time!) wrote the following back in 1953:

Every individual finds himself with a given social identity, a role or set of roles which define his phase within a set of social relationships, and these in turn constitute the immediate horizon of his life. Kinship, occupation, social class, each provide a set of descriptions from which individuals derive their identity as members of a society.

“Social identity” is hardly a new concept. MacIntyre chose not to multiply “identity markers” endlessly, but he clearly could have identified such markers as education, income/wealth, religion, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc. My point being that the understanding of “identity” as both a social construction and an available existential project—meaning, it is something parts of which are given and parts of which are acquired, parts of which are fixed and parts of which we can endeavor to change and to shape—existed well before the phrase “identity politics” came along.

So, for that matter, did “identity politics” itself exist before the label was coined; it just wasn’t called that. What was “Jim Crow” but a century of white identity politics? What was the suffragette movement if not a reaction to male identity politics? What were laws criminalizing same-sex sexual activity if not expressions of heterosexual identity politics? What were Sunday “blue laws” or Prohibition if not the result of Christian identity politics?

When dominant social groups impose their will on the rest of society, they do not call it “identity politics”; they call it “politics” so as to disguise their hegemony.¹  It is only when previously unrepresented or under-represented groups assert themselves that “identity politics” is invoked, always pejoratively; and it is only when members of such groups insist on the right to decide for themselves the nature and value of their “identity markers” that they are perceived, correctly, as a threat. After all, no status quo can abide large numbers of people (especially people traditionally marginalized) claiming to be independent of established social distinctions and identities: the result would be chaos. Without uniforms, that is, how would we know whom to salute?

The precocious young Master MacIntyre also noted that secular causes often resemble religions:   

For the most part lacking a religious perspective, the members of modern industrial societies have also mostly lacked any alternative framework of beliefs which would enable them to criticize and transform society…We can understand in general the attractions of the project of elaborating a secular doctrine of man and society that would have the scope and functions of religion, but would at the same time be rational in the sense that it would be open to amendment by critical reflection at every point, and that would enable men to self-consciously and purposefully achieve such transformations of social life as they wished to see. Such a doctrine becomes an urgent necessity when traditional religion ceases to provide an effective vision of the world for groups at once numerous and influential, and when their position in social life is such as to deprive them—really or apparently—of any stake in the social order.

Individuals or groups deprived of “any stake in the social order” seem, unsurprisingly, to be at the heart of “Grievance Studies”. As such, they can be (and sometimes are) rude, pushy, obnoxious, extreme, intolerant, unreasonable, infuriating, and overbearing: in other words, they can at times display the same traits which dominant individuals and groups have used to get ahead. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but that does not guarantee it will always be appreciated.

On balance, the furor over the “postmodern paradigm” strikes me as a tempest in the academic teapot, and alarms about the “death of liberalism,” “cancel culture,” and “political correctness” strike me as overblown. That does not imply that the Social Justice crowd is beyond criticism; their claims, like everyone else’s, should be subjected to a rigorous hermeneutic of suspicion ² and a healthy dose of their own medicine.

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The Alasdair MacIntyre quotes are from his book Marxism and Christianity.

¹ In my last post I used “woke,” and now I’ve used “hegemony”; see how easy it is to play the postmodern-jargon game?

² Not only did I find a way to use “hermeneutic of suspicion,” I played it on a space marked “triple word score”! Also, what if a bunch of “critical theory” scholars formed a band and called it either “Herman’s Hermeneutics” or “Herman and the Hermeneutics”?

Three More Blinks

{Full disclosure: the three articles cited here will test any reader's patience and good will. Since I suffered through them, however, I don't see why my readers shouldn't suffer as well. Merry Christmas!}

At RealClearPolitics, Erec Smith, a professor of rhetoric, offers some helpful hints for keeping holiday gatherings civil. If you must speak of difficult topics, he suggests, consider adding the following ingredients to your discourse: Kairos (or “situational awareness”), validation, empathy, and “cognitive distancing”. That last will presumably enable you to disassociate from any unpleasant conversations, nodding politely while inside your skull a voice screams Kill me now, God, I can’t take two more years of this! With sufficient discipline, writes Professor Smith, you can mouth platitudes like "I applaud your concern for people’s well-being. That is commendable," while your drunk uncle insists No collusion! What about her emails? Witch hunt! 

I don’t see anything that could possibly go wrong. 

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/12/22/a_guide_to_keeping_holiday_conversations_civil__138980.html

At City Journal, Heather Mac Donald defends laws and policies that have a “disparate impact” on particular groups of people, claiming that such impact is neither intentional nor discriminatory but merely reflects “disparate realities”. For instance, poll taxes and literacy tests for voting in the Jim Crow South were not inherently racist, even though they disproportionately disenfranchised African-Americans; it wasn’t lawmakers’ fault that blacks in the South tended to be poor and uneducated.  

In fairness, Ms. Mac Donald does not use that example; but, also in fairness, she might as well have. Prattling on about Florida’s “juvenile crime wave” and bemoaning the fact that “Widespread weekly disorder in classrooms was reported in schools with at least 50 percent minority populations at more than five times the rate as in schools with 5 percent to 20 percent minorities,” Mac Donald insists that “the real school to prison pipeline” is the laissez faire approach (advocated by clueless liberals) to student thuggery. 

Ms. Mac Donald’s article is peppered with horrifying anecdotes about out-of-control classrooms that might have been taken from Blackboard Jungle or Dangerous Minds—where are Glenn Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer when we need them?  Mac Donald’s reasoning is that if we throw the bad apples out of school now, we won’t have to lock them up later; or, if we put them in juvie today, we won’t have to put them in the Big House tomorrow. At the risk of being unkind, I have to say that Heather Mac Donald is every bit as ill-informed as she is ill-intentioned; and that’s saying a lot.  

https://www.city-journal.org/disparate-impact-analysis  

Finally: at The Catholic Thing, David Warren, who knows that “Climate Science” is a “comprehensive fraud,” enlightens us as to the varieties of Bad Science, of which there are six: 

There is junk science, wherein endless experiments are conducted to prove things that were perfectly obvious to start with. 

There is pseudo-science, wherein something not obvious, but obviously fruitcake, is studied as if anything could come of it. 

There is pathological science, wherein the researchers refuse to give up, even after the nonsense they are espousing has proved chimerical, because they want the unavailable result so badly. (Example, the search for extraterrestrial life.) 

There is cargo-cult science, in which relations between cause and effect have been too casually assumed, and an immense research establishment built on top, like the bamboo runways and control towers of the South Sea islanders. (Most medical research is like this.) 

There is fraudulent science, already mentioned, wherein the search is chiefly for misleading anecdotes to scare people into paying more taxes, until they aren’t scared anymore, put on yellow vests, and riot in the streets of Paris. 

There is zombie science (example neo-Darwinism), in which a theory devised in the age of phrenology is kept alive by academic solidarity alone, and no stake through the heart can kill it. 

According to Warren, these six comprise 90% of all current science: 

The half-dozen kinds of science I named, which will account I think for 90 percent of the world’s scientific activity, excludes the 9 percent or so of genuinely scientific enterprises, which would be of value were they not conducted in a slovenly way. 

Warren gives no examples of “genuinely scientific enterprises,” so we’ll need to take his word that they exist. Instead, he goes on to cite Richard Fenyman’s caution against the perils of “scientism” and his emphasis that scientists not succumb to self-delusion (“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself”).  Warren seems to think he's the only one he's ever read Fenyman's lecture; I assure you he is not.

Warren triumphantly concludes: 

While empirical science is quite distinct from moral philosophy, it is a theatre in which moral principles are constantly at work, starting with detachment from one’s own ego, and extending all the way to fundraising techniques. For not only should one not fool oneself, one must desist from fooling others into the bargain. Or if I may put this another way – and this is my column, so there is little to stop me – empirical science is a religious discipline. 

There you have it: science is a religion! Next thing you know, Warren will reveal to an astonished world that economics, too, is a religion (but I’ve already beaten him to it, and at great length to boot!). In fact, about the only thing that Warren doesn’t consider a religion is Catholicism, which is revealed Truth and therefore not subject to critique at all, except when Pope Francis utters something heretical. 

https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2018/12/21/science-in-the-unmaking/

 

The Rhetoric of Progress

Albert Hirschman's 1991 book THE RHETORIC OF REACTION was written, according to its author, "in part as a polemic against the then aggressive and seemingly triumphant neo-conservative positions on social and economic policymaking."   In the book, wrote Hirschman, he "identified three staple claims of reactionary rhetoric which have recurred since the French Revolution. I labeled them futility--the claim that all attempts at social engineering are powerless to alter the natural order of things; perversity--the argument that interventions will actually backfire and have the opposite of their intended effect; and jeopardy--the idea that a new, possibly more radical reform will threaten older, hard won liberal reforms."  

Futility, perversity, and jeopardy: those are the same charges still made by conservatives against proposed liberal reforms ("perversity" is another name for the Law of Unintended Consequences). Hirschman, writing in 1993 at The Prospect, warned progressives to be prepared for such charges and to know how to argue against them. For example, wrote Hirschman: 

Because some recent reforms have misfired, (often because conservatives hobbled them with unattainable conditions) the watch for conceivable perverse outcomes is particularly intense. On occasion, it risks being overdone, even by advocates of reform...The mere visualization of perverse reactions says, of course, very little about their likely incidence. Moreover...many unintended consequences of public policies are not necessarily perverse, and even perverse effects are often such that "some positive margin survives [their] onslaught". In evaluating the prospective outcome of public policies, reformers should certainly be attentive to such possibilities as well as to the probable extent of truly perverse effects. Otherwise they would become affected by oversophisticated skittishness and, in general, be paralyzed by imaginary fears...reformers must realize that it is impossible to guard in advance against all possible risks and dangers. The most thorough prospecting will miss out on some negative effects that will appear only as events unfold. This inability to foresee future trouble will strike us as less disturbing once we realize that we are similarly unable to think in advance of the remedial measures that may become available or that we may devise once trouble occurs.    

At the same time, though, Hirschman also advised progressives to temper their own rhetoric regarding both the need for reform and the supposed benefits reform would bring: "Reformers [must] use self-restraint in using certain arguments on behalf of their programs and policies, no matter how effective and persuasive they may be or may seem to be." Among other rhetorical transgressions, Hirschman deplored progressive claims that "[we] should adopt a certain reform or policy because such is the law or tide of history " That notion, said Hirschman, was essentially the counterpart of the conservative "futility" argument, both sides claiming to know what "history" demanded or what it would allow. 

In particular, Hirschman warned against progressives deploying "the alarmist claim that disaster is upon us if we fail to take this or that progressive step. This way of arguing might be called "impending-disaster" or "impending-revolution" blackmail. It has been a common way for various Western progressives or reformers to present their programs, particularly since 1917 when the threat of social revolution appeared on the horizon of Western societies."  ¹ 

Hirschman was not suggesting that progressives refrain from criticizing or from raising concerns, but that they should avoid histrionic rhetoric and stick as closely as possible to the facts: 

Progressives can and should make a convincing case for the policies they advocate on the ground that they are right and just, rather than by alleging that they are needed to stave off some imaginary disaster.  

It could be argued that Hirschman underestimated the effectiveness of appeals to primal emotions like fear, while overestimating the electorate's appetite for rational discussion of policies; or perhaps Hirschman was well aware of those things but believed progressives should take the high road regardless.  

Hirschman concluded his 1993 essay with the following "Reformer's Primer," which seems worth reprinting here in full: 

My "practical" advice for the reformer can be summed up in the following three points:  

1) Reformers should be aware of the principal objections that are likely to be raised against their proposals and attempt to minimize the vulnerability of these proposals on perversity, futility, or jeopardy grounds. While doing so, reformers should not become unduly timorous; in particular, they need not endlessly search for all conceivable perverse effects.  

2) Reformers should refrain from claiming that "history is on their side" or that, if a reform they advocate is not adopted, revolution or some other disaster is sure to follow.  It [is] far more expedient...to argue for reforms on purely moral grounds.  

3) This does not mean, of course, that there are no longer any intransigent poses available to reformers. An example is the popular "synergy" thesis which holds that all reforms, past, present, and future, lend each other mutual support and that any conflict among them is inconceivable. Such an attitude disregards the complexity of the societies we live in and is injurious to democratic deliberations whose essence is tradeoff and compromise. Moreover, the amiable maxim "all good things go together" can mask a reformer's readiness to push through one "good thing" at the cost, if need be, of the others.  

Reformers would actually do well to canvass themselves what damage their proposals might inflict on other values and goals of their society. For example, it would be disingenuous to pretend that stimulating economic growth and correcting or attenuating inequalities that arise in the course of growth require exactly the same policies. The problem rather consists in finding an optimal combination of policies that does as little damage as possible to either objective. We are more likely to find something close to this optimum if we admit from the outset that we are in the presence of two objectives between which there exists normally a good deal of tension and conflict.  

In the present political climate, progressives may not feel much inclined to accept Hirschman's words of caution or his call for "tradeoff and compromise"; but in the present political climate, we need such caution more than ever. It's bad enough that one of our two national political parties has given up on being reasonable; it can't possibly be a good thing if the other one does too.    

http://prospect.org/article/rhetoric-reform  

¹ "Alarmism," as we might call it, has of course become a staple of the political Right as well, best exemplified by the "Flight 93 election" argument in 2016, which held that the peril of a possible Hillary Clinton presidency justified voting for Donald Trump despite Trump's obvious lack of qualifications. As the "Flight 93" essay (at The Claremont Review) explained, the stakes were literally life and death: 

“2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.” 

Joseph Sobran, Alienist

I want to follow up my recent post on the late Joseph Sobran, a leading conservative voice of the 1980s and 1990s who became a conservative cause celebre in the years before his death.  

In his 1985 essay "Pensees," Sobran criticized Liberalism as a form of what he called "Alienism"--a neologism with clearly pejorative connotations (see below). Here is the context for, and the explanation of, Sobran's epithet:   

There are two possible basic attitudes toward social reality. One of these, as I say, has many names, but I will call, it, for convenience, Nativism: a prejudice in favor of the native, the normal, and so forth, reaching an extreme in lynchings and pogroms. Its most ghastly form was German National Socialism.  

The other attitude I am forced, for lack of a better word--or any word at all--to call Alienism: a prejudice in favor of the alien, the marginal, the dispossessed, the eccentric, reaching an extreme in the attempt to "build a new society" by destroying the basic institutions of the native. The most terrible fulfillment of this principle is Communism.  

This seems very even-handed, very "both sides do it"; Sobran identifies forms of "prejudice" that lead to lynchings and Nazis on the one extreme and to Communism on the other. Sobran, however, has stacked his adjectival deck; "native" and "normal" versus "alien" and "eccentric" is no contest. ¹ He goes on to portray "Alienism" in entirely negative terms: 

Alienism is far from a marginal force. It offers malcontents of all sorts an ideology or gnosis that enables them to interpret normal life maliciously as a crude though somewhat disguised struggle between oppressors and victims. If the oppression isn't obvious, that is because the oppressors are so cunning and their victims so totally subjugated that even their perceptual powers are in thrall. Acquiring the liberating gnosis is called "consciousness-raising." The process enables the initiate to strip off the mask of oppressive structures and see capitalism as exploitation, freedom as "repressive tolerance," and prosperity as "invisible poverty."  

Sobran neatly concealed his operative assumptions: that dissatisfaction with social norms is always a matter of "malicious" interpretation, that oppression is largely imaginary, and that consciousness never needs to be raised. In "Pensees," at least, Sobran did not subject "Nativism" to similar scrutiny; his attack on "Alienism" was entirely one-sided. He linked Liberalism (and its modern offshoots) with Marxism, tarring everything left of center with the same broad brush: 

Liberalism and Marxism are variant forms of Alienism; so are feminism and "gay liberation," for that matter. Liberalism does all it can to accommodate its sister ideologies without overtly endorsing them; and it is bound to insist that the real peril to humanity is always some form of Nativism. This accounts for its obsession with the Nazi period, its endless search for old Nazis, its wild alarm over the most eccentric expression of neo-Nazism, and above all its attempts to link its enemies with Nazism.  

With Auschwitz and Dachau at that point a full forty years in the past, Sobran had no patience for the Left's unseemly and unwarranted "obsession with the Nazi period".  Six million dead: got it, now get over it already, will you? ² Despite protesting the unfairness of linking Nativism with Nazism, Sobran didn't hesitate to link Alienism with Marxism, but he generously extended an olive branch: 

We don't have to choose between Nativism and Alienism. A healthy native is not an all-out Nativist, but rather has a code of hospitality and gallantry that takes into account the position of the alien; and the reasonable marginal member of society is not bound to be a fanatical Alienist, even though there are those who would like to inflame his resentments. Both perspectives have their stories to tell. Both can be accommodated by civility and the rule of law, without privileges for either, although it is a mark of the surprising power of Alienism that its favored minorities do, in spite of majority sentiment, enjoy privileges based on race. 

For Sobran, social aliens must rely not on justice but on "gallantry," which will be extended to them so long as they are "reasonable" (i.e. they know their place) and do not allow others (i.e. Liberal agitators) to inflame their "resentments".  Civility will rule over all, including the marginalized and the dispossessed; no group will be favored or have "privileges" and everyone, rich and poor alike, will equally be prohibited from sleeping under bridges.   

The gist of Sobran's complaint came to this: 

What is at issue in these matters is not a set of facts but a way of looking at the facts. Most of the time Americans deal with each other civilly, and their antagonisms and rival interests form a small part of the whole picture. But liberalism insists on highlighting points of difference and treating moments of conflict as the essence of the relation between groups whose identities hardly enter into the ordinary transactions between their members. 

That assessment, of course, reflected Sobran's perspective on an American history that others have viewed quite differently; but it also reflected a temperamental preference for calming, rather than roiling, the social and political waters. ³ For Sobran, liberalism's basic flaw was that it fetishized and exaggerated social ills, thereby fanning the flames of social conflict:     

Put another way, liberalism cultivates alienation. It does so because it has become a form of alienation. It has a heavy investment in estrangement. It is primarily interested in emergencies and social pathologies, and it makes policy prescriptions on the basis of abnormal situations, with no concern for the possible impact on the normal. It finds disease everywhere, without offering a useful image of health. And its remedies aggravate real diseases: redistribution, "gay rights," abortion on demand, appeasement--none of these policies has kept its promises, but liberalism was never really interested in the results.  

Liberalism has its flaws, and it is perfectly legitimate to argue that it fails to "appreciate" (the word Sobran emphasized earlier in his essay) the positive aspects of society. As noted before, Sobran's criticism here is the political equivalent of rejecting "abnormal psychology" in favor of what has come to be called "positive psychology"; Sobran wanted the healthy-minded and relatively happy majority to be left in peace by the noisy, dissatisfied minorities and their liberal advocates who manipulated those minorities in Svengali-like fashion. Whatever the merits of that argument, Sobran's language of "pathologies," "abnormal," and "disease" could not help but recall the language of Nazi Germany, but Sobran didn't care; after all, he had already dismissed, to his own satisfaction at least, Alienism's "obsession" with all things Nazi. 

That Sobran, a life-long Catholic, so strongly denounced concern for the "marginal" and the "dispossessed"--the very ones, that is, whom Jesus singled out for blessing and for compassion—is difficult to square with Catholic social teachings, or for that matter with the Sermon on the Mount; and while it is no sin to possess a conservative temperament and a preference for social stability, Sobran's blithe unconcern both for the company he kept (e.g. David Irving) and for the objectionable rhetorical echoes he raised with his taxonomy of "Alienism" are impossible to excuse, even posthumously.

The fact is, Joseph Sobran delighted in being a controversialist and a provocateur, which was certainly his right; but anyone interested in rehabilitating Sobran's reputation is going to have to reckon with his peculiar penchant for peddling something that looked, for all the world, less like conservatism and more like anti-Semitism.      

 ______________________________________ 

http://www.wildwestcycle.com/f_pensees.htm  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Sobran  

¹ Let's not mince words here, either; "alien" is a term that has been widely used, historically, to derogate Jews--"alien race" and "alien presence" were part of the vocabulary of the Holocaust. It is highly unlikely that Joseph Sobran was unaware of that. 

² Conservatives have voiced similar sentiments about liberals' tireless "fixation" on slavery and racism, both of which (conservatives insist) are over and done with and no longer relevant. Oddly, though, the same conservatives sympathize with white Southerners' nostalgia for ante-bellum days and defend the veneration of Confederate Civil War figures. The one bit of history, apparently, that it's okay not to get over is the surrender at Appomattox.  

³ Such a preference used to be considered part of "conservatism," before Gingrich-style open warfare against the "liberal establishment" became the right-wing norm; for his part, Sobran had no objection to roiling the social waters when he aligned himself with the likes of David Irving and other Holocaust deniers.  Moreover, American conservatives in the past twenty-five years have wallowed in outrage, vociferously protesting the many supposed ills of American society: our federal government, our schools, our degraded culture, activist judges, "American carnage," etc. "Appreciation" does not seem to be part of conservatives' vocabulary anymore, if it ever was. 

Gulag 'R' Us?

You wonder why we have to endure Donald Trump? You wonder why we can't have nice political things?  I'll tell you why: because America's political Right has lost its collective mind.

On the one hand, Andrew Peach’s “Peace in Dark Times” is a standard conservative Christian litany of gloom and doom:

America is facing dark times. The family has been redefined and is collapsing; nearly 60 million children have been aborted since 1973; urban violence, after a steady decrease, is rising rapidly; the national debt has doubled in eight years; the labor participation rate is at its lowest in nearly four decades; record numbers of people are on food stamps and state assistance; wealth disparity has reached levels not seen since the Gilded Age; nuns are being sued by the Department of Justice; religious liberty is being removed from the public square; Catholic school enrollment is in decline; genuine Catholic colleges are practically non-existent; and foreign powers, such as ISIS, North Korea, and Russia, pose grave existential threats to the country. Further, regardless of who wins the election, the country will send a moral reprobate to the White House. And the future looks even darker than the present.

Familiar stuff; but what makes this dystopian boilerplate noteworthy is the illustration that either Mr. Peach or his editors at Crisis Magazine deemed appropriate for the article:

This photo, as I discovered when I downloaded it, is titled “Gulag”.

Last I looked, that is not what America looks like, unless you happen to reside somewhere within the nation’s sprawling and unconscionable penal system.  Mr. Peach resides in Wilmington, Delaware, home to a correctional facility known as the "Gander Hill prison," so perhaps his view is different than mine.  Nonetheless, he and his editors at Crisis should be ashamed of themselves for suggesting that such an image represents America.

By the way: I hate to let facts interfere with Mr. Peach’s fantasies of martyrdom, but nuns are not being sued by the Department of Justice.  The Department of Justice has itself been sued by the Little Sisters of the Poor (over, literally, paperwork); the Supreme Court, having heard the case on appeal, has ordered lower courts and the parties involved to find some “reasonable accommodation” both for the nuns and for the women affected by the Little Sisters’ refusal to comply with the Affordable Care Act.  

That's more than a few steps, I would say, from the gulag.¹

Secular liberals like me do not claim that America is without its faults; we do not agree with or defend every decision made by the Obama administration or every policy proposed by Hillary Clinton.  We recognize that Americans are divided, rightly and sometimes passionately so, on a variety of issues. But so long as conservatives continue to indulge in such overheated rhetoric as We want our country back! or This is our last chance to preserve our freedoms! there is little hope of productive discussions of our differences.  

To use the simplest analogy I can think of, our current political impasse comes from conservatives hysterically screaming the sky is falling! while liberals exasperatedly point out that, no, it's only the roof that's leaking, so why don't we work together to repair it?  Such a pragmatic approach lacks both the high-minded appeal to "first principles" so dear to conservatives and the dramatic allure of impending martyrdom, but it lowers the rhetorical temperature while allowing us, as a polity, to get things done: imperfectly, of course, but do we really have any other option? 

I would ask American conservatives, in all seriousness and with all due respect, to stop trying to scare us all to death.

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2016/peace-dark-times

¹ Mr. Peach's sweeping national indictment is mistaken on several other particulars, but I don't have the time or energy to debunk them all.  

Political Eructations

This election is bringing out both the worst and the weirdest in all of us.

Case in point: at The American Conservative, a commenter who goes by the name of “Ludo” has seen through Hillary Clinton’s clever ploy to foist Donald Trump onto the Republican Party in order to guarantee her own election.  Citing a document from the recent Wikileaks release (a document not yet verified, but what the heck), Ludo insists that the Trump phenomenon has been deliberately orchestrated by Ms. Clinton, the Democratic Party, and the mainstream media.

Ludo’s conclusion is worth quoting verbatim, if only because no summary could do it justice:

In reality [Donald Trump] is an artificially-elevated ‘pied piper’ buffoon, instrumentalized to lead the Republican presidential field in toto towards a ‘malarial swamp’ of political confusion and delusion, reflecting an almost Artaudian-level of theatrical (political) irreality and perversity, of irrationality, incomprehensibility, even semiotic decomposition itself: a signal war consisting of amplifying up the ‘enemy’s’ signals (i.e. themes, messages, and methods) until they become indistinguishable from noxious and cacophonous static or white noise (ironically, considering his white purportedly nationalist demographic).

Trump is a political eructation elevated by the msm to the condition of an intolerably shrill and repetitive psycho-environmentally offensive noise: noxious and toxic to a majority of American voters (especially those evincing the psychologies of responsible heads of families) by Orwellian-cum-Machiavellian design.

I’m not sure where the lines get drawn (a) between cynicism and paranoia, and (b) between abstruse rhetoric and sheer gibberish; but I’m pretty sure Ludo has crossed both lines and left them in the far distance.    

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/gop-meltdown-answered-prayers/