Items Posted by Jim Kalb
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Jan 9 05:24:18 EST 1996
Article: 6659 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Evidence FOR Racial Equality??
Date: 9 Jan 1996 04:58:27 -0500
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In <533465356wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> rafael cardenas writes:
>Trying to make [extended families and so on] general in the West would
>require far more than a return to our traiditonal culture.
Quite true, but history is not a series of returns to traditional
culture.
>the tendency has been for groups
>or extended families with such standards to be eroded by exposure to
>liberal values. The successful examples you give (Hasidim, Hutterites)
>have developed _within_ a wider society and in antinomy to it; they
>do not necessarily form a model for possible modules of a wider society
>without their specific religious beliefs.
Liberal values have indeed been extraordinarily powerful and pervasive,
increasingly so as time goes on. The issue to my mind is whether they
will lead us to the End of History, some stable final state from which
no fundamental change in political and moral regime is possible, or
whether their triumph will reveal internal contradictions that make a
continuation of liberal society impossible.
In the latter case the successor form of society will have to be based
on structures capable of resisting liberal values. The values
themselves, I think, will not go away but will exist as a perpetual
possibility in any prosperous and technologically advanced world. So
the successor structures will have to have special characteristics that
make them capable of repelling seductive outside influences.
Structures capable of developing within and in antinomy to some larger
society ought to fit the bill.
There have been a great many efforts to establish structures capable of
resisting liberalism but most (for example the totalitarian state) have
failed. Since a lot of possibilities have been tried, it seems a
reasonable conjecture, at least more reasonable than other specific
conjectures, that the future belongs to the structures that we can now
see have succeeded, especially if they provide a satisfying life to
those who participate in them and are growing steadily and other
structures are tending to shrink.
If that's right, then it doesn't much matter except as to timing
whether the way the new structures will win is by serving as a model to
some larger society or by multiplying, growing, and replacing what is
left of that declining and shrinking society. The mammals, after all,
didn't prevail by serving as a model to the dinosaurs.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Murder for a jar of red rum!
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Jan 9 05:24:20 EST 1996
Article: 6661 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Evidence FOR Racial Equality??
Date: 9 Jan 1996 05:15:33 -0500
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In <48222793wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> rafael cardenas writes:
> If the U.S. disappeared tomorrow would such technology no
>> longer exist or no longer erode local cultural distinctions and promote
>> a universal culture that emphasizes image, celebrity, sensation, and
>> the rest of it?
>I hate to tell you, but the answer is: in part, yes There would still
>be celebrities, etc. but they would be national or local. Moreover
>the universal drug of rock music might at last start to decline.
Why would the celebrities be national or local? Why wouldn't the
nature of the medium and the process of mass-marketing entertainment
produce some other universal drug? After all, every 14-year-old in the
world will still be able to turn on the tube and watch any performer
anywhere. Promoters would still try to penetrate foreign markets, and
those who are most successful would have the cash to put on the most
dazzling presentation. I always thought the language of music and art
was universal, or at least non-parochial. That's especially true if
>from childhood people are exposed to foreign styles. How would the
decline of U.S. imperialism stop that from happening?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Murder for a jar of red rum!
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Article: 67225 of soc.religion.christian
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: God and Slavery
Date: 9 Jan 1996 01:53:47 -0500
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In <4cqdkp$e2a@farside.rutgers.edu> bx962@freenet.carleton.ca (Brian RA Sterling) writes:
>My first position on the issue of slavery in the Bible is
>that some things that supposedly were the "word of God"
>was in fact the word of Moses.
Sort of, but not really.
Paul told Onesimus to go back to Philemon, and he told Philemon to
treat him like a brother but didn't tell him to free him. Elsewhere he
tells slaves to obey their masters and doesn't tell masters to free
their slaves. Quite apart from Paul's attitude toward the law of Moses
his advice doesn't seem to be limited to those Christians who were
Jews and thus could conceivably be considered subject to that law.
My own first position is that the moral obligations Christians are
subject to can have their source in social institutions that have
nothing much to do with Christianity. We are obligated to pay taxes to
Caesar even though the taxes are unfair and some things for Caesar uses
the taxes are very bad. We are obligated to respect private property
even when the property is that of an abortion clinic or the Nazi Party.
At a time in which slavery was fundamental to the social order, in
which so far as anyone knew it had always and everywhere existed, and
in which there was in any case no one to free all the slaves, so there
was no prospect of a world without slavery, it seems that slavery had
to be recognized as something that was here to stay. If you can't do
anything about it you have to live with it, so a slave would have been
subject to a genuine obligation of obedience and his master would not
have been obligated to free him because we are not in general obligated
to free others from their legitimate obligations to ourselves. The
alternative to recognizing slavery as legitimate would have been to
reject and put oneself in a permanent state of war with society.
I think the reason we are inclined to feel so strongly about slavery as
such (that is, even in cases in which the master acts as Paul told
Philemon to act) is that we as modern men are inclined to think it is
always and everywhere wrong to bind A to obey B without his consent.
That principle is the basis of modern political and moral theory. So
far as I can tell, though, it is wrong; the world doesn't and can't
work that way. Like Onesimus we are all stuck in a web of obligations
we never choose and that could no doubt have been designed much, much
better. Those obligations nonetheless in general bind us in
conscience.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Murder for a jar of red rum!
---
[Paul doesn't quite command Philemon to free Onesimus, but I think
that's what he has in mind. He says he would have liked to keep
Onesimus as a companion, but he doesn't want to do anything without
Philemon's consent. So he's sending Onesimus back, in order to give
Philemon the opportunity to do the right thing voluntarily. Philemon
should treat Onesimus not as a slave but as a brother. And he's
confident that Philemon will do even more than Paul has asked. Don't
you think Paul expects Philemon to free Onesimus? What else could all
those broad hints be hinting at?
It's true that the early Christians weren't social or legal reformers.
They were in no position to be, and they had higher priorities. Thus
Paul advised people on how to live within the current system.
However I think his principles would eventually have to lead to the
abolition of slavery. In principle it's not contrary to the Gospel.
As long as you treat your slave as a brother, spiritually equal to
yourself, and as long as the slave can accept this arrangement with no
resentment, you haven't violated anything in the Bible. With saints,
it might work. But with real people, it's hard to see how it could.
I think if Christians truly attempted to carry this out, and were
honest in assessing the results, they would conclude that it is not
spiritually safe for fallen people to have this degree of control over
other people. And of course Christians have actually come to this
conclusion.
It seems clear that God did not intend to supply in the Bible direct
answers to every possible question. I don't know why not. But for
one reason or another it seems that God prefers to let us work some
things out for ourselves. In my opinion slavery is one of those
issues. I believe it is contrary to God's intention, and that he
intended us to conclude that for ourselves, based on the principles
present in the Bible.
--clh]
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Article: 67330 of soc.religion.christian
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: God and Slavery
Date: 10 Jan 1996 01:19:33 -0500
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In <4ct3dr$io2@farside.rutgers.edu> our esteemed moderator clh writes:
>Don't
>you think Paul expects Philemon to free Onesimus? What else could all
>those broad hints be hinting at?
I don't think that between the lines Paul was necessarily telling
Philemon to free Onesimus. He was certainly asking him to forgive
Onesimus for running away and any other misdeeds. He might have been
hinting that Philemon should send him back with instructions to help
Paul.
>I think his principles would eventually have to lead to the
>abolition of slavery. In principle it's not contrary to the Gospel.
>As long as you treat your slave as a brother, spiritually equal to
>yourself, and as long as the slave can accept this arrangement with no
>resentment, you haven't violated anything in the Bible. With saints,
>it might work.
To say that Onesimus was Philemon's slave is simply to say that he owed
Philemon an obligation of personal service. I'm not sure why treating
him as a brother would have meant that the continued existence of that
obligation couldn't be recognized. Family life is not necessarily
egalitarian. Most people think that in general children should obey
their parents and brothers should discharge legal obligations to
brothers (if my brother borrows $20,000 from me for a down payment on
his house he ought to repay it). Paul was quite comfortable with the
notion that wives should obey their husbands. So why wouldn't Philemon
have responded adequately to Paul if he had forgiven Onesimus and
viewed him as previously as a permanent member of the household he
ruled, as long as in ruling that household he put Onesimus's good on a
par with that of the other members? Onesimus might have resented this
or that, or for that matter the whole arrangement, but the same is true
of all relationships.
In its purest form slavery means that A feels free do anything he wants
to B and treat him without limitation as a means to his own ends. I
agree that from any Christian point of view that's an outrage, so
Christianity naturally leads to changes in the legal forms that
facilitate such conduct. There are many forms of slavery, inequality,
and subordination, though, and I don't think that Christianity makes
inequality of rights or requiring A to obey B an outrage. Those things
are required by the necessities of social life among men as they are. I
think the current view that slavery as such is an *absolute* evil
results from the need modern men have to disguise inequalities and
relations of subordination. That need results, I think, from the modern
tendency to treat people's actual wills as the sole ultimate source of
value.
Having said that, I should add that I think the abolition of slavery
was a very good thing that was a natural long-run consequence of
Christianity. A question often asked as to slavery in the NT, though,
is not whether it's better not to have slavery (it would also be better
not to have armies and prisons) but whether the NT writers were right
or wrong to recognize slavery as an institution that created
obligations that slaves were bound in conscience to recognize and
(apparently) masters could in good conscience avail themselves of. Do
we or don't we know better on this point than Paul did? Mostly because
at the time it was an institution that was basic to the actual
organization of society and plainly there to stay I think they were
right. Even if the leavening of Christianity meant that eventually it
would be restricted and ultimately disappear, leaven of necessity works
at its own pace.
I'm not sure my view is very different from yours except for a greater
reluctance to treat slavery as special in comparison with other social
institutions. So excuse the long-windedness -- I took this as an
occasion to develop my own thoughts.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Murder for a jar of red rum!
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Article: 67381 of soc.religion.christian
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: God and Slavery
Date: 11 Jan 1996 05:59:30 -0500
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mbarry@u.washington.edu (Matthew Barry) writes:
[proposed analogy to slavery:]
>"In so far as anyone knew, murder had always and everywhere existed.
>There was no one to stop murder. So there was no prospect of a world
>without murder. It seems that murder had to be recognized as something
>that was here to stay. The alternative to recognizing murder as
>legitimate would have been to reject and put oneself in a permanent
>state of war with society."
Don't see the comparison. For starters, murder is an act that in
antiquity as today was universally subject to the strongest social
condemnation, while slavery is an institution that in antiquity was, and
so far as anyone knew always had been, fundamental to the social order.
The comparison would have made more sense if instead of "murder" you had
said "war", "armies", "legal compulsion", "punishment of crime", "social
inequality", "relationships of superiority and subordination" or
"private property". Someone might think that at some point all those
things should and will disappear, and for all I know that's right, but
it's not something that can be rushed and for the present you have to
treat them as legitimate.
I should add that not everything connected to slavery is approved by the
NT. (The same of course is true of the OT but I haven't gone through it
on the point.) For example in 1 Timothy 1 Paul puts those who kidnap
others into slavery in the same class as people who kill their parents,
murderers, adulterers, liars and perverts, and in Philemon Paul tells a
master to receive back his runaway slave as a brother and forgive him
what he owes or charge it to Paul himself.
Can we be multicultural for a moment? The post-18th century Western
attitude toward slavery hasn't been held in many other times and places.
That may demonstrate that we're better than other people, but it also
may simply manifest our idiosycrasies. It seems to me that what lies
behind the current view that slavery as such (that is, without reference
to how the slave is treated) is an *ultimate* horror is the modern view
that the human will creates all value, so to subject a will to an
authority to which it has not consented is to destroy utterly what gives
value to the life of the person whose will it is, and is thus the moral
equivalent of murder.
The Christians of course taught that the life of a slave *in slavery*
had value equal to that of the Emperor or the world's greatest
philosopher. That is very different from the modern Western view that I
think determines much of our attitude toward slavery, but it doesn't
strike me as a worse view. Such a view is likely eventually to result
in restrictions on the legal rights of masters against their slaves and
perhaps ultimately in their abolition, but in the meantime it makes
getting rid of those rights seem far from the most important thing to
which one can devote oneself.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Murder for a jar of red rum!
From panix!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!gatech!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in1.uu.net!dziuxsolim.rutgers.edu!igor.rutgers.edu!christian Sat Jan 13 07:39:03 EST 1996
Article: 67484 of soc.religion.christian
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Physicist finds God in cosmos
Date: 12 Jan 1996 01:36:45 -0500
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erwin@math.human.nagoya-u.ac.jp (Erwin T. Morales) writes:
>According to a newspaper column, a book entitled
> _The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God
> and the Resurrection of the Dead_
>written by Frank J. Tipler, a mathematical physicist,
>has come out. According to the author, this book purports
> "to show that the central claim of
> Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that
> these claims are straightforward deductions of the
> laws of physics as we now understand them. I have
> been forced into these conclusions by the
> inexorable logic of my own special branch of
> physics."
>
>I haven't read the book for the simple reason that I
>do not know where to get it. If anybody knows where and
>how to get it, I'll appreciate his/her sending me an
>e-mail. Also, if somebody is familiar with the book,
>could you comment on it?
I read it. It's a speculation based on various themes in cosmology,
computer science, artificial intelligence and so on. The translation
of theological concepts into the concepts used in those sciences is at
least thought-provoking. It does in fact seem to hang together as a
scientific theory. I don't think it'll do anything for anyone's
spiritual life, but you can't have everything.
As an aside, he includes some extremely funny comments on "sex in the
hereafter", I suppose provoked by questions from physics grad students,
in which he argues that there will be such a thing, and since everyone
in the Tipler scheme of things will get his own universe in which all
his wishes will be realized every man will be able to have the most
beautiful woman *logically conceivable*. He then mentions a principle
that the intensity of a physiological reaction increases as the
logarithm of its rarity, and uses it to demonstrate mathematically that
one's response the most beautiful woman logically conceivable would be
10,000 times as intense as to a woman who was merely in the top 10%.
Putting aside its validity in all details or even as a whole, it's an
interesting effort. I got my copy from the Brooklyn public library,
which doesn't help you much since you're in Japan. If you have web
access there are a couple of booksellers with web sites you can visit,
search databases of available books, and order what you find. Let me
know by email if you're interested and I'll send you the https.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Murder for a jar of red rum!
From panix!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!gatech!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in1.uu.net!dziuxsolim.rutgers.edu!igor.rutgers.edu!christian Sat Jan 13 07:39:04 EST 1996
Article: 67485 of soc.religion.christian
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: The Political Christian
Date: 12 Jan 1996 01:36:48 -0500
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tpatters@gpu1.srv.ualberta.ca (Timothy Patterson) writes:
>What would a chritian state look like? (setting aside the question of
>its possibility - let's deal with that later).
Christian politics like Christian anything else develops as Christianity
grows within the life of a people. It can take different forms, so it's
hard to specify in general just what a Christian state would look like.
Nonetheless, some general comments:
1. A Christian state would foster or at least not undermine Christian
life and practice. For example, a state with a legal system that in
fact tended to make people uncontrolled, contentious, grasping,
faithless, and self-seeking would not be a Christian state. The
Christian Left and the Christian Right each claim that the other's
favored system has that effect, which I suppose shows that both are
Christian.
2. It seems to me that Christianity is something that should
characterize first each of us individually, then the face-to-face
associations and communities we belong to, and last of all large-scale
formal organizations. If that's right, then a Christian state would
tend toward decentralization -- it wouldn't drain life from the
extremities to the center.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Murder for a jar of red rum!
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Jan 14 09:06:19 EST 1996
Article: 6725 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Evidence FOR Racial Equality??
Date: 14 Jan 1996 09:02:03 -0500
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In <726352393wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> rafael cardenas writes:
>But if the U.S. sank into civil war and Hollywood stopped producing,
>the local producers would recapture their markets. A parallel
> is the British capture of German markets for industrial goods
>in World War I, which only massive inflation in Germany was able to reverse.
It's an interesting issue. There's always a market for novelties in
pop entertainment, and if American novelties disappeared why shouldn't
others arise? The growth of unipop culture might slow down at least
for a while and there'd be some regrouping, but I don't see why it
wouldn't continue. Apart from fads for foreign performers that would
leave their mark on popular taste, copying is always easier than
invention. If Greek pop musicians for example wanted to add something
different to their acts the easiest way to do it would be to mix in
something that already exists abroad.
Cultural influence tends to follow political power, but it's not
one-way. The Romans spread their language to the uncivilized West, but
Hellenistic culture and oriental religions spread everywhere. Even now
we have the Italians contributing to unipop clothing styles, the Brits
contributing to unipop music (not just the Beatles, but other groups as
well, not to mention Tom Jones), the Japanese contributing to cartoons
(not just the Power Rangers, Hello Kitty for example is very popular
over here), the Chinese, Japanese, Italians and even the English
(Arthur Treacher's) contributing to fast-food, and so on.
Regional differences are declining within countries and within Europe
as a whole. Why should that change stop and why shouldn't there be
increasing uniformity on a larger scale as well? Once Greek pop music
had washed out local styles in Greece and Hindi films and film music
had done the same service for South Asia you'd have a smaller number of
regional centers of pop culture, each less distinctive than what it had
replaced. Why should those centers be eternal? If America disappeared
people in (e.g.) Asia would probably imitate Europop instead of
Ameripop because Europe would then become the model of having lots of
money and being able to do whatever you feel like doing.
Cultural anti-Americanism seems to me similar to the cultural
anti-semitism of an earlier age. Like the Jews the Americans (or at
least major American institutions) because of their situation have
become leaders in social and cultural trends that a lot of people find
destructive. Concern about the trends might be justified, but I think
it's an error to think that they depend on particular groups of people
with whom they are associated.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cain: A maniac!
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Physicist finds God in cosmos
Date: 15 Jan 1996 01:38:52 -0500
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In <4d2qhj$e48@farside.rutgers.edu> erwin@math.human.nagoya-u.ac.jp (Erwin T. Morales) writes:
>According to a newspaper column, a book entitled
> _The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God
> and the Resurrection of the Dead_
>written by Frank J. Tipler, a mathematical physicist,
>has come out.
>Also, if somebody is familiar with the book,
>could you comment on it?
In my previous response the only specifics I gave had to do with a
quirky theory about sex in the afterlife. You probably were looking
for something less flippant, so here are some other things in the book:
1. As I recall, his theory is based on some sort of extreme
mathematical Platonism or Pythagoreanism that holds that all that
exists is numbers, or since this is the 1990s, computer programs.
2. Every possible computer program like every possible mathematical
structure of any kind exists by logical necessity. For a computer
program to correspond to a world that physically exists it is necessary
for it to contain something that can be interpreted as consciousness
observing the rest of the program. Somehow that's connected to the
collapse of the Schroedinger wave equation when an observation is made.
The science of artificial intelligence tells us what features of a
computer program satisfy that condition.
3. The observation of an event is later than the event, so for the
condition in 2. to be satisfied, for every time t in a physically
existing universe (that is, a computer program that corresponds to and
by virtue of 1. is identical with a universe that physically exists)
conscious life must exist at time t+1. Thus, conscious life as a
phenomenon must never end for the universe to exist. I think this is
what he calls the Strong Anthropic Principle.
4. He then goes on to argue that as the universe collapses (in
symmetry to the Big Bang) its computational power must increase without
limit in magnitude and integration. He refers to the infinite unified
computational power toward which the universe is tending as the Omega
Point and identifies it with God. ("I will be what I will be.")
5. Since there will be all this computational power available just
before the universe reaches its point of maximum density in the Big
Crunch, it will become trivially easy to resurrect everyone (that is,
to emulate everyone with a subprogram of the universal computer
program) and give everyone lots of computing power to emulate the
realization of all their wishes. Since that would be a nice thing to
do it will be done, at least for people who have nice wishes that it
would be good to realize. Note that while I say "emulate" for Tipler
there is no distinction between an adequate computer emulation of a
thing and the thing itself. Also note that while objectively this will
all happen just before the Big Crunch the increasing computational
power will make it possible to give the resurrected people an infinite
number of experiences before then so subjectively they will experience
eternal life.
6. One thing that makes the foregoing a physical theory is that
predictions can be drawn from it, such as the prediction that the
universe will in fact collapse and also that conscious life will spread
throughout the universe before a particular point in its evolution. He
says that one such prediction having to do with the mass of a particle
has been borne out.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Murder for a jar of red rum!
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Jan 16 07:55:03 EST 1996
Article: 6737 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Canada: Crowns & Sceptres
Date: 16 Jan 1996 05:10:09 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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drotov@castle.net (dimitri rotov) writes:
> I have in my hands the massive catalog of an art show called "From
> Gulag to Glasnost" and the striking thing about it is that even
> given a Soviet repression of modernist art idioms, the variety of
> these idioms, the practice evident in their execution, the
> channeling of so much expression into and through these idioms, makes
> it look as though we are dealing with an utterly irrepressible
> world force.
Modern art is so depressing. I went to MOMA (Museum of Modern Art)
here in New York recently, for the first time in several years. They
have one of the great collections of 20th century art, but it's just
not as good as what was done in the past. Most often it's a fragment
of what art has been -- someone with talent discovers a new way to
handle one aspect of what goes into a painting and then does some
paintings and that's what they're about. So what?
The 20th c. art galleries in the Metropolitan Museum are an
embarassment. Huge canvases, not much content, I suppose the fact
they're big means they're important. There are some talented painters
today, Jennifer Bartlett, David Hockney and some bizarre German guy
whose name I forget are some I've seen fairly recently, but so far as I
can tell nothing remotely in the league of (say) Degas.
> An aspect of that force seems to be the universal
> pop idiom that expresses itself through products that overwhelm the
> local and particular. How can Philip Roth or Salman Rushdie
> (or that loathesome Canadian, Robertson Davies) be international best
> sellers? In Germany (where I've seen their books), Japan, anywhere?
> Mere marketing?
I don't think it's just marketing. You could spin out lots of
explanations based on civilizational cycles, the spiritual devolution
of Western man, the hypertrophy of rationalized formal institutions in
social life, the technological elimination of the human significance of
locality, etc., etc., etc. I'm probably not the best person to talk
about the particular subject though since I read almost no post-WWII
fiction. (I thought _The Golden Notebook_ was a good book, and besides
it had the virtue of making me happy I was American, male and
right-wing, and I've liked a couple of Russian novels.)
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cain: A maniac!
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cain: A maniac!
From panix!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!gatech!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in2.uu.net!dziuxsolim.rutgers.edu!igor.rutgers.edu!christian Wed Jan 17 05:46:58 EST 1996
Article: 67806 of soc.religion.christian
Path: panix!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!gatech!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in2.uu.net!dziuxsolim.rutgers.edu!igor.rutgers.edu!christian
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Physicist finds God in cosmos
Date: 17 Jan 1996 03:16:23 -0500
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In <4dfcg4$4s8@heidelberg.rutgers.edu> jstott@poly.phys.cwru.edu (Jonathan Stott) writes:
>>4. He then goes on to argue that as the universe collapses (in
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>This is not a given. I know several people who believe this will never
>happen (\Omega = 1 for any cosmologists out there).
As he mentions. Thus, we get one testable prediction from his theory,
that the amount and distribution of mass in the universe and its other
characteristics are such that it will collapse. In fact the theory
demands more, that it won't start collapsing too soon for conscious
life first to have spread throughout the universe from a single point
(presumably earth). I think that demand is at least part of what led
him to predict that a subatomic particle (don't remember which one)
would have a mass in a certain range, a prediction he says was later
borne out by experiments at CERN. It's a while since I read the book,
though, and I'm no physicist, so I may be wrong about the line of
thought that led him to the prediction.
>>He
>>says that one such prediction having to do with the mass of a particle
>>has been borne out. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>A true physical theory needs TESTABLE predictions. "The Physics of
>Immortality" is just speculation. Contrary to what is stated, the mass
>of NO particle has ever been predicted from first principles (mass
>itself may be something of an accident, hence the search for a Higgs
>particle).
Who said anything about first principles? He has a theory of what the
universe is like some aspect of which doesn't work unless a particle
has a mass in a certain range. He attempts to get an article making
the prediction published, the article is turned down, and the mass
comes out in the predicted range. How has he failed to act as a
physicist?
>I will add, though, that the
>Schroedinger wave equation implies nothing about conciousness despite
>what some writers would like to imply.
Are you saying that a theory hypothesizing a relation between the two
is necessarily invalid? How has that been demonstrated?
>It may be interested reading, but physics (it seems) it is not.
You may be right, but you haven't given me a reason to think so. I can
see that it's extremely speculative, and I realize that most extremely
speculative theories turn out to be false, but "not physics" seems a
stronger claim.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cain: A maniac!
From panix!news.cloud9.net!news.sprintlink.net!howland.reston.ans.net!newsserver.jvnc.net!newsserver2.jvnc.net!igor.rutgers.edu!christian Sat Jan 20 20:45:35 EST 1996
Article: 67937 of soc.religion.christian
Path: panix!news.cloud9.net!news.sprintlink.net!howland.reston.ans.net!newsserver.jvnc.net!newsserver2.jvnc.net!igor.rutgers.edu!christian
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: The Political Christian
Date: 18 Jan 1996 01:04:35 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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SUZANNE FORTIN writes:
>Jesus did not bring us an ideology, but salvation. However, it is
>clear that he favoured the poor and oppressed types. I feel therefore
>that a Christian should above all try to serve the temporal needs of
>all, but especially the poor and oppressed.
If he wanted us above all to serve temporal needs, it seems he wouldn't
have said to take no thought for the morrow.
>A state should make it its business to make quite sure that the poor
>have all they need.
Does that apply to everyone who's short of money regardless of how he
got to be that way, or only to the poor and oppressed? Paul seems to
make a distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor. (1
Timothy 5.) If he was right to do that, it seems that the state and
other big bureaucratic organizations would have trouble making the
distinction, so rather than treat assisting poor people as the business
of the state Christians would do better to promote and live by an ethic
in which people help those in need with whom they have some personal
connection and so some way of knowing.
Another point is that if the state makes quite sure that the poor have
all they need then poor people won't be responsible for supporting
themselves and their families. Regardless of what they do they'll have
all they need. I'm not sure it's good to deprive people of practical
responsibility for themselves and those close to them. It might solve
immediate problems so but in politics the long-term effects of laws and
institutions is more important.
It seems to me a mistake to think of the state as a good vehicle for
moral life. The state is necessarily ignorant, clumsy and unresponsive,
and since it has more guns and money than anyone else and can tell
people what to do it tends to displace other actors. Since Christian
life has to do with our actions arrangements that reduce the importance
of our actions at some point become troubling.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cain: A maniac!
From panix!not-for-mail Thu Jan 25 10:27:26 EST 1996
Article: 40 of alt.thought.southern
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.thought.southern
Subject: Re: Georgia Flag Lawsuit Dismissed
Date: 25 Jan 1996 07:57:49 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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In anne t writes:
>The people up north have prblems and challenges of their
>own.....no offense Bud, but frankly we don't give a damn.
Not true, really. The image of the ignorant and bigoted southerner is
part of what defines northerners to themselves. For an example of
northern views of the south you might look up the recent (fairly recent
-- last 6 months or so) article in _New York_ magazine about Newt
Gingrich's home district. True hate literature. For northern
attitudes toward the Battle Flag you might look up some news stories on
the southern girl who put one up at Harvard as well as some of the
comments in this very newsgroup. (I assume that in this age of rampant
CD-ROM vague references to articles are sufficient.)
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A tin mug for a jar of gum, Nita.
From panix!news.columbia.edu!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!news.msfc.nasa.gov!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.kei.com!nntp.coast.net!lll-winken.llnl.gov!venus.sun.com!rutgers!igor.rutgers.edu!christian Thu Jan 25 10:27:30 EST 1996
Article: 68343 of soc.religion.christian
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: The Political Christian
Date: 23 Jan 1996 22:59:36 -0500
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tpatters@gpu5.srv.ualberta.ca (A Walters) writes:
>I suppose the Christian view of the soul would incorporate at least two
>elements: (1) It's fallen nature and (2) some recognition of its
>reflection of the image of God. Both of which I imagine will be
>important in the construction of our pc (although I'm not sure how
>yet).
>To keep it simple, let's start with a community of only absolute
>necessity. That is, one that takes care of only the base necessities of
>our individual (food, shelter, clothing, etc.). Presumably, he would
>get together with other individuals because it would be easier to meet
>these needs as a group. So let's picture this community of perfect
>harmony, where individuals have everything in common, and each
>individual realizes that the good of the group is always the most
>important consideration (I know the temptation is to say, oh, you mean
>communism. No, I don't, if you mean some sort of Marxist-Leninist-
>whateverist that we know of as communism. For the sake of the
>examination I suggest we forget about modern political ideologies). So
>what's right and what's wrong with the picture I painted of this pc?
>Would it work?
I think the picture fails to take into account the soul's fallen nature.
Harmony can't be assumed (besides, people won't be satisfied with
absolute necessities). Therefore there must be some way of assigning
and enforcing rights and responsibilities.
There's no perfect way of doing that. The two obvious methods are to
define rights and responsibilities through someone's conscious decision
or to accept the patterns of those things that arise and become
conventional in the course of ordinary social life. The first method
corresponds to a society ordered and controlled by an activist
bureaucracy and the second to one based on a combination of tradition
and the market. People can and do argue forever about which method is
better; basically, the Left likes the first and the Right the second.
You could try to base society on Divine Law known through revelation,
but I don't think Christianity has any such law that's specific enough
to do the job. People who do take that approach are usually called
right-wingers because what they view as Divine Law other people tend to
think of as a bunch of stuff that grew up over time. You could also
have an activist bureaucracy controlling society for the sake of things
other than the things the Left cares about. Nazi society and the
internal governance of religious orders would be examples. Finally,
you could have a traditional/free market society that in concept is
based on religion but in which religious leaders do not have direct
political power. Until recently American society could have been
interpreted that way, and it's my own favorite form of society. To tie
it to your scheme, it deals with man's fallen nature by decentralizing
power while also recognizing in each man the image of God.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cain: A maniac!
From panix!news.denver.eti.net!imci3!imci5!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in1.uu.net!dziuxsolim.rutgers.edu!igor.rutgers.edu!christian Fri Jan 26 20:04:30 EST 1996
Article: 68493 of soc.religion.christian
Path: panix!news.denver.eti.net!imci3!imci5!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in1.uu.net!dziuxsolim.rutgers.edu!igor.rutgers.edu!christian
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: women priests
Date: 26 Jan 1996 02:47:39 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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In <4e4avl$hgn@heidelberg.rutgers.edu> Robert J Palmer writes:
>the conditional acceptance of groups of people by the
>'tradition of the church'.
Not sure what this means, really. If 99.9% of all Christians are not
priests, specifically 99.8% of all men and 100% of all women, does the
0.2% difference mean that men are unconditionally accepted and women
are not?
>Tell us exactly what Gospel amd Acts scriptures
>are the basis for the church's claim that Christ taught the Apostles the
>'tradition of the church'?
If Christ taught the Apostles something he wanted passed on to others,
then it seems he wanted to establish a tradition of the church. Do you
disagree?
Do you think the Epistles belong in the Bible or should the canon have
stopped with the Gospels and Acts? If you *are* willing to turn a few
more pages in the Bible you'll find that on several occasions (e.g. 2
Thessalonians 2:13) Paul told the churches to hold fast to the
teachings that have been passed on to them.
>the ascetic, celibate. and ugly minds of the early fathers and doctors of
>the church ... My Christ taught acceptance of all people
On at least one occasion Christ even taught that those who use abusive
language are in danger of the hell fire. Your language suggests a
readiness to distinguish your Christ from other people's Christ,
though.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A tin mug for a jar of gum, Nita.
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Jan 28 05:03:29 EST 1996
Article: 48 of alt.thought.southern
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.thought.southern
Subject: Re: Dave, You Bore Me!
Date: 27 Jan 1996 17:16:20 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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In <31096123.388533440@news.esinet.net> shack@esinet.net (Shack Toms) writes:
>But I agree with you that public schools should be abolished as a
>violation of the first amendment. We can have the funding, but
>we shouldn't be imposing an ideology. We need vouchers that are
>independent of government strings.
Not to get off the ever-fascinating topic of "Dave, you bore me", but
it seems that vouchers independent of govt. strings would be very hard
to distinguish from a large (maybe $5000/kid) family allowance. Is
that what you have in mind? Is that what John C. Calhoun and Jeff
Davis would have wanted?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Wonder if Sununu's fired now?
From jk Sat Jan 13 08:11:06 1996
Subject: Re: Let me try a re-entry
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Sat, 13 Jan 1996 08:11:06 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <199601130113.UAA03289@ctc.swva.net> from "Seth Williamson" at Jan 12, 96 08:12:26 pm
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> Regarding the use of the word "day," I think--though I am not
>positive--that by Aquinas' time it was old hat for theologians to
>assert that "day" didn't necessarily mean 24 hours. The
>fundamentalists were by no means the first to think about this.
In _City of God_, Bk. XI, Ch. 6, Augustine says "What kind of days these
are is difficult or even impossible for us to imagine, to say nothing of
describing them." For starters, there wasn't a sun at the time. In the
next chapter he suggests that "day" might refer to a stage in the
growing self-understanding of God's creation (i.e., the understanding of
the angels of what God has made).
>it was my impression that NO ECUSA seminary weathered the theological
>storms of the past decades. I mean, they all have to give lip service
>to female priests, don't they?
Didn't Nashotah House hold the line? That's what people seemed to be
saying on the ANGLICAN list when I used to subscribe.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Murder for a jar of red rum!
From jk Sun Jan 21 05:46:45 1996
Subject: Neoconservatism (fwd)
To: neocon-l@listserv.syr.edu
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 1996 05:46:45 -0500 (EST)
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> Reply-To: Chris Stamper
Our esteemed listowner should tweak his listserv so that the messages
it distributes give the list address in the reply-to line. That's
unless he wants it this way, of course. In the meantime list members
may want to make sure their replies go to the list address rather than
simply using the reply function of their mail readers.
> What is neoconservatism?
The outlook of neoconservatives. Neocons (so say I) are ex-Democrats
whose most fundamental intellectual loyalties have not changed. So
they accept for example a technological attitude toward the human
world, that is to say a belief that the notion of an elite of social
scientists and other intellectuals deciding what the world should be
like and manipulating institutions to bring about the chosen goal is a
sensible notion. It's true that they've discovered that there are
limits to social policy, but it remains their fundamental political
conception.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cain: A maniac!
From jk Sun Jan 21 15:33:21 1996
Subject: Re: Neoconservatism (fwd)
To: neocon-l@listserv.syr.edu
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 1996 15:33:21 -0500 (EST)
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24]
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Francesca Murphy writes:
> It is true that, here in Great Britain, the privatization programme
> of the 1980s has ended with most of these industries being run by
> unelected committees called QUANGOs. Is that what Kalb is getting
> at?
Actually, by "neoconservatives" I meant a specific group of writers
called by that name in America, for example those associated with
_Commentary_, _The Public Interest_, _First Things_, and _The New
Criterion_. Your comments suggest that the trends with which I
associate those writers are not only American.
> How could it have been avoided?
I dunno. I suppose if the govt. had actually let go they would have
ended up being run by boards elected by shareholders, but I don't know
enough about the situation to say.
> The attempt to run the
> National Health Serivice as a business has spawned an industry
> of 'health care management'. Does this mean that every time
> conservatives get together to eliminate some form of statism
> it pops up elsewhere as (more efficient) corporatism,
> and thus that the ineradicable evil is not leftism, which all
> neocons dislike, but utilitarianism or managerialism?
Centralized managerial utilitarianism, I would say. Centralized
managerial utilitarians with tender souls become leftists, which is why
all the mainstream churches are leftist.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cain: A maniac!
From jk Sun Jan 21 18:20:42 1996
Subject: Re: Neoconservatism (fwd)
To: neocon-l@listserv.syr.edu
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 1996 18:20:42 -0500 (EST)
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> 1) establishment buffers - patricians who want to run the Welfare
> state. They despise people in trade, grocers, and their daughters.
>
> 2) Intellectual Constitutional monarchists, who want a strong
> moral framework, created by voluntary associations, and very little
> government. They are about nine people in the UK who share this
> position. You don't have to be an egg-head but it helps.
>
> 3) A-moral individualists. No state interference in
> anything, from coal-mining to pot smoking.
>
> Which of the three comes closest to American stye 'neo-conservatives'?
They are closest to your 1). They tend to be people who started off
accepting the welfare state and now as always want to be part of an
elite running things. Many of them have been pushed by intellectual
analysis showing that the managerial state and its social policies
don't work in the direction of 2) or 3), but it's hard for them to put
their hearts into it. Some of them have gone so far as to join the
Republican Party, the place where people in trade, grocers and their
daughters are mostly to be found in this country, but they don't feel
socially happy there.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cain: A maniac!
From jk Sun Jan 21 21:26:19 1996
Subject: What is a Neo-conservative (fwd)
To: neocon-l@listserv.syr.edu
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 1996 21:26:19 -0500 (EST)
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> When we combine these
> sentiments with the Grand Republic of Lincoln and Roosevelt, Reagan and Clinton
> ,we have a force that can renew the American dream. Personal Responsibility,
> vitalized local communities and openness to a transcendent power are the core
> of the neo-conservative movement.
Do you think the lists in your first and second sentences go together?
Also, so far as I can tell all neocons are American nationalists or
cosmopolitans and most of them think openness to a transcendent power
is just great for other people.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cain: A maniac!
From jk Mon Jan 22 17:30:16 1996
Subject: Re: New Whitewater language
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 1996 17:30:16 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <199601222209.RAA31150@mail-e1a.gnn.com> from "Thomas Darby" at Jan 22, 96 05:10:57 pm
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> this book about the socialist concept of
> using the whole of society to raise a child--she thinks it's *caring*
She really doesn't see the difference between a village and a childcare
bureaucracy as a setting for growing up. There's something about the
combination of social science and current legal theory that numbs the
brain.
Who was the Frenchman who said that in the modern world stupidity had
learned to think?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cain: A maniac!
From jk Tue Jan 23 07:23:20 1996
Subject: Re: Paul's catching up notes
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 1996 07:23:20 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <199601230619.BAA22617@mail-e1a.gnn.com> from "Thomas Darby" at Jan 23, 96 01:20:19 am
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> PH>The Gospel was specifically designed
> for the simple. Christian liturgy was never supposed to become like a pagan
> mystery play.
> The Gospel was
> written in Koine for the very reason that whatever dialect you had, you also
> spoke Koine. The intent, of course, was to reach as many people as possible
> about Christ.
The language was the ordinary language, but what was preached was
foolishness to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews.
Presumably the liturgy expressing that mystery was never anything that
could blend in with daily life as understood by the average Greek or
Jew. It really was something different -- otherwise, why have it?
I suspect evangelism depends not on assimilating the Church as much as
possible to ordinary mainstream life in America in 1996, but in showing
dissatisfied people a better way of life of which the Church and its
liturgy are part. If people are convinced it's a better way of life
the fact that it includes things they don't immediately understand will
I think make it more and not less likely they will take it seriously.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cain: A maniac!
From jk Tue Jan 23 09:22:59 1996
Subject: Re: Hayek and the rise of neo-liberalism
To: NEOCON-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 1996 09:22:59 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <960122130701.25820b96@ucrac1.ucr.edu> from "GREG RANSOM" at Jan 22, 96 01:07:01 pm
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> So we have a world-wide neo-liberal movement headed by Hayek,
> and a domestic neo-conservative movement led by Kristol. Any thoughts
> on what the relationship between these two movements might be?
I dunno. The paleolibertarians are the domestic political
(micro)movement that most emphasizes Hayek, and they hate, hate, *HATE*
the neocons and all their works and ways. One possible explanation is
that neoconservatism has a very large historical, sociological and
personal component that makes it hard for it to be theoretically clear
and consistent, and Hayek's long suit is clarity and consistency.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cain: A maniac!
From jk Tue Jan 23 15:52:35 1996
Subject: Re: Paul's catching up notes
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 1996 15:52:35 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <960123200056_76752.3721_EHS110-1@CompuServe.COM> from "Paul K. Hubbard" at Jan 23, 96 03:00:56 pm
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> I suspect that the Lord's Suppers that
> St. Paul presided over - while profoundly reverent - had little of the "baroque"
> trappings that have acquired over the centuries - in fact - it probably fit very
> nicely into the everyday, marketplace landscape of metropolitan Corinth - it
> probably involved common bread and comon wine - and probably a simple, common
> meal too.
I don't doubt it. Nonetheless something extraordinarily special was
going on that had little to do with the marketplace as the marketplace
was understood by the average Corinthian. The question today I think
is how to make it easier to experience the Eucharist as special. In
the end the Gospel is to penetrate and transform the world, but it
starts off as foolishness, something so at odds with conventional ways
of understanding and doing things as to be incomprehensible.
> It is true that St. Paul speaks of the mystery nature of the Gospel, but it not
> now a mystery - having been revealed. St. Paul was careful to contrast the
> Gospel with hellenistic gnosticisms ( which maintains that only the initiates
> can know).
We see through a glass darkly, so it still has essential elements of
mystery for all of us. It is true that there is no esoteric teaching,
and ritual certainly shouldn't have the purpose of making it harder for
the uninitiated to figure out what's going on. (As an historical
matter, though, during Roman times didn't catechumens withdraw between
the Liturgy of the Word and the Eucharist?)
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A tin mug for a jar of gum, Nita.
From jk Wed Jan 24 11:13:39 1996
Subject: My fave neocons
To: neocon-l@listserv.syr.edu
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 1996 11:13:39 -0500 (EST)
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I thought I'd post a list of neocon people and publications I like:
1. _The Public Interest_. Social science is a dirty business, but
someone's got to do it. Also, they have the self-confidence
occasionally to publish pieces supporting points of view that really
*aren't* respectable, such as "A Nation of Cowards" (a salute to the
spirit of the 2nd Amendment).
2. _The New Criterion_. Conservatives often talk about the cultural
war but not nearly so much about the specifics of culture. That looks
bad -- it might even lead some people to suspect they don't really care
much about tradition, culture, things that can't be reduced to economics
and power politics, etc. _TNC_ makes a start toward filling the gap.
3. Charles Murray. He's good on the dialectical attack on the
managerial welfare state: if you accept its goals and methods, after
painstaking study you will find that the best way for it to further its
announced ends would be for it to abolish itself. Also, there are
indications in his writings that after the managerial welfare state has
refuted itself a new higher theory consistent with paleo thought is
possible. Although he can catch sight of that Promised Land from the
mountaintop, as a social scientist he cannot himself enter it.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A tin mug for a jar of gum, Nita.
From jk Fri Jan 26 19:49:31 1996
Subject: Re: liberty and tradition
To: NEOCON-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Date: Fri, 26 Jan 1996 19:49:31 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <960126144217.25830dab@ucrac1.ucr.edu> from "GREG RANSOM" at Jan 26, 96 02:42:17 pm
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> I blame, in that
> respect, the psychologists, the psychoanalysts, as much as anybody else.
> They are really the source of this conception of a permissive education, of
> a contemp for traditional rules and it is traditional rules which sucure
> our freedom.
Is that fair? Liberalism of any kind starts with rights and goes on to
say people have a right to do what they want consistent with a rational
system that preserves the same right for everyone else. Unfortunately,
traditional rules usually aren't clearly defensible as necessary
components of a rational system of freedom. They may be necessary
presuppositions of the practical approximation of such a system, but
that's something quite different. As a consequence, liberalism, which
in theory gives the presumption of validity to the desire to do what
you feel like doing but in practice depends on non-liberal rules that
restrain such desires, ends by cutting its own throat. It doesn't need
psychologists or psychoanalysts to do the job for it.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A tin mug for a jar of gum, Nita.
From jk Fri Jan 26 20:03:51 1996
Subject: Re: ACC/Liturgy
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Fri, 26 Jan 1996 20:03:51 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <199601270049.TAA02800@ctc.swva.net> from "Seth Williamson" at Jan 26, 96 07:37:55 pm
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> Everything points to something else--the
> whole universe pulses with meaning. And because reality is
> incarnational, we wear ashes on our foreheads, we sprinkle things
> with holy water, we burn incense--knowing all the while that all
> these things are meaningful only because they are haunted by
> their Creator.
Everything points to something else, but the statement that reality is
incarnational sounds like it goes too far. There is a radical
distinction between God and his creation. That's how it was possible
for the Fall to take place.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A tin mug for a jar of gum, Nita.
From jk Sat Jan 27 05:23:31 1996
Subject: Re: liberty and tradition
To: NEOCON-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Date: Sat, 27 Jan 1996 05:23:31 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <960126173630.2583452a@ucrac1.ucr.edu> from "GREG RANSOM" at Jan 26, 96 05:36:30 pm
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> Hayek denies just what you suggest. Liberalism [in the sense
> of the use of this work in political theory and in Europe] depends on
> the following of negative rules of just conduct -- _liberal_ restraints
> on behavior according to negative restrictions on conduct -- and this
> is the very definition of liberal liberty provided by Locke, and Hayek,
> and is found in different forms also in Kant and Madison, among others.
> And both Locke and Hayek define liberal liberty as exactly _not_ the
> presumption of the validity of the desire to do what you feel like doing.
Liberalism (I think today's liberalism is a legitimate development of
classical liberalism) does indeed recognize its dependence on negative
rules of just conduct -- _liberal_ restraints. That's as true in Rawls
as it is in Locke. We were talking however of traditional restraints
rather than liberal restraints. The question to my mind is whether
liberal restraints are sufficiently concrete and sufficiently rooted in
human nature to support a social order. If they're not then it appears
that liberalism depends on something (nonliberal traditional
restraints) that it can't recognize as valid and therefore undermines.
It seems to me that liberal restraints require fairly specific
justification in accordance with liberal principles. Locke starts by
saying that the goal of social order is preservation of property.
Property, though, is stuff with which you can do anything you want so
long as you don't interfere with other men's equal ability to do what
they want with their property. Locke also thinks legitimate social
rules are best understood by imagining men coming together and making a
contract to secure their property. Contracts, especially hypothetical
contracts, don't seem to impose obligations that aren't rather clearly
required by their purpose. Hence my belief that liberalism naturally
tends over time to undermine everything that it (taking Mills and Rawls
as liberals) in fact has undermined. Liberalism demands that all
social rules tend to maximize a man's ability to do what he wishes with
his property (that's what protection of property means). In a later
formulation that seems to me legitimate, it demands that rules maximize
a person's ability to do what (s)he wishes within a maximal
socially-defined sphere of autonomy. Social rules that don't clearly
do that become hard to defend and therefore come to seem illegitimate.
Part of Locke's purpose, I thought, was to provide a theory that by
justifying certain forms of compulsion allows us to say that compulsion
that doesn't fit that justification is illegitimate.
> Liberalism in the sense understood by Locke, and 19th century liberals,
> placed no such irrational and unmotivated demands of justification on the
> negative rules of moral conduct -- whose role in the generation of a
> great and good society were coming to be understood by Smith, Burke, Hume,
> Menger and others -- and which have been most fully explained by Hayek
> in the modern period.
Should Burke be understood as a liberal? He spoke that language
sometimes, but as a politician he naturally spoke the language people
were used to hearing. His notion of the social contract was that it is
a contract in all virtues, beneficial customs, etc., embracing all
generations and part of the great chain of being created by God. He
assimilates the social contract to the natural moral order. Liberals
do the reverse.
I should say, though, that I've never read Hayek. Does he point to
paleoBurkean elements in Locke? Locke's discussion of the family
doesn't seem to suggest an approach to traditional values that's at all
Burkean. Also, the point of his theory was to establish politics on a
clear rational basis which wasn't a purpose with which Burke had much
sympathy.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A tin mug for a jar of gum, Nita.
From jk Sat Jan 27 14:43:23 1996
Subject: Re: Gendered communication
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Sat, 27 Jan 1996 14:43:23 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <199601271709.MAA04028@ctc.swva.net> from "Seth Williamson" at Jan 27, 96 11:56:33 am
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> The older I
> get, the more I think that the real problem that "ordinary" people have with
> the gospel is not the language it's expressed in, but the fact that we don't
> want to hear a message which we understand all too well.
Could part of the problem be all the alternate ways of talking about
things propagated through TV, newspapers, the educational system, etc.,
etc., etc.? The languages of consumerism, careerism, therapy,
political resentment, humanitarian idealism, empirical social science,
etc. can't easily express the Gospel but they're what we're all awash
in. We jump from choice to choice and never stick with anything long
enough to find a way of talking about things that touches what we care
about most deeply. Certainly our environment doesn't teach us anything
of the sort. So people hear and don't hear the Gospel because their
training does not permit words to touch their hearts. They hear it,
but as one possibility among others, and one that's been debunked
because in an age of inclusiveness it claims exclusivity.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Wonder if Sununu's fired now?
From jk Sat Jan 27 17:21:05 1996
Subject: Re: liberty and tradition
To: NEOCON-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Date: Sat, 27 Jan 1996 17:21:05 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <960127132934.2583588a@ucrac1.ucr.edu> from "GREG RANSOM" at Jan 27, 96 01:29:34 pm
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> the Americans who fought a war of independence based on
> the liberal principles of the English Constitution.
Doesn't the Declaration of Independence go beyond what's in the English
constitution?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Wonder if Sununu's fired now?
From jk Sat Jan 27 17:30:48 1996
Subject: Re: liberty and tradition
To: NEOCON-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Date: Sat, 27 Jan 1996 17:30:48 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <960127133613.2583588a@ucrac1.ucr.edu> from "GREG RANSOM" at Jan 27, 96 01:36:13 pm
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> I think we can identify Rawls as part of the false and
> unteneble liberal tradition of the French Revolution and of
> Mill, Hobhouse, and Keynes -- a constructivistic vision
> of liberalism with a vision of justice based not on the justice
> of individual conduct, but on a factually untenable vision
> of social justice, premised on a God's eye view of the possibility
> of watching the social process and controlling the results of
> that process from the top-down, as opposed to the bottom-up vision
> of a just and good great society envisioned by the true liberals
> who founded the American nation, and such English Constitutional liberals
> as Hume, Locke, and Burke.
But Locke's social contract is a single event that produces clear
principles valid for all societies. That doesn't seem consistent with
a bottom-up approach.
My view is based on my reading of Locke, Burke, and Rawls and also on
mainstream modern American legal theory and Straussians like Walter
Berns. All could of course be wrong, and it would be nice if they were
because that would make me a lot happier with the constitutional
tradition of my own country. What do you think I should look at to see
the best presentation of the view you propose?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Wonder if Sununu's fired now?
From jk Sun Jan 28 15:50:22 1996
Subject: Re: Gendered communication
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Sun, 28 Jan 1996 15:50:22 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <199601281609.LAA05591@ctc.swva.net> from "Seth Williamson" at Jan 28, 96 10:55:58 am
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> It seems to me that the gospel message, as opposed to some other
> parts of the Bible--wisdom literature, apocalypses, prophecy, etc.--is
> straightforward and down to earth. Wouldn't you agree? Whether or not a
> modern pagan will believe it, it is in the form of a story about something
> that happened in the past and follows a direct and accessible chronological
> sequence. Theoretically, at least, it should be susceptible to a plain
> rendering in modern English, which in fact I believe it's gotten several times.
When I used "language" to refer to things like the language of
consumerism, careerism, social science, etc. I was using it in an
expanded sense, of course. Perhaps it would have been clearer if I had
stuck with "way of talking about things", which I used earlier.
What I had in mind was a system of expressions and the assumptions they
imply, especially evaluative expressions and assumptions, which claims
to be able to deal with human life as a whole, or at least very large
parts of it. For example, if someone thinks man's life is basically a
struggle toward goals he sets himself, and the way one measures the
validity of his goals and his success in achieving them is by reference
to prestige and to the acquisition of things socially recognized as
valuable (which in a society that recognizes no other common good will
be limited to wealth and power), then it's likely that if you talked
with him and wanted him to feel the force of what you were saying it
would help if you spoke the language of careerism. It's hard, though,
to translate the gospel message into that language because part of the
message is that another language should be used in talking about our
own lives and our relations to God and our fellow man.
Maybe you don't like using the word "language" that way. If not that's
OK. The usage is not I think idiosyncratic. If it's taken seriously it
suggests that conflicting judgments of good and bad are not conflicting
but incommensurate because they are simply statements in different
languages that can not be translated into each other. As such I think
it captures part of how people today tend to see the world. To the
extent communicating with the world requires the ability to understand
the world as it understands itself the usage would then be justified to
some extent even though its ultimate implications can't be accepted.
As to the gospel message itself, the sequence of chronological events
is indeed straightforward and down to earth. Otherwise it would not be
a message of the Incarnation. To discuss why the events are believable
and world-transforming is not something that can be easily done in
every "language" as I am using that term. For example it would be
difficult in the language of modern natural science even though the
sequence of chronological events could be described in that language.
The conversation has wandered, and I suppose I should attempt to show
the relation of the foregoing to other things that have been discussed
in the thread. Paul I think suggested that high-churchery is part of a
religious "language" foreign to most people today. What he may have
meant is that people would get the message better through a different
system of liturgical symbols, for example through using electric
guitars, business suits and clapping instead of Anglican chant,
traditional vestments and genuflecting, because when people want to
celebrate or show respect for something today those are the things they
use to convey that meaning. I used Paul's comment as a springboard for
a more general point about the current spiritual situation that people
can either pursue or not as they choose. The use of "language"
language may have been confusing.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Wonder if Sununu's fired now?
From jk Sun Jan 28 19:08:39 1996
Subject: Re: Electric guitars???
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Sun, 28 Jan 1996 19:08:39 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <199601282235.RAA02383@mail-e1a.gnn.com> from "Thomas Darby" at Jan 28, 96 05:35:49 pm
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> Paul I think suggested that high-churchery is part of a
> >religious "language" foreign to most people today. What he may have
> >meant is that people would get the message better through a different
> >system of liturgical symbols, for example through using electric
> >guitars, business suits and clapping instead of Anglican chant,
> >traditional vestments and genuflecting, because when people want to
> >celebrate or show respect for something today those are the things they
> >use to convey that meaning.
> I dare say, that is NOT what Paul meant.
>
> I think you all have made a grave mistake in assuming that Paul is a non
> liturgical Christian. What he is, however, is a lower-end-of high liturgical
> Christian.
> Electric guitars, indeed!!!
Let me rush to say I didn't mean to stick Paul with electric guitars
and clapping or anything else he doesn't like. Possibly what I wrote
above would have be better if instead of ", for example" were changed
to ". Thus, some people today might be better reached". If I've still
misinterpreted him he should tell me.
Incidentally, I don't see why electric guitars, business suits and
clapping and liturgy can't mix. The church I go to is an ECUSA parish
that uses a piano, drums, the occasional guitar, overhead projectors
with praise music, etc., and also the BCP. So far as I know none of
the former are forbidden by the rubrics. I would prefer more bells,
smells, and genuflecting (we have some, it's an uneven mixture and not
everyone does the same thing) but my objections to other nearby
churches are much more substantive than guitars.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Wonder if Sununu's fired now?
From jk Sun Jan 28 21:48:55 1996
Subject: Re: neocons & communitarians
To: NEOCON-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Date: Sun, 28 Jan 1996 21:48:55 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <960128174953.25829da4@ucrac1.ucr.edu> from "GREG RANSOM" at Jan 28, 96 05:49:53 pm
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> What is the relation
> between the Communitarian and the Neoconservative
> movements. These seem like two movements of
> former '50 &'60 'Institutional Liberals' [i.e. New
> Deal Democrats and Welfare State intellectuals and leftists]
> headed in very nearly the same direction. Or aren't
> they?
The Communitarian movement seems to sweep in the '69s soft left better.
For example FLOTUS's book _It Takes a Village_ I am told has a lot of
communitarian elements. You're going to have all these local
communities that people organize their lives around, but of course
they're all guaranteed to meet high standards of inclusivity and
respect for personal autonomy, and if they have problems the feds will
support them without however making them arms of the bureaucracy, and
the feds will of course also arbitrate conflicts and do some overall
planning that will not interfere with autonomy.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Wonder if Sununu's fired now?
From jk Mon Jan 29 07:58:22 1996
Subject: Re: neocons & communitarians
To: NEOCON-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Date: Mon, 29 Jan 1996 07:58:22 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy" at Jan 29, 96 12:13:09 pm
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> But don't many conservatives believe that different goods are
> capable of being put into practice by different communities?
> Don't conservatives believe in a practical plurality of
> effective values?
A conservative position might be that there's only one Good but it
can't be fully possessed by men at least under present conditions so
it's legitimate for different communities to have different
understandings of it and indeed the multiplicity of communities makes
it possible for good to be more fully present in the human world as a
whole.
A communitarian position might be a more complex sort of liberalism in
which there is no good, just differing conceptions of the good, and
justice consists in ensuring equal treatment of all those conceptions.
Since many conceptions of the good cannot be realized without
embodiment in a community liberal justice thus requires that the
existence of communities be permitted and fostered, subject to measures
preventing domination of members by communities or one community by
another.
A major political difference between the two views is that the latter
affirms and the former denies that the fundamental goal of politics
(justice or the good) can be fully grasped by an elite of top-level
theorists and civil servants and realized by administrative means.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Wonder if Sununu's fired now?
From jk Mon Jan 29 13:24:37 1996
Subject: Re: neocons & communitarians
To: NEOCON-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Date: Mon, 29 Jan 1996 13:24:37 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: from "Jeffrey W. Reed" at Jan 29, 96 10:10:35 am
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>I am a bit concerned by the idea of 'a good'. Is there one single good
>that embraces every possible community. My feeling is that a community
>itself has to define its own good. Liberty consists in being able to
>judge a good for myself, within the context of the social, political
>and economic traditions of the community in which I live. For anyone to
>impose 'a good' on my community, regardless of the traditions and
>customs of the community in which I live, is a violation of the
>prudential principle of conservatism, and as much a danger as the civil
>servant and bureaucrat. Certainly, the only common good we have is the
>equality of the last judgment, when it comes. Otherwise, I have to
>conform to the norms of my community, tradition and custom.
I was proposing as a conservative view that there is one good toward
which all men and all communities rightly orient themselves, that we
will not fully comprehend or realize that good until the last judgment,
that every man and community has to develop and realize its own
conception of that good within the context of history, tradition,
experience, thought and inspiration, and that liberty consists in a
recognition that the need to do so is unavoidable because the good
though real is transcendent and can't be identified unconditionally
with any institution or community.
I don't see how that view leads to a denial of liberty or destructive
imposition of extraneous purported goods. It seems to me that to deny
that the common good is an operative concept today makes it hard to
avoid moral relativism, and if you accept moral relativism principled
objections to imperialistic communities and bureaucracies become as
hard to make as principled objections to anything else.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Wonder if Sununu's fired now?
From jk Tue Jan 30 17:43:22 1996
Subject: Fish and First Things
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Tue, 30 Jan 1996 17:43:22 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <199601301808.NAA07687@mail-e1a.gnn.com> from "Thomas Darby" at Jan 30, 96 01:14:49 pm
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A development with possibly some connection to the fate of
deconstruction, communications theory and other aspects of
postmodernism -- the current issue of _First Things_ includes an
article by Stanley Fish with answer by Fr. Neuhaus and further response
by Prof. Fish on the subject "We can/can't live together". It's
interesting because Fish, who takes the "can't" position, is apparently
having personal difficulties figuring out which "we" he belongs to.
The analysis Fish presents is that the ostensible mission of liberalism
has been to make common life possible in the absence of a common
understanding of what the world is all about and therefore what the
world *is*. However, it has now become obvious that such a mission is
not at all neutral; to say as liberalism does that questions of
ultimate good and evil are not matters of public concern is to say that
ultimate good and evil are of no great importance and therefore to
assert materialism. Liberals, like Satan in _Paradise Lost_, interpret
the world by presuming materialism, while Christians, like Adam,
interpret it by presuming the objective validity of categories such as
purpose, good and evil. Both views are based on faith, since to
arbitrate rationally between them would require adoption of a
perspective free from interpretive presumptions, and there is no such
perspective. Accordingly, the issue between them can be resolved only
by war, although Fish doesn't use that word. He goes on to criticize
writers such as Michael McConnell, Stephen Carter, and George Marsden,
who have complained about the exclusion of religious perspectives from
the liberal table, for inconsistency in accepting liberal rules of
engagement which make sense only if the liberals are right (i.e., there
is no ultimate good or evil).
Neocon Fr. Neuhaus responds by suggesting possibilities of common
ground among those who differ fundamentally, observing that since man
is rational his choice of ultimate commitment isn't *his* unless he
understands it as a rational choice, and praising some other kind of
liberalism that's different from the degenerate kind we have today. In
his final statement Fish adverts to the possibility McConnell, etc.
were speaking politically rather than philosophically, and accepting
for purposes of engagement rules that ultimately they would reject. He
goes on to observe that while he is considered an "authority on Milton"
it is not possible to raise certain questions within academic Milton
scholarship, for example whether Milton was in fact inspired by God,
and that a couple of years before he had felt his attitude toward his
subject shifting from something academic to something far more
personal, a shift that crystalized when he burst out in a class
discussion that Milton "doesn't want your admiration, he wants your
soul". He now feels the danger or hope of becoming something quite
other than an authority, but what it all means, he says in his final
line, "God only knows".
I'd be interested in hearing what others think.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Wonder if Sununu's fired now?
From panix!news.cloud9.net!news.sprintlink.net!malgudi.oar.net!imci4!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in1.uu.net!dziuxsolim.rutgers.edu!igor.rutgers.edu!christian Thu Feb 1 08:21:39 EST 1996
Article: 68768 of soc.religion.christian
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: women priests
Date: 1 Feb 1996 01:13:40 -0500
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In <4eho9d$odj@farside.rutgers.edu> horsch@cs.ubc.ca (Michael Horsch) writes:
>|> >the conditional acceptance of groups of people by the
>|> >'tradition of the church'.
>|>
>|> If 99.9% of all Christians are not
>|> priests, specifically 99.8% of all men and 100% of all women, does the
>|> 0.2% difference mean that men are unconditionally accepted and women
>|> are not?
>If 100% of women are not priests, then 100% of priests are
>not women. Robert's point stands.
100% of priests are an extremely small minority of members of the
church. What sense does it make to identify qualifications for
belonging to that small minority with unconditional acceptance by the
traditions of the church? If one met all the qualifications for
priesthood he would *be* a priest. Does that mean non-priests are only
conditionally accepted?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Wonder if Sununu's fired now?
From panix!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!gatech!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in2.uu.net!dziuxsolim.rutgers.edu!igor.rutgers.edu!christian Thu Feb 1 08:21:41 EST 1996
Article: 68780 of soc.religion.christian
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Defending the underdog (Re: Yeshua (Jesus) and Christianity)
Date: 1 Feb 1996 01:16:54 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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In <4ekcou$kk@farside.rutgers.edu> gt7122b@prism.gatech.edu (Randal Lee Mandock) writes:
>Because of
>your response here, I suppose you were using "RCism" in the sense
>of "Catholicism," and not in the pejorative sense that it normally
>seems to carry on s.r.c. I guess I am just too sensitive about
>the use of a term that slaps millions of Eastern Catholics in the
>face. They are in full communion with the pope, yet rail at being
>referred to as "Roman" Catholics. They are not Roman in any sense
>of the word.
They are Roman in the sense of being in full communion with the Bishop
of Rome. I'm not sure there's an expression that would please
everyone; quite possibly someone might feel that the millions who
accept the Apostle's Creed but are not in full communion with the Pope
are slapped in the face by the use of "Catholic" to refer specifically
to those who are. I think C.S. Lewis once suggested "Papist" but not
surprisingly it didn't fly.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Wonder if Sununu's fired now?
From jk Tue Jan 23 15:28:42 1996
Subject: Re: Hayek and the neocons
To: NEOCON-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 1996 15:28:42 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <960123093536.25827a4c@ucrac1.ucr.edu> from "GREG RANSOM" at Jan 23, 96 09:35:36 am
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> The paleolibertarians really aren't so hot about Hayek --
> and there intellectual for-fathers, e.g. Rothbard and Rand,
> basically were outright hostile to Hayek. Rand in her
> new collection of letters even identifies Hayek as an enemy
> of liberty (!). Its a complicated world.
Too complicated for me, I agree. I am surprised by what you say about
the relation between the paleolibs and Miss Rand, although I don't know
specifically what any of them have said about her. Is there something
I should look at on the point? On the relation between paleolibs and
Hayek, the web page of paleolib Lew Rockwell's Ludwig von Mises
Institute starts off:
The Ludwig von Mises Institute On-Line
The Ludwig von Mises Institute is a non-profit educational
organization dedicated to the Austrian School of economics. In the
tradition of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and Murray N. Rothbard
(1926-1995), the Institute also defends private property, free
markets, hard money, and less government.
By itself that doesn't prove anything, of course, but it's consistent
with my other impressions.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A tin mug for a jar of gum, Nita.
From jk Thu Jan 25 10:26:17 1996
Subject: Re: ACC/Liturgy
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Thu, 25 Jan 1996 10:26:17 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <199601251322.IAA14187@mail-e1a.gnn.com> from "Thomas Darby" at Jan 25, 96 08:22:40 am
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> I feel that what we have here is really (For the rest of you, I attend a
> lower-end version of the same ACC to which Seth belongs) a denominational
> difference. We seem to use the same Canons, the Affirmation of St. Louis and
> we all attend the same conferences, but there are serious differences between
> our two little churches that speak of more than taste differences.
> THis is not a modest ACC you describe, SEth. It is, however, a modest RC you
> describe. I think I am understanding the problems more and more.
It seems that high-church ritual points in a direction you don't want
to go, or maybe seems to manifest an understanding of Christianity that
seems not quite right to you. Is that a fair statement?
High-church types seem to think that the low church is missing
something that should be there, while low churchers seem to think
there's something implicit in the extra ritual they don't accept. Is
anyone able to articulate what that thing is?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A tin mug for a jar of gum, Nita.
From jk Thu Feb 1 08:15:48 1996
Subject: Re: Fish and First Things
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Thu, 1 Feb 1996 08:15:48 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <199602010424.XAA08943@ctc.swva.net> from "Seth Williamson" at Jan 31, 96 11:22:32 pm
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>The first idea that popped into my head was that liberalism could only
>succeed in eras when in fact people DID largely agree on questions of
>what the world is all about, even though that agreement was on so
>fundamental a level that it was obscured by contemporary arguments. I
>think we're seeing the tail-end of liberalism precisely because that
>underlying agreement about the world and man and why we're here is just
>about exhausted. When you disagree about literally everything, then
>liberalism is powerless to mediate between the factions.
There are other respects in which liberalism is not self-sustaining.
Taken as a personal commitment the view that there are no goods but only
preferences naturally turns into love of power. We need to view our
principles of action as somehow objectively valid, otherwise we cannot
take them seriously, and if validity based on some transcendent
principle is not available social validity will have to do. The only
way reliably to give my preferences social validity, though, is to
become a tyrant. That seems to me the explanation of the early Fish.
Love of power refutes itself, however. Even if successful, tyranny is
not satisfying because the more perfectly my preferences can be enforced
the more clearly they are only my preferences and therefore things with
no claim to objective validity. Coldly considered, pure power is
worthless because it is power over things that don't matter. Therefore
tyranny must forever expand in ways that astonish the tyrant. That's
why Sade's writings and the lives of the great tyrants end up as
something rather like science fiction.
The solution, of course, is to accept that there are goods as well as
preferences. A great deal follows from that solution. That is the
point of the cultural war. It appears from Fish's second piece that he
may be realizing that the side of the war that has been his can't be
maintained when the issues are sufficiently clarified. On the other
hand, his statement that Milton "doesn't want your admiration, he wants
your soul" could also be interpreted as dissatisfaction with dominance
of academic circles by brilliant rhetoric and ambition for a more
profound kind of power. As he says, at this stage very likely only God
knows.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Wonder if Sununu's fired now?
From jk Thu Feb 1 19:57:14 1996
Subject: Re: Neocons & Empire
To: NEOCON-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Date: Thu, 1 Feb 1996 19:57:14 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy" at Feb 1, 96 10:06:06 pm
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> Do neo-cons think America should try to be World Policeman,
> in addition to spreading Kentucky Fried throughout the globe?
>
> Or is Kentucky Fried enough?
We need both! Until its spiritual essence is safe Kentucky Fried will
never rest on a secure foundation. The spiritual essence of Kentucky
Fried can never be safe until the political order that embodies that
essence has become universal.
> May be speak of an American Christendom?
>
> In that the only power worth having is subject to transcendent
> norms?
The only power people will accept and be willing to live and die for is
subject to transcendent norms. Therefore we need a civil religion
tailored to meet the needs of the political order and Kentucky Fried
Chicken to which all particular religions will be relativized in all
respects that matter publicly (that is, all material respects). The
neocons will excogitate that religion and establish it through
dominance of the media, the centralized educational bureaucracy, public
symbols, etc.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From jk Fri Feb 2 10:36:59 1996
Subject: Re: Neocons & Empire
To: NEOCON-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Date: Fri, 2 Feb 1996 10:36:59 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy" at Feb 2, 96 01:48:35 pm
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> Sounds like a top down sort of civil religion to me!
The neocons believe in top down, for sure. Why else would they call
their latest mag _The National Standard_?
> Were the mystery religions in the Roman Empire run by an elite?
Never seen anything suggesting they were. I always assumed they were
bottom up, like Christianity. The Roman state of course had its own
official religion and took a dim view of those who would not ritually
affirm its authority. The future however belonged to those who
rejected that religion altogether.
> Who is Elba Kramer? One of these allegorical figures one
> finds in Mithraism?
Until you see her you'll never know.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From jk Fri Feb 2 10:47:16 1996
Subject: Re: Right to Die
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Fri, 2 Feb 1996 10:47:16 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: from "Neill Callis" at Feb 2, 96 10:08:52 am
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> Anytime you introduce, into
> an argument, or into a legal system, an ELEMENT OF TRUTH WHICH CANNOT BE
> PROVEN, you're gonna have trouble.
> You also cannot use science to "Prove" anything. Any scientist will tell
> you that.
Are these two statements consistent? The first seems to say that in
public affairs we should rely only on things that can be proven, while
the second seems to say that science (which you seem to regard as
something we are justified in relying on) cannot prove anything.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Feb 4 16:23:37 EST 1996
Article: 6849 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Southern Traditionalist Home Page
Date: 4 Feb 1996 16:23:23 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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le@put.com (Louis Epstein) writes:
>: The present monarchy was
>: established by the Glorious Revolution and indeed its supporters (such as
>: Edmund Burke) gloried in calling it a revolution. So is it legitimate?
>
>You see the monarchy the way the supporters of the "Glorious Revolution"
>saw it.I see them as having effected a change in the incumbency of an
>institution whose nature they were powerless to alter.
Didn't "revolution" mean something rather different before the French
Revolution? I was under the impression that Burke for example thought
the Glorious Revolution preserved English institutions and their spirit
and traditions better than a continuation of James II's rule would have.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From panix!not-for-mail Mon Feb 5 05:56:02 EST 1996
Article: 6850 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Political Left/Right -- Opposites?
Date: 4 Feb 1996 16:26:13 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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thevoice@upx.net (El Voz) writes:
>To be a leftist is -supposed- to mean one supports personal freedom of
>choice, individualism, and to be a rightist is supposed to mean to
>advocate a powerful central state.
Most of those today who would make individual freedom of choice the
foundation of political philosophy support a powerful central state
that liberates us from traditional or majority prejudices, family and
community authority and informal social standards.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From panix!not-for-mail Mon Feb 5 05:56:03 EST 1996
Article: 6859 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Monarchism: Threat or Menace?
Date: 4 Feb 1996 19:18:45 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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In <4f11ke$8ev@wagner.spc.videotron.ca> michelg@sorel.mtl.net writes:
>Monarchy is best suited for homogenous countries, united in faith and
>ethnic construction, and Republic has always crashed under it's own
>errors: atheism, multi-culturalism resulting in decadence... I deeply
>believe that the day will come when the "proofs" you asked for will
>shine as sun...
Any comments on the current monarchist scene in Europe? You hear
nothing about it in the states. For that matter, what are the
prospects even there for having homogenous countries united in faith
and ethnicity? European-style monarchy seems to me historically
unusually; despots ruling over multicultural multiethnic dynastic
empires have I think been at least as common and perhaps would be more
suitable for the kind of world that is growing up around us.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From panix!not-for-mail Mon Feb 5 05:56:09 EST 1996
Article: 39546 of alt.society.conservatism
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.society.conservatism,talk.politics.misc
Subject: Re: Kalb dilemma [was} Conservatism Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Date: 4 Feb 1996 16:28:46 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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Xref: panix alt.society.conservatism:39546 talk.politics.misc:423908
rjenkins@illuminet.net writes:
>> People with a skill can't give a fully explicit account of their skill
>> such that all someone needs to match the skill is to read the account.
>
>I don't seem to have the problem of articulation that Mr. Kalb does.
>Nor do I have a problem demonstrating any skill that I have. In
>point of fact, I can give a fully explicit account of skills I don't
>have.
Congrats! Why not write an account of how to write Nobel Prize-winning
works of literature so that anyone who read it would know how to write
things of that quality and post it to this newsgroup? It would improve
the quality of the discussion here immeasurably.
>> That's one reason practical knowledge can not be made fully explicit.
>
>Pray tell, Mr. Kalb, how can you call it knowledge if it can not be
>expressed.
Because it's something people learn as demonstrated through what
they are able to do after learning it that they weren't able to do
before.
If it were possible to give fully explicit accounts of human skills it
would be possible to program them into a computer. AI hasn't gotten
very far, though, in spite of a great deal of effort.
>> Cooking skill isn't attained by analysis. If it were, McDonald's
>> hamburgers would be the best food in the world.
>
>McDonald's success has less to do with cooking skill than restraunt
>management.
They devote a great deal of analytical thought to just how to cook their
burgers and explicitly set forth the results of that thought in manuals.
I must say that I'd be more ready to pursue a discussion with you if I
thought you had put any effort into thinking through your positions.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From panix!not-for-mail Mon Feb 5 05:56:10 EST 1996
Article: 39617 of alt.society.conservatism
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.society.conservatism
Subject: Why #, @ and ! ?
Date: 5 Feb 1996 05:48:25 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 6
Message-ID: <4f4n9p$g80@panix.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
Upon looking into this newsgroup for the first time in a month, I
notice that some of the subject lines start with a "#", "@" or "!".
What's going on?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From jk Sat Feb 3 03:01:40 1996
Subject: Re: Right to Die
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Sat, 3 Feb 1996 03:01:40 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <199602021800.NAA29522@ctc.swva.net> from "Seth Williamson" at Feb 2, 96 12:57:27 pm
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> This is to say that faith is, by definition, unreasonable. I
> believed this years ago. I came to believe it was bad reasoning itself.
> There are facts, and there is meaning. We can't exist without both.
The necessity is internal to knowing. We couldn't know a system of
facts without moral commitments, views on their meaning, assumptions
and interpretations that go far beyond the evidence, etc. Faith is not
an add-on to knowledge as it might be if knowledge could exist without
it.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From jk Sun Feb 4 16:41:14 1996
Subject: Re: Irving Kristol: Censorship Is Good
To: NEOCON-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Date: Sun, 4 Feb 1996 16:41:15 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy" at Feb 4, 96 03:42:52 pm
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> Censorship could only be successfully reintroduced
> in a bottom up way.
This is of course right. It can't work unless its function is to
reinforce ordinary distinctions between what is obscene and what is
not, and the ordinary feeling that publication of the former is a
vandalistic assault on the public culture through which we carry on our
common life.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From jk Sun Feb 4 17:15:55 1996
Subject: Re: Neocons & Empire
To: NEOCON-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Date: Sun, 4 Feb 1996 17:15:55 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <960204054555_414104893@emout04.mail.aol.com> from "Bill Riggs" at Feb 4, 96 05:45:58 am
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> > We need both! Until its spiritual essence is safe Kentucky
> > Fried will never rest on a secure foundation. The spiritual
> > essence of Kentucky Fried can never be safe until the
> > political order that embodies that essence has become
> > universal.
>
> How very Hegelian of you, James. I do hope you enjoyed that outburst.
I did. One of the most exciting books I ever read was Kojeve's book on
Hegel. A dazzling depiction of what we have now as the end of history,
the consummation of all human aspirations and struggles in a final
universal and homogenous state. Leo Strauss comments somewhere "maybe
so, but if that's what it's all about I'd rather have bloody anarchy".
> Come to think of it, I haven't been seeing you very much on the ANGLICAN
> mailing list these days, Jim...
It's probably a year since I dropped out, after deciding it was my duty
to participate in one of the discussions on homosexuality and feeling
depressed about making people unhappy. Anyway, I had watched most of
the things that are subjects there go around in circles often enough.
> Good to hear from you again.
Glad you're here.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From jk Sun Feb 4 21:24:54 1996
Subject: Re: Neocons & Empire
To: NEOCON-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Date: Sun, 4 Feb 1996 21:24:54 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <199602050113.UAA08636@mailhub.cc.columbia.edu> from "Chris Stamper" at Feb 4, 96 08:13:12 pm
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> > One of the most exciting books I ever read was Kojeve's book on
> >Hegel. A dazzling depiction of what we have now as the end of history,
> >the consummation of all human aspirations and struggles in a final
> >universal and homogenous state. Leo Strauss comments somewhere "maybe
> >so, but if that's what it's all about I'd rather have bloody anarchy".
>
> Don't you see? The "final universal and homogenous state" and "bloody
> anarchy" are the same thing.
There's something to that, but Kojeve didn't see it that way.
If you're right, then the end of history would presumably only be the
end of an historical cycle, and the bloody anarchy would give rise to a
new one.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From jk Mon Feb 5 09:49:47 1996
Subject: Re: Neocons & Empire
To: NEOCON-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Date: Mon, 5 Feb 1996 09:49:47 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy" at Feb 5, 96 11:35:23 am
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Francesca exclaims:
> I agree with Strauss! But does Empire have to be realise in an
> Hegelian way - ie does it have to see itself as absolute value?
Empire I think has to see itself as representing or embodying absolute
value, so an empire that is modern and thus rejects transcendence would
have to see itself as absolute value.
> Don't you think it would be a good joke if American Christendom
> came about in the same way?
Christendom I suppose requires Christianity, and I'm inclined to think
American Christianity is anti-imperial. It's protestant and
secessionist. The trend toward centralization and empire in this
country has I think gone together with a naturalization of Christianity
that has been a rejection of most of its substance.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From jk Mon Feb 5 09:53:42 1996
Subject: Re: Neocons & Empire
To: NEOCON-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Date: Mon, 5 Feb 1996 09:53:42 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <960205082019_136174553@emout10.mail.aol.com> from "Bill Riggs" at Feb 5, 96 08:20:20 am
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Bill R. says:
> Rather, I think Chris meant that any attempt to impose a universal world
> order would result in bloody anarchy, not order.
Suppose it evolves organically as Kojeve would have it instead of being
imposed? It still seems to me that it would turn out to be the same as
bloody anarchy unless man is less than man.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From jk Mon Feb 5 10:05:10 1996
Subject: Re: Neocons & Empire
To: NEOCON-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Date: Mon, 5 Feb 1996 10:05:10 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <960205082018_136174426@emout05.mail.aol.com> from "Bill Riggs" at Feb 5, 96 08:20:21 am
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Bill R. writes:
> My sole contact with Kojeve was via Fukuyama's _End of History and the Last
> Man_.
As in the case of Strauss, the great man is greater than his disciples.
> How is it that the Straussians have gone Hegelian ? Or perhaps they
> always were, and just didn't reveal it, until the appropriate time ?
Strauss I believe thought Kojeve's view the alternative to his own, so
their intellectual worlds had certain affinities. Also, many
Straussians are atheists who may think religion is just great for other
people (that's the view they attribute to their master) but would like
themselves to be able to explain things in a way that locates value,
purpose, etc. wholly within the world and explains why now they are
able to see why it is so while in earlier times great thinkers thought
it was not so.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From jk Mon Feb 5 16:51:08 1996
Subject: Re: Right to Die
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Mon, 5 Feb 1996 16:51:08 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: from "Neill Callis" at Feb 5, 96 01:59:36 pm
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Neill Callis writes:
>Science is not in the business of 'proving' anything; scientists, as I
>am told, acknowledge the limits of human understanding to the point
>that they know they are always in search of "the answer". Whether
>that's the answer to life, or why tadpoles turn into frogs, etc, it
>doesn't matter. Science acknowledges it's limitations. Through
>reasoning alone, it acknowledges it's own weaknesses.
>
>But religion does not make that claim, oh no. Science has at least
>basis in logic and reason for it's theories. But religion will not
>submit itself to scruntiny...because it is "THE TRUTH". And that's
>that. No discussion, no democratic way about it, it's the Way and the
>Light and that's all there is to it. If you disagree YOU ARE
>DISAGREEING WITH GOD. If we can't question religion, what can we
>question? And furthermore, how can you introduce this into a
>government of man?
Both modern natural science and religion deal with a world that's hard
to understand by making assumptions, living with them and thinking about
experience in light of them. The same is true of other branches of
knowledge, political knowledge for example.
If the assumptions and their articulation through a tradition of thought
and experience "work" in the sense that they help us understand the
world and act in it better than anything else available our allegiance
to them is reinforced and we grow in confidence that we can know what is
good and true through them, at least to the extent such knowledge is
available to us. Since we can't do without assumptions and traditions
the assumptions and traditions we accept become part of what constitutes
our world. That's as true for science as it is for religion.
Science does not act through reasoning alone, and it has a body of
results of which it is quite confident even though they can't be proved.
Like any other human activity it requires prior commitment to things
that are quite unprovable, and no-one would bother with it if he didn't
think it led to results he could rely on.
Science is certainly no more conscious of the limits of human
understanding than religion; it is religion after all that recognizes
human understanding as insufficient even to carry on ordinary life.
That is why revelation is needed. If you think religion does not
scrutinize itself you might take a look at Thomas Aquinas among others.
Its history is in large part a history of discussion, and the discussion
is far more democratic than that of natural science because it relates
to a far wider range of human experience.
You question the notion of introducing things other than science, such
as religion, into a government of man. We can't even begin to engage in
government without being able to deal with questions of good and evil.
Modern natural science does not deal with those questions well. How do
you propose to handle them? Religion is knowledge of the whole, at
least insofar as the whole is relevant to man's life. Science is
knowledge of aspects of the whole that can readily be isolated,
quantified, and subjected to manipulation. The latter sort of knowledge
has a great many advantages, but useability as a basis for government
isn't one of them.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From alt.revolution.counter Wed Feb 7 20:47:53 1996
Path: panix!not-for-mail
~From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
~Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
~Subject: Re: Natural rights
~Date: 5 Feb 1996 10:46:56 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
~Lines: 24
Message-ID: <4f58pg$qgr@panix.com>
~References:
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In Thomas Woods writes:
>The libertarian responded that these unhappy events have been a result of
>perversions and misunderstandings of natural rights, and cannot be blamed
>on natural-rights philosophy itself.
>There wasn't time for the exchange to continue, but Fleming characterized
>Lockean political philosophy as "dangerous."
It seems to me that one problem with Locke is that making the equal
right to do as one chooses -- that is, every man's arbitrary will --
the *ultimate* standard in politics just isn't right. He thinks the
way to protect and facilitate arbitrary will is to have property
institutions that create for each man a well-defined zone within which
he can do as he pleases without consulting others, but it seems
perfectly legitimate for later thinkers like John Rawls to build on
Locke's work and try to come up with some other institutional system
that deals with men's preferences in an even more even-handed way.
After all, the project of constructing political systems by reference
to fundamental principles and implementing those systems is one of
which Locke approves.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Feb 11 05:56:09 EST 1996
Article: 9624 of alt.politics.equality
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.politics.equality,alt.politics.correct,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,talk.politics.theory
Subject: Draft FAQ re anti-inclusiveness (long)
Date: 10 Feb 1996 09:34:46 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 494
Message-ID: <4fiae6$4i3@panix.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
Xref: panix alt.politics.equality:9624 alt.politics.correct:108845 alt.discrimination:60589 alt.society.conservatism:40652 talk.politics.theory:78379
Here's a revised version of a draft FAQ I posted on several of these
newsgroups some time ago. Any comments would be welcome.
ANTI-INCLUSIVENESS FAQ
February 10, 1996 Draft
Inclusiveness is a central moral issue for liberals today. It has long
been a liberal principle that the benefits of society should be equally
available to all, with "benefits" and "all" construed more and more
broadly as liberalism has developed. In recent years this egalitarian
principle has come to demand that persons of every race, ethnicity,
religious background, sex, disability status and sexual orientation be
able to participate equally in major social activities, with roughly
equal receipt of status and rewards the test for equal ability to
participate.
Antidiscrimination laws and other social policies promoting
inclusiveness enjoy powerful political support and carry enormous moral
prestige; nonetheless, some people oppose them. The reasons for such
opposition are not commonly understood, and the purpose of this FAQ is
to answer common questions regarding them. Comments are welcome and
should be directed to jk@panix.com. The current version of this FAQ is
available at http://www.panix.com/~jk/inclus.faq.
QUESTIONS
1. Isn't discrimination based on fear and hatred of "the other"?
2. Isn't discrimination based on overbroad stereotypes that it would
be more intelligent to avoid?
3. What possible justification could there be for discrimination on
grounds forbidden by civil rights measures?
4. What is the connection between community and forbidden grounds for
discrimination, and why does it matter?
5. But what practical problems have been caused by antidiscrimination
rules?
6. Shouldn't communities that define themselves by reference to
ethnicity, religion, lifestyle and so on broaden themselves to reflect a
fuller appreciation of the richness of humanity?
7. What happens to those excluded?
8. Weren't civil rights measures necessary to redress evils caused by
discrimination?
9. If exclusion is morally OK, why are so many conscientious people so
very troubled by it?
10. Whatever errors or excesses it may sometimes lead to, isn't the
ideal of inclusiveness clearly a generous one?
11. Isn't it divisive to oppose measures designed to promote
inclusiveness?
12. What about Bosnia, the Wars of Religion, and other communal
conflicts?
ANSWERS
1. Isn't discrimination based on fear and hatred of "the other"?
Since discrimination is simply associating by preference with
people of one sort rather than another, it need not be based on
fear and hatred. People who hire their relatives or join clubs for
graduates of their own colleges usually do not hate and fear non-
relatives or alumni of other colleges. Liberal professionals who
seek out other liberal professionals more than Republican used car
salesmen may have no particular negative feelings regarding the
latter. It is unclear why discrimination relating to ethnicity,
religion, sex or lifestyle should be thought different.
2. Isn't discrimination based on overbroad stereotypes that it would
be more intelligent to avoid?
On the contrary, it is nondiscrimination that requires such
stereotypes. Every society assigns rights and obligations to
people based on expectations of what they are like, what has to be
done, and how things will be organized. The rights, obligations
and expectations with respect to a class of persons correspond to
the "stereotype" for those persons. Thus, the stereotype for "U.S.
citizen" is someone who obeys the law, follows the news, votes,
works for a living, pays his taxes, believes in education, and so
on, and the laws establishing the rights and obligations of U.S.
citizens are based on that stereotype.
The nondiscrimination principle is the principle that the same
rights, obligations and expectations, and thus the same stereotype,
should apply to everyone. It thus demands that society base its
treatment of persons on the broadest possible stereotypes.
Stereotypical thinking is unavoidable, but one might reasonably ask
whether it would be more intelligent to have a single stereotype
for "adult human being" or to have (for example) separate
stereotypes for "man" and "woman". Our society has officially
decided in favor of the former, but it's hard to make the decision
stick in practice and its justification isn't clear to everyone.
3. What possible justification could there be for discrimination on
grounds forbidden by civil rights measures?
Similarities of habits, attitudes and standards make it easier for
people to associate productively with those of similar background.
The characteristics with which civil rights laws are concerned are
important in that regard. To take ethnicity and employment
discrimination as an example, an ethnic culture is in large part a
collection of attitudes, habits and standards that has grown up
among a group of people who have lived and worked together for a
very long time. Since those who share such things tend to find it
easier to work together, they tend to associate with each other for
that purpose. That is why ethnic diversity is recognized as a
major challenge for employers. An employer that wanted to limit
the number of challenges with which it must deal might reasonably
seek out a niche in the market for people to hire just as it might
seek out a niche in the market for goods and services to provide.
The civil rights laws, of course, forbid such a strategy.
Other forbidden grounds include sex, which all societies always and
everywhere have treated as socially important. Toleration for the
views of nearly the entire human race, as well as consideration of
the effects of increasingly ill-defined sex roles on family
stability and the well-being of children, suggest caution in
attempts to create a gender-blind society. Another forbidden
ground is disability, which is obviously relevant to decisions
regarding employment and other aspects of social position.
Apart from purely functional issues relating to organizational
success, some forbidden grounds of discrimination, such as
ethnicity, religion and lifestyle, help define the communities to
which people belong. Since community is important, things related
to its definition are a reasonable basis for decisions as to
affiliation. If a Mormon wants to earn his living working with
other Mormons, the better to participate in a distinctively Mormon
way of life, he is not acting unreasonably in choosing to do so.
In current usage, "discriminate" also means "fail to be inclusive"
or "fail to include in numbers roughly proportionate to presence in
the relevant population." Since problems specific to affirmative
action programs corresponding to that expanded definition have
already been extensively discussed on the net and elsewhere this
FAQ will deal with them only incidentally.
4. What is the connection between community and forbidden grounds for
discrimination, and why does it matter?
Objections to exclusionary conduct have to do with the demand that
the benefits of human society be made equal for everyone. It is
easier to make that demand than to meet it even approximately,
since the benefits of human society arise within concrete ways of
life carried on by specific communities rather in accordance with
an abstract scheme that can be reconfigured at will to meet uniform
standards.
We all belong to networks of personal connections and groups of
"people like us" by reference to whom we understand our lives and
find them satisfying or the contrary, and with whom we prefer to
deal because when we do so we are in a world we understand and
trust. Families are the most obvious examples of such communities,
but each of us belongs to a variety of others as well. It is our
connections to such communities that enable us to form our goals,
give them stability, and find them valuable. Many people want to
be CEO, but very few would bother (if it were somehow possible) to
do the things a CEO does in exchange for the material benefits of
the position if they were permanently marooned on a desert island
and not allowed to communicate with anyone about anything other
that purely business matters.
The communities within which we live are never fully inclusive as
to lifestyle and religion because the ties by which they exist
include beliefs about the world and the good life. They are very
rarely fully inclusive as to ethnicity, region or class since
communal ties usually include half-conscious attitudes and habits
that people grow up with, and perhaps a sense of common history and
destiny.
It follows that to try to divorce the arrangements by which men
come to enjoy the benefits of society from religion, lifestyle,
ethnicity and class background, which is the goal of
antidiscrimination and similar legislation, demonstrates a
fundamental failure to understand how human life is carried on. To
the extent the attempt is successful it divorces material success
from personal loyalties and from any shared understanding of the
use to be made of success, because those are things that find their
home within particular communities. It thus makes position, money
and power self-sufficient goals and the only ones given social
recognition.
5. But what practical problems have been caused by antidiscrimination
rules?
It is difficult to separate the effects of antidiscrimination rules
from those resulting from other changes since the early '60s in
public policy and accepted public morality. Nonetheless, certain
changes for the worse seem inevitably to follow from them.
For example, if the relevance of membership in a particular
community to social or economic well-being has been authoritatively
declared an evil to be extirpated it is hard to see what room there
can be for traditional systems of mutual assistance based on
kinship, community and religion. The predictable result is an
increase in the demand for public assistance, which has in fact
occurred.
Antidiscrimination rules also mean that private organizations will
be oriented more single-mindedly toward private gain than in the
past. Public spirit does not exist in a vacuum, but in a setting
of shared understandings and expectations that grow up over time in
particular communities. That is why public spirit varies by
community: WASP organizations are public-spirited in a WASP style,
Jewish organizations in a Jewish style, and so on. If the network
of shared understandings and expectations weakens within private
organizations, as it generally will if they do not choose their
members more from some communities than others, trust will dwindle
and public spirit dissipate. People who complain about the Decade
of Greed and also favor energetic enforcement of "civil rights"
haven't thought things through.
The rejection of definite duties within the family implicit in
rejecting stereotypical sex roles results in a weaker family and
therefore greater difficulties in raising children. The
difficulties are compounded by official rejection of the view that
birth into a group with shared moral standards (typically, an
ethnic or religious group) is fundamental to what one is and
creates obligations to which one should submit. The schools and
broader society today must teach children to throw off parental
standards and authority, since those things are almost always based
on ethnic or religious standards that under antidiscrimination
ideology cannot be authoritative. Some people like that result,
but whether it leads to a better life doubtful.
6. Shouldn't communities that define themselves by reference to
ethnicity, religion, lifestyle and so on broaden themselves to reflect a
fuller appreciation of the richness of humanity?
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Unlimited breadth is impossible
because we are finite creatures. Since no single person or society
can express the full richness of humanity, the diversity and
particularity of human life requires social diversity and
particularity. It is that necessity that inclusiveness denies.
One social shoe (the inclusive society) is to be designed that will
fit everyone equally well.
The Vikings, the Abbasid Caliphate and Heian Japan all achieved
splendid things, but it is unlikely that mixing them together would
have created something that manifested human capacities better than
the three did separately. Each might have profited in its own way
by learning from the others, but not by attempting to reconstruct
its institutions and usages to make them equally accessible to the
other two. In that regard the world is no different now and a
thousand years ago.
Also, in spite of its multiplicity mankind may have an essential
nature to which some religions and lifestyles correspond better
than others. To assert that each society is morally required to be
equally open to all religions and lifestyles is to forbid social
recognition of such a possibility, and therefore (among other
things) to deny the possibility that society can progress morally.
Without a notion of moral progress, however, it is hard to make
sense of liberalism itself.
7. What happens to those excluded?
That depends on the size and power of the group in which they have
failed to find a home. Usually someone who doesn't get in one
place will get in another. If I'm excluded by the Century Club I
may be able to join the Shriners. If the excluding group is
socially very dominant, so that another home is hard to find, those
excluded may however suffer the same thing religious and social
conservatives, and ethnics who consider their ethnicity important,
suffer in an inclusive society: they may find themselves in a
social order they don't like run by people who look down on them in
which it is difficult to live as they prefer.
In both inclusive and non-inclusive societies people on the outs
may be able to practice the way of life they prefer in private,
perhaps by establishing their own communities. Such a possibility
can be more realistic in a non-inclusive society, since an
inclusive society by definition tries to establish a single social
order that applies equally to everyone. For example, ethnic
minorities in a non-inclusive society may be able to thrive through
some combination of adaptation and niche-finding, while in an
inclusive society they will find themselves on the receiving end of
public policies designed to make their (and every other) ethnic
culture irrelevant to all matters of serious concern.
8. Weren't civil rights measures necessary to redress evils caused by
discrimination?
Many evils have been attributed to such practices, and it is
difficult to discuss them all in a FAQ. Since the position of
black people is usually thought to present the strongest case for
state intervention, commenting on it may serve as a partial answer.
Black people indeed have problems, but statistics suggest that
discrimination and civil rights measures are not the key. In 1959
55.1 of blacks and 18.1 of whites were in poverty. By 1966 those
percentages had fallen to 41.8 and 11.3 and by 1969 to 32.2 and
9.5. Since then they have not changed much; in 1992 they were 33.3
and 11.6. The ratio of the percentages has varied between 3 and 3-
1/2 to 1, with the lower ratios in 1959 and 1992. The gap
doesn't seem to be closing, in spite of antidiscrimination
legislation adopted in the middle to late 60s and strengthened and
extended in the 70s through affirmative action requirements and the
like. Figures for the population as a whole, rich and poor,
suggest a similar conclusion. In 1970 the median income of all
black households in constant 1992 dollars was $21,330; in 1992 it
was $21,161. For white households the figures were $34,773 and
$38,909. (Source of figures: _Statistical Abstract of the United
States_.)
Judging by these figures, 30 years of antidiscrimination measures
and radical changes in public attitudes regarding race have done
nothing substantial to reduce relative black economic disadvantage.
Poverty dropped for both blacks and whites during the 60s (it had
been dropping steadily since the Second World War), but
proportionately somewhat more for whites, and since then has
rebounded slightly as household income has stagnated. The relative
economic status of whites and blacks has remained on the whole
about the same.
Economics is of course not everything. It appears, however, that
civil rights laws and changes in racial attitudes have not on the
whole benefitted other aspects of black people's lives. Between
1970 and 1993 the percentage of black children living with both
parents declined from 59 to 36. [Extend figures to cover crime
rates and other indicia of personal and social disorder, and add
figures for 1960.]
It appears that some of the deterioration can be attributed to the
civil rights revolution. If blacks live in a prosperous country
and are allowed ordinary freedom in economic, cultural and
religious matters, most of what their lives are like will depend on
the condition of black culture, which will in turn depend on the
state of black communities. The effect of the civil rights
revolution has been to undermine community generally by making
human relations more abstract and ordered more predominantly by
economics and government regulations, and to lead blacks to put
their hopes in white "society" -- practically speaking, the
government -- rather than in each other and their own communities
and institutions. The deterioration of those communities and
institutions is thus no surprise.
9. If exclusion is morally OK, why are so many conscientious people so
very troubled by it?
It is natural for people who take a technological view of human
society to find exclusion a moral outrage. If "society" is a
system that dispenses benefits and detriments by reference to a
single overall scheme, then the design of the scheme becomes the
fundamental moral issue. If society is the actor and men objects
of action, with none having greater claims on the social machine
than any other, the scheme should be designed to benefit all as
much and as equally as possible. If some in fact fare worse than
others (that is, are excluded from some benefits) then the existing
scheme needs reform, and in a technological age it is assumed
possible to redesign a system to achieve or at least progressively
approximate specifications. On such a view, the only possible
motives for opposition to antidiscrimination and pro-inclusiveness
measures other than stupidity and inertia are greed, bigotry and
love of domination.
Many people today accept this view of society without much
question. It is nonetheless false. "Society" can't be conceived
as an actor following a single script because it is composed of men
who are themselves irreducibly independent moral actors.
Consequently, things happening within society can't be held to
uniform standards as if they were the acts of a single responsible
moral agent. To attempt to do so is to attempt to eliminate all
moral agency except that of the government. While men do form
communities that are unified enough to become collective moral
actors, society as a whole is far less likely to act as such a
community than a family, church or other particular group based on
specific ties. In any case, such communities are never so tightly
bound as to put an end to the independent agency of their members.
Inclusiveness is also related to the ideal of universal love,
interpreted as requiring our relations with others to be direct and
all-accepting rather than mediated by roles and presumptions.
However noble such an ideal may be, it is not possible for us to
build a society on it here and now any more than it is possible for
us to build a society on universal forgiveness or taking no thought
for the morrow. The issue is what fosters the best in human life.
As one exponent of universal love has said, "By their fruits shall
ye know them." Are people more connected to each other now than
they were before the civil rights revolution? Has the legal
requirement that we ignore certain expectations and presumptions
improved human relations, or by making them more artificial and
abstract has it undermined the ways in which we actually achieve
community, loyalty and intimacy?
Finally, inclusiveness is related to the romantic tendency to
resist categorization and external rules in favor of infinitely
varying and willful subjectivity. If I am excluded then I have
been categorized and subjected to someone else's rules, a terrible
offense to the ego. However, neither that tendency nor the ideal
of universal love seems as important as the technocratic side of
inclusiveness ideology, since the demand for binding formal rules
is so strong in that ideology. Unlike love or romanticism,
inclusiveness tends to be moralistic and legally-minded.
10. Whatever errors or excesses it may sometimes lead to, isn't the
ideal of inclusiveness clearly a generous one?
Generosity is not the only possible explanation for the social
power of the ideal of inclusiveness. For example, that ideal
benefits some people directly, who might support it out of motives
other than generosity and disinterested love of justice.
It also serves powerful social interests that ostensibly are not
intended beneficiaries at all. The issue of inclusiveness arises
when society is thought of as a single actor with a single script,
and to demand inclusiveness is to demand that the script be
rewritten and a new one put into effect. Attempting to carry out
such a demand requires an enormous grant of power to a small and
cohesive group, a grant that is all the greater because up to now
there has in fact been no script. On the design side, that group
includes social theoreticians, legal experts and social scientists,
and on the implementation side civil servants, jurists, lawyers and
educators (including journalists and media people). Not
surprisingly, the ideal of inclusiveness find most support among
the people named, whose power it does so much to increase.
Finally, inclusiveness liberates each of us from the particular
demands of the parochial social groups he belongs to. Some may
want such liberation because it will enable them to soar higher,
others may have baser motives.
11. Isn't it divisive to oppose measures designed to promote
inclusiveness?
The issue of divisiveness can not be separated from the merits.
People who believe certain principles should be fundamental to
social order naturally view opposition as divisive. It is unclear
why anyone who rejects the substantive demands of a movement should
take its rhetoric about divisiveness seriously.
One could argue at least as easily that measures and movements that
favor inclusiveness are divisive. The first task of the movements
that have provided the support for inclusiveness, after all, has
been to raise consciousness -- that is, to use hate-filled rhetoric
to create division, to violate the law to demonstrate contempt for
established order and thereby undermine that order, and so on. In
addition, measures to promote inclusiveness rely for their
legitimacy on a permanent sense of grievance on the part of those
they favor and are not likely in the long run to seem at all fair
to those they burden. They thus perpetuate and exacerbate
divisions.
12. What about Bosnia, the Wars of Religion, and other communal
conflicts?
It can be very messy when attempts to create an inclusive society
such as Yugoslavia or medieval catholic Christendom unravel. These
examples suggest that such attempts are better avoided.
Proposals for social changes as radical as the eradication of
sexism and ethnocentrism raise questions as to the degree of force
needed to establish and maintain the proposed new form of society,
and whether any amount of force can ultimately be successful.
Attempts in this century to eradicate economic self-interest as a
motive have repeatedly led to colossal oppression and suffering
because such attempts go against nature. It is not clear that
attempts to eradicate man's natural clannishness will turn out
better.
Related reading:
Brimelow, Peter and Spencer, Leslie: "When Quotas Replace Merit,
Everybody Suffers", _Forbes_, Feb. 15, 1993, p. 80. A brief survey of
the almost nonexistent work by economists on aggregate economic costs of
affirmative action programs, followed by an analysis and estimate of
such costs.
Epstein, Richard A.: _Forbidden Grounds: the Case against Employment
Discrimination Laws_ (Harvard University Press, 1992). A discussion of
antidiscrimination laws by a University of Chicago law professor that
concludes that they are economically and socially destructive.
Levin, Michael: _Feminism and Freedom_ (Transaction Books, 1987). A
clearly-written and comprehensive discussion of the claims of feminism
and their political implications by a New York City University
philosophy professor.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From panix!not-for-mail Mon Feb 12 10:38:54 EST 1996
Article: 6938 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Does anyone write anything new on the group?
Date: 10 Feb 1996 15:43:26 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 11
Message-ID: <4fj01e$6d@panix.com>
References: <4fbb0o$cm4@pipe3.nyc.pipeline.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <4fbb0o$cm4@pipe3.nyc.pipeline.com> lmurdoc@nyc.pipeline.com (Larry Edward Murdock) writes:
>I am tried of reading the same posting, and replies to it over and over and
>over again. Will someone write something new, please!
Why not comment on my inclusiveness FAQ? It's immensely long, so you
can think of it as the equivalent of dozens of run-of-the-mill new
posts. A bonanza for fans of new posts, you might say ...
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From panix!not-for-mail Mon Feb 12 10:38:55 EST 1996
Article: 6952 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Does anyone write anything new on the group?
Date: 12 Feb 1996 06:31:38 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 20
Message-ID: <4fn8eq$s6n@panix.com>
References: <4fbb0o$cm4@pipe3.nyc.pipeline.com> <4fgquo$o6l@arther.castle.net>
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In <4fgquo$o6l@arther.castle.net> drotov@mail.castle.net (dimitri rotov) writes:
>p.s. Regarding your "natural rights" posting: why did Voegelin
>accuse Strauss of historicism? (I'm not being a wise guy, I really
>want to know.)
Judging by comments on the LEO-STRAUSS mailing list V. wasn't alone in
viewing L.S. that way. Perhaps because of Strauss's way of writing and
his theories about reading between the lines there seems an unusual
degree of dispute as to what his views were. Was he or was he not an
atheist? Did he or did he not think it possible to return to the
ancients, and if so in what sense? Some Straussians (Allan Bloom?)
have apparently been atheists and historicists without feeling a need
to distinguish their views on those points from those of the Master.
It's all too deep for me.
Any comments from those who know more?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From panix!news.eecs.umich.edu!newsxfer.itd.umich.edu!news.ece.uc.edu!babbage.ece.uc.edu!news.kei.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in1.uu.net!dziuxsolim.rutgers.edu!igor.rutgers.edu!christian Wed Feb 14 07:52:29 EST 1996
Article: 69630 of soc.religion.christian
Path: panix!news.eecs.umich.edu!newsxfer.itd.umich.edu!news.ece.uc.edu!babbage.ece.uc.edu!news.kei.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in1.uu.net!dziuxsolim.rutgers.edu!igor.rutgers.edu!christian
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: What do you think about Presuppositionalism?
Date: 13 Feb 1996 00:23:31 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 32
Sender: hedrick@farside.rutgers.edu
Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu
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References: <4fms3c$asj@farside.rutgers.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: farside.rutgers.edu
In <4fms3c$asj@farside.rutgers.edu> Philip quotes:
>The issue between
>believers and non-believers in Christian theism cannot be settled by a
>direct appeal to "facts" or "laws" whose nature and
>significance is already agreed upon by both parties to the debate. The
>question is rather as to what is the final reference-point
>required to make the "facts" and the "laws" intelligible.
For an interesting exchange on the same issue, see the articles by
Stanley Fish and Fr. Richard John Neuhaus in the current issue of
_First Things_ entitled "We Can't Live Together" (Fish) and "We Can
Live Together" (Neuhaus). Fish is a secular Jew and a well-known
professor of literature and law at Duke University generally identified
with postmodernism and the academic Left, Neuhaus a neoconservative
Roman Catholic priest who converted from Lutheranism. Fish gives an
extremely clear and vigorous exposition of the presuppositionalist view
(he doesn't call it that) to which Neuhaus responds with a mixture of
classical liberalism and what I take to be standard Roman Catholic
views on the role and capabilities of of human reason.
An interesting feature of the exchange is that at the end Fish touches
on personal matters and it appears that while he maintains his
presuppositionalism he finds that he is not clear exactly what his
presuppositions are. After years of scholarship it seems that John
Milton and his concerns and commitments have gotten under his skin, so
that he can no longer hold them at arm's length and is uncertain where
they will lead him.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From panix!not-for-mail Thu Feb 15 09:15:43 EST 1996
Article: 6998 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Please Boycott Mr. E. and UNIFY!
Date: 15 Feb 1996 09:15:23 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 9
Message-ID: <4fvf5r$hp0@panix.com>
References: <4fnprd$pvt@wagner.spc.videotron.ca> <4fq7lb$f23@gerry.cc.keele.ac.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
cla04@cc.keele.ac.uk (A.T. Fear) writes:
>one of the two big mistakes my country has made - the other was not
>joining the German side in WW1
How was that a mistake?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From panix!not-for-mail Thu Feb 15 23:32:08 EST 1996
Article: 6999 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: request: autonomous communities
Date: 15 Feb 1996 09:16:34 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 45
Message-ID: <4fvf82$i28@panix.com>
References: <4fp1fm$htq@news1.infinet.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
On Tue, 13 Feb 1996, yomo wrote:
> Could someone send me a list of autonomous communities/nations that
> have or currently do exist. Any books directly related on the history
> of these communities would also be greatly appreciated.
Some references that you may find of interest:
Tom Bethell, "Is the Kibbutz Kaput?", _Reason_, October 199O, pp. 33-37.
Joseph Blasi, _The Communal Experience of the Kibbutz_, Transaction
Books, New Brunswick, New Jersey (1986).
David Crowe and John Kolsti, _The Gypsies of Eastern Europe_, M.E.
Sharpe, Inc., Armonk (1991).
H. Darin-Drabkin, _The Other Society_, Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc.,
New York (1963).
Angus Fraser, _The Gypsies_, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford (1992).
Rena C. Gropper, _Gypsies in the City_, The Darwin Press, Princeton
(1975).
John A. Hostetler, _Amish Society_, The Johns Hopkins University Press,
Baltimore (4th ed., 1993).
David Landau, _Piety and Power: The World of Jewish Fundamentalism_,
Hill and Wang, New York (1993).
C.H. Lawrence, _Medieval Monasticism_, Longman, New York (1984).
Shalom Lilker, _Kibbutz Judaism_, Cornwall Books, London (1982).
Charles Nordhoff, _The Communistic Societies of the United States_,
Schocken Books Inc., New York (1965).
Yaacov Oved, _Two Hundred Years of American Communes_, Transaction
Books, New Brunswick, New Jersey (1988).
"The Kibbutz in Crisis", _World Press Review_, October 1992, p. 46.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From jk Wed Feb 7 20:27:27 1996
Subject: Re: Right to die
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Wed, 7 Feb 1996 20:27:27 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <199602072342.SAA14146@ctc.swva.net> from "Seth Williamson" at Feb 7, 96 06:35:06 pm
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> Scientists, of course, claim to have reduced their axioms
> to the absolute minimum, and that the rest of us haven't.
If you deal with a restricted range of questions no doubt it's possible
to use fewer and clearer axioms. Also, if you keep doing the same
thing the ambiguities and incompleteness of what you think are your
axioms are less likely to become noticeable.
> This really is an excellent putting of the case for common sense. You
> ought to be teaching political science at Harvard.
Flattery is always pleasing.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From jk Wed Feb 14 07:49:56 1996
Subject: Re: Eating fried rats and roaches
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 1996 07:49:56 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <199602132346.SAA04743@ctc.swva.net> from "Seth Williamson" at Feb 13, 96 06:45:30 pm
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> Then, when the predictable family horror stories hit
> the papers, the liberal says, "See? We just can't trust families
> to raise children! We need Big Brother on the job!"
There don't have to be that many bad things happening, since for a
liberal there's very little difference between recognition that
something is bad and belief in the moral necessity of a government
program that on paper at least will deal with the matter.
For a liberal the primary vehicle of moral life *has* to be the
government; otherwise, morality will place heavier burdens on some than
on others and personal autonomy will not be equalized, contrary to
liberal justice.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From jk Thu Feb 15 09:56:02 1996
Subject: Re: First Amendment
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 1996 09:56:02 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <199602142307.SAA08427@ctc.swva.net> from "Seth Williamson" at Feb 14, 96 06:06:26 pm
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> Americans simply
> assumed that free and unfettered exercise of religion in public
> life was what being free citizens in a democracy meant.
There does seem to be a problem when it can no longer be assumed that
"religion" means something specific, like "Protestant Christianity",
and increasing numbers of the most respectable people adopt a wholly
secular viewpoint. At some point free and democratic public life
becomes impossible; public affairs come to be controlled by
manipulative elites because the common moral life of the people has
dwindled until popular deliberation has become impossible. The only
tolerable solution that comes to mind is radical decentralization,
which has its own problems.
Or is that the wrong way to look at it? Maybe people have more in
common than I suggest, so there really is a moral majority or could be
one if the manipulative elites would get out of the way and let the
people work things out themselves. A consensus on abortion or what
have you would emerge from popular debate that would be responsible
because it would have consequences. So abolish the Supreme Court and
restore popular self-rule. Any ideas? Comments? Can this republic be
saved?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From jk Fri Feb 16 07:07:52 1996
Subject: Re: First Amendment
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 1996 07:07:53 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <199602160030.TAA13299@ctc.swva.net> from "Seth Williamson" at Feb 15, 96 07:28:35 pm
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> > The only
> >tolerable solution that comes to mind is radical decentralization,
> >which has its own problems.
> What's wrong with decentralization? It is, after
> all, the Republic that was conceived by the Founders and the one that's
> described in the Constitution.
The kind of decentralization conceived by the Founding Fathers required
common understandings that don't exist any more, for example acceptance
of a common-law tradition that embodied principles like "law precedes
politics", and belief that human conscience is important not because
"conscience" is a clumsy premodern approximation of "autonomy rights"
but because conscience is God speaking to us. I worry about a kind of
decentralization like traditional middle-eastern society, in which
there is no public life, only inward-turning religious and ethnic
communities inhabiting the same territory, and a despotic government
with no organic connection with society (there can't be, because there
is no common society for it to have an organic connection to).
Admittedly traditional middle-eastern society had certain advantages,
for example despots who didn't try to do much.
> Our elites have
> succeeded in producing a generation of young people radically infected with
> nihilism. Bloom was the first to direct a lot of attention to this point in
> "The Closing of the American Mind."
How alien are the elites? If the German thinkers Bloom worries about
had all stayed in Europe would things have turned out any different?
Obviously elites exaggerate certain tendencies but they don't invent
them. Also, every society of any size and complexity has elites.
Could we have had different elites with different interests and goals?
> My suspicion is that there is more of a moral concensus on many
> matters than the liberal elites will admit. I think one reason they keep
> repeating their "diversity" mantra is because they're afraid that most
> people do indeed share some remnant of a core of moral beliefs that they
> wish wasn't there at all.
True enough.
> So much that is absolutely fundamental to the liberal state is
> blatantly unconstitutional. It may be that we have passed some point of no
> return. Recently some liberal writer in either the New Republic or Harper's
> conceded that we abandoned the Constitution during FDR's reign. Amazing to
> hear the liberals concede such a huge fact after decades of denying it.
Another line some constitutional law professors have been promoting
lately is that the New Deal constituted an informal adoption of a new
constitution that has since been thoroughly ratified by popular as well
as elite acceptance and therefore is the constitution the courts should
enforce. The post-New Deal constitution has provisions like "the
federal government should not accept existing social arrangements as
just but should reform them in the interests of equality and autonomy."
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From jk Fri Feb 16 13:08:13 1996
Subject: Re: Christendom or City of God
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 1996 13:08:13 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <960216145008_76752.3721_EHS144-1@CompuServe.COM> from "Paul" at Feb 16, 96 09:50:09 am
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>But I would suggest that the only legitimate corporate morality issue
>any religious person can address is the "denominational city" in which
>he lives.
To what extent must a Christian be a foreigner in this world? Suppose
for example there are members of his family who are not Christians.
Does that mean he can't view his family as something he is morally part
of? Is it OK for a Christian to serve in the army, and kill or
sacrifice his life for the sake of a non-Christian collectivity? Is it
OK to vote, and so take part for example in determining the
circumstances in which offenders will be judged guilty and punished by
such a collectivity?
Even within the denominational city there will be tares as well as
wheat. What should a Christian do? He's told he shouldn't try to root
all the tares out, so it seems his choices are purely private piety on
the one hand and partnership with the pagan and perverse on the other.
(Third choices must also alliterate.)
>And this comes after a much closer, fundamental and abiding examination
>of one's personal morality.
"Clean up your own act first" is of course a good rule. If you wait
until it's done before you do anything else, though, you will never do
anything else. Also, evil communications corrupt good manners. We
can't help but be concerned with the moral and spiritual well-being of
any society of which we are part, for the sake of our own weakness as
well as that of others.
>Religious Toleration was built into the constitution as a default
>mechanism. That's as far as we can go. Bad religion - like Liberal, New
>Age, Pan-everythingism is as much protected as Christian, catholic
>orthodoxy. The presupposition that man is a creature "somewhat less
>than God" - or the philosophical equivalent - can live outside of the
>Christian framework.
The idea I think was that the federal government would have a limited
role. The states weren't required to be religiously tolerant, and were
expected in any event to respect rather than create or define the
framework within which people lived. Maybe that idea isn't one that
works in the long run -- maybe an institution with the right to define
public enemies, demand loyalty unto death, and define and punish crimes
is not one that can be religiously neutral in the way perhaps an
institution that does nothing but clean the streets might be. People
don't foresee all the consequences of their ideas, though.
>We all know that the French Revolution is the half-brother of our own -
>right down to the stinking humanistic philosophical presuppositions.
A book I'm reading on the subject that I find interesting is M. Stanton
Evans' _The Theme is Freedom_ in which he argues that the actual basis
of our revolution was the common law, together with specifically
Christian forms of doctrines such as human equality, the rights of
conscience, and the non-sovereignty of the state. The argument seems
persuasive to me. That doesn't mean the two revolutions are wholly
unrelated, of course; they could correspond to different stages in the
development of an overly individualistic understanding of life that in
France had broken decisively with Christianity but in America had not.
>We need to get out of the habit of looking at the USA as if it were our
>Church.
True enough. One problem is that the USA demands to be viewed as a
church and its claims grow ever more comprehensive. Consider the
sequence George Washington --> Abraham Lincoln --> Martin Luther King.
At each stage the claims of transcendent spiritual importance become
grander. Nonetheless, the USA is part of the world God made, and a part
for which we have special responsibility because we belong to it in
somewhat the way we belong to our natural families.
>The cancer of unfaith must first be discovered in
>the confessional before it can be moderated in the voting booth.
First in order of importance rather than of time.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cigar? Toss it in a can, it is so tragic.
From jk Fri Feb 16 21:20:52 1996
Subject: Re: First Amendment
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 1996 21:20:52 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <199602170004.TAA17901@ctc.swva.net> from "Seth Williamson" at Feb 16, 96 07:01:21 pm
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> >I worry about a kind of
> >decentralization like traditional middle-eastern society, in which
> >there is no public life, only inward-turning religious and ethnic
> >communities inhabiting the same territory, and a despotic government
> >with no organic connection with society (there can't be, because there
> >is no common society for it to have an organic connection to).
> This may be a well-founded fear. I just don't know. But it seems
> to me that the practical result of liberal social policies and liberal
> attitudes over the past three or four decades has been to utterly destroy
> the possibility of community in the first place, as in the inner city
> dystopias.
True enough. We will get the middle-eastern solution only if it is the
best possible for us under the circumstances. Certainly a traditional
middle eastern-style society would be better than a John Rawls-style
society, and I think something of the sort is the likely outcome of a
determined attempt to build the latter. Maybe determined efforts
aren't even necessary -- doing what seems easiest and most pragmatic
may be enough.
> I think there are
> huge areas of America in which Americans can find enough in common to serve
> as the basis of some tolerable coexistence. Maybe not as much as in 1820.
> But enough. I think it's like grass, only the centralized mega-state is
> blocking the sun. It needs to be able to grow without the "help" of people
> like Hillary.
This may be right. Maybe if the country could magically be broken up
each part could find its own different way. Or maybe not. The article
you posted a couple of weeks ago suggests some of the problems. Also,
if mega-state is really the problem, why have the less populous
Anglo-Saxon countries gone in the same direction we have? I understand
there are bothersome trends even in Switzerland, not to mention the
other small European states such as the ones in Scandanavia.
> I guess it would suit the liberals perfectly, wouldn't it? Now
> we have an +unwritten+ constitution, so they don't even have to pretend to
> worry about violating it. Perfect.
Even better, the combination of an unwritten constitution and a huge
and incoherent body of law with overburdened judges who rely too much
on law clerks would give enormous power to a body of law professors
collectively able to come up with a theory explaining it all. So
there's another conspiracy theory for you.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cigar? Toss it in a can, it is so tragic.
From panix!not-for-mail Mon Feb 19 22:40:20 EST 1996
Article: 9911 of alt.politics.equality
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.politics.equality,alt.discrimination,alt.politics.theory,alt.society.conservatism
Subject: Re: Revised anti-inclusiveness FAQ Part I (much too long)
Date: 19 Feb 1996 22:35:31 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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white@nyc.pipeline.com (James White) writes:
>Where can you show me that the objective of so called liberal ideology
>is equal participation in major social activities and rewards for
>example?
Surely the Civil Rights Act and affirmative action programs are
supported by liberal ideology. Under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as
it has been interpreted and applied for the past 25 years, if a
protected group participates and gets rewarded in a covered activity at
less than 80% of the rate for all groups the presumption is that the
decisionmaker is discriminating. For example, if there are 1000 people
available for a job, half black and half white, and an employer hires
100, 30 black and 70 white, he's got some explaining to do. I think
the current standard is that he has to show that whatever the practices
were that led to the disproportionately low number of blacks hired were
"consistent with business necessity", whatever that means. That
presumption is why people set up affirmative action programs to promote
more equal participation and rewards and try to meet the 80% target.
>This category whom you characterize as liberal contains who? What
>group of people is included in this characterization?
Like "conservative" it's primarily a tendency of thought rather than
category of people. For a presentation of pure liberal theory you can
read the academics who call themselves liberal theorists, John Rawls is
an eminent example. For liberal views of law you can read the
professors who call themselves liberals like Bruce Ackerman or Ronald
Dworkin. Elsewhere, liberals include politicians like Ted Kennedy,
judges like William Brennan, almost anybody who makes pronouncements on
politics for a mainline religious group or the NEA, etc.
>How is the demand for inclusiveness a demand for comprehensive social,
>political and economic equality?
I deal with the issue under question 3. You might reread the answer to
that question with that in mind.
>Other than your assertion, where can I find a statement by an
>inclusioner (to coin a term) which says this. Where is the inclusioner
>manifesto?
There isn't one, at least none that I know of. Part of the purpose of
the FAQ is to discuss the actual nature and tendencies of the demands
and tendencies of thought going under the name of "inclusiveness" rather
than rest content with their self-presentation, which as you suggest
tends to be more limited. Again, comments on my answer to 3. would be
helpful.
>Discrimination based on ethnicity, religion, sex and life style lumps
>all people who belong to the group in question regardless of their
>personal worth into a category and then discriminates against them.
Is it your view that taking such things into account to any extent at
all, which is what the civil rights laws prohibit (putting affirmative
action aside for a moment), lumps everyone in a group into the same
category? Is that also your view regarding taking whether somebody is a
veteran or went to your college into account?
>But what does social distance and differences in a variety of ways
>mean? How are the magnitude of social distances to be determined and
>by whom?
Magnitudes and so on would be determined by people and reflected in how
they act themselves. For example, people of Sicilian ancestry might
feel they have something in common that distinguishes them from other
people. Very likely they would feel more different from some than
others; possibly they might tend to feel more at home with Catholic
Irishmen than with WASP Methodists, or with Jews than with blacks. In
the normal course their patterns of association in all spheres of life
would reflect those differences. They would normally go to church with
other Catholics, maybe preferring Sicilian or Italian parishes to some
degree. Many would marry people who aren't Sicilians, but mixed matches
of some kinds would be much more common than others. In business they
would tend to feel more comfortable dealing with some groups than
others; how much it mattered would depend on the group, the
relationship, and specific circumstances. Presumably they wouldn't mind
selling things to anyone. They might be happier hiring or going to work
for someone they thought they understood -- ideally a family member or
old acquaintance, or failing that someone with a similar background who
would be more likely to have compatible attitudes and expectations.
They might of course hire or go to work for someone completely different
if other indications were right, but that would be less common.
>To my way of thinking there is no mandated social inclusiveness right
>now in the US.
What are affirmative action programs then?
>Discrimination is clearly based on stereotyping, of assigning a role
>based not on personal worth but on membership in a certain group.
Equality is also assigning a role based not on personal worth but on
membership in whatever group the members of which are to be treated as
equal.
>> one might reasonably ask
>> whether it would be more intelligent to have a single stereotype
>> for "adult human being" or to have (for example) separate
>> stereotypes for "man" and "woman". Our society has officially
>> decided in favor of the former, but it's hard to make the decision
>> stick in practice and its justification isn't clear to everyone.
>
>What do you mean it's hard to make the decision stick in practice?
The same thing feminists mean when they complain about how deep-rooted
sexism is.
>What do you mean its justification is not clear to everyone? Theses
>are distortions of fact.
Its justification is not clear to me, and therefore not to everyone.
>In some parts of the country you would have all Italian employees, in
>other parts you would have all Hispanic employees etc. New Jersey
>would become Italian, Texas and California would become Hispanic,
>Georgia would become all black.
Why? Even assuming the employers who talk about the benefits of
diversity are all lying, so that all employers would like to have
monoethnic workforces, why couldn't different employers hire from
different groups? If everyone in New Jersey who wasn't Italian was
unemployed, why wouldn't that be a great opportunity for a prospective
employer who wasn't thrilled with Italians to find the workforce of his
dreams?
>In a multi cultural society like the USA which was created by US
>immigration laws, except for blacks and Native Americans, any other
>strategy would cause the disintegration of the nation.
Was the USA closer to disintegration in 1963 than it is today?
>The creation of a single American Nation on the other hand, which was
>the vision of the founding fathers, requires that all people have equal
>political rights and that you promote those ideas which aim at creating
>a single nation.
The Founding Fathers weren't that keen on a single American Nation.
"Consolidation" was a dirty word in the debates over the Constitution.
I can't say that the slogan "Ein Volk, Ein Reich" pleases me that much
either. I haven't suggested depriving anyone of equal political rights,
by the way. As to Balkanization, see my answer to question 16. Also,
why "Balkanization"? Why not "Switzerlandization"?
>If you do not allow women equal access to the means of livelihood you
>in effect make women the wards of men.
I'm not proposing forbidding the hiring of women or female
entrepreneurship. To make women have the same relationship to earning a
livelihood as men do, though, is to end the family as a significant
social institution. Are you so confident that is the way to build a
better world? Do early indications from the present effort suggest that
it is?
Your further comments seem repetitive or in the nature of "I don't see
the point of this", so I will not comment on them.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cigar? Toss it in a can, it is so tragic.
From panix!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in2.uu.net!dziuxsolim.rutgers.edu!igor.rutgers.edu!christian Mon Feb 19 22:40:45 EST 1996
Article: 69855 of soc.religion.christian
Path: panix!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in2.uu.net!dziuxsolim.rutgers.edu!igor.rutgers.edu!christian
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Does Jesus support Christian activism ?
Date: 19 Feb 1996 00:06:16 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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you@somehost.somedomain (anon) writes:
>For many years I've tried to reconcile the following verses with the
>stated positions of the tele-evangelists and other members of the
>christian right-wing, such as the Moral Majority and the Pro-Life
>movement.
There are lots of televangelists and Christian right-wingers and they
say and do different things. In general, though, I don't see that the
texts you cite cause special problems for them.
> Matt 7: 1 - 27
Unless Christians withdraw wholly from public affairs, including the
internal government of their own churches, "judge not" can't mean
"don't support social rules and standards based on your best
understanding of goods to be promoted and evils to be avoided".
Christian rightists support rules and standards that are different from
those supported by mainliners and leftists, but that's a different
matter that has no specific connection to "judging".
The Sermon on the Mount of course requires that whatever principles we
want to establish we apply to ourselves first, and that they be
principles we would want others to apply to us. It doesn't seem to me
there's anything about Christian right positions that causes right-
wingers to fail on that point more than other people do.
On other matters, Christian rightists often pray for things, and they
are at least as concerned as other people with entering in at the strait
gate, avoiding false prophets, bringing forth good fruits, and building
their houses on a rock.
> Matt 13: 24 - 30
Is utopian thinking and petty inquisition and meddling more
characteristic of the Christian right or of liberalism and the left,
including the Christian left? As an example, compare the attitudes
toward sexual misconduct, "sexism" in the case of the left and more
traditional sexual sins in the case of the Christian right. Which
movement favors a more elaborate apparatus of compulsion to eradicate
the attitudes and conduct it dislikes?
The question how much can or should be done politically when people do
bad things or have bad habits and attitudes is of course an important
one. In America in 1996, though, it doesn't seem to me a question that
mostly pertains to the Right. Otherwise it would be hard to understand
why most fans of the minimal state are to be found there.
> Matt 19: 23 - 35
The Christian right often shares in the tendency to overvalue prosperity
and position. That doesn't distinguish them from other political
groupings. To judge by the disciples' response to Jesus' saying it
doesn't distinguish them from much of anyone. Christian rightists
certainly aren't more prosperous, more concerned with worldly ties and
success, or more respected by those who are most respected in this world
(i.e., political, social and cultural elites) than people associated
with the liberal wing of mainline denominations.
To say that the goal of politics is to promote, equalize and secure
prosperity and position for everyone, as the Left does, doesn't avoid
the problem. To the extent the religious Left treats politics as the
point of religion it compounds it. The Christian right is involved in
politics, but I think it has less tendency than mainline liberals and
the Christian left to reduce religion to material and social goals.
(It's of course possible my views on all these things would be
different if my Bible included Matt 19: 31 - 35 depending on what those
verses say.)
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba Kramer, nu?
From jk Sat Feb 17 18:36:03 1996
Subject: Re: Christendom or City of God
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Sat, 17 Feb 1996 18:36:03 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <960217172616_76752.3721_EHS66-1@CompuServe.COM> from "Paul" at Feb 17, 96 12:26:16 pm
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Paul says:
>But I would allege that the fatal flaw of Americanism is the slow
>motion version of the French.
Is the problem really one of our original political constitution? The
USA has remained more religious than the European countries, even those
that did not become republics and retained their established churches.
What constitution could we have had that would have changed things for
the better?
>> Is it OK for a Christian to serve in the army, and kill or
>>sacrifice his life for the sake of a non-Christian collectivity?
>
>For me Romans 13 addresses this directly. Rom:13:1: Let every soul be subject
>unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are
>ordained of God. and by Rom:13:7: Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to
>whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom
>honour.
>
>Indirectly, it is addressed by John the Baptist: Lk:3:14:" And the soldiers
>likewise demanded of him, saying, And what shall we do? And he said unto them,
>Do violence to no man, neither accuse any falsely; and be content with your
>wages." Thus not condemning the profession.
I assume John was speaking to men who had already signed up. None of
this tells us that we should join the army, or otherwise voluntarily
participate in public life for example by voting. Voting goes beyond
obedience to higher powers ordained by God, it involves a moral
partnership with your fellow-citizens involving matters of good and evil
and life and death that doesn't seem consistent with viewing yourself as
altogether a stranger and pilgrim on the earth.
>St. Paul's legal dichotomy is clear: 1Cor. 6: 1-4 Dare any of you,
>having a matter against another, go to law before the unjust, and not
>before the saints?
So would Paul have us avoid jury duty, in which we join with the unjust
in applying their law, and voting, in which we participate with the
unjust in making that law?
>But a concern for the moral and spiritual well-being of my nation is
>way down on the list.
The nation is so intrusive these days, though. Should Christians form
separate communities, work only in their own businesses, not read
secular periodicals, only watch Christian TV shows, turn off NPR (sorry
Seth!), avoid the public schools and secular colleges, stay out of
politics and public office as much as possible, etc.? If we did we'd
reproduce for ourselves something like traditional middle eastern
society, and it would be much more like the society Paul was used to
than what we have today. Unless we do something of the sort it will be
hard for any but the strongest and most mature to avoid being profoundly
influenced by the nation's moral and spiritual well-being.
>My objection is that we have the caboose of poltiical activism right
>after the coal car of individual piety.
I agree that a lot has to be built up in between.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cigar? Toss it in a can, it is so tragic.
From jk Sun Feb 18 18:28:26 1996
Subject: Re: Christendom or City of God
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 1996 18:28:26 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <960218192959_76752.3721_EHS141-1@CompuServe.COM> from "Paul" at Feb 18, 96 02:29:59 pm
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Paul says:
> (This is where a healthy concern for decentralization could fit in). I detect a
> hint of scorn for the "traditional middle eastern society".
I prefer the kind of society traditional in Europe in which the state
exists within a public sphere that has enough moral content to make
non-despotic government possible. Even a decentralized society in the
European mold has to have common binding conceptions of freedom, law,
right, etc. Maybe such societies are no longer possible in a world
that instant communication and easy transportation is making everywhere
as multicultural, multiethnic and multireligious as the middle east has
always been. If so I think it's an immense loss. The position of the
Christian Right I take it is that such a society is still possible,
that the only possible source of the necessary common moral content at
least in America is Christianity, and in any case it's intolerable for
them (and also objectively wrong) for the common moral content to be
anti-Christian.
> But we don't enter a moral
> partnership with the world by voting, jury duty, paying taxes, and serving in
> the military. But if an individual feels he personally is entering into a moral
> partnership rather than rendering to Ceasar the things that are his - then he
> should conscientiously object to such duties - as the Amish did in Wisconsin v.
> Yoder (forcing Amish kids to go to public highschool).
Voting and other responsible public service (jury duty, public office)
seem plainly a form of moral partnership with the world. They are acts
of citizenship -- becoming part of Caesar rather than rendering unto
him. How could they be construed otherwise? Jury duty for example is
deliberating as to right and wrong in accordance with the world's
standards. Voting and responsible public office involve deliberating
with others what the world's standards should be in accordance with the
principles of deliberation that the world accepts.
Suppose we all accept that the world is the world and this Christian
America stuff is ridiculous, and the Constitution of the United States
is whatever body of principles the responsible authorities declare it
to be because they're the responsible authorities and besides current
constitutional law was really implicit in it all the time. At what
point does an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United
States against all enemies public and private become impossible in
conscience?
> Should they work only in their own businesses?
>
> No, this is a key feature of being +in+ the world. St. Paul was a tentmaker.
He didn't have a management position in a big tentmaking company. If
he had it would have been another case of moral partnership with the
world.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cigar? Toss it in a can, it is so tragic.
From jk Mon Feb 19 07:22:27 1996
Subject: Re: Christendom or City of God
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 1996 07:22:27 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <960219013506_76752.3721_EHS107-1@CompuServe.COM> from "Paul" at Feb 18, 96 08:35:07 pm
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Paul says:
> Jury duty is deliberating with
> unbelievers as to what is right or wrong??? If I'm ever called, my mission will
> to be to evaluate evidence and make a scientific judgement about whether the
> defendent actually committed the act for which he is accused.
A lot of what juries do is morally-laden and can't be reduced to what
is today called science. Was what somebody did unreasonable, negligent
or reckless? Did it violate a duty of care he owed others? Was his
conduct so outrageous that punitive damages are called for? Was it so
excusable that the case shouldn't even have been brought? Juries are
routinely called upon to decide such things.
> If my brother is a big exec in a tent making
> corporation, far be it from me to judge whether he loves mammon/Caeser more than
> God or that he has compromised his conscience.
> Far be it from me
> also to accuse my brother of forming a moral partnership with Caeser simply
> because he votes.
You might nonetheless form a view of the situation. My own view is
that both involve participation in making decisions in accordance with
shared standards and understandings regarding the unlimited variety of
things that come up when people live and work together. If we're going
to do those things the nature of the standards and understandings has
to be important to us.
> How about paying taxes? You left that one out. Does this make
> me an accomplice as well? Christ payed taxes and his father obediently
> registered for them too.
Paying taxes is not common deliberation and action, it's following
orders.
> And
> never once did I think for a minute that the Constitution or the U.S. Flag or
> the Constitution of Virginia were anything more than transitory political bands
> which - as a consequence of "being in the world" - have connected me with my
> fellow human being in an attempt to secure rights of peace and some amount of
> liberty. This is hardly a moral partnership. How can these bands be anything
> more than this?
Suppose the responsible authorities under the U.S. Constitution tell
you that the Constitution has a moral content and people in the
government act that way? It seems to me they do and can't possibly do
otherwise. So the nature of that moral content is relevant to a
decision to take an oath supporting the Constitution or otherwise go
beyond simply following the laws in supporting and participating in the
government the Constitution establishes.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cigar? Toss it in a can, it is so tragic.
From jk Mon Feb 19 13:46:31 1996
Subject: Re: Copy of: Re: Christendom or City of God
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 1996 13:46:31 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <960219165736_76752.3721_EHS72-1@CompuServe.COM> from "Paul" at Feb 19, 96 11:57:36 am
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Paul writes:
>Many of
>the ancillary parameters you mention are subsumed in the definition of the
>crime; i.e. the difference between 1st and 2nd degree murder.
But that means that to attempt to answer the question "does the
definition of the crime apply to what he did" is to participate with
your fellow jurors in difficult moral reasoning based on understandings
of human nature, good and evil shared by the authorities and the people.
To decide the defendant is guilty and should be publicly condemned and
punished is certainly a collective moral act that makes sense only on
the basis of such understandings.
>In civil cases, I meet with an entirely different body of jurisprudence - much
>of which is moral nonsense. In this case, my fellow jurors will see me as a
>whacky intransigent. I'll just have to apologize for my "city of God"
>Christianity and let them ridicule me.
By agreeing to become a juror why aren't you agreeing to accept and act
on the moral nonsense? "Sure I'll take my oath as a juror but you gotta
realize I don't see things the way the law does and I intend
intransigently to act on my own views instead of those of the law" seems
wrong.
>This "shared standards" thing is the problem, I think. If you want to dwell on
>this word "shared" - which leads illogically to 'moral' partnership simply
>because my moral world-view is congruent at many points with my fellow Liberal,
>Moslem, Mormon or Bourgeois citizens, then I am guilty. For the "Christendom"
>types there is no way out (al la Hotel California) and for the Amish - well,...
>I shouldn't have gone in the first place.
There is of course no perfect solution. In America the accommodation
was to limit the functions of government, so that the moral partnership
of citizenship extended only to things as to which moral world-views
were tolerably congruent, and publicly to recognize a religious and
identifiably Christian basis of the American order. That way out no
longer exists, and not surprisingly citizenship isn't in such great
shape either. The Christian Right wants a restoration. That may be
impossible, but if so I don't think much content can be given to the
notion of "citizenship", and in the absence of a substantive conception
of citizenship institutions like juries, elections and the control of
power by law (e.g., civilian control of the armed forces) will I think
wither and die.
>When the authorities wanted to try St. Paul at Jerusalem and he appealed to
>Caeser's court, was he thereby entering into a moral partnership with Caesar?
He was claiming a right with which he was born under Roman law. If he
had been born a slave he wouldn't have contested his slavery; similarly
for citizenship. He wasn't deliberating with Caesar and the Senate what
Roman law should be or accepting the responsibility of deciding as a
representative of Rome how the principles of Roman law should be applied
in a particular case. Our activity as voters and jurors is more like
those latter situations than merely claiming a right.
>Or we are simply being obedient to
>God and we mean no moral endorsement by paying taxes.
We certainly aren't saying we think the money will be used only for good
purposes or that the sort of reasoning that determines how it will be
used is something that in good conscience we could participate in. We
are saying that almost any government is better than no government and
that we are neither capable nor authorized to create a new one.
>We can live as a citizen in extremely
>wicked societies without coming close to entering into a moral partnership with
>any of the worldly powers that be. Being in the world and not of the world is
>possible even in hideously wicked societies. The early Christian community
>demonstrated this. By affirming his Roman citizenship when he was jailed, St.
>Paul did not send any message to me that he was authenticating any implicit
>moral partnership he had with Caesar.
Many Christians were martyred for refusing to demonstrate that they
spiritually bought into the Roman state. The Romans treated their
conduct as a sort of treason. It seems to me that our present society
is spiritually no less intrusive than Roman society. What is
"inclusiveness", the loftiest moral ideal of the society growing up
around us and against which the Christian Right is fighting, but a
demand that we recognize the gods of others as equally valid?
Christians don't get thrown to the lions for rejecting it, just excluded
from the public realm.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cigar? Toss it in a can, it is so tragic.
From jk Mon Feb 19 22:27:47 1996
Subject: Re: Copy of: Re: Christendom or City of God
To: newman@listserv.vt.edu
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 1996 22:27:47 -0500 (EST)
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Paul writes:
>Likewise, my conscience would probably not condemn me if I accepted a
>Supreme Court Judgeship. However much I was ridiculed for
>"intransigently acting on my own views" I would still base my decisions
>on the laws of Christain revelation and not on "natural law" or
>sociological law (what 51% of the people think is right). And my
>dissenting opinions would clearly show that no such moral partnership
>exists.
To me this suggests that you believe that the laws of the United States
are consistent with Christian principles, even though a great many
people in authority erroneously believe otherwise. If not, how could
you both take the oath of office in good faith and also decide in
accordance with Christian revelation?
>Your generalizations are too difficult for me to unravel.
Sorry. I sometimes refer in shorthand to my private theories of the
world and expect other people to follow.
>>We
>>are saying that almost any government is better than no government and
>>that we are neither capable nor authorized to create a new one.
>
>I guess you would not have participated in the Revolution either. By the way,
>who is this "we"?
"We" means "Christians paying the tax". I might very well have
participated in the Revolution, by the way. I don't think we always
have to pay every tax.
>>It seems to me that our present society
>>is spiritually no less intrusive than Roman society.
>
>But in terms of persecution - there is simply no comparison here.
True, but persecution is not the only form of intrusiveness.
>For the record, if you judge me as forming a moral partnership with the USA
>powers that be by voting, jury duty and serving in the military (but not,
>thankfully, by paying taxes) then I can only object that I mean nothing by it -
>except my poor attempt to obey Romans 13.
My point really wasn't that we should all drop out, it was that if we
don't drop out quite radically the spiritual and moral well-being of the
USA has to be important to us.
This discussion has been helpful to me. On reflection, it seems to me
that when I said "voting and jury duty involve a moral partnership with
the political society" what I meant was "elections and juries make
sense as institutions only if the political society is a moral
partnership among its members". Someone who is alienated from the
political society might vote and serve as a juror without moral
partnership, simply to advance his own understanding of things
regardless of how adverse that understanding was to the political
society, but if so he would be exercising his authority as a voter or
juror in a way inconsistent with the principles underlying the grant of
authority to him. Maybe Kant or somebody would object to that, but the
question's too deep for me and I'm ready to drop it for now. (And if
that's another tangled generalization I apologize. No-one is forced to
be always coherent on the net.)
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cigar? Toss it in a can, it is so tragic.
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Feb 20 15:13:20 EST 1996
Article: 9927 of alt.politics.equality
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.politics.equality,alt.discrimination,alt.politics.theory,alt.society.conservatism
Subject: Re: Revised anti-inclusiveness FAQ Part I (much too long)
Date: 20 Feb 1996 08:45:31 -0500
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[some additional thoughts]
white@nyc.pipeline.com (James White) writes:
>Where can you show me that the objective of so called liberal ideology
>is equal participation in major social activities and rewards for
>example? Other than your assertion, show me where it says that.
You should also consider the constant references to underrepresentation
of blacks, women or whatever in various things as a problem to be
corrected. So far as I can tell that's the standard way of talking
about such situations in public discussions today.
>How is the demand for inclusiveness a demand for comprehensive social,
>political and economic equality?
How could a society harbor substantial continuing inequalities without
violating inclusiveness? If such inequalities existed people with some
qualities ("low class status", for example) would be excluded from
substantial social benefits. Strikes me as a clear violation of
inclusiveness.
>What has more often destroyed civil society in the history of the west
>has been gross distortions in distribution of the wealth of society.
>Two relatively recent examples of this were the French Revolution and
>the Russian Revolution.
Civil society -- the array of institutions not created or controlled by
the state -- was in better shape in 19th century England than England
today although the distribution of wealth is more even today. So far as
I can tell the same is true of the West generally.
In Russia and France the development of civil society had of course been
suppressed by royal autocracy. A natural consequence of centralization
of power is that discontent leads to thoughts of revolution and the
establishment of a new and even more tyrannical government as the most
obvious way of curing large problems. The civil rights laws result in
centralization of power that was once dispersed throughout civil society
because they place some of the most important decisions and policies
organizations have under government supervision and second-guessing. In
the coming years I think our politics will be nastier and more divisive
because of them.
>Socialism is far from being dead as you suggest, the present
>governments of Sweden and Germany are examples of socialism at work.
>Yet both countries are very prosperous and have not the situation you
>have in the USA where there are upwards of 50 million people without
>health insurance.
Sweden has its problems, such as very high unemployment and very large
deficits to pay for their social programs, far larger than anything
we've seen here. Like other Western European countries they're also
accumulating social problems, for example huge increases in crime and
illegitimacy and growing problems of ethnic relations due to relaxation
of their immigration policy. Germany has some of the same problems,
although I think they are doing better in controlling their deficit.
Only time will tell whether welfare state consumer societies have the
resources to turn these problems around or whether they'll just keep
getting worse. For my own part I'm pessimistic.
>You have missed the whole modern trend, do you want to turn the clock
>back to a time of segregation?
If all civil rights laws were repealed you wouldn't go to something like
the situation in Alabama in 1940. For one thing that situation depended
on government enforcement. For another it depended on popular attitudes
which have changed; otherwise you wouldn't have people watching Bill
Cosby and majorities in Congress voting for civil rights legislation.
For yet another the economy has changed to make it far harder to exclude
any group of workers from participation; that's why American workers are
so worried about competition from workers in Hong Kong.
There are possibilities other than thoroughgoing segregation and
thoroughgoing integration. For example, people could do what they find
most productive or feel most comfortable with. I would expect that to
result in something somewhere in between. In the long run in a
competitive economy I would expect efficiency to win out over comfort
when the two clash, by the way.
>Any other strategy [that does not include civil rights laws] would
>Balkanize America.
Was Balkanization more or less of a problem before the sixties, when the
civil rights laws were enacted and the old national origins system of
immigration quotas abolished? The civil rights laws as applied confer
very valuable legal rights on ethnic and other groups and thus have made
a major contribution to the Balkanization of America. Relaxed
immigration policies have no doubt contributed to the problem.
>The creation of a single American Nation on the other hand, which was
>the vision of the founding fathers, requires that all people have equal
>political rights and that you promote those ideas which aim at creating
>a single nation.
The Founding Fathers had a vision of self-government and limited
government power that doesn't seem to mix very well with giving the feds
authority over the personnel policies of every significant institution
in the country.
>It is a fact that one could use these same numbers [on continuing
>economic difficulties of black people] to argue for stronger
>antidiscrimination laws rather than their elimination.
If you have faith that discrimination *must* be the problem you could
certainly do so. My point was that the numbers don't seem to support
the faith. If someone says the problem with the soup is not enough
salt, and I add salt and it doesn't help, I'm inclined to think lack of
salt is not the problem. Someone else might think the solution is
always to keep on adding salt until the soup tastes good.
>First you said that the objective of inclusiveness was the elimination
>of social, economic and other discrimination and now you are arguing
>not only that they have not worked but that they have created a whole
>host of social ills.
So what's the contradiction?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cigar? Toss it in a can, it is so tragic.
From panix!news.eecs.umich.edu!news.sojourn.com!condor.ic.net!news2.acs.oakland.edu!news.tacom.army.mil!ulowell.uml.edu!wang!news.kei.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in2.uu.net!dziuxsolim.rutgers.edu!igor.rutgers.edu!christian Wed Feb 21 18:37:19 EST 1996
Article: 70010 of soc.religion.christian
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Why do you believe?
Date: 18 Feb 1996 23:59:03 -0500
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Brigid writes:
>In 100 words or less, why are you Christian, instead of something else?
I can't think or act without some understanding of the world and my
place in it. Because I am a social animal, the understanding must be
one that I share with other people and reflects more than my own
insights, perceptions and feelings. It also has to explain why the
world is as it is, composed of intellectual and moral as well as
physical realities, and why I am the in-between sort of being I am. It
must cohere internally and guide action in a way that seems to make
sense. Christianity does better on such things than other views.
[Exactly 100 words!]
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cigar? Toss it in a can, it is so tragic.
Do let me know if you have comments of any kind.
Back to my archive of posts.