From panix!not-for-mail Mon Jun 3 07:19:19 EDT 1996
Article: 7595 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Jacobites
Date: 2 Jun 1996 19:15:40 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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References: <4o51b6$cs3@dfw-ixnews10.ix.netcom.com> <4onjs1$spo@news.ios.com> <4orufr$9a2@gerry.cc.keele.ac.uk>
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cla04@cc.keele.ac.uk (Andy Fear) writes:
>: Which leads to the central politcal issue of counter-revolution:
>: How do you "go back" without unleashing the fiends of modernism?
>
>You can't just go back.
As a great philosopher once said, you can't hurry love. I suppose the
presumption has to be that modernism leaves out too much of human
nature, so when it becomes sufficiently debunked, worn out and self-
refuted non-modernism will arise again. It may be possible to whittle
away at obstacles to that process.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Bush saw Sununu swash sub.
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Jun 4 10:58:42 EDT 1996
Article: 56601 of alt.society.conservatism
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.society.conservatism
Subject: Re: Question on "conservatism" faq..
Date: 4 Jun 1996 09:23:16 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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References: <4ovi07$c8l@cronkite.ocis.temple.edu>
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In <4ovi07$c8l@cronkite.ocis.temple.edu> acybriws@thunder.ocis.temple.edu (Adrian Cybriwsky) writes:
>I do consider myself a conservative
Great! Then why not take up the invitation in the introduction:
The conservatism discussed is traditionalist American
conservatism; other varieties are touched on in section 6 and
their adherents are urged to draft additional FAQs.
Since "conservatism" can mean a variety of different things, it's hard
to give a coherent and reasonably specific account of more than one
variety at a time. It's of course possible to comment on how that
variety relates to other things called "conservatism", which is in fact
what the FAQ does. You might be able to do far better. Why not give
it a try and enrich the net?
>Specifically, the authors reliance on the idea of "tradition" as a
>central part in conservatism is utter fancy
Do you believe it unreasonable to call a political outlook that
emphasizes the importance of tradition "conservative"? Would you say
for example that it is utterly fanciful to refer to Edmund Burke as a
conservative?
>and their repeated misuse of the term "theory" belies a juvenile
>understanding of the term.
Please be more specific.
>The main thrust of the faq describes the term "conservative" to virtually
>de facto mean a type of person who holds certain political and
>philosophical views for the most part unique to the United States
If so, the FAQ would still be of use and would not fall short of
anything claimed for it. Nonetheless, if you do an Alta Vista search
with their "link" command you'll see it is not wholly lacking in
interest to people in other countries. It's being translated into
Swedish, for example (although that of course would not show up on an
Alta Vista search).
>Furthermore, even the strawmen arguments brought up supposedly to
>challenge the proposed definition of conservatism are not put to rest
>adequately.
Specifics?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Bush saw Sununu swash sub.
From jk Sun Jun 2 18:44:46 1996
Subject: Re: Is this Neoconservativism?
To: neocon@abdn.ac.uk (neocon)
Date: Sun, 2 Jun 1996 18:44:46 -0400 (EDT)
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I was off tromping around Valley Forge with some boy scouts, so couldn't
respond to Francesca's comments until now. Ever onward:
>He is not laying down an agenda for a liberal state.
He seems to set forth principles of a generality not far from John
Rawls describing what sorts of coercion are justified and indeed
required.
For him coercion is justified to enforce property rights (the definition
of which he seems to consider untainted by "moral ignorance"), to
enforce overlapping and clearly correct views of the good (even though
he says there may be reasonable inconsistent views!), and to advance
"social justice", defined as an end-state requirement on the
distribution of goods additional to the process requirement libertarians
recognize and somehow independent of comprehensive views. I'm not sure
why that doesn't give rise to a rather clear agenda, or why it's
anything but liberal. I find his manner of reasoning strongly
reminiscent of the sort of thing Rawls and Ronald Dworkin do.
>He is posing a middle ground between the libertarian urge to give
>institutions over the market (the destructive consequences of which can
>be seen in British universities) and the socialist and conservative
>idea that a new consensus can be formed around the conception of
>'communitarian' values.
It seems to me he attempts to split the difference between ideological
liberals and ideological libertarians. He and both of them are as one
in their attitude to communitarians. So it's not a middle ground
between something else and communitarianism.
>It is thereby posited that health is a good, but not any particular
>type. Catholics could use their vouchers in hospitals where no
>abortions are performed; Humanists could use their vouchers to get
>themselves euthanasied; Christian scientists could eat their vouchers.
The claim that even though we don't agree about what's good and evil,
and it's forbidden to enact contested conceptions of the good, we can
still agree to set up a scheme of healthcare, education and income
redistribution (or for that matter property rights) puzzles me.
His reason for saying coercion is just on these points is that almost
everyone agrees they are good things, and are clearly right in so
agreeing. That might be so when you say something vague like "health"
or "diffused well-being", but any actual system will have to make
decisions with which reasonable men will vehemently disagree for
fundamental moral reasons. So I do not see how there could be an
actual system that would not be unjustly coercive on his view. He
says:
There will therefore be cases ..where, in putting its view into
effect, the state directly or indirectly coerces people to do other
than they would choose on the basis of their comprehensive view.
Given its moral ignorance, it seems unlikely that government would
even grounds to believe it better that those coerced do what it
requires rather than what they would choose.
Nonetheless, for him Christian Scientists are supposed to put their
beliefs aside and pay taxes funding drugs and surgery; Roman Catholics
are supposed to do the same and view social institutions as just that
force them to pay for abortion and euthenasia. People who think the
redistributive welfare state, especially the generous redistributive
welfare state that on principle ignores the moral quality of its
beneficiaries' acts, necessarily reduces both personal responsibility
and family and local community functionality are supposed to wipe that
thought out of their heads. People who think the market maximizes
consumer well-being are supposed to ignore all the suffering and death
that in their view would result in the long run from government funding
and therefore government control of health care. If the funding and
control had been established 200 years ago medicine wouldn't have
advanced nearly as much, such people might say, so the long-term result
of enlightened views would have been increased misery. Why think the
future will be different from the past in that respect? So it turns
out he is quite happy to coerce people to do other than they would on
the basis of their comprehensive views.
>Marenbon is not advocating an hypothetical liberal society, but
>suggesting a policy for action within the pluralistic society within we
>already live. He notes that British society has been pluralistic at
>least since the eighteenth century, and suggests, in a footnote, that
>the Middle Ages were perhaps much more pluralistic than some historians
>or philosophers have imagined (he has written three books about
>mediaeval philosophy/theology).
I'm sure there's a great deal of pluralism at all times and places.
>From what you tell me of his scholarly work he might not disagree. So
if as you say he's suggesting a policy for dealing with a particular
pluralistic situation I'm not sure that casting the suggestion in the
form of abstract moral theory resulting in specification of necessary
and sufficient conditions for coercion based on the nature of pluralism
as such makes sense.
>We act all the time, on vaguely defined or half-understood principles -
>that is, on the basis of experience and common sense.
That's not at all the sort of thing to which he appeals.
>> His principle seems to be that if it's known what should be done the
>> government should see that it happens. Why presume the wisdom and
>> virtue of government?
>
>The opposite is the case. He speaks repeatedly, I'm sure in the
>sections which I cited, of the 'moral ignorance' of government.
His principle as I stated it is a conditional. He thinks the condition
is satisfied in many important cases. For example, he believe that even
if everyone is hopelessly divided in their comprehensive views the
government will be able to define and enforce property and contractual
rights
and it would redistribute money in accord with social justice.
There would be progressive taxation and a generous basic minimum
income.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Bush saw Sununu swash sub.
From jk Mon Jun 3 10:00:30 1996
Subject: Re: Is this Neoconservativism?
To: neocon@abdn.ac.uk (neocon)
Date: Mon, 3 Jun 1996 10:00:30 -0400 (EDT)
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I had said
> People who think the market maximizes consumer well-being are
> supposed to ignore all the suffering and death that in their view
> would result in the long run from government funding and therefore
> government control of health care. If the funding and control had
> been established 200 years ago medicine wouldn't have advanced nearly
> as much, such people might say, so the long-term result of
> enlightened views would have been increased misery.
That's not good enough as a criticism of a voucher scheme. On the face
of it, if 200 years ago the government had started requiring people to
spend a certain amount of money on health care or insurance medicine
might well have advanced *more* than it has. So a lot more would have
to be said to make this kind of point. E.g., one might say there would
have to be a lot of government supervision to make sure the "health
care" is really health care rather than vacations in Hawaii and meals
in fancy restaurants (both might be thought salubrious, especially if
"emotional well-being" counts as "health"), and that once government
gets involved in supervising how its money is going to be spent the
temptation to supervise more and more specifics will be irresistible.
Or one might say that the same presumption of individual incompetence
that leads the government to insist that people spend part of their
guaranteed income on health will lead them equally to insist that they
spend it wisely (as determined by the government), etc.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Bush saw Sununu swash sub.
From panix!not-for-mail Thu Jun 6 05:38:17 EDT 1996
Article: 56601 of alt.society.conservatism
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.society.conservatism
Subject: Re: Question on "conservatism" faq..
Date: 4 Jun 1996 09:23:16 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 49
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References: <4ovi07$c8l@cronkite.ocis.temple.edu>
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In <4ovi07$c8l@cronkite.ocis.temple.edu> acybriws@thunder.ocis.temple.edu (Adrian Cybriwsky) writes:
>I do consider myself a conservative
Great! Then why not take up the invitation in the introduction:
The conservatism discussed is traditionalist American
conservatism; other varieties are touched on in section 6 and
their adherents are urged to draft additional FAQs.
Since "conservatism" can mean a variety of different things, it's hard
to give a coherent and reasonably specific account of more than one
variety at a time. It's of course possible to comment on how that
variety relates to other things called "conservatism", which is in fact
what the FAQ does. You might be able to do far better. Why not give
it a try and enrich the net?
>Specifically, the authors reliance on the idea of "tradition" as a
>central part in conservatism is utter fancy
Do you believe it unreasonable to call a political outlook that
emphasizes the importance of tradition "conservative"? Would you say
for example that it is utterly fanciful to refer to Edmund Burke as a
conservative?
>and their repeated misuse of the term "theory" belies a juvenile
>understanding of the term.
Please be more specific.
>The main thrust of the faq describes the term "conservative" to virtually
>de facto mean a type of person who holds certain political and
>philosophical views for the most part unique to the United States
If so, the FAQ would still be of use and would not fall short of
anything claimed for it. Nonetheless, if you do an Alta Vista search
with their "link" command you'll see it is not wholly lacking in
interest to people in other countries. It's being translated into
Swedish, for example (although that of course would not show up on an
Alta Vista search).
>Furthermore, even the strawmen arguments brought up supposedly to
>challenge the proposed definition of conservatism are not put to rest
>adequately.
Specifics?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Bush saw Sununu swash sub.
From panix!not-for-mail Fri Jun 7 06:39:39 EDT 1996
Article: 7626 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: A Refutation of Conservatism, Part 1
Date: 6 Jun 1996 13:11:15 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 54
Message-ID: <4p73fj$fqd@panix.com>
References:
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suo@execpc.com (Frank Suo) writes:
>The reliance on tradition is subject to an obvious and fatal flaw.
>Nearly every improvement in the human condition, every increase in
>human knowledge, every advance in every field of study has involved a
>break with tradition.
A tradition is simply a system of attitudes, presumptions, beliefs,
habits, and institutions, some of which are always inarticulate, that is
passed down. So every field of study has its traditions and is part of
larger traditions.
An advance in a field comes from developing or changing tradition in
some respect while holding to it in most. That's why advances are most
often made by those who have mastered "the field" (meaning the tradition
of the field) and are in touch with what other workers in the field are
doing. That's also why people normally become scientists, scholars,
musicians or whatever by a sort of apprenticeship -- a lot of what they
have to know consists of things that can't be explicitly stated and are
best passed on by personal contact. I should add that if the advances
were not incorporated in a tradition they could not be useable to those
who follow.
>Meteorology broke with religious traditions, which held that storms
>were sent by gods, deities, spirits, or any witch who happened to be
>available for public burning.
This and the other examples you give are extraordinarily oversimplified
and foreshortened. It's as if someone said "NFL football broke with
jousting". Meteorology like other modern sciences has a long history
and therefore a long tradition. Aristotle's treatise on meteorology,
for example, may have had its problems but it didn't attribute storms to
the local witch who looked most combustible.
>Politics and morals are not the only things learned by experience and
>imitation. The entire body of human knowledge has been accumulated that
>way.
Agreed. Note that that experience and imitation are processes that can
not be made wholly explicit or rational.
>Tradition contains no mechanism of sorting the true from the false, the
>successful from the failed or the helpful from the harmful. That
>sorting process is accomplished by the Scientific Method.
It sounds almost as if you were saying that the Scientific Method sprang
into existence out of nothing in early modern times, before which there
was no way for knowledge or the arts to advance beyond utter ignorance
and incapacity, and that even today there is no better or worse
regarding things to which the Scientific Method is not applicable such
as morals and aesthetics. Surely that's not what you believe.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Bush saw Sununu swash sub.
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Jun 9 19:00:29 EDT 1996
Article: 7676 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: EU and Naziism
Date: 9 Jun 1996 19:00:04 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 16
Message-ID: <4pfl1k$5ts@panix.com>
References: <4pbdr8$a4b@gerry.cc.keele.ac.uk> <12974382wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <12974382wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> rafael cardenas writes:
>labour is _prevented_, with increasing restrictions from both the EU
>and other national governments, from going where capital goes: that
>way, capital can play one lot of labourers against another, and force
>down working conditions everywhere as far as it can.
I find it hard to imagine how this would work. How could a capitalist
be benefited by restrictions on the labor he could hire to work in the
rubber reclamation plant he plans to construct adjacent to Swarfmire
College? I would think he would prefer the freedom to import laborers
>from Pakistan if he thought that would be cheaper than hiring
moonlighting faculty.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Ed, I saw Harpo Marx ram Oprah W. aside.
From jk Wed May 1 20:49:34 1996
Subject: Re: Roger Scruton's skeptical piety
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Wed, 1 May 1996 20:49:34 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960501224650.006891fc@swva.net> from "seth williamson" at May 1, 96 06:46:50 pm
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Seth Williamson:
> Well, it seems that he's nostalgic for a state of affairs in
> which religion played a certain atmospheric role and little else.
He's nostalgic for it, but the restoration of that state of affairs is
not his proposal which is for a this-worldly piety. (I don't think it
works either.)
> A church that lent a certain
> civilized +tone+ to its surroundings, but which issued no
> challenges to the society around it, which made few demands on
> individuals. And which was a scandal or affront to no one.
He thinks all that's dead. He wants more than a tone, definitely
demands on individuals. No challenges to society or scandals, since
you need something that transcends man's traditions to give us that and
that's not something Scruton thinks is publicly available today. The
culture of one's own people is the most he thinks we have access to,
and since it's bigger than us, makes it what we are and tells us what's
good and bad, he thinks in some ways it can act as a substitute for
God.
I think a better comparison than Barbara Pym is Irving Babbitt and his
notion of the inner check, another attempt to find something that
serves the moral role of religion in establishing a standard that
trumps impulse without however being religion. Babbitt was a different
sort of thinker than Scruton. Far more masculine, if no one gets angry
with me for saying that. More determined and indifferent to feeling
and to what other people think. Scruton seems to analyze his inner
life to pieces, and has no good defense against what other people think
and say and feel, which drops immediately to the core of his being.
> I still don't really know the nature of
> his problem with religion. You said something about it being
> aesthetically unacceptable to him. His guiding assumption
> looks--to me, anyway--quite naive, namely, that the actual
> +content+ of the Christian story is by definition unbelievable to
> modern people. I don't want to minimize the difficulties of
> having faith in the late 20th century, which are truly a cross
> for many, but this assumption of his strikes me as facile.
To be honest, I know very little of the man or his views. The essay
made an impression on me though, because I thought I recognized in it
things that I see to some extent in myself and far more in certain
people I know. My impression, true or false, is that he experiences
his own beliefs not as logical conclusions from anything but as a
resultant of feelings, perceptions and attitudes that have difficulty
attaining stability if they are not echoed and supported by the people
around him that he respects or otherwise must take seriously. So for
*him* it's very difficult to believe in things that are very different
from what his class believes in. To the extent he does so he gets an
exaggerated feeling that he's set himself against other people that he
finds difficult although he also bases his view of himself on it.
Enough theorizing about Roger Scruton, though. If the foregoing makes
sense of the essay, fine, otherwise it's probably not worth worrying
about.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: "Do nine men interpret?" "Nine men," I nod.
From jk Thu May 2 07:08:20 1996
Subject: Re: Roger Scruton's skeptical piety
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Thu, 2 May 1996 07:08:20 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960502092614.006b8004@swva.net> from "seth williamson" at May 2, 96 05:26:14 am
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Seth Williamson:
> But how can Scruton have missed the fact, obvious to all who take the
> time to investigate, that it still has a green and incredibly vital
> and potent center? One suspects that he has missed something that's
> right under his nose.
Christianity is too much of a scandal today. It's difficult for him to
take something seriously that is rejected by the traditions
authoritative in his social world. It's a matter of how his mind works
-- his way of apprehending the world is overly social and aesthetic.
Or such is my theory of the man.
> >I think a better comparison than Barbara Pym is Irving Babbitt and his
> >notion of the inner check, another attempt to find something that
> >serves the moral role of religion in establishing a standard that
> >trumps impulse without however being religion.
>
> I guess Confucianism fits the bill, right?
Babbitt liked Confucius, of course. Nonetheless, there are different
forms of Confucianism. I think the views of Confucius himself depended
on his conception of Heaven which had some similarities to the
Christian God (Heaven was personal, at least to the extent of having
intentions, it was active in history, it revealed itself through sages
and through tradition). Later Confucianism became more positive in
Babbitt's sense -- less supernatural. As a practical matter I think it
could become more positive because there arose a bureaucratized
imperial despotism to do most of the work of keeping people in line and
because it became the outlook of men who were well-placed and
propertied and so did not have to base of their understanding of
themselves on it so much.
> One of my old major professors (of Western intellectual
> history) sees Babbitt as a major thinker and very attractive. I am
> still ignorant of most everything he wrote.
Try his book on Rousseau (really on romanticism in general). It even
has the inner check in it.
> I guess this is what puzzles me about the man. Most of the
> conservatives I know are used to being loners and outsiders in the
> intellectual and cultural milieus they inhabit.
Not everyone is all of a piece. Someone who reacted to things
aesthetically might want to distinguish himself by being different but
want to be viewed as "distinguished" so he couldn't be too different.
He might find the notion of becoming a fundie (I'm using "fundie" as
Bp. Spong might use it, to mean "partisan of actual Christianity")
sectarian and crude from the standpoint of Mainstream Western Culture
and therefore not believable, but also find W.C. as it now officially
exists unacceptable because of serious internal problems.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: "Do nine men interpret?" "Nine men," I nod.
From jk Thu May 2 07:12:13 1996
Subject: Re: Atlanta Olympic Capers
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Thu, 2 May 1996 07:12:13 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960502092610.006aca60@swva.net> from "seth williamson" at May 2, 96 05:26:10 am
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Seth writes:
> But they are so far unwilling publicly to condemn most of the
> organizations who promulgate the very moral standards they revile. They
> +will+ attack certain Fundamentalist churches or preachers or at
> least hold them up to ridicule. But they are so far unwilling openly
> to concede that anybody who is a believing and serious and consistent
> catholic MUST regard homosexual behavior as repugnant and radically
> wrong.
> It is "bigotted," for example, to "discriminate" against
> homosexuals, but they are reluctant to confess out loud that the
> great majority of churches in this country teach that Christians are
> +obliged+ to make distinctions like this. One senses they're only
> biding their time until they feel they're powerful enough.
If they attach the fundies and support the progressives in the
mainstream churches they think they'll bring the mainstream churches
around, who'll then be an educating agent in bringing the bulk of the
conservative public around. They are confident that history is on
their side.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: "Do nine men interpret?" "Nine men," I nod.
From jk Thu May 2 12:48:23 1996
Subject: Re: Roger Scruton's skeptical piety
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Thu, 2 May 1996 12:48:23 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy" at May 2, 96 02:09:56 pm
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> > It's difficult for him to take something seriously that is rejected
> > by the traditions authoritative in his social world. It's a matter
> > of how his mind works -- his way of apprehending the world is
> > overly social and aesthetic.
> His way of apprehending the world is too ideological. I don't think
> he really does feel like an insider in his social world.
> He desperately wants to belong to the upper class - fox hunts, etc -
> but can't quite join. In many ways, he is not so much a conservative
> addicted to outsider status as a nonbelonger who wants to belong.
How does all that show an ideological outlook or one that is
indifferent to social and aesthetic matters and traditions
authoritative in his social world (that is, in the part of his social
surroundings that he views as the bearer of authority)?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: "Do nine men interpret?" "Nine men," I nod.
From jk Fri May 3 14:31:39 1996
Subject: Re: The High Places
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Fri, 3 May 1996 14:31:39 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <14301034@prancer.Dartmouth.EDU> from "Gregory D. Wadlinger" at May 3, 96 01:16:29 pm
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Status: RO
Greg Wadlinger writes:
> If you've ever seen a candlestand with rows and columns of little
> red-glass-surrounded stubby candles in front of an icon of Mary, and
> you see someone kneel down on the kneeler attached to the
> candlestand, and you see someone light one or more of those candles,
> the lighting of the candles stands for prayer.
I always thought of the lighting of the candle as one of the gestures
of prayer, like going into a place set aside for the purpose, kneeling,
closing the eyes or saying "amen". When someone kneels I think the
kneeling also stands for prayer in the same way.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: "Do nine men interpret?" "Nine men," I nod.
From jk Sat May 4 06:37:42 1996
Subject: Re: The High Places
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Sat, 4 May 1996 06:37:42 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <14332372@prancer.Dartmouth.EDU> from "Gregory D. Wadlinger" at May 4, 96 06:03:42 am
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Thus Greg:
> The lighted candles represent current or ongoing prayer
> concerns.
Sometimes when I meet someone and have a conversation with him I shake
hands. In fact, sometimes when I'm in a hurry or don't have anything
specific to say I just shake hands and say "Hi Joe." The handshaking
represents friendly personal contact, respect, trust, etc. Should I
get rid of it because it's a substitute for real communication?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: "Do nine men interpret?" "Nine men," I nod.
From jk Sat May 4 09:56:08 1996
Subject: Re: The High Places
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Sat, 4 May 1996 09:56:08 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <14332631@prancer.Dartmouth.EDU> from "Gregory D. Wadlinger" at May 4, 96 06:43:58 am
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Greg writes:
> Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That should cover
> justifying your handshake effort with Joe.
Would you prefer there were no handshakes, because then people would
pay more attention to real communication? Is is simply wrong to think
that nonverbal gestures help people pay attention to each other with
the appropriate attitude? Why are words so special? God knows what we
need better than we do anyway.
Another example: Would it be silly for a principal of a school to
think he could increase attention to the substance of education by
establishing formalities like school uniforms, a custom of teachers and
students addressing each other as "Mr." instead of nicknames or grunts,
and so on?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: "Do nine men interpret?" "Nine men," I nod.
From jk Sat May 4 10:05:53 1996
Subject: Re: The High Places
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Sat, 4 May 1996 10:05:53 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <14332647@prancer.Dartmouth.EDU> from "Gregory D. Wadlinger" at May 4, 96 06:52:25 am
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Greg W. writes:
> Why does the candle stay lit after the pray-er has left?
It's something like a keepsake. When I get a Christmas card from
someone I don't necessarily throw it away immediately even if I don't
particularly like how it looks and am not likely to do anything further
with it. The object makes concrete to me my connection to the sender.
Even when I'm not looking at it or thinking about it the knowledge at
the back of my mind that I received it and still have it has something
of an effect.
How do you feel about leaving flowers at a grave?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: "Do nine men interpret?" "Nine men," I nod.
From jk Sat May 4 10:28:35 1996
Subject: Re: The High Places
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Sat, 4 May 1996 10:28:35 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960504132806.006aa108@swva.net> from "seth williamson" at May 4, 96 09:28:06 am
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Seth writes:
> Although, I note that you say you're father claimed the
> candles "represent" prayer. This is not quite the same as saying
> they ARE prayer, which I believe was your original claim.
Is making a certain sequence of noises a prayer? Like lighting a
candle that action in itself is a physical process that I suppose one
can't say IS prayer.
Maybe protestants tend to think language narrowly construed to leave
out "the language of gesture" is uniquely qualified to be a vehicle for
the spirit while catholics are more catholic on the point. If that's
right, then Seth should no doubt accuse Greg of "logocentrism".
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: "Do nine men interpret?" "Nine men," I nod.
From jk Mon May 6 06:14:06 1996
Subject: Re: The High Places
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Mon, 6 May 1996 06:14:06 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy" at May 4, 96 03:59:42 pm
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Francesca:
> Jim has perhaps been reading O'Leary.
O'Leary?
> Old fashioned Catholic apologetics always described the Reformation
> as a form of irrationalism - with the nominalism and so forth.
> Perhaps it could equally well be defined in terms of a departure in
> to rationalism, an insistence that everything must be intellectually
> and verbally clear.
The two are the same. If you try to make everything utterly clear and
explicit you will find that your language does not refer and your
justifications are arbitrary. Language is part of something larger
that we just have to trust.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Golf? No sir, prefer prison-flog.
From jk Mon May 6 08:00:10 1996
Subject: Re: The High Places
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Mon, 6 May 1996 08:00:10 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <14403264@prancer.Dartmouth.EDU> from "Gregory D. Wadlinger" at May 6, 96 07:20:56 am
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Greg:
> The Quakers have nothing. They sit on bare chairs in a circle.
> That is as symbolical as a baroque cathedral.
> --- end of quoted material ---
> I would say it's more a rebellion against symbolism, and "it" would take
> umbrage at being called symbolism if it were a person.
"It" would have good reason to be touchy on the subject. Man is
necessarily a symbolizing animal. There *do* exist Quaker styles, and
those styles symbolize something. If as you say they symbolize
rebellion against symbolism as such, then that's their problem. If
they symbolize consciousness that the thing sybolized exceeds any
possible symbol, then of course there may be something to it.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Golf? No sir, prefer prison-flog.
From jk Mon May 6 15:54:03 1996
Subject: Re: The High Places
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Mon, 6 May 1996 15:54:03 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: jk (Jim Kalb)
In-Reply-To: <199605061734.AA22097@aplo1.spd.dsccc.com> from "Tom George" at May 6, 96 12:34:11 pm
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Tom George writes:
> In case I have missed it, are there any of these non-verbal prayers in
> the Bible? When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, He
> said some words. But I do not think He was being "intellectualistic
> and rationalistic".
There was some non-verbal stuff he did the night before he died that he
said we should do as well. He didn't call it "prayer", but it's become
part of worship. Or am I confusing threads?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Golf? No sir, prefer prison-flog.
From jk Tue May 7 06:48:18 1996
Subject: Re: The High Places
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Tue, 7 May 1996 06:48:18 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <14469472@prancer.Dartmouth.EDU> from "Gregory D. Wadlinger" at May 7, 96 06:14:48 am
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Greg suggests:
> Check out Romans 8:26.
More non-verbal prayer. I thought of mentioning it, but the Lord's
Supper and footwashing were more concrete examples of non-verbal things
legitimately done (I suppose all will agree) as part of worship.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Golf? No sir, prefer prison-flog.
From jk Tue May 7 13:23:35 1996
Subject: Re: non-verbal prayer
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Tue, 7 May 1996 13:23:35 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <199605071639.AA23015@aplo1.spd.dsccc.com> from "Tom George" at May 7, 96 11:39:28 am
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Tom G. says:
> > > It is curiously intellectualistic and rationalistic to insist
> > > that you can only pray verbally - you can only approach God
> > > through things your mind does, and not through things your body
> > > does.
> I am still skeptical of this idea of non-verbal prayer. Granted that
> there are any number of commendable activities that don't involve
> saying words. But I don't see why there is this push to call them
> prayer, and to say that it is "curiously intellectualistic and
> rationalistic" to resist diluting the language in such a manner.
Francesca appears to be using the word "pray" figuratively, to cover
all things that we do simply because they help us approach God. I
assume we all agree that those things include saying the Lord's prayer
and taking Communion with appropriate intention. The issue is whether
lighting candles and other Romish mummeries are also included. For my
own part, I don't see why not.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Golf? No sir, prefer prison-flog.
From jk Wed May 15 21:01:38 1996
Subject: Re: your mail
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Wed, 15 May 1996 21:01:38 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960515210522.0068c76c@swva.net> from "seth williamson" at May 15, 96 05:05:22 pm
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Seth Williamson writes:
>It seems to me that conservatives in general have consistently
>underestimated two things:
>
>a) the size of the job in reclaiming our culture from the current
>liberal hegemony, and
>
>b) the effectiveness of politics as a means of accomplishing that
>renewal.
It's a problem. Conservatism is based mostly on a feeling that one's
society is based on certain political and moral realities that are
settled and could not conceivably be rejected. It's also based on a
willingness to trust established institutions. So when the institutions
themselves reject the realities while retaining the old form and
language it's very difficult for conservatives to respond effectively.
When they become somewhat aware of what's going on their inclination is
to think it can't be real and will go away of itself or to view it as an
aberration that can be removed by straightforward administrative or
political action.
>The so-called "firebrand" Newt Gingrich couldn't even work up the nerve
>to dismantle a massively unpopular aspect of the liberal state like
>race and sex quotas when he had his brief window of opportunity.
"Liberal" has become a term of opprobrium, and people don't trust what
their betters tell them. Nonetheless, liberalism retains the power to
define "extremism" because for the average American no alternative
point of view is available that has nearly the comprehensiveness, self-
assurance and support from established authority. It's impossible
without a lot of work to feel comfortable in a position that's really
at odds with liberalism, and Americans like comfort and don't like
intellectual work.
>Before we can make the streets safe again, we have to instill again in
>Americans a vivid sense that right and wrong proceed from a
>transcendent order and not from their own momentary appetites. And we
>can't do that until we re-evangelize this pagan nation.
> I'm not suggesting that conservatives become quiescent
>politically.
The implication does seem though to be that the political problems
result from other problems that are far more serious. It's as if
someone were having career problems because he was sliding into
insanity. So at present it seems that the best thing we can do
politically is not so much try to win elections as deal with the other
problems and try to make clear to people just what our political
situation is.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Live not on evil, madam, live not on evil.
From jk Thu May 16 13:37:36 1996
Subject: Re: The utility of politics
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Thu, 16 May 1996 13:37:36 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy" at May 16, 96 03:08:52 pm
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Seth W:
> > It puts conservatives in the position of being revolutionaries
> > against the established order, doesn't it? Uncomfortable indeed.
> > Nevertheless, it has happened before in this nation, at the very founding.
>
> Francesca
>
> Kolnai says in his Memoir that America can never be conservative,
> because it begins from scratch with a revolution.
It's a puzzling situation. American conservatism has usually viewed
the Founding as a once-for-always event. That's been sufficient as a
basis for opposition to the modern managerial state, and so for most
conservative purposes. In particular it makes it possible to demand
the truly radical changes that would be needed to bring about a society
in which the Left is not institutionalized.
One difficulty is that the principles of the Founding themselves seem
at least somewhat anti-conservative. So another approach that some
intellectuals have promoted has been to play up a conservative
interpretation of those principles, to claim that it was a case of the
Americans holding to older common-law views, not to mention their own
particularisms, and not going along with the revolutionary English
doctrine of imperial parliamentary absolutism.
> 1) I have been told that Rush put Newt Gingrich and his followers
> into office.
It's believable.
> 2) Do you not have any conservative Newspaper proprietors?
There aren't many individual proprietors, they're mostly chains. Also,
the professionalization of journalism has made it hard for a proprietor
to have all that much effect on anything except maybe the lead
editorial on the days that happens to be the thing he's paying
attention to. It's the collective outlook of the class of journalists
that determines coverage and slant, and that outlook is liberal.
Thirty years ago there were still conservative big-city papers (the
Chicago _Tribune_ or Los Angeles _Times_), but no more.
> Getting into politics means usually means playing the liberals' game,
> and doing it less well than they do.
Still, when the government claims the power and obligation to remake
all of social life politics can't be avoided.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Live not on evil, madam, live not on evil.
From jk Fri May 17 11:13:45 1996
Subject: Re: The utility of politics
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Fri, 17 May 1996 11:13:45 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy" at May 17, 96 10:53:28 am
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Kolnai said:
> ...The original sin of American democracy did not lie in Hamilton's
> defeat by Jefferson and the crushing of the Whigs by Jackson but had
> been inherent in the primal gesture of the Rebellion and its 'New
> World' programme and messianic pretension as such. ..No doubt, an
> overseas colony may prefer to achieve her complete independence. But
> is difficult to abuse King George the Third as a 'tyrannt' unless you
> resort to some more ambitious, more subversive and sweeping
> conception of 'liberty', in whose context the appellation may appear
> justified."
It's a problem. I suppose such gestures can be reinterpreted,
relativized to something else, etc. but it's uphill unless a lot of
other things are pointing the same way. Again, the best I've seen is
that the tyranny consisted in the assertion of Parliamentary
omnipotence in contradiction to the older view (Lord Coke's, for
example) that the common law was superior. Tyranny, after all,
consists in arbitrary power. The actual theory of the Declaration
would then have to be treated as rhetorical excess.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Live not on evil, madam, live not on evil.
From jk Fri May 17 15:38:02 1996
Subject: Re: The utility of politics
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Fri, 17 May 1996 15:38:02 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy" at May 17, 96 04:31:48 pm
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Francesca
> But I think it is true there is that ineliminable republican element
> in American conservativism - I know the South did the best job of
> washing it out.
Why is republicanism necessarily revolutionary or antitraditional?
Tradition has no monarch or even strict hierarchy. Chesterton referred
to it I think as the democracy of the dead.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Live not on evil, madam, live not on evil.
From jk Fri May 17 21:40:28 1996
Subject: Re: The utility of politics
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Fri, 17 May 1996 21:40:28 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960518002211.00697e00@swva.net> from "seth williamson" at May 17, 96 08:22:11 pm
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Seth W:
>>One difficulty is that the principles of the Founding themselves seem
>>at least somewhat anti-conservative.
>
> Which ones?
Direct recurrence to equality, inalienable pre-social rights and the
consent of the people explicitly given as the basis for government, and
protection of rights such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
as the purpose of government. It seems that political society is
conceived as an instrument contrived by agreement among individuals to
protect them in pursuing whatever goals they happen to have. That's
what I get out of the Declaration anyway. "Prudence, indeed, will
dictate" that you don't recur to first principles often, but doing so
is a judgement call that in principle is not troublesome.
>>So another approach that some intellectuals have promoted has been to
>>play up a conservative interpretation of those principles, to claim
>>that it was a case of the Americans holding to older common-law
>>views, not to mention their own particularisms, and not going along
>>with the revolutionary English doctrine of imperial parliamentary
>>absolutism.
>
> But this is not so very much of a stretch, is it?
My impression is that the colonial position started out that way at
least for many men but then developed and became more radical. The
Declaration for example complains about the King rather than Parliament
and bases itself on universal principles rather than common law.
>If it's true that America is "founded on a proposition," then it's a
>new thing under the sun and to that extent revolutionary.
Novus ordo seclorum, or so they said at the time. Also, it would be
terribly difficult to make an interpretation of America politically
effective that doesn't accept the outcome of the 1861-1865 war and the
victor's interpretation of that war. Anything is possible, I suppose,
and we should do our best even if it's uphill, but uphill it is.
>I would disagree with Jim Kalb on this matter, or refine what he said,
>by noting that it's possible, if tremendously difficult, for ownership
>to force journalists to produce a more balanced product. They've done
>it at the Washington Times. But it's like trying to keep a rubber band
>in an odd shape: it requires continuous force.
True enough. How many owners are sufficiently determined, though? If
someone has a ton of money and owns a newspaper the next thing he's
going to want is the respect and admiration of well-placed people, and
he's not going to get it by putting out a right-wing rag.
>>That is what conservativism is. It has to do with the 'real assents'
>>of daily life and not the fantasy and sound bites of politics.
Therefore it's against nature for conservatives to have much influence
among people whose position depends on the importance of the ability to
stack imagery and information. That's why it seems doubtful to me that
changes in ownership or personnel can do much to reform the media. Seth
mentions the Washington _Times_. How much influence does it have? For
that matter, do Sam Francis' friends think it has succeeded in being all
that conservative?
>"Messianic pretension"? Where do we find this as a prominent strain
>among the Founders? They strike me as being among the most hard-headed
>men you could ever meet.
His point seems to be that it's implicit in what they did, in
establishing what they thought was a novus ordo seclorum. _The
Federalist_ is certainly hard-headed, but it appears they view the
construction of governments as a science they hope to demonstrate to
the world so that others can do the same. Also, messianism keeps
popping up in America which strengthens the feeling that it has some
essential connection to the sort of polity the Founders established.
(Incidentally, if the view is that the War for Independence was
fundamentally conservative shouldn't we come up with some expression
other than "Founders"?)
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Live not on evil, madam, live not on evil.
From jk Sat May 18 17:24:55 1996
Subject: Re: The utility of politics
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Sat, 18 May 1996 17:24:55 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy" at May 18, 96 06:20:57 pm
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> > Why is republicanism necessarily revolutionary or antitraditional?
> > Tradition has no monarch or even strict hierarchy. Chesterton referred
> > to it I think as the democracy of the dead.
Francesca:
> By republican, I meant failure to respect the Monarchial and Aristocratic
> principle.
I simply meant constitutional rule without a monarch. That doesn't
mean no social differences.
> In practice, you will have a hard time keeping a tradition going without
> any sort of hierarchy.
Of course. I meant only that the hierarchy didn't have to have a
formal definition or single apex.
> I waiver to few in my admiration for GKC, but his politics were completely
> impractical, and he had very little (conservative) sense of original sin.
I don't think the phrase has to be understood as supporting political
or social egalitarianism. Aphorisms do not state the whole truth. The
way tradition develops means it can draw on the experience,
aspirations, etc. of all sorts and conditions of men far better than a
formal process managed and therefore manipulated from some center. A
paradoxical way of making that point is to say that it is more
democratic than democracy.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Live not on evil, madam, live not on evil.
From jk Sun May 19 18:32:11 1996
Subject: Re: The utility of politics
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Sun, 19 May 1996 18:32:11 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960519172105.006bbc08@swva.net> from "seth williamson" at May 19, 96 01:21:05 pm
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>>Direct recurrence to equality, inalienable pre-social rights and the
>>consent of the people explicitly given as the basis for government, and
>>protection of rights such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
>>as the purpose of government. It seems that political society is
>>conceived as an instrument contrived by agreement among individuals to
>>protect them in pursuing whatever goals they happen to have. That's
>>what I get out of the Declaration anyway. "Prudence, indeed, will
>>dictate" that you don't recur to first principles often, but doing so
>>is a judgement call that in principle is not troublesome.
Seth W:
> My quibble would be whether or not these things constitute
>something revolutionary or anti-conservative in our own history. In
>Europe, sure. But we never had a true landed aristocracy or native
>royalty here. It was a country of smallholders and yeoman farmers and
>mechanics from day one. It seems to me that these Lockean and
>Enlightenment notions constitute something like our received political
>culture.
I'm not sure of the distinction between what you say here and what you
said to Russell Kirk, that some sort of liberalism is at the heart of
the American political character.
One can of course speak of a liberal tradition, or the tradition of the
Enlightenment. In fact, neither liberalism nor Enlightenment thought
could exist apart from their specific traditions. That is the
contradiction at their heart, since they deny the authority of tradition
in favor of that of a supposed universal reason accessible to all and
capable of answering the main substantive political and moral questions.
Is there a similar contradiction at the heart of America?
I'm not sure royalty and landed aristocracy are the sole alternative to
Lockean and Enlightenment notions. It seems to me that what's lacking
in L. and E. notions, and in the political outlook I described, is the
notion of a substantive common good that does not reduce to the
arbitrarily chosen goals of particular individuals. I can understand
how the latter notion in effect implies conservatism, since it can be
developed, refined and made concrete only through common traditions that
people feel are more authoritative than private reason because they are
among the things that constitute their own identities. But does it
really imply royalty and aristocracy of the European type?
>If I were a betting man I'd say we are pretty much on course to be
>conquered by another civilization which actually believes in its
>founding principles. And then the whole question will be moot, won't
>it?
What civilization is that? My own bet would be in favor of radical
dissolution of civil society, regrouping on tribal-religious lines, and
despotism as the overall principle of political organization. It'll be
a while before there's a new civilization. (I've been boring people on
the subject for weeks on Francesca's list.)
>to the emphasis on freedom in Centensimus Annus, which, Jim, is
>different from the liberal conception of freedom ;)
I would expect so. One's conception of freedom follows from his
conception of man and the good. +:-)
(The next message will have a new palindrome.)
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Live not on evil, madam, live not on evil.
From jk Mon May 20 15:34:07 1996
Subject: Re: The utility of politics
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Mon, 20 May 1996 15:34:07 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy" at May 20, 96 04:41:47 pm
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Francesca:
> They didn't just despise trade, they despised 'knowledge' and being
> 'competent'.
Confucius: "A gentleman is not an implement."
> I don't know if you can have an idea of the best life, humanly
> speaking, without having a 'heroic class' who sum it up. Eg the
> Benedictines in Mediaeval Europe.
That seems right. I suppose in America we have had Jefferson's yeoman
farmers, and there have been recent attempts to make entrepreneurs the
heroic class of democratic capitalism. Maybe today "celebrities"
constitute an heroic class of sorts.
> I bore people on my list with the principle that the future is
> between American Christendom and Pacific Confucianism.
You'll have to write much, much more to have a shot at boring us.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Stop! Murder us not, tonsured rumpots!
From jk Mon May 20 20:37:37 1996
Subject: Re: The utility of politics
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Mon, 20 May 1996 20:37:37 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960520230049.006a9a74@swva.net> from "seth williamson" at May 20, 96 07:00:49 pm
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Seth W:
> It does seem clear to me that the Founders were not, by and large,
> utopians. Indeed, quite the opposite. But there's something in the
> water here that has been hospitable to utopians.
Their practice was better than their theories, but they couldn't have
explained why experience and respect for habit should take precedence
over theory and will rather than the reverse. Or so say I, knowing
much less about their thought than I should.
> It would seem that the great majority of average Americans have
> always believed in God and the objective reality of moral standards,
> virtue and vice, that we are created by God for a purpose, etc.
But I think they've also been strong theoretical individualists, to a
degree that doesn't sit very well with the other beliefs you mention.
As long as government remained small and Protestant Christianity
dominant practical conflict between these two fundamental tendencies of
American thought could usually be averted. Not thinking was a help.
> Maybe not. They just occurred naturally to me as a kind of
> government that, theoretically, at least, refers to a transcendent
> order, aristocratic and royal prerogatives being supposed to come
> from God.
Israel under the Judges and Puritan Massachusetts were republican
social orders that referred to the transcendent. I suppose medieval
Iceland was a pre-modern republic that did not. It's an interesting
subject for historical consideration. Royalty does make earthly
reverence possible, and so makes it possible for a government to
somehow mirror the transcendent order without actually becoming a
theocracy.
> Don't know, but one candidate might be some Islamic state or
> confederation. The Muslims, at least, know what they believe.
They're used to ruling incoherent multicultural societies, like those
of the Middle East, and so do have advantages under current
circumstances. On the other hand, Islam has I think internal
philosophical disadvantages resulting from overemphasis on the absolute
unity, transcendence and arbitrariness of God. I think Christianity
will prevail because it refuses to oversimplify. The Incarnation shows
how a transcendent God can have a genuine relation to a world that is
real and good although finite and fallen. That makes it superior to
Islam as an ordering principle in the long run although not
immediately.
> When do you suppose this dissolution you mention might
> happen? Are you predicting it will be accompanied by bloodshed?
I picture it as a gradual process that people will deny every step of
the way. We already have bloodshed in the form of increased crime,
including the growth of international mafias, and the occasional race
riot. We have increasing dependence on universal formal arrangements
based on some combination of force and money (e.g., international
markets and bureaucracies) and also on radically privatized
arrangements (private police forces, private and home schooling,
housing developments with contractually-based private governments).
The things in the middle that defined civil society seem in steady
decline. It means something for example that the mainline churches
have been declining for decades and that it seems all-but-impossible
today to create public monuments that people generally find acceptable.
I don't see anything that is likely to cause any of these trends to
turn around.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Stop! Murder us not, tonsured rumpots!
From jk Tue May 21 15:14:10 1996
Subject: Re: The utility of politics
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Tue, 21 May 1996 15:14:10 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy" at May 21, 96 11:57:44 am
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Francesca:
> But it is technologically adaptable cultures of South East Asia which
> can achieve economic predominance.
Japan will I think have trouble because so much of their way of life is
based on self-sacrifice for the sake of the group, with no visible goal
beyond that. Can such a system survive peace and extreme prosperity?
Won't people eventually grow tired of giving up everything for the sake
of meeting sales targets or whatever?
As to China, the Overseas Chinese have shown that Chinese families do
well economically wherever they are and I expect that to continue. I
doubt they'll achieve political dominance, though. Managing a
multi-ethnic empire would not I think be their long suit. (Grandiose
predictions about the future are fun, no?)
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Stop! Murder us not, tonsured rumpots!
From jk Wed May 22 11:36:00 1996
Subject: Re: Supreme Court travesty
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Wed, 22 May 1996 11:36:00 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960521220326.0069430c@swva.net> from "seth williamson" at May 21, 96 06:03:26 pm
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I looked at the opinions (Supreme Court opinions are immediately made
available on-line). As in Roe v. Wade, the majority got its dumbest
member to write the opinion. It was a dirty job, and elite lawyers can
be squeamish about what they'll put their name on, but someone had to
do it, so why not use someone who's too stupid to know the difference?
Also, it was interesting that Justice Scalia picked up on Pat
Buchanan's "peasants storming the castle" rhetoric. He referred to the
cultural wars as a battle between the knights and the villeins, with
the lawyers as Templars.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Stop! Murder us not, tonsured rumpots!
From jk Wed May 22 16:01:29 1996
Subject: Re: The utility of politics
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Wed, 22 May 1996 16:01:29 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy" at May 22, 96 02:23:39 pm
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Francesca:
> > Japan will I think have trouble because so much of their way of
> > life is based on self-sacrifice for the sake of the group, with no
> > visible goal beyond that.
>
> All I can say is that our - very many - Korean PhD students know the
> meaning of self-sacrifice.
Do you have any sense of the ultimate purpose of self-sacrifice for
Koreans? In the case of the Japanese it seems simply for the sake of
the group and its expectations, with no sense that those things are
ordered to anything beyond themselves. I just wonder how durable that
will be after a few decades of cable TV and lots of disposible income.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Stop! Murder us not, tonsured rumpots!
From jk Thu May 23 06:35:04 1996
Subject: Re: The utility of politics
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Thu, 23 May 1996 06:35:04 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960523031659.006a8768@swva.net> from "seth williamson" at May 22, 96 11:16:59 pm
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Seth:
> I was talking about the United States per se, this pagan country that
> seems headed for some kind of cultural collapse. I don't really have
> any good reason for picking Islam as our future conquerer. Maybe it
> will be China. It's just that fat, wealthy, corrupt and decadent
> countries don't seem to hang on to their independence for very long
> in the scheme of things.
It's an interesting question. Technology does make a difference, not
only because it gives rich commercial secular countries a military
advantage they never had but also because it reduces the value of
conquest. More of the wealth and power you conquer disappears when you
conquer it because it depends much more on complicated voluntary social
arrangements. Also, the annihilation of space by technology I think
tends to turn the Outer Barbarians into Marginalized Proletarians who
aren't likely to conquer anything.
Perhaps we could have a compromise combined position? What we have
known as the United States will end through immigration by a variety of
groups with some form of small-scale internal organization strong
enough to resist the solvent qualities of American life indefinitely.
Everyone else will die out because of low birthrates, gross failure of
socialization, the end of the social safety net because of increasing
expense and the absense of anything solid enough to tie it to, etc.
Maybe some native groups like the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses will
pull through, but most will not. So we can have both your conquest
from abroad and my dissolution into tribalism.
> Have you read Walker Percy's "Love in the Ruins" and "The Thanatos
> Syndrome"? Both set in a future U.S., and not all that far into the
> future, quite like the one you describe.
For some reason I haven't read much of Percy. I will look at the books
you mention.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Stop! Murder us not, tonsured rumpots!
From jk Thu May 23 11:06:17 1996
Subject: Re: The utility of politics
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Thu, 23 May 1996 11:06:17 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy" at May 23, 96 01:05:30 pm
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> > So we can have both your conquest from abroad and my dissolution
> > into tribalism.
Francesca:
> This discussion is beginning to remind me of Chesterton's The
> Napoleono of Notting Hll Gate. If you recall, that novel begins with
> a discussion of all of the predictions about the coming century, made
> in 1900. What would the world be like in a hundred years time? After
> a couple of paragraphs of this, Chesterton says, 'A hundred years
> later, the world was pretty much the same.'
Could I get you to sign on to my compromise theory by extending it to
include Chinese families and kinship groups among the "tribes"?
I never read the book. What did he mean by saying the world in 2000
was pretty much the same as in 1900? The world in 1996 is very similar
in very important ways to that of 1896 but there also seem to be
material differences. And our bit of it has been very stable, compared
to say Russia or Japan.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Stop! Murder us not, tonsured rumpots!
From jk Thu May 23 13:56:36 1996
Subject: Re: The utility of politics
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Thu, 23 May 1996 13:56:36 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <199605231506.LAA18889@panix.com> from "Jim Kalb" at May 23, 96 11:06:17 am
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How much of the Chinese way of doing things could effectively be
imitated by other peoples is an interesting question. I suppose a
people's version of universal reason is most easily imitated. Greek
universal reason gave us Hellenistic civilization and philosophy, Roman
universal reason gave us Roman law, an ideal of universal empire and
many aspects of the Roman Church. The universal reason of the West
gave the world modern science, industrialism and liberal democracy.
I'm not sure of what's included in Chinese universal reason. Legalism,
the philosophy of maximizing state power through ruthlessly practical
bureaucratic organization? That's what created Imperial China and
that's what's behind some of the specifics Francesca mentioned, like
centralized disposal of the unfit and unwanted. The other aspects of
Chinese civilization, like the family system, Confucian public spirit,
humility and reverence for tradition, and Taoist abstraction from the
everyday would be harder to transplant.
(Speaking of China: the exhibition of objects from the Imperial
collections that's been on in New York is now going on a tour of
several other American cities. Anyone who can should see it. Go
several times -- you can't see it all at once, and they rotate objects
to limit exposure to light. It wasn't until our final visit, the day
before it was over, that we saw our favorite thing in the show, a
40-foot scroll said to represent the peak of Southern Sung landscape
painting.)
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Stop! Murder us not, tonsured rumpots!
From jk Fri May 24 12:58:34 1996
Subject: Re: Supreme Court travesty
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Fri, 24 May 1996 12:58:34 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960524115750.0069f2b4@swva.net> from "seth williamson" at May 24, 96 07:57:50 am
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Seth W:
> Who actually wrote the opinion, by the way?
Kennedy.
> Bowers v. Hardwick a decade ago saw the self-same court declare that
> homosexuals are NOT a legally special class. But in this decision
> they are.
Different people are on the court. I don't think anyone changed his
vote.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Stop! Murder us not, tonsured rumpots!
From jk Fri May 31 05:38:19 1996
Subject: Re: Tobacco and the law
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Fri, 31 May 1996 05:38:19 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960531004349.0069df20@swva.net> from "seth williamson" at May 30, 96 08:43:49 pm
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It's odd in a way. I suppose a lot of visceral anti-smoking feeling
has to do with with the fact that it's an established and traditional
vice. It's part of what has been accepted as normal life in America,
so if that's what you don't like you'll hate smoking and prefer other
vices that have the virtue of outraging conventional morality.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: We panic in a pew.
From jk Sun Jun 2 21:09:34 1996
Subject: Re: Introducing The New New Left
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Sun, 2 Jun 1996 21:09:34 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Chris Stamper" at Jun 2, 96 05:54:14 pm
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>The energy, community, and commerce of the digital nation seem, in
>contrast, breathtaking. This community is discussion is thriving and
>the young are drawn to a whole new kind of civics, in which they
>enthusiastically participate. Rights are fiercely articulated and
>defended. New ideas buzz out of the hive and circle the world even
>before we can absorb them.
"Nation" and "community" seem odd. The idea is that you can drop out of
what you don't like and hook up with what you do, with the whole world
to choose from.
The ideas emerging from the net at large reflect all the depth of
experience and subtlety of perception of science fiction. In themselves
they're not much, but the fact they exist and a worldwide network of
energetic and intelligent people talk about them to each other is
important. As the man says,
>As the millennium approaches, the digital generation - with its money,
>education, technological skills, energy, the world's greatest system of
>communications, and access to the world's information - will become an
>extraordinarily powerful, determinant factor in the civic life of the
>entire planet.
"Civic life or lack thereof", I would have said.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Bush saw Sununu swash sub.
From jk Mon Jun 10 07:42:28 1996
Subject: Re: The utility of politics
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 1996 07:42:28 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Rhydon Jackson" at Jun 10, 96 00:06:44 am
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Rhydon writes:
> Jim wrote, in reference to the American Founders,
>
> "Their practice was better than their theories, but they couldn't have
> explained why experience and respect for habit should take precedence
> over theory and will rather than the reverse".
One of the Founders said:
> "Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us. It was not
> Reason that discovered the singular and admirable mechanism of the
> British Constitution."
What I said wasn't true of all the Founders. The Federalist, though,
seems to take the view that politics is a science, and that the
American Revolution would be a demonstration to the whole world that a
country's form of government need not be dependent on the chances of
history.
I'm not sure how to deal with this kind of issue. No doubt part of the
public significance of historical events is determined by how later
generations have understood them. How believable is a non-radical
Founding? Why call them the Founding Fathers and play up the language
of the Declaration of Independence if it was a fundamentally
conservative event?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Ed, I saw Harpo Marx ram Oprah W. aside.
From jk Sun Jun 9 19:05:12 1996
Subject: Re: Warning: This is NOT a parody (fwd)
To: neocon@abdn.ac.uk (neocon)
Date: Sun, 9 Jun 1996 19:05:12 -0400 (EDT)
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>A representative excerpt from "Technology and Empire" [pp.124-6]:
It seems that since the time of writing the claim the humanities are
non-evaluative sciences has led to attempts to make them evaluative
non-sciences. When was it written?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Ed, I saw Harpo Marx ram Oprah W. aside.
From jk Mon Jun 10 13:26:43 1996
Subject: Re: More on heresy
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 1996 13:26:43 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy" at Jun 10, 96 01:09:58 pm
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> A while back, when Parliament signed into law the Maastrich Treaty,
> Lord Rees Mogg, former editor of the Times, took Her Majesty's
> Government to court for treason. He lost.
>
> It would be hard to be more Eurosceptical than I am, but 'treason'?
I admire the man's spirit. I suppose he and the presenting bishops
believe that an attempt by responsible officials to destroy a morally
fundamental collectivity (one's country or one's church) in essence if
not in outward appearance is of necessity illegal by the law of that
collectivity. If no remedy is explicitly provided for one should be
inferred. So on that line of thought a lawsuit was appropriate even if
there was no available rubric for it that wouldn't strike people as
odd.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Ed, I saw Harpo Marx ram Oprah W. aside.
From jk Wed Jun 12 04:45:25 1996
Subject: Re: The utility of politics
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Wed, 12 Jun 1996 04:45:25 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960612010055.006bb05c@swva.net> from "seth williamson" at Jun 11, 96 09:00:55 pm
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Seth writes:
> It would seem that how the actual event played out would be
> at least as important as the understanding of later generations.
As the Protestants say. People with a traditionalist cast of mind
would look at events as they have been understood and remembered more
than the events as they were intended and understood at the time. It
wasn't Harry Jaffa who invented reverence for the Declaration of
Independence or William Brennan who first viewed liberty and equality
as more a promise to be fulfilled than an inheritance from the past.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Ed, I saw Harpo Marx ram Oprah W. aside.
From jk Wed Jun 12 10:39:56 1996
Subject: Re: The utility of politics
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Wed, 12 Jun 1996 10:39:56 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy" at Jun 12, 96 10:00:36 am
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Thus Francesca:
>1) Whose memory? Which tradition? The Vikings probably remember the
>sacking of northern England differently from the monks who were sacked.
We were discussing what conceptions of events in America from c. 1770
to 1800 could reasonably become part of the conception of America
publicly accepted by Americans today and in times to come. My point
was that the traditional American public understanding of those events
is highly relevant to the question. I don't think that the British or
Tibetan understanding is to the point.
>2) Are you not opening the door to saying the event is whatever
>(some) people said it was? And thus, in the language of your last
>post, to a imaginative as opposed to a literal interpretation?
The issue is less what happened than the public significance of what
happened. History _wie es eigentlich gewesen_ sets limits to the public
significance of historical events but doesn't determine it.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Ed, I saw Harpo Marx ram Oprah W. aside.
From jk Wed Jun 12 10:41:19 1996
Subject: Re: Thought for the Day
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Wed, 12 Jun 1996 10:41:19 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy" at Jun 12, 96 10:19:40 am
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Rocco Buttiglione says:
"The problem of our epoch is different from epochs of the past: the
subject able to think the difference between being and truth might be
disappearing. The genesis of this subject is strictly connected with
the Judaeo-Christian principle that there exists a justice which is not
of this world, and that power and right do not coincide."
I don't understand this. "Truth" I think Francesca told us is the
conformity of mind and being or something of the sort. That conformity
is not the same as the thing conformed to, so the two are different,
and it no doubt takes a subject to recognize that logical point, but I
don't see where he goes from there.
Also, Plato thought that true justice is not of the world of our
experience, and that the good and the necessary are very different.
Confucius also refused to reduce the Good to anything we experience and
distinguished power and right. It's true, though, that RB does not say
that the Judaeo-Christian principle he mentions is only a Judaeo-
Christian principle.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Ed, I saw Harpo Marx ram Oprah W. aside.
From jk Thu Jun 13 07:10:12 1996
Subject: Re: Thought for the Day
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Thu, 13 Jun 1996 07:10:12 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy" at Jun 13, 96 08:51:04 am
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Francesca explicates:
> Clearly, he means immanent being, ens commune, as opposed to
> transcendent being.
That answers the question. What puzzles me about the quote now is that
he seems to take "truth" from one tradition and "being" from another.
In his way of speaking "what is true" seems disconnected from "what
is". Is there a group of thinkers who use "being" as he does while
accepting the existence of transcendent being? Or is all this clear in
context and I'm making something out of nothing?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Ed, I saw Harpo Marx ram Oprah W. aside.
From jk Fri Jun 14 07:06:31 1996
Subject: Re: the utility of politics
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 1996 07:06:31 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Rhydon Jackson" at Jun 14, 96 01:49:35 am
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Rhydon writes:
> Jim, if you can agree to use my simple-minded model, it must be the
> case that you feel the conservative tradition no longer viable. I say
> this because it appears that you concede this interpretation as the
> original and, hence, older one. I will concur that it is certainly
> not ascendant. Yet the position has been articulated by enough people
> of sufficient stature and with adequate frequency for me to call it
> viable.
I'm not sure it's the older one. Neither the Declaration, the
Constitution nor the Federalist seem to me conservative documents.
What they do is of course far more limited than what the French
revolutionaries tried to do, so especially the latter two are capable
of incorporation into a conservative position. It doesn't seem to me
though that such a position is older than the position that views them
as a new beginning. The apparent theory of the earliest of the
documents, that governments are are in essence contrivances to secure
universal presocial rights, strikes me as downright anticonservative.
Like everything else that view has roots in old traditions but if that
makes it conservative then everything is conservative.
> So we have a traditional, widely held understanding of a radical
> founding and a traditional, less widely held understanding of a
> conservative founding.
Radical, or at least a true Founding issuing out of revolution and
based on libertarian, egalitarian and individualistic principles of
universal applicability. How coherent and rooted in popular belief and
political practice has the contrary tradition been? Is it the contrary
tradition that has bound Americans together as Americans?
> Simply because it has some history of dominance should we decide that
> a conservative, prudent man will acquiesce to it?
> I guess I'm asking why the argument should be abandoned. Jim, is it
> your position that such a stance is futile because so many people
> feel differently?
"Some history of dominance" and "so many people feel differently"
doesn't seem to me to capture the extent of the difficulty.
Actually, I'm really not sure where I come out on all this. It seems
to me our way of life has problems in part because we emphasize
immediate individual desires too much and pay too little attention to
less palpable considerations that (Rocco B. and Francesca might tell
us) become useable to us only through tradition. The difficulty is
that the traditions that make us Americans also emphasize individualism
and the centrality of things that are presocial and therefore
nontraditional. I'm not sure what to do about it.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Ed, I saw Harpo Marx ram Oprah W. aside.
From jk Mon Jun 17 09:48:27 1996
Subject: Re: Is this Neoconservativism?
To: neocon@abdn.ac.uk (neocon)
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1996 09:48:27 -0400 (EDT)
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B. Riggs writes:
> one can make any attempt at conservative politics appear not only
> thick headed, but downright dangerous to civil society.
>
> Following Rawls rules, then, I do not know how to keep pluralism, well,
> pluralistic.
We seem to have entered an odd period in which traditionalism is
abstract and radical and liberalism is narrowminded and intolerant. It
seems to me what has happened is that liberalism has won decisively,
but can not in fact create a social order that meets its own standards
of universal rationality. The obvious alternatives at this stage
(apart from a new revelation or sheer irrationalism) are a sort of
frozen liberalism backed only by rhetoric and force, and a reborn
traditionalism that paradoxically would require a radical break with
existing political practices and understandings.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Embargos are macabre. Sad Nell, listen O!
not to no nets -- I'll lend a Serb a camera, so grab me!
From jk Mon Jun 17 12:16:55 1996
Subject: Re: Is this Neoconservativism?
To: neocon@abdn.ac.uk (neocon)
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1996 12:16:55 -0400 (EDT)
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F. Murphy asks:
> Isn't your reborn traditionalism like the radicalism of Paddy
> Buchanan, for example?
Buchanan's a politician who wants to get elected, so it's difficult for
him to deviate too much from accepted understandings. The usual
complaint about him is that he's a sort of statist who wants to enact
family values, ethnic particularism, and economic nationalism. To the
extent the complaints are well-founded he's not radical enough, because
he adheres to the current understanding of politics as a matter of
describing a desired overall state of affairs in some detail and
creating an apparatus that will bring it about.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Embargos are macabre. Sad Nell, listen O!
not to no nets -- I'll lend a Serb a camera, so grab me!
From jk Tue Jun 18 06:57:03 1996
Subject: Re: Is this Neoconservativism?
To: neocon@abdn.ac.uk (neocon)
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 1996 06:57:03 -0400 (EDT)
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C. Stamper writes:
> > The obvious alternatives at this stage (apart from a new revelation
> > or sheer irrationalism) are a sort of frozen liberalism backed only
> > by rhetoric and force, and a reborn traditionalism that
> > paradoxically would require a radical break with existing political
> > practices and understandings.
>
> Reminds me of the Protestant Reformation
Har har. It is hard for me to work through the analogy though. The
paradox of promoting rebirth of tradition is that it involves abstract
radical theorizing for the sake of tradition. The Reformers on the
other hand wanted Scripture interpreted by conscience for the sake of
scripture interpreted by conscience. Maybe there's more of an analogy
to the Counterreformation.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Embargos are macabre. Sad Nell, listen O!
not to no nets -- I'll lend a Serb a camera, so grab me!
From jk Tue Jun 18 08:46:35 1996
Subject: Re: Is this Neoconservativism?
To: neocon@abdn.ac.uk (neocon)
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 1996 08:46:35 -0400 (EDT)
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> Clearly neoconservativism is Political Mozart
So neoconservatism is a Masonic plot? I suspected as much.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Embargos are macabre. Sad Nell, listen O!
not to no nets -- I'll lend a Serb a camera, so grab me!
From panix!not-for-mail Thu Jun 27 16:44:19 EDT 1996
Article: 7828 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Jim Kalb on Confucius
Date: 27 Jun 1996 16:42:28 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 10
Message-ID: <4qurnk$fjd@panix.com>
References: <4qu9et$cov@nadine.teleport.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <4qu9et$cov@nadine.teleport.com> cfaatz@teleport.com (Chris Faatz) writes:
>Jim's piece on Confucius in the Summer '94 issue of "Modern Age,"
Fall '95 -- it seemed so much more up to date than Summer '94 ...
Praise, of course, is always welcome, so I should thank you for yours.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Eva can ignite virtuosos out riveting in a cave.
From jk Wed Jun 26 21:21:57 1996
Subject: Re: Court tries to destroy VMI
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Wed, 26 Jun 1996 21:21:57 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960626213342.00692a98@swva.net> from "seth williamson" at Jun 26, 96 05:33:42 pm
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It's hard to see the justification for bringing the Court into the
picture. There's certainly nothing in the Constitution on the subject,
except in the sense that a majority of the Court can find anything it
wants there and get away with it if national elites like the result.
It's really hard to see on general grounds why this is the sort of
thing the Supreme Court should be deciding. If the elected
representatives of the people of Virginia want to have a men-only
military academy, and somebody thinks that's a bad idea, why not let
him make his pitch to the representatives and the voters? After all,
most of the electorate is female.
Moving to the merits, the decision gets worse. There are differences
between men and women that are sometimes material. Mixed company and a
bunch of the boys just aren't the same. In the case of groups working
together in close proximity for extended periods under conditions of
extreme physical and emotional violence, I would expect the differences
to affect functioning. For some reason seven members of the Court
think that kind of notion is too crazy to take into account when the
government trains people for leadership positions in such situations.
I would have expected caution in preparing for situations in which men
will be asked to die, but it seems other things come first.
Putting that aside, the Supreme Court, like respectable opinion
generally, is convinced that sex role stereotyping is bad. Men and
women are supposed to have the same relation to violence and to
protectiveness, just as they are supposed to have the same relation to
career and to the care of children. Maybe that approach really will
mean happier employees, better tended children, less violence, and
better protection, and everyone's been stupid all these years for
thinking the contrary. Or maybe abstract justice requires unisex for
some reason that escapes me and escaped almost everyone else who has
ever lived. On the other hand, it's always possible that human beings
like everything else have particular natural tendencies, and that the
key to good social order lies in cultivating and civilizing those
tendencies rather than insisting they don't exist, or trying to uproot
or neutralize if they do. But what do I know?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Eva can ignite virtuosos out riveting in a cave.
From jk Thu Jun 27 06:17:16 1996
Subject: Re: court destroys VMI
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Thu, 27 Jun 1996 06:17:16 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Gradle" at Jun 26, 96 11:33:05 pm
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Doris asks:
> Some how, with these lowered standards, with the men not being as
> well trained as in the past; the American military is supposed to win
> at combat?
> Doris
So far as I can tell, they're not. The other side is supposed to back
down, and if they don't they're supposed to be zapped by military
hardware. The theory seems to be that we conquer the world in the name
of democracy and internationalism or something of the sort while
remaining utterly unwilling to accept any substantial number of
casualties.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Eva can ignite virtuosos out riveting in a cave.
From jk Thu Jun 27 20:28:53 1996
Subject: Re: court destroys VMI
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Thu, 27 Jun 1996 20:28:53 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <31D3257A.6F24@vt.edu> from "Morton Nadler" at Jun 27, 96 05:21:14 pm
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Morton Nadler writes:
>I have rarely seen such rage
I very much wish I could agree, but I often see far greater rage. In
fact, I wouldn't have used the expression "rage" at all. I may have
become calloused, though.
>the almost unanimous Supreme Court decision
Isn't it terrible that seven justices signed on to it? It's a sad
world, but then I suppose we all knew that.
>The issue is not women in combat at all. It is the opportunity to enter
>the charmed closed club of VMI alumni who run so many civilian
>enterprises.
If the function of VMI is to create a charmed closed club it's
outrageous that it should receive any state funds at all. I don't see
why the outrage should be less now that the charmed closed club
benefitting some Virginians at the expense of all others will include
the few women who will meet the apparently irrelevant standards for
admission and graduation. What am I missing?
>In any case, your issue is moot; women are in the ROTC and getting
>commissions everywhere there is an ROTC in a publicly supported school.
It's true that people sometimes complain about one but not all causes
for complaint. This does seem a somewhat different situation, though.
In the case of ROTC I suppose Congress decided the program should be as
it is. If people don't like it things can change. Here the Court
acting on its own has determined that people who think VMI should
continue to be all-male have no right to have their views taken into
account by the responsible policymakers, no matter how numerous their
supporters or how well they make their case.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Eva can ignite virtuosos out riveting in a cave.
From jk Fri Jun 28 13:46:35 1996
Subject: Re: VMI/feminism/supreme court
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Fri, 28 Jun 1996 13:46:35 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Neill Callis" at Jun 28, 96 08:37:48 am
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E. Neill Callis writes:
>Since, as both the Court and Seth have acknowledged, only 15% of VMI
>graduate pursue active military service upon graduation, I think that
>this makes the how men fight/how women fight argument very moot indeed.
>VMI is an undergraduate institution that seeks not to make soldiers, but
>"soldier-citizens". It's a liberal arts college, plain and simple.
Liberal arts colleges do not characteristically try to make "soldier-
citizens", so it's clearly not a liberal arts college plain and simple.
"Soldier" suggests that military qualities, and therefore how men
fight/how women fight, remain very much in point.
>The issue is this: VMI resides on state-owned property, and recieves
>$10 million a year from the citizens of VA. More than 50% of which are
>women. Entrance and subsequent graduation into VMI affords an
>individual access into an incredible good 'ol boys club-network of jobs
>and contacts unavailable to those not participating in the program. VMI
>is an incredibly prestigious LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE. Equal protection of
>women under the law demands that IF women want access to this
>prestigious program, AND they help support it with taxes, THEN the STATE
>nor the PEOPLE cannot deny them access.
Almost the entire population of Virginia is excluded from VMI. Why
doesn't equal protection require the school to admit and grant a diploma
to any taxpayer who wants these wonderful benefits? Does adding a small
proportion of women to the favored few really do away with the enormous
injustice being perpetrated against the vast majority of taxpayers who
wouldn't be admitted if they applied or if admitted couldn't attend
because of personal circumstances?
Your argument seems to assume that the men-only rule had no relation to
VMI's educational mission. VMI's supporters of course disputed that and
you haven't said why they're wrong.
It seems to me that if you're taking "soldier" as your model, which I
gather VMI does, then sex is relevant. That was the point of the whole
earlier discussion, that sex is relevant to being a soldier and even
more relevant to developing the military qualities of a group of young
people. As stated, mixed company is different. The distinctive
successes of VMI to which you point suggest that those who designed its
program were on to something. If they were, then what the Court has
done is destroy something real and valuable and forbid its future
reappearance. That seems wrong.
>As a matter of principle, the STATE cannot subsidize gender
>discrimination.
Where does that principle come from? Who adopted it and made it law?
Does it mean e.g. separate sports teams for girls are unconstitutional?
The combat exclusion for women? The rule that two persons can marry
only if they are of different sexes?
>I'll submit a quick & dirty critique of the Court's opin/dissent this
>weekend sometime when I'm done with it.
Looking forward to it. From the syllabus the Court's reasoning looked
thoroughly standard.
>amounting (in my mind) to gender apartheid.
The existence of a single men's-only institution with special qualities
(attributable in large part to its men's-only character) seems to me so
different from the South African system of racial separation as to make
this choice of language extraordinarily odd.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Eva can ignite virtuosos out riveting in a cave.
From jk Fri Jun 28 20:11:55 1996
Subject: Re: VMI/feminism/supreme court
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Fri, 28 Jun 1996 20:11:55 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Neill Callis" at Jun 28, 96 02:49:51 pm
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Neill Callis writes:
>Agreed, VMI is unique in what it does as a liberal arts college, but
>it remains that; an institution designed to provide an educational
>background for entry into the workforce. How men and women fight
>would seem to be of philsophical (and practical, for that matter) non-
>importance for the 85% of the graduates who enter the civilian sector
>to work.
In the same sense that mastery of a liberal art would seem to be of non-
importance for the 85% (or whatever) of graduates who enter the non-
academic sector to work. Nonetheless, state-supported institutions
often grant admission only to students who they judge most likely to be
successful in the liberal arts and to enhance the liberal arts
experience of others. Why shouldn't military institutions do something
similar?
>Because in this case, the college is "discriminating" based on
>objective data; GPA, SAT scores, class rank, teacher recommendations.
>Almost ALL of which you have general control over while in high
>school.
Sex is an objective datum. Students don't have much control at all over
their SATs, and only very partial control over the other things you
mention. And most students will always be excluded from a school like
VMI no matter how hard they try. In any case, it's not at all obvious
that sex is a worse predictor of the potential student's likely
contribution to the educational goals of the institution than some of
the things you mention.
>However, for the college to "discriminate" along lines of gender is
>different: How can you deny women such a prestigous education just
>because they're not men? Why penalize women...for being women? The
>same applies (in my mind) to race. It's inherently weird to penalize
>people for demographics, which they have absolutely no control over.
I don't understand your use of the word "penalize". Not to be admitted
is not a punishment when the intention is to admit the students whose
presence will best enable the school to realize its educational goals.
Also, many people are excluded from schools for things they have
absolutely no control over. And not all schools can be all things to
all students.
The basic point, I think, is that those responsible judged that the
inclusion of women in the program would interfere with the specific
educational goals of the institution. I will not repeat the reasons
for that judgement. You apparently believe such judgements are
illegitimate for reasons that are unclear to me unless saying they are
illegitimate with block caps and exclamation points constitutes a
reason.
>their precious balance of 1) lack of privacy and 2) general physical
>abuse would be destroyed (again, the "adversative model") if women
>were admitted.
I gather you don't like VMI's style of education. I don't think I
would have cared for it myself, but don't see that as a reason for
getting rid of it. Judging by alumni loyalty it's been very
successful, and I am sorry to see it go.
>The court said that the changes would not be necessary...if there were
>women (and I don't doubt there are a few) who want to participate in
>that kind of punishing system, so be it!
The Court should get real. Not that anyone can force them to do so.
>Countless figures in history have trumpeted the superiority of a
>particular race or religion. Why stop with gender?
It seems you believe that the notion that the sexes differ and that in
some settings the differences are material is just a crazy invention,
and whoever believes it will believe anything. Is that right?
>But I think it is "different" because we have had centuries, before
>the creation of our country even, of indoctrination in patriarchal
>society
I haven't the faintest idea why anyone should believe this. If it takes
special indoctrination to think the sexes differ, where is the society
in which men do not occupy most positions of formal authority and women
do not have primary responsibility for childcare? Where have all the
women warriors been? They must have existed somewhere in the thousands
and thousands of societies that have existed if the notion that war is
specifically masculine is an invention of our own society.
>Since when have those in power ever needed their rights protected??
>Not ever, really.
Whoever loses is not in power. VMI has lost. More generally, people
who believe in traditional sex roles, traditional sexual morality, the
traditional family and a lot of other things have been losing badly for
years. You seem to think those people are more powerful than the
winners in the culture wars. I find that view very odd. As to the
issue of power, isn't it obvious that the net effect of all these
changes is to concentrate all significant power in a small national
ruling class? And if you think the effect of the changes is to help
people at the very bottom of the ladder you should look at social
statistics for the past 30 years.
>But against the will of the people (who are occasionally wrong) the
>government gave blacks the right to vote, to be equal, to be free from
>discrimination and persecution...
Apparently you like small national ruling classes. I was however under
the impression that the Civil War Amendments and the Civil Rights Act of
1964 for example were adopted by elected representatives through the
ordinary political process, at least (in the case of the Civil Rights
Amendments) as far as the Northern states were concerned. You should
also note that small ruling classes who aren't responsible to anyone but
themselves sometimes do destructive things even though they may make the
trains run on time or do some other particular thing you find important.
>The same with women's rights, and I see VMI very much as a case of
>gender rights.
Women are more than half the electorate. Why are you call gender rights
something to be taken out of the ordinary political process and given to
the Supreme Court? Do you think that the relation between men and women
is something that can best be determined by experts based on a priori
legal reasoning? That it's not something that can be handled by consent
among the people most directly involved?
>> Where does that principle come from?
>
>The 14th amendment, which is the "equal protection under the law"
>clause.
That of course is where the Court hung its hat, and if different
treatment of the sexes is presumptively irrational and malicious then it
may have been right to do so. My question though is how that view of
the relation between the sexes became part of the fundamental law of the
United States.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Eva can ignite virtuosos out riveting in a cave.
From jk Sat Jun 29 08:27:42 1996
Subject: Re: VMI/feminism/supreme court
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Sat, 29 Jun 1996 08:27:42 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy" at Jun 29, 96 12:35:49 pm
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Francesca writes:
> If one had a class with 17 girls, two bumptious boys and one dim boy,
> the boys shouted their heads off and I had to battle to get the girls
> to speak. If the two loud mouthed boys were away, the DIM boy tried
> to take over.
>
> Much ruder, much more jousting, often less thoughtful, debate rather
> than expression of opinion. I am not saying the boys are more
> intelligent than the girls. They are not. But they are far more
> determined to make everyone hear their unformed ideas.
>
> it is not my opinion that an all-boys school penalizes women. I
> think that a social system in which all-women's colleges are a rarety
> penalizes women more.
Even in America the "girls need their own space to develop their talent
for achievement and leadership because boys are animals " theory has
respectable adherents, so women's colleges have had more success
hanging on than men's colleges. All I'd add to that theory is that
[women are different from men] => [men are different from women], so
it's equally likely that a men's-only program would be better for
developing some specifically masculine possibilities. It appears that
up to now VMI has had such a program.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Eva can ignite virtuosos out riveting in a cave.
From jk Wed Jul 3 06:00:34 1996
Subject: Re: Is this Neoconservativism?
To: neocon@abdn.ac.uk (neocon)
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 06:00:34 -0400 (EDT)
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Liz writes:
> > It seems to me he attempts to split the difference between
> > ideological liberals and ideological libertarians. He and both of
> > them are as one in their attitude to communitarians. So it's not a
> > middle ground between something else and communitarianism.
>
> (groan) JIM????? You were doing so well till you hatched out *that*
> boner! One cannot equate ideological libertarians and ideological
> liberals in any sort of comprehensive "attitude" towards
> communitarianism.
Why not? Both try to understand social order on the assumption that
man is not a social animal. We are fundamentally complete before
entering into society. That's why they believe it captures the moral
essence of society to view it as contractual.
> > His reason for saying coercion is just on these points is that almost
> > everyone agrees they are good things, and are clearly right in so
> > agreeing. That might be so when you say something vague like "health"
> > or "diffused well-being", but any actual system will have to make
> > decisions with which reasonable men will vehemently disagree for
> > fundamental moral reasons. So I do not see how there could be an
> > actual system that would not be unjustly coercive on his view.
>
> Clearly, he is trying to provide a "justly coercive system" based on
> something other than fundamental morality.
He wants to provide a system that will coerce people so long as it does
not coerce them contrary to their fundamental moral views, at least if
those views are somewhat reasonable. His definition of "coercion
contrary to moral views" is quite broad and he seems to intend a broad
view of what constitutes reasonableness. Therefore the problem I see,
that any system that promotes a vague and pervasive good like "health"
will end up in concrete cases doing something that he seems to want to
treat as unjust coercion of moral views.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From jk Wed Jul 3 09:06:35 1996
Subject: Re: The American Heritage
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 09:06:36 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Rhydon Jackson" at Jul 2, 96 08:33:47 pm
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I would like to thank Rhydon for his most recent comments. I don't
know enough and haven't thought enough to have settled views on the
issues, so they were useful to me. Right now I tend to feel depressed
when I think about America, and to feel that the way forward will have
to be based on something very different from the principles that have
dominated our national past. That view of course has its own
difficulties.
In part the issue is how one interprets tradition. One might say that
to the extent he views it as authoritative he should understand it in a
way that supports the authority of tradition as such. That means
relativizing and contextualizing statements like those of the
Declaration and playing up other things, which is what I think Rhydon
does. A traditionalist loyal to his country might find such an
interpretation obligatory.
I did have one criticism, though. Rhydon says:
> If someone refers to the Founders, in toto, as deists, or champions
> of unlimited sufferage, or opposed to the public sanction of
> religion, or dedicated to an expansive Federal apparatus generating
> equality, or sympathetic to Rousseau, or inimical to the practices of
> VMI, we should correct them.
I have no problem with the substance, but is "someone ... them" really
correct usage in right-wing circles?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From jk Fri Jul 5 06:18:40 1996
Subject: Interns and their training
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 06:18:40 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960704145525.006a8728@swva.net> from "Seth Williamson" at Jul 4, 96 10:55:25 am
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> The general assumption seems to be that they were as allergic to
> public manifestations of piety as the board of People for the
> American Way. That they could have gotten that far in their
> education with such a backward impression of the early history of
> their own nation is amazing to me.
A couple of random thoughts:
1. If the purpose of public education in history is to bring people to
believe that history justifies and supports an idealized version of the
current social order (idealized to give the authorities something to do
that requires the transformation of the rest of society and so
justifies the pre-eminence of their power) then historical education in
America is very effective.
2. Our current system of education and scholarship stands for
bureaucratic centralization of training and knowledge, and brings those
things as so organized into partnership with the centralized managerial
state. So it's not surprising those most exposed to it would come to
see things with the eyes of People for the American Way, which stands
for the social and moral side of the managerial state.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From jk Fri Jul 5 09:57:42 1996
Subject: Let's give Pat a hand!
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 09:57:42 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB6946.F8CC8200@eb3ppp17.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 4, 96 01:12:16 am
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>So there are two basic questions about sticking with tradition: 1) how
>big are the defects? and 2) how likely are efforts to remedy them to
>lead to improvements rather than make things worse.
It's hard to know how big the defects are in the absence of an external
point from which to assess them. A tradition recognized as superior to
one's own or a larger tradition of which one's own is a part would
provide an external point. So would a valid revealed religion.
Attaining an independent view sufficiently comprehensive to see things
in proportion though is very difficult. There are also internal
criteria for defects, for example self-consistency and capacity to
achieve self-set goals.
As to improvements, my preference is for piecemeal improvements informed
by sympathetic understanding of what is being improved made by a variety
of actors each with limited power. If the improvements are improvements
they'll be accepted and extended by other actors. The left tends I
think to like grand reforms conceived abstractly, designed centrally and
implemented bureaucratically.
>In America today, for example, we can be trampled by huge corporate
>powers that are answerable to virtually no one or we can try to
>restrain them with a superpower of a democratic government.
If corporate behemoths are a problem I don't see government behemoths as
an answer. Why wouldn't all the behemoths decide they have a lot in
common and get in bed together? Also, I don't see that the things big
government does have much to do with the large size of business
enterprises except to the extent largeness facilitates them (e.g., it's
easier for a large bureaucracy to establish controls over another large
bureaucracy than over a lot of independent actors).
>I have not given up on the idea that a government that is democratic,
>structured with checks and balances, and restrained by a bill of
>rights, can escape your characterization of "absolute,irresponsible and
>utterly top down."
1. Big government can't really be democratic because it does too many
things for the people to supervise or for popular deliberation to deal
with rationally.
2. To the extent government has general administrative powers over
society checks and balances are likely either to be bypassed or to
paralyze operations.
3. To say that government is restrained by a bill of rights means at
present that a committee of lawyers supervises government operations to
make sure they are consistent with the social and political ideals of
the class to which the elite of the legal profession belongs. That
class is not independent of big government, so I'm not sure how much of
a structural restraint the bill of rights can be.
>But I certainly don't think we'll get much justice with the Republican
>approach to worry a lot about Big Government but worry hardly at all
>about other Big Powers that are private and unaccountable.
The other Big Powers are accountable to the extent their power depends
on people's willingness to deal with them, so they're not less
accountable than Big Government. It's imaginable though that some
government restraints on other BPs would be a good idea. For example
some right-wingers like tariffs because they make life harder for
multinational corporations and other institutions. Others don't like
government regulations that bear particularly heavily on small
business. What I think would not be a good idea is government
restraints that take the form of detailed or discretionary
administrative control.
>Within the framework I'm trying to develop, your "tradition" functions
>as an authority, it governs from above. People live "under" tradition.
>That's why people can speak of the weight of tradition. It is on top
>of them. Constraining their action, telling them what they can or
>cannot do.
>
>Also, is it not the case that tradition is, in important respects,
>enforced. Is it not your argument that liberalism, by ALLOWING people
>to do as they please, eventually degenerates into CONDONING and
>legitimizing the full range of possible choices? And is it not also
>the case that traditional society is not liberal in that sense? In
>other words, that it does not allow such an exercise of free choice.
>Sometimes the coercion is non-violent (as in the shunning practiced by
>the Amish), sometimes violent (as in lynchings of the uppity in the
>South). WIth all kinds of in betweens. But always, it is an order
>that has means to enforce itself.
I agree with all this. Like the educational system (for example)
tradition is a system in which force is not prominent day-to-day but in
the end in one way or another is used when needed. It does seem to me
that tradition normally relies less on naked force and assertion of
power than other principles of social order because it is more connected
to the habits and preconceptions people grow up with.
>would it not be correct to say that your view is quite atypical of how
>the members of traditional societies generally understand tradition?
>Is it not usually seen --not as a self-organizing system emerging
>through experience but rather as a more or less God-given way-things-
>should-be that's been handed down? It seems to me that almost all
>traditions I know have some kind of mythology of a "handing down"
>either by the divinity or by culture heroes.
>
>Would you agree, then, that your bottom-up rendition of how tradition
>comes to be is quite different in its structure than the understandings
>most traditional peoples have had?
It's a rendition for liberals. That means among other things that it's
a rendition for a large part of me. Liberalism penetrates everywhere.
To the extent one lives within tradition though it's felt as having a
revelatory element. Since we can't do without tradition (we can't even
begin to think or act rationally without it) that means I think that if
we think clearly and comprehensively we necessarily accept revelation
as valid.
F.A. Hayek's discussion of tradition in his _Law, Legislation and [?]_
(it's the 3-volume thing he published in the 70s) is interesting on the
point. He's a classical liberal, of course, but he's quite clear that
things fundamental to classical liberalism, like conceptions of
property, depend on tradition, and that classical liberalism can be
institutionalized socially only if tradition is followed in a way that
from a liberal rationalist point of view can only be described as
mindless. Within the limits of his outlook he doesn't seem to have a
good way of dealing with that fundamental point. So it seems that
properly developed liberalism itself shows that it must be transcended.
>Speaking of which, where are you on the still-bubbling controversy
>about evolution? (I noted, with surprise, over the weekend that even
>in such an intellectual mag as COMMENTARY space was given --in the June
>issue-- to a piece questioning the validity of the Darwinian view.
>This piece of bottom-up thinking --which I thought firmly established
>in all intelligent minds-- seems increasingly (not vanishingly) under
>attack these days from people with an attachment to top-down order, now
>including some bright conservative intellectuals. Are you one of them?
I don't have any special theory about evolution. Whatever my other
views imply on the subject is I suppose what I believe; I just haven't
done the work to figure out what that is. I noted the _Commentary_
piece; there was another within the last few months in _The New
Criterion_. The TNC piece was an attack on a book by someone who
generalizes evolution to become a total explanation of reality by a
writer who didn't much like the idea and thought a fundamental
counterattack was appropriate.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From jk Fri Jul 5 10:32:37 1996
Subject: Re: Legal Theory
To: neocon@abdn.ac.uk (neocon)
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 10:32:37 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <960704214445_231239239@emout19.mail.aol.com> from "BillR54619@aol.com" at Jul 4, 96 09:44:47 pm
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Bill Riggs writes:
>Instead, the court ruled that a "hostile work environment," rather than
>quid pro quo sexual extortion, was sufficient to warrant legal
>recourse. Vinson was the first major court victory for radical
>feminist legal theory. It replaced an objective legal standard with a
>subjective one in which the victim, rather than a specific law, defines
>the offense. According to Young, a subjective legal standard vastly
>expands the power of the government, through the courts, to regulate
>individual conduct.
It seems like a logical development. Once the principle of equality
takes charge, fixed private property rights are done away with, and the
requirement of equal opportunity becomes that of equal results,
government becomes obligated to remake the world so it will be the same
for everyone. First physical evironments must be remade so they are
equally suitable for everyone, for example women and people with
disabilities. Then the same sort of requirement is applied to social
and psychological environments -- they must be equally welcoming to all.
Anything less would be cooperation with hatred and exclusion.
A notable feature of this last form of equality is that it requires
extensive control over what people think, feel and say about each other
and so makes nonsense of earlier ideals of freedom of speech and
thought, which like other aspects of laissez faire turn out to be mere
temporary stages in the development of liberalism.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From jk Sat Jul 13 16:53:53 1996
Subject: Re: Gay Pride, etc.
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 16:53:53 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960713202311.006aa754@swva.net> from "Seth Williamson" at Jul 13, 96 04:23:11 pm
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> I personally witnessed, during the last big homosexual march
> in Washington, a group of TV cameramen lower their cameras and switch
> off when a float approached that featured huge obscene paper-mache
> sex organs and homosexuals dressed like priests and nuns performing
> mock fellatio and cunnilingus on each other. Too much of a challenge
> to the family-next-door image the mainstream media wants those of us
> in the heartland to buy.
It's a mixture of motives, I think. One of course is reluctance to
expose the objectionable aspects of things one supports. Another is
cognitive dissonance -- if something is happening that doesn't fit into
a view you're committed to (in this case the view that homosexuality is
just as healthy, normal and otherwise worthy as any other constellation
of sexual inclinations and habits) you'll refuse to deal with it. You
certainly won't immortalize it on videotape and beam it out to the
world at large.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Niagara, O roar again!
From jk Tue Jul 16 16:53:39 1996
Subject: Calvin and Hobbes (was Re: Request for references) (fwd)
To: neocon@abdn.ac.uk (neocon)
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 16:53:39 -0400 (EDT)
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Bill Riggs writes:
>Existentially, this modern concept of "role" as the measure of all
>things human goes far towards explaining the spiritual alienation
>Hobbes hath wrought upon the world.
That sounds right. The alienation is due to the separation of the human
person from the human essence. Everything except the most basic
appetites and passions is external to us.
>As they say in the Internal Revenue Service, "We're here to help." :)
My thought as well.
>I may not be able to do much with a person so postmodern that he is
>immune to deductive logic - which, after all, is all there is to
>Hobbes's theorizing.
He's not postmodern but is always looking for a halfway house, higher
synthesis, whatever.
>I'd recommend that your friend move on to Locke's _Two Treatises on
>Government_ then to Montesquieu's _Spirit of the Laws_, and stop right
>there.
We've spent a lot of time talking about liberalism.
>Indeed, if your friend wants to rediscover normative political science,
>but somehow retain his positivist underpinnings, I'm afraid I cannot be
>very helpful: maybe he would benefit from familiarizing himself with
>Kuhn and Feyerabend's philosophies of science, but I really must
>protest that facts is facts and values is values, and you're not likely
>to obfuscate the distinction between facts and values by going around
>and spouting rhetoric about "revolutions" and "innovative approaches"
>or what have you.
We've discussed fact/value. His preferred approach is to talk about
evolution and emergence.
>To begin with, the liberals rejected Hobbes's teaching about authority.
>Hobbes wrote that each individual who submitted (or subjected)
>himself/herself to the acts of the sovereign power was the author of
>the sovereign's acts, and that to rebel against the sovereign was to
>rebel against one's own will.
They accepted the fundamental point that ethics starts with the wills of
particular men. Both Hobbes and liberals then try to put some necessary
rational content into the will, in the case of Hobbes recognition of an
artificial superior will without which the end of the will (self-
preservation) could not be attained, in the case of classical liberals
self-ownership and contract, consequently property rights, and in the
case of contemporary liberals equal self-ownership and social
technology, consequently the multicultural welfare state.
>One of the problems with the United Nations is that no one can possibly
>envision such an institution as having supreme political authority -
>even in a "new world order". For in the "Novus Ordo Seculorum" there
>can be no transcendent sovereign power.
The intended solution is management by a small elite combined with
various techniques for distracting attention from ultimate questions.
>The jurisdiction of any government only lasts, therefore, as far as the
>citizens find that it protects and advances their self-interest.
And you can only buy people off so long. So it turns out that popular
attention has to be distracted from not-so-ultimate questions as well,
and the management has to involve a lot of manipulation.
>Perhaps your "countercultural" friend might find the definition of
>social roles too inauthentic to be appealing.
He does. That's an important point on which the nonliberal right and
the countercultural left come together.
>what would happen in a completely demythologized polity - such as
>Plato's _Republic_.
The Republic was demythologized only for the very few.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Niagara, O roar again!
From jk Fri Jul 19 13:35:47 1996
Subject: Re: Protestant/Catholic
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 13:35:47 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960719165616.0069d814@swva.net> from "Seth Williamson" at Jul 19, 96 12:56:16 pm
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Seth Williamson writes:
> We would agree that Christendom is dead, right? The only
> question remaining is what civilization will replace it.
>
> a big reason for Orthodoxy's doctrinal purity so far is that it had
> no Enlightenment and has been a tiny insular factor in American
> society. Whether it can maintain its message when (or if) it becomes
> a bigger factor in American religious life I have no idea.
If Christendom is dead, of which American civilization was part, and no
new civilization has appeared or will appear for a long time, then
there's at least an issue whether going forward there's going to be
anything that can be called "American religious life". The phrase
could be on a par with "Lebanese religious life".
If so, then everything coherent will necesarily be insular,
Enlightenment ideals of universal rationality readily available to all
men will be permanently implausible, and the EOs should do just fine.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Niagara, O roar again!
From jk Fri Jun 28 18:22:02 1996
Subject: Re: liberty and republican virtue
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Fri, 28 Jun 1996 18:22:02 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB64DD.E9578E40@eb4ppp18.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jun 28, 96 10:37:57 am
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Hello Andy,
>Sandel it would seem would think that libertarianism would leave each
>individual too much on his own to generate his own moral world,
>"autonomous selves" unbound by any ties not of their own choosing,
>undermining the basis for a self-governing society.
As a moral theory libertarianism has that vice. As a set of legal
institutions it doesn't seem to.
The moral outlook of a society has a lot to do with maintenance of
conditions that enable people to deal with the practical difficulties
of life. In a night-watchman state, which is what libertarianism calls
for as a practical matter, an individual would have no legal
entitlement against the state for education in childhood, support in
sickness and old age, help in time of need, and so on. Those functions
are however absolutely necessary. Therefore extralegal institutions
would evolve to handle them. The family is an obvious example of such
an institution, but there have been and would be others. Those
extralegal institutions would be strongly supported by accepted
morality and custom because almost everyone would be vitally interested
in their strength and reliability.
Institutions like the family become strong and reliable when children
are brought up to view their roles in them as part of what they are,
and adequate discharge of the responsibilities of their role as part of
what it is to be a good person. In a libertarian legal order people
would end up bringing up their children that way. "Free to be you and
me" just wouldn't be practical. So children would grow up accepting
that they are persons with a necessary moral essence that carries with
it particular duties rather than "autonomous selves" unbound by ties
not of their own choosing. The evolution of liberalism from its
classical form to the modern welfare state is no accident.
>Wtih respect to government and morality, 1) I do not agree with the
>critique that the "individualist" perspective is responsible for our
>society's apparent moral disintegration--certainly not solely
>responsible. Mainly what is lacking is the proper EDUCATION of
>children (I think the disintegration of the American family is the
>single greatest cause);
The individualist moral perspective has a lot to do with the
disintegration of the family. I differ with your friend though in
believing that contemporary liberalism better expresses that perspective
than classical liberalism.
>2) I do not believe that the proposed alternative, government
>"regulation" of morality, will produce worthy results, just the
>opposite.
I agree that government can't create morality. In appropriate cases
though it can and should take moral good and evil into account and
favor the former over the latter. In fact, I don't see how it can do
otherwise, since all human acts express judgements of good and evil.
>3) My belief that morality is a matter of autonomy is not the same as
>the view that morality is ONLY (meaning MERELY) a matter of individual
>choice (where choice means PREFERENCE). This is a very common
>misunderstnding of individualism, and it is becoming something of a
>"standard" interpretation among "communitarians."
I'm not sure how as a practical matter a society in which morality is a
matter of autonomy would differ from one in which it was merely a
matter of individual choice.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Eva can ignite virtuosos out riveting in a cave.
From jk Mon Jul 1 09:08:42 1996
Subject: Re: your arguments on sexual morality
To: johns@caldera.silverplatter.com (John Spragge)
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 09:08:42 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB66FA.C8F0C4E0@ppp01.silverplatter.com> from "John Spragge" at Jul 1, 96 03:08:33 am
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Thank you for your comments. They were intelligent although I thought
fundamentally in error.
>I do reject the idea of an imposed code of sexual practice.
"Imposed" strikes me as misleading. It seems based on the assumption
that man is not really a social animal, that what people accept and feel
as good and the possibilities available to them are not largely
determined by the attitudes and practices of their society. Also,
remember that even if there is nothing you would call an "imposed code"
people will still live in a world they never made in which sexual
practice will be conditioned in ways they did not choose.
"No imposed code" seems to mean that what each individual does in sexual
matters will be his own free choice. Other people won't have much
concern in the matter except for those whose cooperation he needs
(sexual partners). Those conditions are sufficient to define a
situation which has its own moral tendencies, those of the market.
Since that situation will exist regardless of the desires of particular
individuals, those moral tendencies will in fact be imposed on everyone.
The market is a wonderful thing in its place, but it is not I think very
well suited to sexual and family life. It makes people cautious and
self-seeking, worried about risk and adverse to committing themselves.
Also, it distributes its benefits very unevenly. Its application to
sexual matters has always been thought to injure women, children and the
poor. Rich men of course find their choices multiplied. So the
application of your principle of choice, it seems to me, creates a
situation most people would not choose.
>Certainly, feminism has liberated the potential of half the human race;
>certainly, we don't make ten per cent of our population live a lie. I
>would say that makes us stronger, both as individuals and as a society.
It seems to me wrong to say that feminism has simply liberated
potential. Its effect is to make some sorts of life (the wage earner,
the careerist, the bureaucrat) more available and others (the fulltime
mother and homemaker) less available to women. If you think most women
live better, and the world is more benefited, by the former than the
latter, then it makes sense for you to say it liberates their potential
more than suppressing it. It's not obvious to me that's right, though.
Is the 10% the Kinsey Report estimate for homosexuality? I thought that
had been thoroughly debunked. In any case people still live lies and
will continue to do so as long as they accept any standards at all.
Since a human life is not possible without standards, the issue seems to
me which standards by and large promote the best life for people
generally. In addition, it seems to me that a lot of people with
disordered sexual impulses would be better off frustrated than free to
act when action would often mean self-destructive behavior.
>dishonesty in refusing to acknowledge the widespread ways in which
>people with power did not conform to the recommended pattern;
People with power often do what they feel like doing, to the injury of
others. Is the solution really to say that everyone can do what he
feels like doing? The differences in power will remain, so why wouldn't
the solution only multiply the injuries? Would people really be happier
if there were no social support whatever for faithfulness in sexual
relationships? For example, would women with small children (and their
children!) really be happier under such conditions?
>and the ways in which the defenders of "traditional" morality have
>refused to face the real cost of their solutions.
If traditional morality means a life that is in general better for most
people then the real cost of the alternative is higher.
>To justify a return to the coercive norms of the old morality, you must
>equate the burden of a lifetime of loneliness or violence to the
>requirement to clearly and honestly define your relationships.
I agree that clearly and honestly defined relationships are better than
a lifetime of loneliness or violence. Loneliness and violence are more
widespread now than they were when the old morality held sway. That
counts in favor of the old morality, especially since the changes seem
to be related.
As to clarity and honesty in relationships, my point is that people
can't individually define their own relationships. I could define my
relationship to you as "blood brotherhood", but what good would it do?
A's relationship to B depends on far more than A's act of definition.
It also depends on B, and beyond that on the presumptions and
expectations that A and B can both feel confident and entitled to rely
on in dealing with each other. Those presumptions and expectations are
not things that A and B can easily invent for themselves. With respect
to sexual relationships they prominently include accepted sexual
morality.
>I accord no weight to "generally beneficial effects" when weighing moral
>choices. A million people can only vote themselves what they each have a
>right to demand as individuals. A slight increase in the happiness of a
>multitude does not justify the complete misery of one person.
"Generally beneficial" comes down to a large number of individual cases.
There are lots of very miserable people today whose misery can
reasonably be attributed to the sexual revolution. And if you want to
discount general effects and relationships you should forget about the
social history you cite.
>As far as the majority of the period to which you refer, between 1970
>and the present, you simply have the facts wrong. Social spending did
>not increase; it declined steadily.
The discussion in the FAQ related to something going on throughout the
Western world. Did social spending decline steadily everywhere? As to
the U.S., here are some figures I pulled from the _Statistical Abstract
of the United States_ a couple of years ago:
From 1970 to 1990 public social welfare expenditures have gone, in
constant 1990 dollars per capita, from $2219 to $4116. Over the
same period, education expenditures went from $776 to $1020, public
aid (e.g., AFDC, SSI, Food Stamps) from $251 to $575, health from
$146 to $246, and housing from $10 to $77, all in constant per
capita dollars. Also, during the 1980s private expenditures on
education (in current dollars) went from $27,055 million to $66,872
million and on welfare and other similar services from $22,776
million to $66,837.
>As for "formal education", consider this: "Given a paycheck and the
>stub that lists the usual deductions, 26 percent of adult Americans
>cannot determine if their paycheck is correct. ...Forty-four percent,
>when given a series of 'help wanted' ads, cannot match their
>qualifications to the job requirements" (Jonathan Kozol, "Illiterate
>America", 1985, pg. 9).
Just my point. Greater expenditures (both total and per student) and
more time spent in school have not made people better, stronger, more
capable, etc. In fact, things seem to be going the other way.
>Indeed, such solid facts as exist suggest strongly that social and
>economic changes, rather the decline of coercive sexual norms, account
>for most of the problems of "rising delinquency" (actually, crime rates
>have recently fallen in the United States and Canada), child poverty,
>and even broken homes.
It's hard to respond in the abstract. Which facts and which changes?
>The same fundamental moral grounding that informs our dealings with one
>another in matters of politics and economics also must inform our
>dealings in matters of sex: one common moral basis and no other. To
>posit different standards leads to a different standard of behaviour in
>economic decision making (carried on by the rich and powerful), and in
>private decisions (which everyone makes).
I agree that ultimately there is only one morality. Many people
consider that view a sort of moral fanaticism, and it does seem that
unless we are saints or monsters our approach to life has to be more
piecemeal. I don't deal with my wife and children in the same way I
deal with someone from whom I'm buying a used car. If I were a saint or
a monster no doubt I would.
Your approach so far as I can tell would be to take the free-market
approach -- respect for private property (in one's body) and treatment
of all consensual transactions as legitimate -- and apply it to sexual
life. I've suggested my reasons for thinking that a bad idea.
>This allows us to blame the victims of social and economic policies for
>their suffering, by pointing to their supposed lack of "family values"
>or "sexual morality".
A sexual libertarian could just as well point out that economic decision
making (taking a job or not, being industrious or not, living an orderly
life or not) is carried on by everyone, and say that the poor are simply
those who have engaged in bad economic decision making. If you read the
net you'll see people saying that the decision to have children with no
secure means of support is simply a bad economic decision that ought to
be treated like other bad economic decisions. The actual function of
treating family life as somehow different from economics has been to
support social welfare measures.
>we need not look far for the causes of "family breakdown" in the
>neighborhood he serves: "Everything breaks down in a place like this.
>The pipes break down. The phone breaks down. The electricity and heat
>break down. The spirit breaks down. The body breaks down. The immune
>agents of the heart break down. Why wouldn't the family break down
>also?" (Jonathan Kozol, "Amazing Grace pg. 180).
A geographical theory of social problems? There are a lot of
illegitimate children in certain neighborhoods because those
neighborhoods don't happen to be where the marriages are located?
Family stability and durability of telephones etc. have gone hand-in-
hand and depend perhaps on the local geology?
>Even given a willingness to accept a special or "unique" set of
>standards for sexual practise, I would still refuse to accept the
>coercive nature of such a standard. The damage done to individuals by
>coercive sexual norms does not justify the marginal advantages other
>people may derive from the existance of such a standard.
Why do you say the advantages are more marginal than the damage?
Chaotic interpersonal relations injure the weakest most, and the weakest
don't have much to lose. It's the suicide rate of young people rather
than that of rich businessmen that has risen.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From jk Tue Jul 2 09:45:35 1996
Subject: Re: your mail
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 09:45:35 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB6747.A2777FA0@eb3ppp20.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 1, 96 12:13:35 pm
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Hello, Andy --
I should mention that most of the right-wingers I know like self-
organizing systems. They think of rationalized bureaucracy as the main
enemy, and want to oppose it with some combination of the market and
tradition. Tradition can of course be understood as a self-organizing
system.
You wrote:
>Questions: 1) Do you have any people within your acquaintance who are
>intelligent and articulate in general, and knowledgable and concerned
>about these kinds of issues in general, and who would be willing to
>enter into conversation with me such as we are having? 2) Do you
>and/or your other acquaitances have particular books to recommend that
>make a compelling case against how such bottom-up ways of conceiving
>moral order are having detrimental effects on the moral fabric of
>CONTEMPORARY American society?
_Authority and its Enemies_ by the right-wing Hungarian/American
Catholic philosopher Thomas Molnar seems relevant to your concerns. It
came out in 1976 but has recently been republished by Transaction. It
has lots of concrete examples and footnotes for further references. I
know Professor Molnar, and he's intelligent and articulate, but he's
getting old and tends to be impatient. For example, he becomes annoyed
when I mention the Internet in his presence. If you read the book and
want to follow up we could discuss how best to approach him.
As I recall, _Disabling America: The "Rights Industry" in Our Time_, by
Richard E. Morgan, is very helpful on the institutional effects of
overidealizing individual autonomy. It came out in 1984.
_The Dream and the Nightmare: The 60s Legacy to the Underclass_ by
Myron Magnet deals with the effect of "do your own thing" on people who
need all the support they can get holding their lives together. I don't
know Magnet but have a contact at his Manhattan Institute who might be a
good correspondent for you or might know someone else who could help
you. I could ask.
The neoconservative magazine _The Public Interest_ is a good source for
discussions of relevant issues by social scientists. I don't know any
of the people involved, but most of them are well-known social
scientists who might be willing to help you with further references.
Most conservative magazines have articles periodically on the topic "how
all this liberalism stuff is messing everything up". A lot of it is
preaching to the choir, but if you went through a few bound volumes of
_National Review_ and _The American Spectator_ you ought to be able to
get useful examples and leads.
>"So children would grow up accepting that they are persons with a
>necessary moral essence that carries with it particular duties rather
>than "autonomous selves" unbound by ties not of their own choosing.
>The evolution of liberalism from its classical form to the modern
>welfare state is no accident."
I think of the autonomous self as the fundamental principle of
liberalism. Classical liberalism made the self more autonomous than it
had been formerly, since as many things as possible were treated as a
matter of property rights and a man could do whatever wanted with his
own property.
The problem was that the autonomy was often only formal, since:
1. People were still in fact dependent on particular other people
(employees on employer, wife and children on husband and father, etc.).
2. Classical liberalism considered only direct legal compulsion (e.g.
established church) and did nothing about illiberal social institutions
(e.g. race, class and gender).
In a classical liberal society children were also brought up to accept
those illiberal things, for example that they had unconsented
obligations springing from their essential nature with respect to
things like family and membership in some particular part of society.
As a result liberalism paradoxically had to establish comprehensive
government control over society to advance its ideal of the autonomous
self. Today I think the paradox has become utter contradiction rooted
in the incoherence of the notion of the autonomous self (we do not
create our own moral world and we can't think of ourselves as doing
so).
>"The individualist moral perspective has a lot to do with the
>disintegration of the family."
The current _The Public Interest_ has a couple of essays on this. It's
one of their recurrent topics.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From jk Tue Jul 2 09:51:07 1996
Subject: Re: your arguments on sexual morality
To: johns@caldera.silverplatter.com (John Spragge)
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 09:51:07 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB67B5.DD25BCC0@ppp01.silverplatter.com> from "John Spragge" at Jul 2, 96 01:27:24 am
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>An absence of coercion does not create any specific moral "tendencies"
>it merely makes the reality, that people do have choices, visible.
You seem to believe that choices are not affected by social setting, and
apart from the threat of violence public standards of conduct do not
exist. "Standard of morality" and "threat of violence" seem for you
synonymous. That's clearly wrong.
Also, what it is possible to choose and what choices will be experienced
as good depend very much on setting. For example, a life based on
loyalty that does not count the cost (an ideal characteristic of clan,
tribal and feudal life, and traditionally also of certain aspects even
of our own society) would be difficult to choose and unsatisfactory if
chosen unless there were good reason to think that others would
understand and play the game. It's unlikely they would if for example
they were all brought up to believe:
>The market, or the surrounding "moral tendencies" in society have
>exactly and only the effects on us that we as individuals choose to
>allow. We all have complete freedom to choose what we do, and no social
>context can relieve us of that responsibility in any way.
The reason is that loyalty and radical moral individualism don't go
together. To be loyal to something is to believe in one's essential
moral connection to that thing. Such a belief is inconsistent with
radical moral individualism.
You seem to believe that people in essence create themselves morally,
and that "freedom" and "responsibility" make sense without public
standards to determine which choices are worth making and which would
constitute a failure of moral conduct. I disagree.
>the new morality has no real effect on the choices wealthy men have;
>they have, as always, essentially unregulated access to sexual
>satisfaction.
Why suppose that one's understanding of a good life for himself is
unaffected by what is socially understood as good or bad? For that
matter, why not suppose that a wealthy man in search of satisfaction
would not prefer a situation in which all women were potentially
available and he could be completely open to one in which he had to be
cautious, limit himself mostly to demimondaines and bordellos, and worry
about exposure?
>I do not agree that freedom undermines moral responsibility. In fact, it
>accomplishes the reverse; exercising freedoms provides us with practice
>at personal responsibility. An attempt to influence behaviour by
>coercion does not create real willingness to behave in the desired
>manner: it encourages an abdication of personal responsibility.
Human life depends on a mixture of freedom and necessity, of public
standards and individual choice. "Responsibility" doesn't exist unless
there are public standards by reference to which one can be held
responsible.
I'm unclear about your use of the word "coercion", by the way. If
people didn't like your manners and thought you were a liar, so they
avoided you and sometimes treated you rudely, would that be an example
of the coercive application of public standards?
>Certainly, any standards will frustrate some people; but a difference
>exists between having to restrain yourself to respect someone else's
>rights, and having to pretend to agree to a fiction that your basic
>nature does not exist.
Is it my basic nature to work for a living when I'd much rather be doing
other things? The issue of course is how important it is for there to
be a socially-defined pattern of sexual relations that people can rely
on, that reliably supports the stable families children need, and that
support self-understandings that people find satisfying and lead them to
act in productive ways. My answer is that it's absolutely fundamental
to a tolerable society.
>You can not justify a severe cost to one person by alluding to a
>diffused minor benefit spread out over a great number of people.
If someone could steal from the government or engage in counterfeiting
and never get caught, and he really wanted the money, would he be
justified in doing so?
Also, I don't understand "minor benefit". It would help your argument
if you could point to societies that did just fine without public
standards for sexual conduct. If the benefits of such standards are so
minor and the whole thing is so arbitrary I would expect that among the
thousands of human societies there would be many to which you could
point.
>>As to clarity and honesty in relationships, my point is that people
>>can't individually define their own relationships.
>
>A point that the very existence of this conversation proves absolutely
>wrong. The existence of this computer depends on the ability of humans
>to define an entire "virtual" world. Withing ths world, the net has
>defined an entire social order from scratch, in the course of about two
>decades.
>From scratch? From a group of fairly young English-speaking college
educated men with technical backgrounds who already had a great deal in
common culturally. For an idea of the common cultural background, you
should compare the interest in science fiction and in libertarianism on
the net with that in the world at large. Even if what you said were
true, though, millions of people doing something in 20 years isn't the
same as an individual doing something himself.
>People have no less freedom to commit to traditional marriage; people
>have no less access to positive support for their committments now than
>they did forty years ago.
"Commitment" is a choice of life and necessarily takes into account the
setting in which life will be carried on. I don't see the point of
claiming you have you have the same freedom to commit to a shaky
institution for which lots of alternative arrangements are available as
to one on which you have more reason to think you will be able to rely
and that is more integrated with the other things in which you will be
participating.
>Where has the sexual had more of an effect, San Francisco's Castro
>Street, or Flint Michigan? Where have people had their standards of
>living ravaged, Castro Street, or Flint Michigan?
There are more dead bodies on Castro Street. On the other hand, there
are not many children there, so Flint is where you have a lot more kids
growing up without fathers. Far more than in the 30s.
>As for the American statistics you provided, none of them refute my
>contention: that the resources available at every level to children and
>families under threat have steadily declined.
Showing that real per capita social welfare expenditures have increased
greatly seemed relevant. Perhaps the expenditures haven't kept up with
social deterioration, for example the absolutely unprecedented growth in
illegitimacy, but that it seems to me supports my point.
Some more statistics I happen to have at hand that suggest that purely
material factors are not the issue:
In 1960 24.7% of 16 and 17-year-olds were living in poverty. In 1970 it
was 12.0% and in 1980 9.9%.
In 1960 per-pupil expenditure on schooling were $1,248 in 1980 dollars.
In 1970 it was $1,963 and in 1980 $2,491.
[Source: Uhlenberg & Eggebeen, "The Declining Well-Being of American
Adolescents", _The Public Interest_ (Winter, 1986). Further sources
given.]
>Those people who spend the time in well-funded schools do indeed end up
>much more capable.
I don't doubt that in communities in which parents are sucessful and
care about education (1) the children will mostly grow up to be capable,
and (2) the schools will be well-funded. The issue of course is whether
giving more money to a school system tends to do much to improve the
quality of education in that system.
>The main problem comes from the disparities in the distribution of
>these educational resources:
If this were so it would be very hard to understand why more money for
schools overall has not meant better achievement overall.
>Monstrous decisions rarely happen without a piecemeal approach to
>morality and relationships.
On the contrary, fanatics and the self-centered characteristically have
a single vision.
>The type of moralistic socal welfare measures this differential
>treatment has promoted have had the apparently perverse but actually
>predictable effect of breaking up families.
My intention wasn't to say the welfare system is good, only to dispute
your claim as to the function of saying economics is one thing, family
life another. As to welfare, my own view is that if a government
bureaucracy, especially a government bureaucracy that has no very
definite standards for how people should live or means of enforcing
such standards if it had them, takes direct responsibility for the
welfare of individuals there are going to be major problems. In other
words, the liberal welfare state is doomed.
>a post industrial society where the family wage does not exist for most
>of the work force.
This is necessarily true to the extent women work for pay. If most
families are two-paycheck families then one-paycheck families will have
substantially less money and feel relatively deprived.
>The sexual revolution has absolutely nothing to do with any of this. It
>happens because of economic and political decisions made by people far
>from the neighbourhoods involved, people who use the naive appeal you
>make to "sexual morality" to blame the victims for their condition.
It seems odd to claim that the unprecedented rise in crime and other
signs of social dissolution throughout the Western world beginning in
the 60s have been due to unprecedented economic hardship.
Your view seems to be that political decisions at the center are the
explanation and answer for all social issues. Attempts to implement
that view have ended badly.
>I will not let have anyone say that my marriage depends on violence and
>oppression.
Again, you seem to identify social standards with violence and
oppression. I'm not sure why. There are social standards of honesty.
Some of them are even enforced by law. Alger Hiss went to jail for
perjury. Does honesty then depend on violence and oppression?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From jk Wed Jul 3 08:33:08 1996
Subject: Re: your arguments on sexual morality
To: johns@caldera.silverplatter.com (John Spragge)
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 08:33:08 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB6871.6A73FCC0@ppp01.silverplatter.com> from "John Spragge" at Jul 2, 96 11:51:25 pm
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>My assumption of violence or coercion comes from both the historical
>record and your own original presentation. What happens if, after you
>make your case for the "public standards" you propose, someone politely
>declines to live that way? If you respond with a "good luck to you" and
>move on, then I accept your proposals as non-coercive. If you propose
>to make life difficult for anyone who rejects your arguments and
>refuses to live the way you recommend, then you do consider the
>advantages of a public standard for sexual practise important enough to
>justify coercion. And given the role of violence in coercing people to
>follow socially dictated sexual practises in the past, you have some
>obligation to explain how you would avoid your forms of coercion
>falling into violence.
"Original presentation" -- the FAQ? What I said there was that there
should be standards, and that questions regarding legal enforcement
depended on general political philosophy so I wouldn't deal with them.
What is necessary for a tolerable life in society seems to me one thing,
how to bring it about at least in many respects something else.
You put "public standards" in scare quotes, and you seem to be asking
what I personally propose to do. Something seems to be missing from the
discussion.
Maybe it would be illuminating to consider honesty, which I gather you
think is a good thing. People are honest mostly because they understand
it to be part of being a good human being, and because they think of
dishonesty as betrayal of what they most fundamentally are. That
attitude is not however simply an individual choice. It is connected
with upbringing and social sanctions of various sorts, and the
upbringing and sanctions have something to do with how honest people
are. Children are told to tell the truth and punished for lying.
Sometimes they are beaten. As they get older they may be penalized in
various ways for dishonesty -- students who cheat may be failed or
expelled, employees who lie may be fired, friends who lie may lose their
friends, those who get a reputation for dishonesty may be treated
without respect. Sometimes people who lie -- perjurers -- are jailed,
and suffer whatever happens to people in jail.
Historically the concern for truth-telling has led to horrors. Under
Roman law, which as the most civilized code around was carried forward
in Europe through the Middle Ages, witnesses were routinely tortured to
make sure they were telling the truth. Until the 18th century those
who were thought to have rejected the truth and proclaimed falsehood in
the most important matters -- heretics -- were sometimes burned to
death. In our own times, the insistence that judicial sentences
correspond to truth led to reintroduction of torture on a colossal
scale in the communist countries, where millions were coerced to
confess to offenses that as a practical matter carried the death
penalty so that the justice of punishing them would be confirmed.
Elsewhere, entire classes and races have been stigmatized as
"dishonest", and that imputation used as an excuse for their violent
subordination. At all times there has been the hypocrisy of pretending
to tell the truth when one is not. That hypocrisy has routinely led to
further and more serious lies, and been especially odious when (as
often) engaged in by those in power.
Given the circumstances and history, would you say that someone who said
honesty is important and there should be social standards supporting it
is in favor of coercive violence and lies?
>>Also, what it is possible to choose and what choices will be experienced
>>as good depend very much on setting.
>
>People in the best of situations choose evil, and know it as evil;
>people in the most vile situations choose good, and know they have
>chosen the good.
Not what I meant. It would have been possible for a Frenchman in 1750
but not for an American today to make loyalty to throne and altar the
guiding principle of his life. It would have been possible for at least
some Frenchmen to do the same in 1900, but it's unlikely it would have
been as morally rewarding as for his compatriot 150 years earlier (it
would have been safer, of course).
>If "radical moral individualism" means the belief that moral obligations
>come about through my own choices, and I have to take responsibility for
>them, I'll gladly claim the title.
I can't make sense of the view. Is the principle that moral obligations
are created by your choice one that is valid only because you choose it?
Suppose you don't choose to take responsibility for anything -- are you
nonetheless stuck with responsibility for e.g. the consequences of your
acts? If so, what choice of yours put you in a situation in which you
are subject to responsibilities you don't want? On a different point,
do you feel any obligations at all to family members whom you didn't
choose as family members? To human beings as such, just because you're
a human being?
>The "public standards" of the ante-bellum South made helping escaping
>slaves "a failure of moral conduct". The public standards of Stalin's
>Russia made opposing the regime a "failure of moral conduct".
My claim isn't that all public standards are correct, only that we can't
make sense of "responsibility" unless there are valid public standards.
It's not a wholly subjective concept; there's a distinction between
*being* responsible and *feeling* responsible.
>The elevation of social needs to moral absolutes leads to an
>intolerable society very quickly. Totalitarianism means the ability to
>equate something useful for the political and social order to a moral
>imperative.
I thought totalitarianism was the view that morality reduces to whatever
those in power determine to be useful. The view that morality includes
what is necessary for a tolerable society is very different, I think.
>As you yourself have pointed out, neither I nor anyone else proposes to
>have no "public standards" for sexual conduct.
True enough. I should have asked for examples of societies in which
sexual morality and commercial morality were the same -- based wholly on
concepts of private property, free contract, and proscription of force
and fraud, with no special rules based on the special role in human life
of sexuality and its consequences (e.g., children).
>As to how many societies had standards the differed from the ones you
>propose, I would say pretty much all of them. Muslim society certainly
>does not have the same "public standards" as ours; neither does Native
>American, or most Asian societies. In fact, the "public standards" for
>most of European history have differed markedly from what you propose.
There have been variations, of course. My point is that the standards
have been far more similar to what I propose than to the post-sexual-
revolution standards, and that the latter standards are going to make
people miserable.
>I don't consider marriage a "shaky" institution; not do I think marriage
>involves a committment to an institution. Marriage means a commitment to
>another person, and I don't see how you can strengthen a commitment by
>making people believe they have no choice but to make it.
Rates of divorce, cohabitation and living alone suggest more shakiness
than is consistent with the most important purpose of marriage as an
institution, rearing children well. If marriage does not involve
commitment to an institution, why do people promise to be husband and
wife? Those are institutional roles. Why do they get married at all,
and think doing so is an important act?
Commitment to an institution is likely to be stronger if it's
reasonably clear what it is (i.e., it doesn't depend simply on the
wishes of those involved) and if it's functional (it provides the best
and socially most accepted way of doing the things most people want to
do in life).
>I see no evidence of social deterioration, particularly given the
>absolutely unprecedented speed of social and political change.
We see differently.
>If you think of the current welfare system as insupportable and
>useless, we agree on something: that appealing to one form of morality
>for economics and another morality for family life has led to an
>expensive and ineffective social program.
Actually, I think the welfare system is bad because it's based on a
grossly over-simplified understanding of human life -- that people are
rather inert components in a system that can be re-engineered and
reordered as wished using regulations and money. Post-sexual-revolution
sexual morality is I think based on a similarly over-simplified
understanding of life, that all aspects of our life can be governed by
the principles applicable to traders in a commodities market.
>Allow me to point out that crime and its consequences declined about
>one hundred thousand fold in the Western World in the three decades
>following 1960, as opposed to the three decades before it. Or perhaps
>you don't consider aggressive wars, purges, and genocide as crimes or
>signs of social dissolution?
Certainly the Nazi and Soviet regimes were signs of social dissolution.
As such, they didn't come from nowhere. The dissolution of traditional
social and moral arrangements that led to them has progressed since
their fall, and has now reached the family and its supporting habits and
understandings. Not a good sign for the political future.
>I do believe that people should treat the commitments they make in
>marriage seriously.
Does it bother you that adultery was once punished by stoning and that
even today it is often punished by informal violence? That it has
always been taken more seriously in the case of women than in the case
of men? That the rich and powerful have often gotten away with it?
>I merely insist that allowing people to choose what obligations they
>will take on, and how they will structure thier relationships, makes it
>easier, rather than harder, to insist that people honour their
>commitments.
So we are all to create ourselves out of nothing as moral beings. Does
this principle apply to observance of property rights, paying taxes,
ordinary honesty, refraining from rape and pillage, obeying the traffic
laws, etc.? None of those things are written in the sky. Their
specific requirements differ in different times and places, and
reasonable men may differ. Does everyone write his own ticket?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From jk Wed Jul 3 10:44:52 1996
Subject: Re: your mail
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 10:44:52 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB681A.C3F878E0@eb3ppp20.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 2, 96 01:23:28 pm
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> But anyone who you think would be good, and who's willing, please
> help me hook up with.
I have a couple of ideas, which might not pan out. Can I excerpt your
last email to show what you have in mind?
> my image of it --in the context of my present thinking and of our
> previous discussions-- has been that it is more a matter of
> "authority," and top-down. Individual conduct is constrained by the
> weight of tradition, the social pressure of others who uphold
> tradition, etc.
When a particular issue arises tradition is top down. It's not created
by top down authority, though, it arises from the accumulation of
social experience and habit, which is more bottom up than top down.
Also, tradition prevents issues from arising so it reduces the need for
explicit top down authority.
Consider language as an analogy. On any particular point that comes up
usage is a top down authority. However, "usage" is simply common
practice, at least the common practice of people who care about
language and pay attention to how they use it. Common practice is a
bottom up matter, and people who know and use a language well usually
don't feel oppressed by rules of usage as by an alien authority.
> At another level, I am inclined to think that all systems have been
> self-organizing in the sense that tradition has been. So it leads to
> the question, if tradition is self-organizing, what is NOT? Could it
> not equally or comparably be said of the U.S. gov't that it is
> self-organizing, from the Constitutional Convention (and all the
> antecedents before that stretching back decades and centuries) up to
> the democratically elected representatives?
A system is self-organizing if it arises without plan or intention and
without those involved necessarily understanding or much caring about
the functions served. The market and tradition are both
self-organizing systems in that sense.
In the U.S. we have a written constitution, and from the Federalist it
appears that those who drafted it thought there was a science of
politics that made it possible for government to be a matter of design
rather than history. At first the government didn't do much, and
self-organizing systems (the market, moral traditions, various forms of
direct popular self-rule) did most of the work of governing society.
More recently, though, the responsibilities of the government have
increased quite radically, and those responsibilities are administered
through rationalized bureaucracies that certainly are not intended to
be self-organizing systems as I've defined the term. (As an aside, I
regard the culture wars as part of a dispute over the relative value of
self-organizing systems or centralized rational bureaucracies.)
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From jk Wed Jul 3 10:56:38 1996
Subject: Re: letter to the editor
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 10:56:38 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB681A.C7B3AC20@eb3ppp20.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 2, 96 01:25:06 pm
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> I am leary of those who assume that their "right beliefs" embody the
> whole of God's truth.
I don't know enough about _The Lion King_, Esmeralda or James Bowman to
comment on specifics. It does seem to me that talking about God can't
do much good unless we sometimes have good reason to think God's truth
on some point is A and not B. Also, it's hard to talk about the sacred
while excluding the possibility of talking about the blasphemous. And
finally, if any of this stuff is important it's going to be hard to
keep it out of discussions before a general audience.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From jk Wed Jul 3 16:41:09 1996
Subject: Re: Tradition and power
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 16:41:09 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB68D5.F7151F60@eb3ppp17.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 3, 96 11:50:00 am
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>But I also see the realities of power as profoundly important in
>shaping tradition, and though you've never explicitly ruled that out in
>conversation with me, it seems that this dimension is not a very vital
>one in your customary thinking about tradition.
Do you have an alternative to tradition in which power plays a smaller
role? The point of traditionalism or self-organizing systems generally
isn't that they give perfect answers, but that the answers they give
are hard to improve upon largely because they take more into account
and are harder to manipulate. People think it's easy to do better, but
then they think it's easy to beat the stock market too. It's not, even
though the market often misprices things.
>Chastity belts were a tradition in some circles during certain eras.
I'm told that the chastity belt was 19th-century or at least post-
enlightenment sneer at the Middle Ages, and that the ones on display are
fakes.
>Slavery was a tradition, and after that the "separate but unequal"
>schools and different drinking fountains?
On the whole slavery has been at its worst when rationalized, as on
large plantations in the Old South, or established for ideological
reasons and run bureaucratically, as in communist labor camps in our own
times.
>Where, on the spectrum of top-down vs. bottom-up, should we place the
>origins of these forms of traditional order? In India, the caste
>system appears to be a legacy of strata formed by conquest (lighter-
>skinned Indo-European-speaking peoples subjugating darker-skinned
>indigenous peoples on the subcontinent): was this system an
>accumulation of "social experience and habit" and/or was it imposed by
>"authority"
Conquest and enslavement are pure examples of top down power.
Afterwards their effects become traditions and are modified as the
tradition develops. The development of tradition does reflect the
accumulation of experience and habit. It's therefore more likely to
take the viewpoint and interests of the dominated into account than the
original non-traditional system.
Dominance can be established by terror at sword's-point, but it's
easier to maintain and run it productively with the cooperation and
participation of the dominated. In the normal course of things ways
will eventually arise for securing that cooperation and participation.
Doing so will involve some sort of implicit quid pro quo: what do the
various parties want out of the situation? The development of
tradition, with adjustments here and mutually acceptable practices
there, makes that sort of thing possible.
Admittedly circumstances can result in the development over time of a
more one-sided social contract, as in the case of slaves in the South
due to the cotton gin or the deterioration of the position of European
peasants in the early Middle Ages due to the need for strong local
military organization based on armored calvary and fortifications.
It's hard to see how getting rid of tradition would have helped the
peasants or slaves though -- tradition is a limitation on action, and
it is usually the powerful who want most to be active.
>Is there not a significant way in which the institution of these
>traditions involves "design" as does the drawing up of the
>Constitution? Not as formal, of course. Not as self-conscious,
>perhaps. But still a degree of design. (And contrariwise, I'm also
>suggesting, can we not see even the process of design as in some
>respect an unfolding of the bubbling "what-is," a self-organizing
>system?)
Something designed can of course become a tradition or part of a
tradition. Sometimes what it becomes has nothing much to do with the
original purpose, as in the case of the Indian caste system. Or a
connection with the original purpose can be maintained but the
significance of the thing nonetheless transformed. Magna Carta might
be an example. Also the concepts and motives guiding design can arise
through the development of a tradition, as with the U.S. Constitution.
So as you suggest the distinction is not absolute. It seems to me
nonetheless useful.
>On the question of the role of power in shaping tradition, I do wonder
>what proportion of it fits your model, and what proportion of it
>requires attention to the determinative role of power-- with power
>being, I assume, by its nature, a top-down kind of thing.
The development of tradition is not a sole sufficient key to
understanding society. Lots of other things also play a role. One
concern I have, though, is that people who say "it's just power that
determines who gets what, and we've got to deal with that" often end up
with the bright idea of creating a superpower outside the normal web of
social relations with the responsibility of ensuring that power does
not overstep the bounds of justice. The problem with that idea, of
course, is that the superpower is also a power, and an absolute,
irresponsible and utterly top down power at that.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From jk Wed Jul 3 22:36:27 1996
Subject: Re: your arguments on sexual morality
To: johns@caldera.silverplatter.com (John Spragge)
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 22:36:27 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB6916.78774520@ppp02.silverplatter.com> from "John Spragge" at Jul 3, 96 07:33:04 pm
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> Moral obligations can't exist as a practical matter without choices.
I'm not sure how you would distinguish between what you are morally
obligated to do and what you choose to do.
> Define "valid" public standards.
A public standard that is binding morally.
> As long as you impose a code of behaviour by external coercion, then
> that code will depend on power to enforce it.
If the code is binding morally, what does external coercion take away
from it? Also, are you opposed to all legal coercion?
> Excuse me, but I find the difference between four wives and one, or
> the difference between allowing concubinage and forbidding it a lot
> more than "variations".
Not in comparison with a view of sexual morality based purely on
property in one's body and free contract.
> And please explain why the current standards will make people
> miserable. Even better, please provide some evidence that the new
> morality creates social problems that the unpercedented speed of
> technology and the resulting social dislocation can't account for.
See the FAQ.
> When I got married, my wife and I had no doubt what our committment
> involved. The church made that information very available to us, and
> we took advantage of it. And neither the church nor society would
> have allowed us to change the terms of the contract to suit our own
> wishes.
Why did you bother getting married if it's all just external coercion
and other people's ideas?
> I seriously doubt that any significant number of the people whose
> marriages failed split up because they didn't understand what
> marriage would entail going in.
Didn't accept what marriage would entail? Didn't agree concretely on
what it would entail for each party? Weren't supported by other people
in demanding and complying with the entailed rights and obligations?
It seems to me such things matter.
> As for "socially the most accepted", again, please define it.
The conduct people generally expect, accept, think makes sense, have
already accommodated themselves to in various ways and so on is
"socially the most acceptable".
> Do you seriously expect me to believe that nazi Germany or Stalin's
> Russia grew out of a philosophy of moral individualism?
A situation of social fragmentation.
> Perhaps you can explain why, if our morals have detriorated since the
> fall of naziism and Stalinism, we now have more democracies than ever
> in history; we have (for the first time) a standard of sexual
> behaviour the completely forbids rape; and we have a growing
> international consensus on the value of human life. You might also
> explain why the greatest bloodbath of the last decade took place
> between a tribal regime (Iraq) and a theocracy (Iran), and the
> contractual democracies almost managed to stay completely out of wars
> with each other.
Democratic forms and morality or the good life aren't the same thing,
your descriptions of sexual mores as always I find odd, the sort of
thing people say at international conferences mostly shows that there
are lots more international conferences these days, and not that much
of the bloodletting in modern times has had to do with tribal regimes
or theocracies. As to contractual societies, an important question to
my mind is whether they will last.
> The prevailing sexual morality does have clear standards, anchored
> not simply in the concept of free contract, but also in the universal
> morality based on mutual respect.
I don't see that the two are distinguishable on your view. What is
worthy of respect in your morality of mutual respect seems simply to be
decisions of the arbitrary individual will, whatever those decisions
happen to be. That morality is not universal although it claims to be
so by right.
I think I have a clear idea of the nature and basis of your objections
to the views set forth in the sexual morality FAQ. I don't think
continuing this exchange will repay the effort or bring us closer to a
common understanding. You may of course respond or not as you choose
and I will do the same.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From jk Thu Jul 4 04:45:48 1996
Subject: Re: your arguments on sexual morality
To: johns@caldera.silverplatter.com
Date: Thu, 4 Jul 1996 04:45:48 -0400 (EDT)
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A sudden urge to clarify:
> > Perhaps you can explain why, if our morals have detriorated since the
> > fall of naziism and Stalinism
That's not what I said, only that the process of social fragmentation
that led to Naziism and Stalinism has continued since their fall. One
measure of that process is social statistics showing weaker bonds among
individuals. Social fragmentation is not the same as bad morals but it
does have a connection with political extremism.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From jk Fri Jul 5 09:47:06 1996
Subject: Re: Recycling
To: Chris@Free-Market.com (Chris Whitten)
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 09:47:06 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: Hepcon@aol.com, jtlevy@phoenix.Princeton.EDU
In-Reply-To: <199607041619.JAA03139@holland.it.earthlink.net> from "Chris Whitten" at Jul 4, 96 12:22:51 pm
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A couple of comments:
It seems to me that liberalism as Todd describes it is a natural result
of a modern outlook that starts with sensation and formal logic, with
the emphasis on sensation, and doesn't want to add anything else. In
ethics, that outlook don't let you get beyond "follow your feelings",
with all feelings equally valid because they are all equally feelings.
On such a view moral judgements are only acts of aggression, and
evidence doesn't count, so you get Todd's liberalism.
Pascal's basic point I think is that sensation and formal logic aren't
enough for rational action. You need additional assumptions sufficient
to establish an objective moral order within which ethical rationality
is possible, but from an initial standpoint of accepting only s. and
f.l. no such assumptions can be demonstrated. Therefore a choice must
be made among unprovable possibilities; once the issue is raised, even
refusing to make a choice and so sticking with mindless impulse is
itself a choice that cannot be shown to be correct.
The best choice is the choice that once made most convincingly
illuminates the nature of man and the world. Before the choice is
actually made, though, the world remains unilluminated because there
are limits on our ability to think hypothetically. Therefore the
arguments that will most appeal to someone wholly in the initial
position will be arguments that appeal solely on logic and sensation,
such as the wager argument. That doesn't mean that Pascal's views
depend very heavily on that argument.
As to liberal religion -- I think it's basically a reconstruction of
traditional transcendent religion that turns it into a deification of
man. To be God is to be one whose will is unconditionally valid.
Liberalism is the view that our wills are unconditionally valid
morally, since they are authority and there is no higher authority, and
that technology including social technology will increasingly make them
unconditionally valid in fact as well, since things will be arranged so
that more and more we will all get whatever we happen to want. (see
http://206.1.24.2/TESM/Missmini/Smithjoy.htm for a discussion of the
nature of liberal religion.) So it's true that there is something that
could be called religion that is consistent with liberalism but false
that traditional transcendent religion is consistent with it.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From jk Sat Jul 6 05:41:07 1996
Subject: Re: paradoxes
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 05:41:07 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB6A7A.E7D57120@eb3ppp17.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 5, 96 02:02:52 pm
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> Consider this possible paradox. On the one hand, it is "my"
> side of the cultural divide that I think is most bottom-up:
> permissiveness in childrearing, relativistic (at times) in its moral
> philosophy, less respect for authority, more into evolution and
> self-organizing systems as a cosmology. But then there is the
> dimension that you, quite aptly I think, at least in imporant ways,
> observed in this morning's post (I wish I could get my stuff into the
> Post). You wrote: " The left tends I think to like grand reforms
> conceived abstractly, designed centrally and implemented
> bureaucratically." That, of course, is very top-down.
>
> It seems a paradox. Is there a resolution to it that can help
> keep my framework in good working order?
I think it's an instance of the problem of the One and the Many, which
people have been puzzling over for a long time.
What is the relation between particulars and general principles? The
viewpoint of the Left is I think the modern viewpoint that begins by
demanding clarity and concrete reality, and so adopts nominalism, the
view that only particulars are real. That I think is your "bottom up"
outlook.
We can't however get along without general categories and principles.
We can't speak or even think without them. So the Left also uses
general categories and principles, but the organic connection with
particulars has been broken and the categories and principles express
less experience and knowledge of the things to which they apply than
the aspirations and will of the political reformer. Hence the
unfortunate tendency toward bureaucratic central control.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From jk Sat Jul 6 14:29:24 1996
Subject: Re: paradoxes
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 14:29:24 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB6B1E.C7374660@eb3ppp17.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 6, 96 09:36:04 am
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>what is it that leads the "left" to think that only particulars are
>real?
Something of the sort has been the trend of modern thought, and the Left
has been the progressive tendency in modern times. Think of the
influential modern philosophers -- Descartes, with his demand for "clear
and distinct" ideas; Locke, who thought all knowledge came from sense
experience and a "blank tablet"; Hume, who resolved the mind into a mass
of particular ideas, and abstract ideas into associations of more
concrete ones; Nietzsche, who emphasized the emptiness of abstractions;
the linguistic philosophers, who reduce abstract ideas to words, that is
to classes of concrete human actions in concrete social settings.
The idea overall seems to be that you don't want to be fooled so you
should concentrate on things that are as concrete and particular as
possible. If you do so you will deal with things that are more easily
grasped, understood and manipulated, so the knowledge you get will be
both more reliable and more useful.
>what are examples of how that is so?
Consider the leftist view of social stereotypes. People are supposed to
be able to define themselves as they choose. Also consider the leftist
tendency toward radicalism -- imposing a wholly new categorization on
things that is intended to guide the fundamental reordering of society.
If leftists thought things had real essential natures that made each
thing part of the cosmos in a way that didn't depend on our wishes they
would be far more suspicious of such an enterprise. The view that only
particulars are real is the view that any order among particulars is
made and not found. That's the view of leftist radicalism from which I
think the left generally, including liberals, can't fundamentally
separate itself.
>isn't the perception by the Marxists of people not as individuals with
>particularities but as members of "classes" an example of just the
>opposite?
The Marxists tend to downplay innate differences among men and emphasize
those due to social position. I don't think that means they believe
things have essential natures.
The Marxists begin by emphasizing the physical and concrete: there are
particular men acting under particular natural and technological
conditions to remake nature in accordance with their needs and desires
(e.g., by turning iron ore into automobiles). Classes are defined
logically, by reference to the relationship of particular men to
concrete productive processes and more particularly to control of the
means of production. The concrete constellation of men, needs,
production, and productive organization gives rise to an ideological
superstructure of philosophy, morality, political theory, religion, and
so on. Since it is the former rather than the latter that is real, I
think I can fit the Marxists into my theory.
A related point -- to believe that only particulars are real is to
believe no particular has a definable intrinsic nature that must be
respected; otherwise something else would be real, a definable intrinsic
nature potentially shared by many particulars. If that's the way things
are, the things on which we act can give us no guidance and our only
possible guide to action is our own will. So "only particulars are
real" really means we need not respect particulars and can deal
rationally with them only by reference to categories and principles we
construct to facilitate achieving our own wills. Therefore, among other
things, modern genocide and other forms of mass murder.
>And how do conservatives (or whoever is the other side) see things?
>are categories more real in that outlook? and if so, how does that fit
>into the more general worldview of the right?
The conservative view is the opposite of the one described. Things,
including human beings, have essential natures that make them part of an
order that is found and not made.
Other comments: conservatives accuse leftists and liberals of a
fondness for abstractions, and conservatism is said to favor the
concrete over the theoretical. My version of the accusation is that l's
prefer abstract schemes based on their own wishes to understandings
based on the nature of things themselves. In the conservative view,
particular things have their own nature that must be discerned and
accepted.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From jk Sat Jul 6 18:11:41 1996
Subject: Re: paradoxes
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 18:11:41 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB6B4D.0109E4A0@eb5ppp2.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 6, 96 03:06:58 pm
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>I recall THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY having a great deal to say about
>'species-nature' and it seemed to me that Marx very much want to
>fulfill what he thought was the inborn humanness of the man, which he
>saw as thwarted by the social institutions of dominance he was
>criticizing. Whatever the defects of his vision, I don't think that
>book fits your case, and I think that book is not marginal to Marx's
>vision.
>
>And then there's the Declaration of Independence, a rather radical
>document by any account, and certainly will belong on the left if
>you're going to include Locke and Hume and those guys. "All
>men...endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights..."
>certainly says they see the proper order as one that takes into
>account the inherent nature of the parts.
How about this formulation: according to the Left neither man nor
anything else has an inherent nature, except that it is the nature of
man to choose his own nature and to remake the natural world in
accordance with his self-chosen goals.
"Inalienable rights" and "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"
suggest that for the Declaration man's nature-that-is-not-a-nature is
fixed and present from the beginning, which makes it sound like an
essence although an odd one. Marx, whose thinking was more advanced,
thought of it as a practical state of affairs that would be realized at
the conclusion of the historical process. Since it did not yet exist
he would not discuss it or the future society in which it would be
realized in any detail, saying that for the present the point is to
change rather than contemplate the world. As he said:
The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human
thinking is not a question of theory but is a _practical_ question.
Man must prove the truth, that is, the reality and power, the this-
sidedness of his thinking in practice.
_Theses on Feuerbach_, II. So it seems to me that if Marx believed in a
human essence it was in an odd sense.
I should say though that I'm no Marx scholar and in particular have read
only a few excerpts from _The German Ideology_ and that not recently. I
think the _Theses on Feuerbach_ were written at about the same time,
though.
I'm taken with this "no intrinsic natures" theory, so comments would be
welcome. I suppose I should look at what Richard Weaver had to say on
the subject. As I understand it, his view was that Western Civ. started
to decline with the appearance of late medieval nominalism.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From jk Sun Jul 7 05:42:33 1996
Subject: Re: inborn nature
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 05:42:33 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB6B91.6333F500@eb5ppp2.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 6, 96 11:17:41 pm
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Thanks for the extract from your exchange. It was interesting and
relevant.
For you the objectivity of evaluations seems based on anchoring them in
patterns of functional relationships between man and nature that have
become hard-wired in _homo sapiens_ through biological evolution and so
are the same for all men unless something is disordered. To stick with
my own hobby-horse, it's worth noting that emphasis on unchangeable
biologically-based patterns of behavior is usually thought to be
conservative or reactionary.
As for the other guy, I continue to have trouble understanding him. He
seems to want to transcend "map" and "territory" in favor of a view
that makes naming part of the way the world we talk about and deal with
arised. If the distinction is insisted on, though, he has no trouble
saying that the map lacks reality in comparison with the territory,
which seems a mistake from the standpoint of what he wants to do.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From jk Sun Jul 7 18:51:26 1996
Subject: Re: upcoming radio show
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 18:51:26 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB6BFF.3E7C8100@eb5ppp2.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 7, 96 12:22:24 pm
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>In the era when the Bible, for example, was written, the age of
>marriage was typically, I believe, in the early teens. "No sex before
>marriage" imposed no terrible burden on young people. Compare that
>with now. Even while modern health and diet have pushed the age of
>sexual maturity several years earlier than it used to be, the realities
>of modern life have pushed the age of marriageability in the other
>direction. Many people cannot achieve the economic self-sufficiency to
>allow them realistically to contemplate marrying until ten or fifteen
>years after they become sexually mature.
Random comments:
1. In biblical times as afterwards economic self-sufficiency was
difficult to attain. The solution was that people got married, lived
at home, and continued to participate economically in the paternal
household. People don't like that now, so what's really happened is
that people value economic independence more. Also, the generations
rely on each other less in practical things. A lot of this last change
has been due to new government undertakings -- public schooling and
social security. So it seems to me the issue is still the degree to
which we reject connections to particular people in favor of relations
with abstract bureaucratic or money-driven organizations as the basis
for our social life. Reliance on the latter means looser sexual morals
and vice versa.
2. Reliance on formal public schooling and other things (TV,
separation of home and work) that separate children from real life seems
to mean slower maturity -- people used to be reasonably mature by their
late teens but now it takes an extra decade or two. I really don't
think it's a matter of more complicated jobs in a more complicated world
requiring more formal training -- the schools just aren't that
effective, and requirements for formal credentials are grossly inflated.
I'm inclined to think that radical government downsizing of the sort the
libertarians want would make a big difference in this connection.
3. The average age of marriage has risen in the past couple of
decades, but I believe it's still earlier than at most times in the past
couple of hundred years. Economic self-sufficiency is easier to attain
now than it was a hundred years ago. It would be worth looking at the
statistics.
>Traditional morality, therefore, has the problem that it would condemn
>a great many people to spend the first decade and more of their sexual
>maturity in celibacy-- something that seems neither natural nor
>healthy.
If people got married in their early 20s and had to wait until then
would it really make them miserable or ill?
>When I was growing up, our cultural media seemed to conspire to present
>that sexuality was not part of what we are as human beings. It does
>not seem to me healthy for a society to so shroud sex in shame and
>denial.
Was this really true? Reticence and indirection are not the same as
shame and denial. If you want to see the power of sexual passion read
the ball scene with Anna and Vronsky in _Anna Karenina_ or the
thunderstorm scene between Dorothea and Will Ladislaw in _Middlemarch_.
American pop culture is of course on a lower level and Americans are
said to be more puritanical than Russians or English bohemians.
Nonetheless, as I recall pre-revolutionary times, love, marriage and
having babies were all considered good and normal things and an interest
in the opposite sex was thought healthy and natural. People were just
expected to wait until marriage.
Sex I think is in many ways like money and power -- good in its place in
the general system of life but unruly, and outside that place often
obsessive and destructive. It's like money and power only more so
because it touches us more closely. I think it's the current official
view that makes sexuality not a fundamental part of what we are as human
beings. It's all supposed to be optional and controllable.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From jk Tue Jul 9 13:08:07 1996
Subject: Re: Take three
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 13:08:07 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB6CD5.C044F880@eb2ppp8.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 8, 96 01:58:55 pm
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>1) There is a problem in our society about the abdication of authority,
>the rejection of the idea of authority. Especially in parenting. Also
>in schools. I need two things: a) to show how this is so; and b) to
>explore the underlying beliefs that bring people to choose, to BELIEVE
>IN, an approach to questions of order that don't work, or that don't
>work as well as they think they will.
>
>2) There is a problem in our society about the question of standards.
>Some reject the idea of some things being regarded and treated as
>better than others. Same questions: just how does this phenomenon
>manifest itself, what's the problem with it, and what are the [errors
>in] beliefs that underpin this rejection or undermining of standards?
>
>3) Our political order is jeopardized by the loss of a sense of the
>importance of a moral dimension in the democratic process. Again there
>is an issue of order, here; lack of a sense that the responsibilities
>of citizenship involve the achievement and maintenance of a kind of
>order of the psyche, an order having to do with moral discipline and
>with rational process. ONce again: I need to show that it is so, and
>explore the illusions --the deficiencies in understanding-- that bring
>us to that predicament.
>
>First, do you think I am on to something, i.e. that my basic
>propositions here are valid. Second, do you have any suggestions on
>how I can get a better background in these critiques in order to bring
>them to life in the book I'm planning to write?
I do think you're on to something. We've talked a while about my own
theories about this, which basically come down to the view that (1) the
problem is the modern tendency to make man and the specific feelings and
goals of each individual the measure of all things, (2) that problem is
with us to the extent people do not understand themselves as inhabiting
a common moral cosmos, and (3) the moral cosmos is not something that
can be invented or proved, and can be known and understood only through
acceptance of tradition.
It seems what you want is something that bridges the gap between grand
theorizing and concrete discussions of society comprehensively, and in
a way persuasive to the skeptic. Maybe some grand theorizing that
isn't my personal grand theorizing would also help. I suggested a few
things to look at, but don't know if you've followed up. I agree there
must be more that would help you. All I've come up with since then is
an email address that may work for Myron Magnet, the author of one of
the books I suggested (_The Dream and the Nightmare_). You might look
at the book and decide if it's worthwhile contacting the author. I've
just posted a request to a couple of mailing lists in which I
participate and hope at least to be able to lengthen the reading list.
>Please let me know if my repetition in starting from the top in
>different ways is bothersome to you.
Not bothersome. It's an occasion to reconsider the terrain as a whole.
My most immediate interest is in working out my own ideas in response to
questions and comments, but you are right that concrete confirmation
sufficient to convince the doubtful is important.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Niagara, O roar again!
From jk Wed Jul 10 08:48:43 1996
Subject: Re: Take three
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 08:48:43 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB6DC6.8668FC00@eb3ppp17.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 9, 96 06:03:19 pm
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Andy,
>I'd like Magnet's email address. I've read his book a couple of years
>ago. Thought there was something to it. Wasn't blown away by his
>mind, but he was good enough.
I got the following from Walter Olson, who's associated with the
Manhattan Institute.
At the moment the Manhattan Institute's general one-box-for-
everyone email address, 72702.2710@compuserve.com, is the best way
of reaching Myron Magnet, but I don't think he's much of an email
user. This may change when our new domains come online at any
moment: manhattan-institute.org and city-journal.org, I think they
are.
Olson is my only contact at a conservative think tank, and I had asked
him if he knew of someone who could help you. He also said
I'm also happy to try my hand at an email discussion with Mr.
Schmookler if he wants to get in touch, but I'll warn in advance
that the last way I'd characterize our current woes is that of any
"one-sided emphasis on individual autonomy". Of course that
doesn't keep us from agreeing about many specifics. Lots of
individual autonomy in my view is perfectly compatible with high
and objective standards, a wide choice of hierarchical and
prescriptive institutions in which people need not participate, and
child-raising techniques that lay out firm links between
misbehavior and consequences. Conversely, anti-individualist
ideologies have shown themselves highly compatible with nose-
thumbing at standards and hierarchy and with poor child-raising
techniques.
So if a discussion with an intelligent homosexual libertarian would be
of interest, you might get in touch with him. His email is
73354.1400@CompuServe.COM. He wrote at least one decent book, _The
Litigation Explosion_ I think it was called. I don't think it's
directly on your topic, though.
>Your thesis is one that makes some sense to me. I'd like to have
>deeper understanding than I do of "the modern tendency to make man and
>the specific feelings and goals of each individual the measure of all
>things." I think there's a difference here between "man is the measure
>of all things" and the feelings and goals of each indiviudal. It's the
>latter than more interests me. Even your TRADITION, as I gather you
>seem to understand it, is from man-- No?
Your view may make the human species considered as part of nature
(understood as a functional system) the measure of all things. On that
view there would be a big difference, with only the latter causing the
problems.
In part the issue is whether morality and the like can be understood as
some sort of emergent property of a non-moral (ultimately purely
physical?) system like humanity collectively. I'm inclined to think
not, so I don't see good grounds for distinguishing "man is the measure"
from "every particular man is the measure" as ultimate self-sustaining
principles. It seems to me the same impulses that lead people to reject
absolute transcendence and adopt the former will lead them to reject
emergent transcendence and adopt the latter. If you want a guide to
life and transcendent principles seem unconvincing then your own desires
will do the job nicely.
I'm dubious that tradition can be understood as wholly from or
developed by man. I mentioned that I think that view gets Hayek into
trouble. I've emphasized that side of things in our discussion though
because it makes sense to try to get as far as possible without adding
additional assumptions to those already accepted, and because my views
on the point aren't well worked out. Very briefly, it seems to me that
valid tradition has to do with knowledge, and knowledge (except God's
knowledge) can't be justified purely internally. Even if tradition can
be understood that way, though, it doesn't follow that it's about man.
Consider the natural sciences -- they are I suppose a human invention,
but they don't make man the measure of things. They're about things
that are prior to us and don't depend on us.
>And of course my sense of the need to accept a tradition in order to
>have a moral cosmos is not the same as yours. Is it your point that
>otherwise we'll not have a shared cosmos, or that otherwise we will
>each invent much less adequate cosmae. Of course, I think you've given
>me plenty of reason to think that you mean both. As for myself, I've
>been happy to try to put together my own, with considerable dependence
>on the rich resources of more than one tradition.
I mean both. I also mean that it's hard for a cosmos one invents for
oneself to serve the function of a cosmos, which is to act as a
background and source of standards for us and all our acts of inventing.
To make a cosmos is to be God, and we're not up to the job.
Additions to suggested reading:
_Idols for Destruction_ by Herbert Schlossberg. (I know nothing about
it. The guy who recommended it is one of the more intelligent
Evangelical biblical literalists I know.)
The Summer 1995 issue of _The Wilson Quarterly_ I am told discussed
some relevant themes, especially an article called "Learning From the
Fifties", written by Alan Ehrenhalt, from his book The Lost City:
Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community.
>From Walter Olson:
Still, I can't resist one suggestion for a one-book reading list on
what was wrong with the Sixties and Seventies: Cyra MacFadden's
satire _The Serial_, which taught so many of us to laugh at the
very phrase "self-actualization".
Also, I am told further inquiries have been made to some Catholic
sociologists at Manchester U. in England.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Niagara, O roar again!
From jk Thu Jul 11 07:40:53 1996
Subject: Re: Sources of Tradition
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 07:40:53 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB6E59.1EBBF600@eb3ppp17.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 10, 96 12:12:38 pm
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>Do you see tradition as being in some respects like the tablets brought
>down by Moses, i.e. revealed by a being that is above and transcendant,
>and thus embodying a wisdom that did not develop through the use of the
>human mind?
Something in our view of it has to be like that. If no body of
knowledge can justify itself internally (and I think that's so) then we
have to understand it as justified from outside. Human knowledge as a
whole is a body of knowledge. The justification of human knowledge as a
whole from outside would be an instance of revelation. So to think of
our knowledge as justified true belief it seems we have to view
ourselves as beneficiaries of revelation.
I think it follows that we have to understand tradition as revelatory.
Tradition preserves, refines, coordinates and carries forward knowledge
from whatever source. It's especially necessary for knowledge that
can't readily be created anew in accordance with some set procedure or
by just anyone. So if there is revealed knowledge it seems tradition is
where it would be found.
>I would imagine that you would regard English as being a human
>creation. Is that exemplary of the nature of tradition?
The development of the English language is the development of a
tradition. As such it sweeps in the experience and conduct of those
who have spoken the language, and is affected by them in accordance
with its own principles in ways no one could have planned or foreseen.
In that way it is a self-organizing system that is able (for example)
to make distinctions and express perceptions in ways that are useful
and illuminating but no one could have devised for himself because
their growth required the experience of generations. On the other hand
the tradition of the English language is not self-sufficient. It
didn't create linguistic principles or the nature of man as a being
that can use sounds and shapes to mean things and express truths. So
in essential ways English depends on principles that transcend it and
the process by which it has developed.
>Is this the nature of the transcendance you are talking about: that it
>must reflect the our nature as creatures, and the actual (and unchosen)
>ways the world works? Is your critique of the notion that "man is the
>measure of all things" essentially a critique of the notion that "man
>can arbitrarily invent ways of living however he wishes, without having
>to take into account realities that exist independent of his wishes?"
>Or is there still more to it than that?
Depends on what you mean when you speak of "our nature as creatures"
and "realities that exist independent of his wishes". If "creature"
means "being that was created as part of a moral cosmos" and if the
independent realities include independent evaluative truths then that's
the kind of transcendence I was talking about. "The way the world
works" sounds though as if it might be meant in the sense of the modern
natural sciences.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Niagara, O roar again!
From jk Fri Jul 12 08:45:18 1996
Subject: Re: emergent morality
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 08:45:18 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB6F00.77F8D560@eb3ppp18.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 11, 96 07:34:47 am
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>I'm still interested in pursuing lines of your thinking and, believing
>from what you've said before that you find it useful for yourself, I
>will not think of it as my asking more from you any more than it is my
>reciprocating by giving back as well.
It's very useful to deal with questions from someone intelligent who's
thought about the same general topics but from a different perspective.
>I'm writing this without yet having seen an answer from you to my last
>inquiry about the sources of tradition.
I sent you something yesterday morning. Did you get it? Let me know if
you didn't -- my service provider was having hardware convulsions.
>(Have you ever seen anything of mine longer than what I've sent you?)
I haven't. Is there anything you'd particularly recommend in view of
our discussions?
>The implication seems to be that if morality is understood as God-
>given, people will respect it, but if it is just somehow part of the
>nature of things, people will instead enthrone their own impulses and
>desires.
If something in the end makes no sense people I suppose will find it
hard to respect. The issue to my mind is how morality becomes part of
the nature of things if modern natural science or something like it is
an adequate description of reality. Is it sensible to say morality
emerges from quanta and quarks, which are temporally, causally, and
logically prior to it? To me that seems rather like saying that
calculus emerges from pebbles. It doesn't, though. Our knowledge of
mathematics might have evolved historically from counting with pebbles,
but the number 5 doesn't depend on pebbles or anything about our history
or even existence.
"Emergence" is puzzling anyway. The behavior of water and ice emerge
from the properties of H2O molecules, which emerge from those of
subatomic particles. Adam Smith said that efficient use of resources
and lots of other economically beneficial things emerge from the profit-
seeking of individuals. The theories are dazzling, but in each case
there seems to be a limit on what sorts of thing emerge from a limited
system. For example, particular sorts of morality arise in commercial
societies, but not simply from the profit-seeking behavior of
individuals. An independent moral impulse I think is necessary even
though that impulse may receive part of its concrete expression from
emergent features of the society.
If morality *is* part of the nature of things then one has to
understand what that means about the nature of things. What are its
major features? How should it be explained? Does it make sense to say
that the good is in the nature of things but at some point was a
novelty? Can ultimate evaluative principles be novelties or if valid
must they somehow have been there all along? If all along, so that the
good, the beautiful and the true are no less primordial than the quark,
what does that say about the world we live in? How can we best
understand it?
">First, God given morality is often understood as backed up by a system
>of rewards and punishments (e.g. heaven and hell) which enlist a
>person's self-interest forcefully and thus do not require a person to
>do what's right just because it's right.
To derive morality from heaven and hell understood as pleasure or pain
consequent on performance or nonperformance of defined acts strikes me
as an example of emergent morality -- morality arising from something
submoral.
>Second, perhaps you are thinking that if one holds to a morality like
>my emergent one --it's just emerged as part of the properties of what
>it means for life, especially sentient, cultural life, to develop in a
>once-nonliving universe-- then one can easily collapse from a sense of
>the transcendant reality to just worshipping one's own impulses and
>desires as being, as it were, a representative microcosm of that order.
By "transcendent reality" you seem to mean the world as a whole viewed
as independent of human knowledge and wishes. I mean by it the
specifically evaluative features of the world as so viewed. The issue
seems to be whether my transcendent reality can be understood as arising
and becoming authoritative for us in a world that initially wholly lacks
it as a result of processes that have no element of it.
>The "impulses" that would lead one to disobey and disregard a
>transcendent and emergent moral order are, I think, identical to those
>that have allowed people to disregard also the absolute God-given moral
>order even while believing in its existence: I want it, and I don't
>want to give it up.
It's a philosophical question: in the long run, how impressive is the
moral order? Can people feel it as a reality or are they more likely
to feel it as a theory? If the latter there will always be lots of
other theories, some of which are far less restrictive on whichever
point is at issue. Also, people do like to make their own cosmos (the
plural can't really be cosmae, can it?), and if the moral order is
emergent why shouldn't moral experimentation of all sorts be a
necessary part of the evolutionary process?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Niagara, O roar again!
From jk Sat Jul 13 07:23:30 1996
Subject: Re: emergence
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 07:23:30 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB7008.616B6CA0@eb5ppp21.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 12, 96 03:28:14 pm
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>It would seem that your quarrel with my kind of "emergent morality" is
>part of a more general quarrel with the whole concept of emergence.
>I've never come upon your kind of reservation about that concept
>before, so I am a bit uncertain how to regard it.
Is the reservation so unusual? For a long time many people have
insisted on a fundamental logical gap between statements of fact and
statements of value. I think the gap is real with respect to what
modern natural science is willing to consider statements of fact. The
concept of emergence claims to bridge the gap between science and value,
but it's not a very clear concept, and the obvious verifiable examples
of emergence (e.g., the emergence from market interactions of a system
of prices that coordinates production and distribution better than an
administrator could) are creative in a sense but not *that* creative.
How open-ended is the creativity of emergence? How can there be
mechanisms that extract from a system what is not somehow there already?
>I get the impression that for you there is a LOGICAL problem with the
>idea that something living could emerge into a system in which
>previously there was nothing alive.
I have no idea how far I might end up going in the direction of such a
statement. The idea of consciousness emerging in a system composed
wholly of quarks and mathematical relations governing their interactions
does seem to me very like a logical oddity. I gather that reaction is
not unique. The relation of consciousness and life as biologists
understand it is of course unknown. To the extent biological life
implies consciousness I might go surprisingly far in the direction you
suggest.
>That to you it seems logical necessary that if there is a particular
>property in a system at time "t" it simply must be the case that there
>was somehow already present in the system FROM THE BEGINNING that very
>property?
That's too strong. Perhaps the notion is that the possibility of that
property was present from the beginning. The world now contains goods,
correct moral judgements and so on. So a nanosecond after the Big Bang
the world contained among other things the possibility of goods and
correct moral judgements. But the possibility of such things is already
a good, and one that implies an obligation to forward what other goods
are possible. (That obligation is of course contingent on the existence
of a person capable of recognizing the obligation and acting on it, but
it's there; a contingent obligation is nonetheless an obligation.) So
it seems that a nanosecond after the Big Bang objective values and the
moral law already existed.
Does the foregoing make any sense? The issue may be the same as the
question of Platonism versus nominalism -- do abstract entities somehow
really exist, or are they maybe just classification practices? For a
Platonist this stuff about emergence seems question-begging. And
Platonists do exist, even in 1996 in reputable academic circles, with
respect to mathematics for example.
>And I might infer from that you think the existence of existence,
>order, life, morality, etc., logically requires us to assume the
>existence from before time began of a God with all those properties.
My guess is that something of the sort is true in the end. For the
present it is enough that a system with God in it is a system in which
those things are much more comprehensible, and I think become more
comprehensible with further thought and experience.
>(But I don't think that really solves anything, any more than I thought
>Aquinas "proved" the existence of God.)
I think of the arguments for the existence of God as arguments that if
the world is to be comprehensible something very like God is going to
have to be part of it. E.g., either you have an infinite series of
explanations, which is no explanation at all, or you get a final
explanation that somehow explains itself. The latter would obviously be
a very odd sort of thing; reflecting on what such an explanation would
be like is theological reflection. One can reflect on what such an
explanation would be like and on its necessity without possessing the
explanation itself.
>I'm not sure whether it would make sense for me to tackle the
>particular, and subsequent issue of the emergence of morality during
>the course of evolution post-primordial soup.
I dunno. One problem is that the objections seem very fundamental,
another that I haven't worked out my own thoughts adequately. The
discussion so far has been very useful to me but it's probably close to
losing the clarity it needs to be productive.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Niagara, O roar again!
From jk Sat Jul 13 07:42:16 1996
Subject: Re: Gay Pride, etc.
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 07:42:16 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <199607121351.JAA13529@graf.cc.emory.edu> from "Martha Bishop" at Jul 12, 96 09:51:41 am
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Walter Bishop writes:
> How did we reach this point? To my mind, one key factor (leaving
> aside the more visible ones) is the promotion of artificial birth
> control over the last eight (?) or so decades.
There's something to this, I think. What is sex all about? For all
the talk of variation it seems there aren't that many possible answers.
Either it has an essential function in human life or it is whatever we
make of it.
The way discussions and customs have developed makes it look more and
more as if artificial birth control is part of a package within which
in the long run a community will have trouble picking and choosing.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Niagara, O roar again!
From jk Mon Jul 15 07:25:11 1996
Subject: the absence of emergence
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 07:25:11 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB71E1.6A27E3C0@eb3ppp22.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 14, 96 10:54:50 pm
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>I don't think the gap between fact and value --which in fact I do work
>to bridge in my most recent, and in my first, book(s)-- is really the
>same logical issue. I think it is soluble --as in my taste-of-the-
>apple example from my forum discussion.
I also reject the fact/value gap. To believe that there are objective
goods, moral laws, etc. is I think to reject that gap. My point though
is that if "fact" means "fact of the sort modern natural science tells
us about and can deal with" the gap opens up. "Emergence" seems to want
to say that systems that can be adequately described by modern natural
science can give rise to things like morality without introduction of
essentially new principles but only of complexity.
One problem as I see it is that modern natural science deals very
awkwardly with subjective experience. So from its standpoint "apples
taste good" means something like "homo sapiens characteristically
prefers eating apples to many other things", with "prefer" defined as a
property of observable behavior. I'm not sure your apple example is
persuasive on that kind of interpretation.
>But I don't think that positing, for example, a Creator with his own
>agenda solves the problem. One could conceive of a God with the
>character of Saddam Hussein who makes pronouncements about what we
>should do, but I don't think that would make His rules equivalent to
>the good. Do you?
I agree that an extremely powerful being with his own agenda would not
as such solve the issue. For one thing, the point of God is that his
agenda is not alien but includes the good (that is so to speak the
objectively valid agenda) of every creature. So "his own" can be
misleading if "his own agenda" is understood as something layered onto
something else that already is all it should be without reference to
that agenda.
The point is not that power solves the problem but that when we think
about what a solution to the problem could be like it seems that power
would be part of it. "Objective good" seems to suggest that purpose is
an essential part of the way things are, and supposing a creator helps
us understand how that could be.
>I guess maybe you're saying something that is the equivalent of: "If I
>think it is good that I am alive, and if my being alive was dependent
>upon the universe coming into existence, then at least in that sense I
>must think it's good that the universe came into existence."
More like: "If it really is good that I am alive, and if my being alive
is dependent upon the universe coming into existence, then it must
really be good that the universe came into existence."
>But is that the equivalent of saying that at BigBang plus one
>nanosecond, the cosmos contained a moral dimension, because if it did
>not it would not be possible for us to say, 12 billion years later,
>that Auschwitz was a terrible thing and Mother Theresa does good work?
If our statement is to correspond to more than subjective feelings,
conventions of speech, the functional requirements of a particular
temporary and contingent organizational structure with no intrinsic
significance, or the like.
I suppose my point is that morality and the like can not be understood
purely historically. To be authoritative they must have a non-temporal
dimension, just as mathematics has a non-temporal dimension. The
reference to the Big Bang was intended to dramatize that point.
Suppose I had the power instantaneously to exterminate the human race.
Would it be wrong for me to exercise the power? Until exercised it
would have no effects and after exercise it appears that on your view
there would be no evil that had been brought about by the exercise.
>But if this topic is best shelved, I'm willing to go along with you on
>that.
I find it interesting and important, but I could understand why you
might not want to pursue it now when you've written a book on the
subject that I haven't read.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Niagara, O roar again!
From jk Tue Jul 16 17:07:57 1996
Subject: Re: virtues of citizenship
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 17:07:57 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB72AC.0049D280@eb5ppp8.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 16, 96 00:14:44 am
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> Does citizenship in a democracy require us to have and to cultivate
> any particular intellectual qualities? Do we have any moral duty to
> become informed on the issues we face as a people, even beyond what
> we wish to do out of pure interest? Are we well-enough-informed?
> For a democratic society to endure and to function well, do its
> citizens have to master the skills of clear thinking, of rational
> discourse? How are we doing in those areas?
This sort of thing makes less and less sense as the government takes on
more responsibilities and becomes more centralized. Popular discussion
and decision doesn't work unless the issues are reasonably narrow and
reasonably close to home so that people can know what they're talking
about and feel a personal stake in the outcome.
> Do we have any obligation to concern ourselves with other people's
> problems, even if they have no bearing on us and even if we did
> nothing to create those problems?
If government emphasizes solving the problems particular people have it
becomes a matter of who gets what and deteriorates. The emphasis has
to be I think on the public good -- on things that at least in general
concept benefit everyone.
My general comment then is that republican virtue and big centralized
government don't go together.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Niagara, O roar again!
From jk Thu Jul 18 02:12:58 1996
Subject: Re: purgatory - canon
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 02:12:58 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960718000234.0069f590@swva.net> from "Seth Williamson" at Jul 17, 96 08:02:34 pm
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> though the Church is not superior to Scripture, it must have some
> kind of ontological priority or authority in that it took the Church
> to decide what was and was not Scripture.
On your view would the faith of the individual believer have even more
ontological priority or authority? If we know what scriptures are
authoritative because the Church tells us, it seems by similar
reasoning we would know what constitutes the authoritative Church
because our faith tells us.
I'm not sure of the point of saying that the Church is prior to
Scripture or Scripture to the Church. What would the early Christians
have said on the point?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Niagara, O roar again!
From jk Thu Jul 18 18:19:55 1996
Subject: Re: Protestant/Catholic
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 18:19:55 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <199607181740.NAA11367@kirk.nrv.net> from "Gibson Worsham" at Jul 18, 96 01:40:59 pm
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> So it seems to me as if the argument that has been underway on this
> list does not take this present-day "turning away" from God into
> account and proceeds as if the Catholics and Protestants both issue
> directly from the early church in purity. We are missing the
> essential problem for us all, and that is to recover the simplicity
> and rationality of thought that was principal characteristic of the
> best of mere Christianity.
It's hard to recover something abstract like simplicity and rationality
of thought directly, so I interpret the discussion as in part a dispute
over what to emphasize as a means of climbing out of the spiritual and
intellectual hole into which we've fallen. Once we're out of the hole
no doubt simplicity and rationality will develop of themselves as a
result of concentration on the right things. In the attempt to get out
of the hole the catholics, I suppose, emphasize tradition and the
church, while the protestants emphasize conscience and the Bible.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Niagara, O roar again!
From jk Sat Jul 20 06:47:47 1996
Subject: Re: Dennett/Johnson article
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 06:47:47 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB75AA.1051B160@eb4ppp4.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 19, 96 07:39:09 pm
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> Am I correct in believing that your viewpoint is that evolution did
> take place, i.e. that we, for example, did emerge over millions of
> years from earlier forms of life (primate from other mammal, from
> reptile and so on back), but that this could not have occurred in a
> purely material universe? Or do you disbelieve the whole idea of
> evolution?
I don't have a clear view of the subject. Until quite recently I had
assumed that Darwinian evolution was correct, simply because it was the
accepted theory. It appears though that there are objections to it,
both on the grounds of its implications and its ability to explain the
evidence that on its own terms it must explain, and that its acceptance
has a lot to do with a principle (methodological naturalism) that I
reject as a metaphysical guide to the way things are. I haven't put
the time and effort into the subject to have a useful opinion, though.
In any case, I see no objection to evolution in the sense of a claim
that latter life forms descend from earlier life forms, nor that
natural selection and similar mechanisms played a role. (Neither so
far as I can tell does Johnson, although he's not willing to assume the
former.) The issue is whether it's mechanism through and through.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Now's evil for evil? Ah, a liver of lives won!
From jk Sat Jul 20 17:44:22 1996
Subject: Bible/church, evolution, tribalism, u.d.g.
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 17:44:22 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960720143415.006979d0@swva.net> from "Seth Williamson" at Jul 20, 96 10:34:15 am
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Seth writes:
>>> though the Church is not superior to Scripture, it must have some
>>> kind of ontological priority or authority in that it took the Church
>>> to decide what was and was not Scripture.
>
>I think, so far as I know, that the early Christians would have said
>that the Bible is the Church's book, as my old bishop used to say.
Maybe what's bothering me here is the notion that as the connection to
apostolic times by oral tradition became more tenuous the Bible became
part of what makes the Church the Church. If the Bible is the best
connection today's Church has to its founding events and earliest times
then it's hard as a practical matter to subordinate it to the Church.
>I recall reading in Prof. Germaine Grisez's volume on moral theology in
>"The Way of the Lord Jesus" that--when you get right down to it--the
>Roman Catholic position is that a person in the last analysis must
>follow his own conscience even if it puts him at odds with the Church.
>But he hedged that position round with admonitions that it is first the
>responsiblity of all Christians to form their conscience in light of
>the teachings of the Church and make every effort to acquire "the mind
>of the Church," insofar as that is possible for a single person.
Something of the sort seems right. Presumably conscience, Church,
Bible and Tradition should all tell us the same thing. So if they seem
in conflict there's a misconception somewhere. Maybe my concern is
that subordinating one to the other is too easy a way to dissolve the
conflict.
> Is it really true that you can't accept some variant of
>Darwinism without going the whole hog as Dennett recommends and
>becoming a thoroughgoing materialist?
I dunno. I think Johnson would agree that natural selection played a
role in making living things what they now are, and I don't think he'd
be upset if somehow it were proved that all living things descended
from a primordial bacterium. So if that constitutes accepting a
variant of Darwinism you'd have non-materialist company.
The issue seems to be whether natural selection and similar mechanisms
are in themselves sufficient to account for the origin of species.
Darwinism seems to be the belief that they are. If you accept that
belief you don't absolutely have to be a thorough materialist,
especially if you think deism or something close to it is a reasonable
alternative. Johnson's point, though, is that Darwinism doesn't
explain the evidence all that well. So his question is why anyone
would accept it if he weren't already a thorough materialist.
> Johnson's essential point in the essay above is well-taken.
>The evolutionists are philosophical imperialists--they are scientific
>Napoleons. Everybody has to accept their ground rules as a description
>of reality even though they can't provide good reasons for doing so.
In fairness, those ground rules are part of a system of dealing with
the world that has been enormously successful in many respects. I
agree that there are parts of reality the system can't deal with at
all, such as subjective experience and the objectivity of evaluations,
but successful enterprises always go too far.
> This is your idea that the big crack-up will leave only islands
>of sanity in a sea of chaos, right?
For sure! I've become a real crank on the issue. The alternatives
(the sound common sense of the American people will prevail,
multicultural liberalism will work long-term, free markets and
technology solve all problems, everyone will become a right-wing
Anglican, whatever) don't seem at all plausible to me. Actually, I
think the islands of relative sanity will tend to grow, since life has
to go on and it's easier to live with sanity than without, but it seems
unlikely there'll be the same sort of relative sanity on each island.
>Speaking of this, on Monday or Tuesday of this week I talked to a
>friend who'd been out to L.A. and had seen some kind of private
>residential community out there.
They're booming! Most new residential construction in the Sunbelt is in
the form of private residential communities of one sort or another.
Twenty+ million Americans live in them. Most aren't as fortified as the
one you mention, but that's the trend.
> It occurs to me, though, that if this is what America comes to,
>that we'll be easy pickings for some civilization that believes in
>something other than license in place of personal freedom.
I don't think so. These days people in Muslim countries are into
American TV and all the rest of it, and it's going to be harder and
harder to keep it out. Islam can deal with infidels in their place,
but it's not used to being a minority religion. Something similar is
true of East Asian *political* culture. East Asians of course thrive
everywhere, but not as rulers. So I don't know who would do the taking
over.
Because of technology the effective physical distance between any two
people and any two ways of life is becoming smaller and smaller. The
societies that last are going to need to keep out disrupting influences
in spite of the immediate availability of every conceivable temptation.
So in the future the societies that remain coherent and thrive will (so
say I) be societies with the features that would enable them to do well
as small minority peoples in an alien environment. So there will be a
premium on inward-turning cultures, which tend not to be imperialistic.
Think of the (anti-Zionist) Satmar Hasidim, the Amish or even of the
Gypsies. Also there's the stuff the libertarians all talk about these
days about how kleptocracy doesn't work as well as it used to.
We've discussed all this before, though.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Now's evil for evil? Ah, a liver of lives won!
From jk Sun Jul 21 21:40:20 1996
Subject: Re: Bible/church, evolution, tribalism, u.d.g.
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 1996 21:40:20 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960721222556.006bdca0@swva.net> from "Seth Williamson" at Jul 21, 96 06:25:56 pm
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Seth writes:
>Tom George raised the not insignificant point of how to square
>evolution with certain doctrines of sin and death. I don't have a good
>answer.
Your answer on sin -- that theories of biological evolution have nothing
to say on the subject -- seems to me a good one. As to death, the issue
seems to be what things would have been like if the first human beings
-- the first earthly creatures capable of sinning -- had not sinned.
Would they somehow have been freed from natural necessity, or would
they have experienced natural necessity so differently that nothing
that happened to them could properly have been described as "death"? I
dunno. Since almost nothing is known of the relation between body and
soul if another mystery were layered on I wouldn't mind.
> Welcome to the brotherhood of cranks.
Thanks, and it's good to be on board.
>It still seems to me that you're describing a highly unstable situation
>that seems to be crying out for an ambitious conquerer to come along
>and reap some easy pickings.
You think we'll be conquered by the rude-but-virtuous Outer Barbarians.
You're in good company, that's what Thomas Molnar told me too. My
answer is that there aren't any Outer Barbarians any more, just
Marginalized Proletarians. Electronic communications mean it's not
just America that has profound cultural problems. It's everyone except
a few let's-keep-outsiders-out-and-do-our-own-thing groups. Those
groups aren't imperialistic and they're the ones that (Darwin would
tell us) will win out in evolutionary competition. Or so say I.
>Conquering this country in its present shape would undoubtedly be
>like swallowing a cyanide pill. They'd be sorry in a few years.
Why do they need to conquer to get the cyanide? It's all immediately
available to everyone anyway via the internet, satellite TV, whatever.
Click on the icon and you can check out _Debbie does Dallas_. If
someone tries to keep Debbie out the cypherpunks tell us that crypto
will always find a way to smuggle her in. Unless of course social
controls are centered in the household, which is not the case in
imperialistic dictatorships.
>But I think all it might take would be a determined dictator with
>all the weapons technology that money could buy.
How does the dictator get the technology and maintain the social
discipline he wants? Technology is the capacity to do what one
chooses, and choices are hard to control. Does the dictator do without
PCs, modems, faxes, copiers, etc. or accept them? Either way he's got
problems. He can't keep them all in his office.
>Would you not agree that the educated cultural elite in most nations--
>not all, I concede--are strongly attracted to the idea of
>centralization? It is a powerful concept that promises them power and
>money and influence.
For sure. But as cultural deterioration progresses the efficacy of
centralized bureaucracies will approach zero, and as point-to-point
communications improve the ability of enterprises to arrange their
affairs to avoid taxes and regulations will approach 1. By combining
paleo cultural pessimism and techno anarchocapitalist optimism we thus
discover that Hasidim, Gypsies, and countercultural Christian
separatists will inherit the earth.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Now's evil for evil? Ah, a liver of lives won!
From jk Mon Jul 22 14:22:31 1996
Subject: Re: Protestant/Catholic
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 14:22:31 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Gradle" at Jul 22, 96 08:40:05 am
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"Gregory D. Wadlinger" writes:
>As a parent (of a now two year-old) I catch myself scheming how I might
>influence my daughter's environment so that she avoids some terrible
>mistakes. I picture uniforms in school, screening her reading list,
>screening her friends, etc. It scares me how willing I am to do this
>sort of thing.
What's so bad about school uniforms? Are they more tyrannical than
saying to a 6-year-old child "OK, for the next 12 years I'm going to
force you to attend an institution where every day for 6 or 7 hours
they're going to make you do what they choose in order to force you into
the mold they want whether you like it or not"? That's what school is,
after all.
As for screening reading lists, friends and the like, I assume most
parents try to influence things without provoking rebellion. That's one
reason for choosing one community and school rather than another; these
things are a lot easier to handle if parental standards are supported by
what the kid hears elsewhere. In a world that doesn't support parental
standards there are problems.
Doris Gradle writes:
>IBYC can appear fairly mild. The advanced seminar is more insidious.
>There is also emphasis placed on following the Levitical code in terms
>of diet, etc. What concerns me is so many homeschooling families want
>all of their children to display the behaviour of the children from
>this group. And of course, the plot thickens. The exteral controls for
>homeschooling are more rigid. The mothers cannot bring in any income
>whatsoever. If the family owns a tv, then an account of how many
>hrs./wk & why. Men cannot have facial hair. Sunday Schools are held in
>suspect, so a large # result into house churches.Whatever Bill says is
>gospel & he has an opinion on every facet of a man & woamn's private
>life.
I wonder, though. How much in substance does any of this differ from
the way strictly orthodox Jews or the Amish live? There's a distinction
between following something one man is making up and following something
based on a lot of experience that people have done successfully for a
long time, but things have to start somewhere.
The American way of life today is bad in a lot of ways and it's not
getting better. How much contrivance and separation is needed to
establish a better way of life? Is it better for parents to act
individually and ad hoc or by an overall plan shared with others? Or
is writing a list of rules and giving seminars like this Bill person
does just too artificial?
You can find insidiousness everywhere if you look for it. To live in
the usual way today means that from ages 5 to 22 you are brought up by
a centralized state or quasi-state bureaucracy and trained to
understand things from that point of view and that you rely on the
state for support in illness, bad luck and old age. These things are
also insidious and controlling. Being told to keep track of TV
watching might seem insidious but TV itself is insidious. People can
say "well anyway *I* live and bring up my children to live thus and
such", and maybe that's right in many cases, but pervasive conditions
have to have an effect on how people understand themselves and the
world. So maybe there's a point to the whole package of homeschooling,
apprenticeships, definite sex roles, limited participation outside the
circle, and so on. In order to break out of one comprehensive
environment another is established.
The world has changed. It matters whether things are localized or
whether absolutely everything is immediately available electronically to
anyone with a computer or cable TV. "Let the kid explore the world with
whatever friends he picks up" changes its whole meaning if every place
is a virtual Times Square. Maybe a few commonsense rules and
adjustments aren't enough any more, or at least break down often enough
to justify a different approach.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Now's evil for evil? Ah, a liver of lives won!
From jk Mon Jul 22 22:01:04 1996
Subject: Re: Protestant/Catholic
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 22:01:04 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Gradle" at Jul 22, 96 05:45:51 pm
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Doris Gradle writes:
>I have wondered if there are two philosophies in question. There is the
>L"Abri way of thinking. A Christian is called to take life seriously,
>be part of the academic world be it science, literature, etc.& not
>abandon society. The other way of thinking is to separate oneself from
>society & live in a separate community with very little outside
>contact. This would include very little formal education.
Some should engage secular thought seriously, but not everyone is cut
out for that. Many people (actually, I think most people) find it
difficult to deal with multiple very different viewpoints. The usual
educational arrangements ought to match what most people find most
useful.
Different people have different gifts. Monastics and missionaries,
laymen and clerics, learned and unlearned men have all contributed
something irreplaceable. So maybe the opposition of philosophies needs
to be shaded a little.
As to separation from the world, it's a puzzling issue. It seems that
today the world is too much with us. It penetrates everywhere, far more
than in the past. In antiquity and until quite recently, work was
usually in the family business, schooling was mostly home schooling, and
entertainment, socializing and study among Christians were mostly within
the Christian community as well. So a distinctively Christian way of
life was much easier to carry on than today. But unless there is a
distinctive Christian way of life Christians won't have much to offer to
the world.
Apart from religious considerations, it seems to me that the enormous
expansion of formal education in the past 50 years has done more harm
than good. Its main effects have been to prolong childhood, create the
illusion of superior knowledge, and replace local and informal knowledge
and social structures with more formal bureaucratic and centralized
arrangements. I really don't think it's taught most people to love
learning or to think better. Learning how to be an adult, a good
person, a competent worker, etc. is more a matter of apprenticeship than
formal instruction.
>Ultimately, I would like to think that parents do not need Bill Gothard
>to tell them how to raise their children.
I agree it's troublesome to have people living their lives in
accordance with a plan cooked up by one guy somewhere. A way of life
takes time and a lot of experience to develop. But to some extent does
BG only put in words what the people who listen to him have already
decided makes sense? Does it all seem to work for them? (I know
absolutely nothing about the man, his programs or his followers.)
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Now's evil for evil? Ah, a liver of lives won!
From jk Mon Jul 22 22:03:39 1996
Subject: Re: Bible/church, evolution, tribalism, u.d.g.
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 22:03:39 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960722231505.006b706c@swva.net> from "Seth Williamson" at Jul 22, 96 07:15:05 pm
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Seth Williamson writes:
>You think we'll be conquered by the rude-but-virtuous Outer Barbarians.
> Not necessarily virtuous.
All I meant really was that they would have a coherent way of life in
common to which they are sufficiently attached to motivate self-
sacrifice.
> What was Molnar like? I hear he's got a pretty European manner
>about him. I've read a lot of his stuff.
He's unassimilated after being in this country almost 50 years. He's
extremely argumentative. He tends to think Americans are naive and
don't understand things, but has the feeling there may be something
about us that he hasn't quite caught on to. His big objection to us
intellectually is that we don't think about things clearly and get to
the point when we discuss them because we're afraid of offending
someone. He thinks all of us are seduced very quickly by the desire for
success and popularity. (So far as I know he exempts only the Unabomber
from those objections.)
>Maybe so, but it seems to me you're discounting the power of racial or
>nationalistic or ideological ideas as motivating ideas and organizing
>principles. I don't think their time is past.
Those ideas have power, but since the power is based on contrast and
opposition to outsiders, and borders are becoming more porous, the
groups to which they relate tend I think to become smaller and smaller.
Also, effective power today requires lots of money, technology, and
organizational skill, all of which seem at present to go more with a way
of life permeated with an Enlightenment outlook than with enthusiasm.
>But it's not hard for me to visualize some charismatic imam whipping up
>his followers to such a pitch that Debbie temporarily loses her appeal.
>All it would take is a decade or two.
Charisma and enthusiasm aren't as helpful as they were in the 630s.
Remember how the Iraqis lay down and got fried when we fought them.
That was after doing quite well in their war with the much more numerous
and enthusiastic Iranians.
>Offhand, I'd say by convincing his people--more likely, simply
>enforcing a pre-existing belief--that their destiny is to conquer the
>heathen on the far side of his borders, who are by nature inferior and
>who deserve to be dominated.
Across the ocean, though? A transatlantic invasion would be difficult
to stage and easy to thwart with technology and money.
>I don't think modern technology and a puritan social ethic are mutually
>exclusive. Maybe in America, now. But not necessarily everywhere
>else.
I think they have become mutually exclusive unless the ethic and society
are acutely localistic and even more acutely family-oriented. Otherwise
an enormous gap will open up between official standards and what people
actually do in private. Too much is available too easily. An emphasis
on localism and family doesn't do much for imperialistic tyrants,
though.
>The other thing that occurs to me is this: as Western nations
>increasingly become societies filled with citizens who are incapable of
>governing themselves democratically, what's to stop the power elite
>from governing brutally? To impose social order the hard way?
They won't have the internal cohesion or the efficient bureaucracy
needed to organize effective brutality. My guess is that as they have
more and more trouble keeping things running at all they'll be happier
and happier to rely on whatever sources of social order are available
as long as they pose no immediate practical threat. So if 30 years
from now there are millions of Bill Gothard fans who keep their noses
clean and pay more in taxes than they consume the authorities will tend
to leave them alone.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Now's evil for evil? Ah, a liver of lives won!
From jk Tue Jul 23 08:39:27 1996
Subject: Re: on order
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 08:39:27 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB782B.DAC522A0@eb1ppp2.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 23, 96 00:13:53 am
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Hello again --
>I've missed our conversation of late. Hope your appetite for it has
>not attenuated.
Not at all -- it's been an occasion to clarify my thoughts on some
issues.
>Assuming for the moment that you agree with me that there are important
>disagreements in our society on the question of where good order comes
>from, how would you articulate the basic disagreement(s)?
>
>I imagined that you would put at the heart of your answer a couple of
>elements: that you see the misguided side as 1) putting the
>autonomous, isolated self too much at the center of the cosmos, denying
>too much the need for, and reality of, our being embedded in a larger
>moral order; and 2) that same side having too much faith in the
>ability of reason to think itself into an adequate order, rather than
>giving adequate respect to the accumulated wisdom of the Larger Mind
>represented by tradition (and beyond that the transcendent).
That's about it. The Left I think believes that good order is something
men construct from human desires which set the goals and from human
reason and actions which put things in order so that the goals can be
realized. That view is naturalistic and oriented toward social reform
and reconstruction, so it interprets the opposing view as an
obscurantist defense of existing privileges.
The opposing view is that good order is not an outcome of our ends and
means but a standard for judging them. On that view "the devices and
desires of our own hearts" (to quote the old Book of Common Prayer) can
not be taken as authoritative. Instead we must recognize and submit to
a transcendent moral order. We can not reason out that order because
it exceeds us. Our recognition of it develops and is passed on through
tradition -- accumulation and (mostly inarticulate) reflection on
experience, revelatory events, insights, hints and suggestions,
whatever.
The opposing views as I present them are more polarized than they have
usually been in America. I think we've historically had a compound of
the two here that limited the logic of each based on a political
tradition of inalienable rights, limited government and federalism and
an implicit Protestant establishment.
That compound is dead now, I think, although a large group of American
conservatives dreams of restoring it. What killed it was the increasing
centralization and bureaucratization of American life and the
clarification of left-wing thought that those trends made possible and
necessary. With the death of the American constitutional order people
either live day-to-day taking very short views or try to bring their
lives in order by adhering to a view or way of life that makes up for
social marginality by coherence. So our political and social life has
become a mixture of polarization, thoughtlessness, self-indulgence,
faddishness and deadlock and is likely to stay that way for some time.
In the end, by the way, I expect the traditionalists to prevail because
I think they have an approach to life that can actually work, and Darwin
tells us that what works and reproduces itself prevails. We shall see.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Now's evil for evil? Ah, a liver of lives won!
Back to my archive of posts.