Treason

In the news: several Arabic linguists have been fired from their military posts because they are gay. There is a bad shortage of Arabic linguists. Whoever is responsible for their firing should be brought up on treason charges. I guess they number in the dozens, hundreds, or even thousands. Congressmen, too, I guess. They should have changed policy right after 9/11. Do you realize that they won't let you translate Arabic for the CIA or NSA if you smoked a joint in college 20 years ago? The chance that dozens of American children will be murdered is now greater thanks to these people. "I can't figure out what these Arab terrorists are saying on their cell phones. Maybe their talking about killing 100,000 Americans, I don't know. But we'll just have to hope for the best, because I sure as hell ain't having no faggits 'round here. Durned faggits! Already bad enough with the coloreds and Jews."

Blogs

Greetings. Check out One Good Turn. Alright! Another blog by a philosophy professor (Eddie Thomas)! And it's good, too. Also, John Jay Ray has been good as ever. Would you two please stop taking the piss out of me? Thanks. 'm not interested in the truth. I just want to make others believe to be true what I believe to be true. (Just kidding, of course.)

Eddie says that my attempt to render conservatism a logical truth won't work but will construe everyone as a conservative. I don't know. I think many are un-conservative because they just don't grasp that it makes no sense not to be. They either cling dogmatically to certain values against the countervailing evidence, or they want to change values out of anger or envy or some other irrational disposition. More later, gotta think about it.

One bad thing is time. I don't seem to have time to think about all these interesting things, or finish my research into John Adams. I don't have time for intellectual pursuits, being stuck in university...;-)

A College Education

The curriculum in English and sociology departments is largely the following. Systems of value and belief, ideologies, are imposed upon reality. None of them is true. Books and films are ideological instruments of control. Ways of life are all equally devoid of objective worth. They are imposed by a cultural system in order to serve those who most benefit from them: the elite. You can take class after class, and each one will have this curriculum. Of course, there are exceptions. There are professors of poetry or Durkheim who will have none of this. But this is the mainstay of the curriculum: postmodern Marxism. The latter is a redundant phrase, meaning that all beliefs and values are merely caused by the interests of those in power and are not based on truth or good reasons. Indeed, there is no such thing as truth or good reasons, these themselves being mere ideological tools.

End tenure and fire these professors for gross incompetence. They can have no good argument for their curriculum. For their curriculum's core concept is that there is no such thing as a good argument. They are charlatans and sophists.

In philosophy departments, you have some of the same stuff, though not in such large helpings. Rather, you have a different problem. If the department is based in Contenental philosophy, you also have meaningless verbiage. Most departments are based in analytic, or Anglo-American, philosophy. Here the problem is not usually pomo Marxism (though it will be if there are professors hired to bring "feminist perspectives on epistemology" and the like). Rather, the problem is that the curriculum is pointlessly arcane. Philosophy professors tend to be slightly but catastrophically dogmatic. Each clings to his favorite premise and spends his career bending over backwards to fill in a story that brings the evidence into alignment with this premise. There are exceptions, but in general, philosophy professors don't spend much time investigating commonsense solutions to philosophical puzzles. They prefer the sexy theory that elegantly makes the evidence seem to support it. 20th Century American philosophy departments have produced little in the way of interesting results. Catastrophy. I think most philosophical problems are solvable by common sense. There should be no Ph.D. in this subject. Just have an M.A. for qualification for teaching. Defund all the philosophy journals. If all the back-issues of the last 50 years burned, it wouldn't matter.

Victor Davis Hanson has pretty much the same to say about Classics departments: pomo nonsense or mindless logic-chopping. See his Who Killed Homer.

Political science? I don't even know what that is. I've tried but failed to discover what it is. For this reason I can't recommend taking courses in it. But perhaps there is something there. I don't know.

History? It's dicey. Many pomo-Marxists, who say that there is no objective history. But there are many regular historians.

Send your kid to major in a science, and sit down with him to choose with great care courses in literature, Classics, history, and philosophy. If your kid won't do this, refuse to pay the tuition. Hopefully, he'll drop out and get a job.

Conservatism: Form or Content?

John Jay Ray posts about my definition of conservatism. John thinks that I'm trying to give a formal definition of conservatism - cynical, pragmatic - as well as a contentious definition. I enjoy his incisive comments. We'll get to the bottom of this yet! The content I built into conservatism is that conservatives are commited to traditional ways of life, traditional values, until overwhelming evidence shows that they should not be. However, there is not much content here, so the definition is still formal. A conservative in one society and a conservative in a traditionally very different society are both just that: conservatives. Even though they are commited to different values, they are both commited to traditional values. There are more than one sets of values to which a society may be commited. Anyone in any society, no matter how different the values from those of other societies, is a conservative if he is reluctant to change the system of values and adopt a new one. What conservatives from various societies share is a pragmatic commitment to the wisdom of generations upon generations of value-formation, values formed by prolonged experience and passed down from generation to generation. The commitment to tradition is pragmatic, and the definition of conservatism is formal. Confucians are conservatives, and so are the folks over at NRO.

I would also argue that conservatism is a logical truth. It is never rational to change one's values, as long as one prefers the values, they are consistent with the relevant facts, and they are consistent with each other. Value is simply preference, and it is never rational to do what you do not, all things considered, prefer. The good is the rationally desireable, Hobbes and Hume would have said. But the "reason" part is merely slave to the desires. Rationalism, on the other hand, holds that value is independent of preference. Look at the link between rationalism and progressivism/radicalism: Plato was a rationalist and utopian radical. I submit that Kant is the hero of the 20th C. progressive left. He's Rawls's inspiration. The idea of rationalism is that there is a highly intelligent elite who know what's best even though the rest of us would not prefer it. But as long as you define "prefer" as "coherently and with full information to desire," then rationalism may be seen to be the lunacy that it is: that there can be something desireable that is not desireable.

There are stark options: conservatism v. progressivism. Conservatism is the moderate choice (as I've argued below), and the only one that makes sense. It is therefore a logical truth (a truth the denial of which is literally nonsense).

Philosophy Professors Against the Invasion of Iraq?

Here is a statement on the prospect of an American invasion of Iraq, that the East Coast division of the American Philosophical Association is deciding whether to make their own (the membership will vote on the matter in December):

"Both just war theory and international law say that states may resort to war only in self-defense. Iraq has attacked neither the United States nor any other nation, and claims that it is about to do so are not credible. Even in the absence of imminent threat, the United States claims a preemptive justification for war in this case. This claim stretches the meaning of preemption beyond reasonable bounds and sets a dangerous precedent which other states may feel free to follow."

The problems with the argument:

1. We have a right to disarm by force a nutjob who has bazookas and bombs in his Manhattan apartment building. By analogy, we have a right to disarm Iraq. There is no significant disanalogy.

2. It would be good, not bad, if other countries would follow our lead and disarm evil nutjobs. It would be bad if morons took it upon themselves to do this. But there is no evidence that morons will do so because we do. Do they invade innocent countries because they saw us invade Germany during WW II? Even if they did, to advise on those grounds inaction in the case of WW II would, well, make you a nutjob. Besides, if the morons ape us and go gun happy on innocent peoples, well just invade and disarm those morons. That's that.

3. Poor risk management. "Saddam might not suitcase-nuke us? What is the probability that he won't? 99.5%? Oh, good, only 0.5% chance that we will be nuked. That sets me at ease." The risks are such that invasion is prudent. There is a reasonable chance of millions of Americans being killed by suitcase nukes. Invasion will cost only a few lives. By the way, once the threat is "immanent," you're dead. How will you find the suitcase nuke?

4. The statement gives no inkling of an alternative way to handle the threat of Iraq. This violates the rules of elementary critical thinking courses: provide an alternative to the policy you criticize, or accept that your refutation is unsound. Maybe the idea is that Iraq is simply not a threat. But that would make the statement stupid. So, the statement is either illogical or stupid.

This is one of the reasons I'm no longer a member of the APA. They are also against capital punishment. Could someone tell me why we shouldn't execute the D.C. snipers? Little known fact: 99.9% of research done in ethical theory in philosophy deparments the last 50 years is worthless. Besides a few exceptions, if the library of late 20th C. ethical theory burned, the human race would have lost nothing. They spin silly theories that no one needs or can use. (But at least they give us brilliant statements like the one above, right?) The world proceeds in its moral reasonings, in total ignorance of these theories. Thank goodness for common sense. I've given notice here at work. I can't wait to be an ex-professor. University is intellectually unstimulating. Students are 40% dead weight, placing no value on education. Enrolment ought to be slashed in half. But I digress.

Rice in 2008

As I said a couple of posts back, some people are better than others. Condoleezza Rice is better than me. She's of greater worth. If it's between me and her, you should save her. She speaks better Russian and is a better musician, and that only scratches the surface. I'm a Republican conservative, and that's what I say. So, shut up, you idiotarian.

This raises another startling fact about the political landscape in America: it is the Right, the Republicans and such, who are the colorblind ones. You remember the old days when right wing folk were bigots and lefties were with Martin Luther King? Dem days is gone. Now, lefties will let you in to law school if your black, but not if you're white. I've lost out on jobs as a professor because I am white. Conservatives don't care what color you are, as long as you've got the goods.

Rice in 2008 won't happen. She is fully intending to become commissioner of the National Football League and dismisses the Rice 2008 idea. But just maybe....

Conservatism

John Jay Ray posts that I collapsed too soon in defending what he calls my "pragmatic" definition of conservatism (scroll to Nov. 9 on his blog). Perhaps! He posts some interesting references. Philosoblog will report back on these references soon. I'll add to the list John Kekes, A Case for Conservatism.

Maybe I'll un-collapse a bit. Consider 'conservatism' as a cluster concept. It is a cluster of ideas: the desire for smaller government, a tragic view of values (the star-crossed intention to try to maximize them all without clinging to any of them lopsidedly - anti-radicalism/anti-fanaticism), a certain deference to tradition as trusted, tried, and true, and a resulting reluctance to change without overwhelmingly good evidence, and a reminder to make changes only to the extent warranted, and to avoid systemic changes that might upset parts of the system one would rather not change. Conservatism as merely the desire for a smaller government leaves too much out of the concept, it seems to me. Libertarianism fails to weigh in on conserving our allegiance to the tradition of values that make life so much better than it would otherwise be. If unwilling to recommend that one stick to our Western heritage of value without fully knowing the reasons why it is good, one can't count as a conservative. And if a libertarian is willing to make the recommendation, then he implies that one ought to relinquish some of one's liberty to to this tradition. Do libertarians make every effort to instill in their children the values I have in mind? Do they give their children the upbringing Aristotle recommended: teach your kids to take pleasure in good things and to despise bad things? If so, they're conservatives, not libertarians. (In addition, John Adams and David Hume would scold libertarians for being rather un-conservative about security. More later on that.)

Nevertheless, John had a good point in his earlier post about facts. If one is pro-abortion and in favor of legalizing drugs, this might appear un-conservative, rather libertarian to those conservatives who believe that the evidence favoring these positions is not overwhelming yet. So, we have, in addition to the fundamental concept of conservatism, the standards of applying the term (rough-and-ready set of conditions under which one should apply it).

By the way, A Sharp Knife waxes conservative and anti-libertarian today (no permalink available).

This issue will preoccupy us for quite some time on Philosoblog.

Equal Opportunity

Let's revisit this concept in a bit more detail (thanks to Greg for raising it). There is no requirement of justice to ensure that all Americans have an equal opportunity to succeed. It's bad luck to have more daunting obstacles to surmount than the average. But it is not unjust that there is such bad luck or that it goes unremedied by others. If it were unjust, then this could be so only because everyone deserves to have as much happiness as his character would allow were there no unusual obstacles to his efforts. But there are two kinds of case that show that this isn't so. First, the case of one child: Abe, who starts out at the bottom: poverty, disease, bad parents, and a bad neighborhood. Abe achieves an unusually good life through the efforts he makes to improve his situation. Having achieved such happiness, Abe has no claim on Americans to provide him with even more happiness. He might have been even happier, had he had an equal opportunity (i.e., an opportunity equal to the average person's). If Americans ought to have given him an equal opportunity during his youth, then since they failed to do this, they owe him even now. But they do not, so they did not.

The second case is that of two children: Amy and Alan. Amy is upper-middle class, healthy, and has good parents. Alan is very rich, has an astonishingly supportive extended family, exquisite schooling, etc. It is not unjust that Amy's opportunity is not as good as Alan's. Nobody owes Amy an equal opportunity to Alan's.

The case of Abe shows that it is not unjust to have an opportunity worse than average, and the case of Amy and Alan shows that it is not unjust to have an opportunity worse than someone else's. Differences in opportunity, like gaps in wealth, are morally irrelevant. There are matters of justice here. First, anyone who wrongly causes another to have a worse opportunity in life than he otherwise would have had has a debt to his victim. People who abused Abe owe him recompense. But other Americans do not, since they did not abuse him. Second, if someone of decent character fails miserably through no fault of his own, consequently ending up destitute and temporarily or permanently unable to provide himself shelter, food, and simple medical care, then other Americans, being quite wealthy, should break his fall with a welfare net, temporarily or permanently, as the case requires. But this is a matter of end-state justice, not initial opportunity. All initial opportunities, no matter how miserable, are just.

On the other hand, as Greg pointed out in comments below, there is a sense in which Americans ought to do something about the poor opportunities some children face. We should do so in cases in which the benefit to the children will be very high, relative to the cost to the rest of us. But this duty is not a matter of equalizing opportunities; it is a matter of improving society and maximizing happiness at little cost, so that its members have better lives. If you see an old man who might have had a good life had he had better opportunity early on, then it is appropriate to wish you could have improved his opportunity. This is a reason to provide vaccinations to poor children, for example. It is a reason to station more police officers in troubled neighborhoods, so that poor children living there will be more secure and better able to play and study. It is also a reason to provide education to poor children, although the benefit to society of having an educated population is already sufficient to make it prudent to do this. In addition, it may be cheaper to improve opportunity now than to pay the welfare bill later. If we can do a few things to help a child now, this might stop him from unfortunately landing in dire circumstances later.

Of course, whether the government or private charities should provide improvements to opportunity depends upon the efficiency we can expect from either. In addition, if we decide to have government provides such services, we should be vigilant about seeing to it that government doesn't interfere with liberty or encourage dependancy. We don't want the government to design people's lives. But government vaccination programs do not do this, nor do police officers. We should be conservative in recognizing problems, considering costs, and assigning remedies.

More Conservatism

Gaps in wealth are not unjust. Inequality in opportunity is not unjust. I've demonstrated this in earlier posts.

"Anti-war," as a position, is either meaningless or wrong, depending on how it's defined.

Some people are better than others. They are wiser, better educated, and more skilled. They are able to engage in finer activities in their lives than others. They inevitably have more political power. Some of it is luck; some of the powerful are buffoons. But they are a natural aristocracy and there is nothing wrong with that. The alternatives are much worse. (I'm echoing John Adams here.)

Nevertheless, all men are created equal, in the sense that all have equal rights and responsibilities, and are equal under the law. In other words, when you make a moral judgment, you should not base it on irrelevant features of people. Government should not establish an aristocracy by law. (I'm echoing John Adams here.)

Anyone is free to become one of the elite. It requires developing moral character, educating oneself in the history and literature of good ways of life, and avoiding distractions. Denying or getting angry at this fact will only delay one's efforts.

The right kind of education in Western history, literature, and philosophy is the best opportunity to achieve such an extraordinarily good life.

The government should be smaller than it is because it inevitably has large and inept parts which waste money and make life worse. This specific problem should be solved by carefully reducing the government.

While Western culture is the best at promoting good lives, other than mandatory education in Western culture, people should have the liberty to live as they please. This gives them the best chance at happiness, since they know better than anyone else what makes them happy.

More

John Jay Ray has more on conservatism. Indeed, conservatism favors smaller government than we tend to have now, whereas my realist definition of conservatism leaves open debates about what the facts are, the facts to which one is supposed to be attuned, as a conservative. John remains meta-conservative, thinking it best not to try to define conservatism as realist and pragmatic but just to characterize it as such. I'll differ slightly. The realism entails a tragedic streak in conservatism, according to which not all values can be fulfilled completely and it is madness (fanaticism) to try to fulfill one completely at the expense of others. So, I'll be meta-conservative by being tragedic about realism: It may be very difficult to find out the facts. We may fail. This is the best we can do. There's clearly more to say here.

This is actually interesting. Not much in university is interesting.

Common Sense, National Review, and God

National Review is a great source of wisdom. But it likes to assure us that morality requires God, and this is as false as can be. In the latest issue we are told that we human beings can’t figure out what is right by using common sense and reason and examining facts. Carol Iannone scolds conservative Anne Hendershott for leaving out God, saying, “Without a belief in the transcendent and its embodiment in custom and tradition, such guides as consensus, common sense, and even nature and reason will prove an insufficient basis of social order, being...prone to the ‘unlimited desires’ that...must be held in check.” Here are four reasons to reject that position, any one of which is sufficient to devastate it.

1. There are clear cases of sound moral reasoning devoid of reference to God. Every National Review itself is full of such cases.

2. The facts about what is right and what is wrong are independent of the existence of God. If God doesn’t exist, it is still wrong to torture children for fun. Therefore, there is no reason to suppose that believing that God exists will help us determine what is right and wrong. If you would think it permissible to kill me and take my money if there were no God, I won’t say that you’re a psychopath, but you have, let’s say, “issues.”

3. If our powers of reason are so clouded by our lusts that we cannot determine right and wrong on our own, then surely they are insufficient to figure out the mystery of what God bids us do. Ms. Iannone would have us believe that determining what the creator of the cosmos thinks is easier than figuring out the right thing to do in our ordinary lives. This is patently absurd. (Read the Bible? What evidence is there that it’s the word of God? Meditate and let God’s command ‘come to you’? A recipe for danger.)

4. Finally, this: Suppose we confront a case in which we must figure out what is the right thing to do. Once we have used our common sense to determine the judgment that is most coherent with the set of values to which we are committed by broad consensus, and assured ourselves that that set itself is coherent and consistent with the relevant facts about the world and human nature, then we have determined the right thing to do. There is nothing that would count as evidence that our shared values are wrong other than that they are based on mistakes about the relevant facts or on inconsistencies. If we value a certain way of life and are consistent and fully informed in this evaluation, then we are right to live that way. (For more on this point, see “How to determine the right thing to do” in the Philosoblog archives.)

This is why Iannone’s contention that we can’t “have morality without a lively belief in God and transcendent truth, something higher than man to which man is bound...” is wrong. God is irrelevant to moral reasoning. In fact, even if he commanded us to live some other way than the way we coherently and informedly prefer, his command would be irrelevant.

Conservatism

[Voice of Jeff Foxworthy]:
Being conservative means accepting traditional values on trust; until you come across enough evidence to reject one of these values, you will not. But if you cling to traditional values, come what may, no matter what the evidence against them, then you might just be a reactionary.

Being conservative can include finding inspiration in religion for your values. But if you take the pronouncements of your religion as enough to reject good reasons against your values, you might just be a reactionary. If several times a year your voice becomes shrill and you say, "I don't care, God says not to do that, that's all!" then you might just be a reactionary. Conservatives think God is reasonable and won't advise us to do things that don't make sense. But if you are prepared to protect something that obviously doesn't matter "because it's holy," then you might just be a reactionary. In fact, if you vote Republican and think that morality stays what it is whether there is a God or not, you're a conservative. If you think God is the basis of morality, then you're definitely a reactionary.

If you are pessimistic about human nature and are tragically prepared to accept a non-utopian society as the only one possible, you're probably a conservative. But if you feel your gut tighten and your pulse race when you think about ushering in a society of perfect liberty or holiness, then you might just be a reactionary. If you are tragically prepared to sacrifice some of your precious values as the situation changes, in order to fulfill as many of your values as possible, I have no doubt that you're a conservative. But if you cling to certain principles, bound for glory, while you let other principles go to hell, it's just possible that you're a reactionary. You might not be. You might be principled, it depends on the case. If you see slippery slopes everywhere, you're definitely a reactionary.

If you are prepared to look at the facts as they come in, such as that some towns have cut crime with downtown surveillance camaras without men in black making townspeople disappear, that blacks are people, that there's nobody home in a brainless zygote, that we evolved from monkeys, that large sections of humanity are evil, etc., and if you are prepared to adjust your moral judgments so that they fit the facts, you are certainly a conservative. That is, you are if you are tenaciously committed to your values and won't alter them because of new-fangled technologies such a reproductive cloning or sperm banks, trendy New Age movements, or trendy multiculturalism - all admittedly exciting phenomena for some but no factual evidence to alter our values. But if you won't listen to anything new because you've already made up your mind, you're a reactionary. And if you first ask yourself how the facts square with your morality or religion before you accept them as facts, you're definitely a reactionary, and a little loopy, too, if you don't mind my saying. Something's amiss if you will laugh at Zen meditiation without knowing what it is or you will crush a skin cell to relieve an itch but will let a woman die before crushing a zygote because zygotes are holy. If that's you, you're not a conservative; you're a reactionary, at least a little, anyway. Sure, a person can be a little reactionary, we all are. But let's all try to be a bit more conservative.

Leftists are reactionaries, too, by the way. No, I'm serious. Economic equality, come what may! Bound for glory! Oh, yes, and they won't accept biology any more than the "I-ain't-come-from-no-monkey" right. That whole sociobiology thing.

What makes a conservative: undaunted acceptance of fact and devotion to truth, plus allegiance to traditional, tried-and-true values, as long as they are not found to be refuted by the facts. We moderate amongst our values, like beloved children - we nurture them all as much as we can. We won't make any radical moves that would jeopardize any of them. I looked up "conservative" in the dictionary today. It said, "moderate." Oh, my word!

Two Items

One in epistemology, one in philosophy of language.

Dogmatism

Do you have a belief that you cherish, a belief that you won't give up, even though the evidence runs against it? Do you spend all your time looking for evidence for your belief because there seems to be none but you don't want your belief to be false? Do you spitefully lash out at others who reject your belief? Do you ever examine the basis of your belief? What do you do when you can find no basis? How do you react? Ignorance and falsehood are dark places. Avoid them at all costs by avoiding dogmatism. Vow to accept only those beliefs that have sufficient evidence. Submit yourself to the possible fate of relinquishing the beliefs that your cherish. False beliefs are worthless.

"Jihad"

The meaning of this word depends upon how the speaker means it. There are no meanings written in the fabric of nature. "Lemon" can mean a citrus fruit or a bad car. For the most part, Muslims mean by "jihad" the central duty of a Muslim to kill non-Muslims. There are a few Muslims who mean more benign things by the word: suppressing one's irreligious feelings, for example. The latter group simply cannot plausibly argue that those benign meanings are what "jihad" really means. There is no such thing as what a word really means in some cosmic sense. Or, if they mean that the benign meanings are what most Muslims mean and have meant by the term, then this is just false. When a jihad is called, the Muslim world doesn't start introspecting. They scream bloody murder. So, let us use stipulative definitions. "Islam" is a cult, a dysfunctional religion. One of its central duties is to kill everyone else. It is a social disease. (To call it "Islamicist" in effort to distinguish it from "Islam," as the media does, obfuscates these facts.) Now, let's use "Izlam," to refer to what is often called "moderate Islam" (the latter term, by the stipulation I'm presenting here, being an oxymoron). Izlam rejects the dysfunctional parts of Islam, thus forming Izlam. We should tolerate Izlam, but not Islam. Of course; you can't tolerate people who want to kill you. The problem is that a member of Islam, as a subversive, when confronted on his beliefs, will be likely to claim to be a member of Izlam. If he wants to kill all non-Muslims, he will not tell them this in polite company, since this would impede his cause. So, if anyone says that he is Muslim, I have no way of knowing whether he is a member of Islam or Izlam, until I have observed his behavior for decades. Sleeper cells, you know. Of course, members of Izlam should be tolerated. It's just that you hardly can tell who they are unless you know them well. But at least we can have different words for the two different religions. This will be useful. (Also, "jihad" and "jikad" might come in handy for the two meanings of "jihad".)

By the way, if a Muslim were insulted by this argument, I'd have to assume he was a member of Islam, not Izlam. If he thought I'd smeared the whole religion, then he'd be trying to trick me into assuming that "jihad" has an objectively non-violent meaning, no matter how the term is used. But this is to misunderstand language; usage determines meaning. "But the true Islam has no violent jihad!" is obviously false. So, as I've indicated that Izlam is a perfectly valid religion in principle, if he construed what I've said here as a vicious attack, then I would have to conclude that he was defending Islam. That's the only religion I've attacked. "Islam is a religion of peace" is either deeply confused or a lie. In any event, it's false (oxymoronic, in fact). But Izlam is a religion of peace. Any reasonable member of Izlam, since benevolent, should have no objection to any of this.

The Sweet Spot

Vodkapundit has said that he's "a Falwell-tweaking, gay-marriage supporting, drug legalizing, pro-abortion, pro-immigration, anti-trade barrier, wary-of-organized-religion kind of conservative. Hardly a conservative at all...."

Sounds good to me. But "wary"? Okay, wary. But I think organized religion is mostly good. You know, I'm one of those religion-liking atheists.

Here's what I'd like to add to the list: I'm a welfare-minimalist conservative. Conservatives of this stripe believe we have a duty to protect children from starvation and death by exposure, and that private charity won't suffice. Libertarianism is the extreme position that no one has a positive duty, a duty to help others (unless he has contracted to do so), or that, if we have such a duty, at least that the state may not force us to fulfill this duty by taxing us in order to provide a welfare net. Libertarians would cut the welfare net, with disastrous results. Libertarianism is thus radical, and welfare minimalism more conservative. (The "minimalism" refers to pretty austere welfare support. More on that later.) I don't know whether Vodkapundit is one of this sort of conservative.

This is not just silly semantics. There is a large set of values that we cherish and desire to uphold. It is radical to dispose of any of them in favor of any other, merely on the grounds that it's hard to satisfy them all. Better to take the tragic view that we must act in ways that maximize the satisfaction of as many of these values as we can. We will fail to fulfill many of them as much as we'd wish. Accept this tragedy. The conservative will stay the course, adhere to these cherished values and not desert any of them (unless shown that there is one that is flawed, such as "It's okay to enslave blacks.") This is the description of conservatism of the contemporary American philosopher John Kekes. More on Kekes later.

We moderate amongst our values. Why did Vodkapundit say he was hardly a conservative at all? Because he's a moderate. Why did he say he's a conservative? Because you have to be conservative to be moderate. No, I'm not kidding. (You're thinking of "reactionary". That's the stance of clinging to your values no matter what evidence comes in that you need to change them. That's "too conservative.") All moderates are conservatives. All interesting debates are amongst moderates trying to determine where the sweet spot is. Libertarians, leftists, and reactionaries will cling to only a few of our values and foresake the rest. That's a non-starter.

I'm also a back-to-basics-in-education conservative: math and science, history and civics, literature and Greek/Latin, and nothing else (okay, maybe some other stuff sparingly.) More on that later.

I'm also a who-cares-whether-one-race-is-statistically-inferior-to-another conservative. What if there were statistics to show that intelligence varied according to big toe size? So, what? More later.

Oh, yes, and Vodkapundit said something about being a paleofeminist. Yes, please! Women are to be treated with equal respect to men.

Coming this Fall on Philosoblog:
The Philosophy of John Adams
The Philosophy of John Kekes
The Poltical Philosophy of Paul Wellstone
Education, Assimilation, and Virtue
Welfare Minimalism
Racism

UPDATE:
Libertarian premises: If you're a libertarian, make sure you have evidence that this is an absolute rule with no exceptions: "It's never okay to apply force to someone who has not applied force to anyone else." The idea that forced taxation is wrong would need to be proven on this premise. But what is the proof for this premise? The case of Fred forcing Joe (see the post below) seems to refute it by counterexample. Fred did nothing wrong.

Slippery slopes: Be careful with slippery slopes, such as the idea that believing that we have a duty to look after each other will lead to communism or fascism. Human beings are smart. They don't slip down slopes so easily. The belief that there is an important duty to look after the unfortunate is consistent with a belief in the free market, self-reliance, and private property. To say that these two beliefs are inconsistent is about as plausible as saying that valuing safety is inconsistent with ever leaving your house. If you value safety, you should never leave your house, right? Of course not. Does the sentence, “If we continue to make caring for others a moral duty, we’ll end up in a communist dictatorship,” have solid evidence for it? It seems wildly implausible to me. Caring for others has been a duty in Western culture for millennia.

Rules (there aren't any): There is a difference between adhering to moral rules (formulae which have no exceptions) and adhering to moral values without yielding. A moderate looks for the sweet spot - the determinations of which action or state of affairs will most fulfill our many moral values - and adheres to it without yielding. The analogy to safety: You want to be safe, but you want to go out and do worthwhile things that involve risk. So, you manage risk. It would be silly to say to someone who leaves his house from time to time that he doesn't really value safety. One can hold to the sweet spot absolutely, relentlessly, without holding to any rule or formula. As Aristotle said, our values are much too complicated to describe with rules or formulae. Distinguish being lax about one’s values from not subscribing to rules. You don’t subscribe to the rule “Always pick the safest option,” or “Never kill,” but if anything is a rule, those are. Even, “Never harm anyone who hasn’t harmed anyone else” isn’t a rule. The case of Fred forcing Joe is a counterexample. So is forcing Americans who do not want to pay any tax to pay it.

In sum, there are "rule absolutists," such as leftists and libertarians, who take the rules "equalize wealth" and "do not inhibit liberty," respectively, to be absolute rules, rules without exceptions. But why would someone cling to a rule and abandon all other values? On the other hand, there are conservatives (moderates, whatever): "sweet spot absolutists," who maintain absolute devotion to a large set of values arranged in a coherent system.

Libertarianism Again

If libertarianism is correct, then Joe does nothing wrong in the following scenario:

"Hello? Oh, Fred, hi. Yes, the mailman came, and it looked like he dropped mail at your house. Oh, by the way, your son, Bobby, is bleeding to death on your front lawn, after he severed his foot under the lawnmower. Actually, I think he's dead.... What? No, I didn't. I was busy with this crossword puzzle. I know we're next-door neighbors and all, but I have no obligation to help other people. I'm free to live on my own and be selfish as long as I don't hurt anybody.... Listen, Fred, you're obviously too upset to think clearly about this, so I'm hanging up now. Bye."

And Fred does something wrong in this scenario:

Joe: "No, he's still alive, barely."
Fred: "I have remote control of my burglar alarm next door. If I press the button, the alarm will sound. It is very, very loud and will fill your house with mind-numbing noise. I suggest that you call an ambulance for my son and administer simple first aid, or I will do this."

Clearly, Fred does nothing wrong in the second scenario, and Joe does something wrong in the first. Therefore, libertarianism is false. Until libertarians prove otherwise, they must renounce libertarianism.

Now, the libertarian could say that he need provide no proof that Fred does something wrong and Joe nothing wrong, since the non-libertarian has not provided argument to the contrary. Well and good. Carry the banner of standing idly by as a kid bleeds to death in front of you. Write on the banner "Individual liberty!" People will continue to take your position as seriously as they do now. You simply do not share American values. You want us to accept new values, just like the far left does. But as long as the vast majority in America share a coherent set of non-libertarian values that they prefer and that is consistent with the relevant facts, it is logically impossible for the libertarian to get a wedge underneath those values and overturn them. It is rational for us to live by our values, as long as they are coherent and informed. So, you want us to accept new values, but you have no evidence that we should accept them. Therefore, libertarianism, like far leftism, is a fanaticism.

UPDATE: To be clear: This is an argument for a minimal welfare net funded by taxation. In addition, I have many libertarian friends. They aren't fanatics, and I apologize for calling them that. They are excellent members of the community of inquirers, whom we are lucky to have around. I let some other libertarians, who are fanatics, led me to lose my cool. I'm sorry.

Today I hate my country. We couldn't even pay our last respects to an exemplary American. Maybe we have no values. What's there? Maybe there's no "there" there. Now: decline and fall. Today I hate my country.

UPDATE: Okay, I'm over my little fit. With people like Bob Dole, Bigwig, and the guy who drove his lawnmower hundreds of miles to see his sick brother, we're alright. Oh, yes, and Matt Groening. And Letterman. Oh, jeez, yes: and the President! Thank God for George W. Bush!

And thank God for the Vodkapundit, Lileks, Aaron Haspel at godofthemachine, and the Instapundit for their kind words about Senator Wellstone. (And thank you Senator Lott, Governor Ventura, and Senator Domenici.)

[Voice of Stuart Smalley, Minnesotan]: You know, I feel pretty good about this country! Back to normal!

The Melting Pot II

America was founded on liberty, but it’s always had its conservative, traditionalist, virtue-pedantic side. The point of liberty is that it allows one to pursue happiness in the way most likely to yield it: the way one prefers. The problem is to determine the degree to which to constrain liberty in order to promote virtues and ways of life that are the best. For the values embraced by adults are mostly fixed. And some preferences are better suited to human nature than others. It is good for everyone to fulfill his preferences, for this is the only chance he has for happiness. But, as we saw in “The Melting Pot I,” it would be better if we could all be raised in a culture that nurtured the best preferences and produced a single, shared set of harmonious preferences. This is the key idea behind American multiculturalism: the melting pot. It is an idea that implies liberty, public debate, and the quest for virtue.

Different people have different preferences. In multicultural America there is a variety of cultures, from Minnesotan, to Tennessean, to Chinatown, to Tex-Mex, and to black American culture, with plenty more to name. Most of us would be unhappy being forced to live according to only one of these. The spirit of liberty protects us from this fate.

But liberty is just the hollow shell of a value. The vast majority in American share more values than liberty. There is a common culture that cuts across the vast majority: a Greco-Western, Anglo-American set of practices and values. If the majority who subscribe to this set of values wish to preserve it, they may do so. They should. It contains a rich array of norms that is unexcelled in its capacity to create good lives. Culture is fragile and precious, and if the people see fit to promote this predominant culture (including publicly funding it), they may. It is not good for the minority that diverges from mainstream values and doesn’t cherish the predominant ways. But it is good for the descendents of that minority. The present generation can’t just change its attitudes, but their descendents will be better off. The point is no different from their duty to pay for the military even if they disapprove of defense. If rational, they would wish their descendents to be defended and, similarly, to have a better and more unified culture than theirs. This is why there is no duty to support minority cultures in any way, and it is permissible to promote only the predominant culture of the majority, even with public funds.

Here is how multicultural America should work. We allow liberty and open debate so that the best ways of life - the highest virtues - will be discovered, preserved, and propagated by rational persuasion and demonstration. The predominant culture accrues new ideas from minority cultures, evaluates them, and settles disputes amongst the various cultures by siding with the one that has been shown to be the best: to promote good lives, and to prevent cruelty. In some cases, one of two equally plausible alternative ways of life must be chosen. Even then, the one which is traditional to the predominant culture may and should be chosen. It is better to have a unified set of values than a hodgepodge, or what I called a “cacophony of the heart” in “The Melting Pot I”. But even after these decisions are made, liberty remains, to the extent that recalcitrant minorities are free to maintain their own cultures. The idea is twofold. Forcing them to stop would make them unhappy, since, as I mentioned, adults cannot easily switch ways of life midstream. Also, the excellence of the predominant culture will win over the recalcitrant minorities’ descendents in the fullness of time by demonstration and reasoned debate. The parents cannot reasonably deny their children this higher fulfillment. And as for the minority ways of life themselves, it doesn’t matter that they die off. They’re not people. In sum, both minority and majority must tolerate each other. But the majority may and should support only those ways of life it deems best.

Notice that the liberty of the minority is constrained. Only its more superficial values are to be tolerated. Those values which conflict with the norms governing cooperative endeavors favored by the majority are not to be tolerated, since these are cases in which majority rule holds (unless the minority can demonstrate the superiority of its norms). These may be matters of law or extra-legal morality. Good old boys can’t get drunk and race their cars on any road they please, Muslims may not kill infidel Americans, Muslims must not prohibit the drinking of alcohol in their neighborhoods, and Korean grocers should not place your change on the counter, rather than in your hand. There is no duty to tolerate these practices, but rather a duty of all to refrain from them. But mosques, Chinese traditional clothing and shrines to ancestors, the study of Indian poetry, and the like that are to be tolerated, since they don’t greatly impinge on cooperative endeavors.

Still, it is permissible to offer criticism of minority cultures while tolerating them, and to voice one’s opinion that they are inferior, whenever one sincerely believes that this is true. There is a representation of a worldview in each of the tolerable, superficial practices and values of a culture, a worldview which should be subject to criticism and scrutiny. Keeping the Taoist book Chuang-tzu as one’s favorite book and wearing a yin-yang symbol does not directly cut against American values. But it might do so indirectly; only scrutiny will tell. Confucian family values might count as oppressive by American standards. It makes no sense to consider it to be a duty to lie to someone about whether he is pursuing an inferior way of life. Americans are widely known to be mutually critical. That’s one reason that we excell. Reasoned public debate is crucial, and it requires truth. Furthermore, if we are to be required to tolerate inferior values in America, then we reserve the right to voice reasoned rejection of them. We will not stand idly by while our children, impressionable as they are, are attracted by alternative ways of life that they cannot see are inferior. If objections to inferior values are stricken from the public forum, youth will be lead astray. We will not betray them in this way. Therefore, no minority culture has a right to have its culture acknowledged to be equal to superior culture when it is actually inferior.

On the other hand, Americans are not to show disrespect for the people who are pursuing passably decent ways of life, even if those ways are demonstrably inferior to those of mainstream American culture. American liberty and equality are not consistent with snobbery. On the contrary, it is appropriate to congratulate minority Americans for their happiness, even if you think they could have achieved more were they psychologically equipped with an even better set of values. American multiculturalism represents solidarity between decent Americans of various cultures, but it also is committed to honesty about which ways of life are best and to be preserved and which are inferior and to be left to fade away.

This is the scheme of the melting-pot multiculturalism of America: liberty, public debate, and the quest for virtue. Diversity and liberty are good as means to virtue and unity in America, and as ways to promote the happiness of minority groups before their melting is complete. But virtue, the best ways of life, and unity in them should always ultimately, and with the gentle guidance of liberty and tolerance, override cultural diversity. Diversity is a mere means; virtue is the end. For this reason, the melting-pot multiculturalism of America is only moderate multiculturalism.

Why Paul Wellstone's Death Made us Cry

Mind Floss has argued that anti-American Americans only like the stuff of America: the raw material that is us. They don't like the form of our country and want to remold us according to their own inclinations, envies, and hatreds. I think most leftists fit this description. Their arguments are so lacking in substance and their animosity so high that clearly it is the animosity and not the arguments that motivate them. Mind Floss's description is perspicuous. Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, etc., all tried to mold their societies into the radically new forms of their narcissistic choosing.

This weekend Paul Wellstone has been eulogized as "principled." But Stalin was "principled" in some sense. So, let us try to be less ambiguous in this connection.

Paul Wellstone was a moral exemplar and a leftist. He was tenaciously devoted to the form of America: its values. He examined the evidence about what these values implied and carefully followed it to what he honestly took to be its sound conclusions. He drew conclusions to the left of where many of us do. He thought that American values dictated that the working man should have more political power than he does at present. He thought that we, too, believed this deep down but were somehow making a mistake, some inconsistency, in recognizing our values and their implications. He was trying to call us back to what he took to be our own form, and his way of doing this was through aiming at the truth, scrupulously democratic devotion to public debate, and the good, old fashioned, legal power politics that our system rightly allows for. He had no interest in molding us according to his personal inclinations.

Paul Wellstone fulfilled the duty of every American: to examine political matters carefully and with devotion to defend the conclusions on the evidence in the forum of reasoned debate. His loss made us cry because he was better at fulfilling that duty than the overwhelming majority of us, even than the majority of our leaders. He carefully put together the puzzle of our values in a plausible manner, such that we became better acquainted with their contours thanks to him and, if we were on our toes, came to understand them better by seeing where he erred. Somewhere in the midst of his reasonings there was an error, such that his conclusions were false. But the error was purely intellectual and blamelessly so, and vastly outweighed by the value of his leadership. This is why we needed him in the Senate. Talk about loyal opposition. His death is like the loss of your left arm. Trauma, shock, grief.

Philosoblog will discuss Senator Wellstone's error in "The Political Philosophy of Paul Wellstone" in the next few weeks. I'm sure he'd take the criticism in the spirit of a tribute in which it is intended. As I say, he was devoted to the truth.

Philosoblog is in the middle of a three-part series: Be a Cultural Elitist (below), The Melting Pot I, and The Melting Pot II.

The Melting Pot I

Extreme Multiculturalism is the position that a society should support a diversity of cultures within itself and should not be partial to any of them, including the predominant one. But this idea should be rejected.

If the predominant culture in a society is a decent one, then its adherents have a right to preserve it. A society is a group of people in a cooperative endeavor, be it a single endeavor, as in the case of a ski club, or the most complete of endeavors: that of living good lives. Cooperation requires shared values, standards, and norms. Therefore, a society should have only one set of moral values. It follows that it is best for a society to have only one culture. This is why extreme multiculturalism should be rejected, which means that the members of a predominant culture in a society have no duty to give support to other cultures.

You’ll notice a superficial irony in this conservative rejection of extreme multiculturalism. The rejection maintains that a people has a right to maintain its traditional culture. Why, then, shouldn’t the conservative support the maintenance of all traditional cultures? But this objection overlooks the fact that a society simply cannot function with a plurality of cultures, since its members cannot cooperate without shared values. It is precisely because a people has a right to preserve its culture that extreme multiculturalism is to be rejected. For extreme multiculturalism, by diverting resources and retraining hearts, militates against the native majority’s effort to maintain its culture. And rejecting extreme multiculturalism is consistent with allowing minority cultures to be preserved. They may be preserved in their home countries, and immigrants may return there if they so desire. If their home country prohibits this, then the loss of their culture is not the fault of their new homeland. The minority has no claim on the majority to alter its way of life to accommodate the minority’s preference. As long as the minority’s fundamental needs are looked after - liberty, food, shelter - majority rule applies.

There are two caveats to the rejection of extreme multiculturalism. First, superficial cultural pluralism is consistent with rejecting extreme multiculturalism. There is nothing wrong with falafel stands, Chinese New Year parades, or reggae bands. (In fact, one suspects that this is the degree of the depth of interest that upper-middle class, white extreme multiculturalists take in the “ethnic diversity” of their communities. They don’t condone the cutting out of little girls’ clitorises, do they?) Certain superficial cultural practices bring happiness to the immigrants who prefer them. These practices don’t militate against traditional American values. So, they should be tolerated. But there is no duty of the predominant culture to support these practices. All of its support may go to preserving its own culture, as difficult and important as that task is. Majority rule applies here. A coherent and monocultural set of superficial cultural practices makes for a healthier moral life by providing harmonious representation of the predominant moral values. A multicultural set of such practices is an aesthetico-moral cacophony signifying no values in particular. Allowing the minority the liberty to diverge from these ways is good for them and not particularly damaging to the predominant culture. But actively orchestrating an array of equally represented practices does do damage. The child of such a multicultural set of images feels nothing in particular about any set of values. He has no deeply felt allegiance to any one way of life. He has a cacophony of soul. (One suspects that this aesthetic joy ride is what the extreme multiculturalists judge to be desirable in the New Man they are designing: a person whose life is like permanent, wild college party, a “long, strange trip,” as the Grateful Dead said. There is no genuine moral argument here.)

The second caveat to the rejection of extreme multiculturalism is that the predominant culture should be open to new ideas from other cultures and to criticisms of its own. Immigrants’ cultures should be examined, and their criticisms should be considered. But this can be done full well without actively embracing those cultures as part of the host society’s cultural makeup.

With these two caveats, the rejection of extreme multiculturalism appears to be well grounded. Of course, rejecting extreme multiculturalism will undoubtedly get you called a “racist”. But rejecting extreme multiculturalism is consistent with inviting immigrants of all races to partake in the predominant culture in America. The topic has nothing to do with biological categories.

Melting Pot II will be up very soon.

Envy II

Dude gnashes his teeth at "big man" who was "undeserving" of his "opportunity" and who doesn't measure up to the "intellectual" standards of Northeast academics' idea of "intelligence" but is able to march around the globe with military superiority. Now, you tell me that idiotarianism is not a matter of envy, when the left labels those who maintain conservative moral standards "Social Darwinists." "Feelings of worthlessness," "feelings of inadequacy," and "inferiority complexes" are attributed by Daniel Moore to George W. Bush. Hmm, why are such things at the forefront of your mind, Mr. Moore?. Renew your efforts to improve your character. Conservatives will extend their hands in kindness and patience to assist you in this courageous effort. It's not too late now. When you're 42 it will be.

(Link via Instapundit.)