Verificationism in Philosophy of Mind

I'll give four examples in which the verificationism I've been discussing in the last two posts gives interesting and plausible results: philosophy of mind, metaethics, epistemology, and social/political philosophy. The gist of verificationism is V:

V: If S knows what S means by an X, then S has an idea of what S would take as evidence that the X correctly described a given object and what S would take as evidence that the X incorrectly described another given object.

Now, in philosophy of mind there is a celebrated and strange individual. He is quite a considerable personage, forcing hoards of materialists, who've rejected dualistic ontologies of mind and brain, to acknowledge the fellow's impossible possibility and shore up this contradiction either by conceding that materialism is false and dualism correct, or by some ornate contortions of theory, to devise a better-defended materialism which can afford acknowledge the brute as a merely a remote possibility of no genuine threat.

The poor fellow is the zombie.

Skip this paragraph if you know well what "zombie" means in philosophy of mind. Otherwise, consider. A zombie is a person just like us in physical and behavioral respects; he is not the groaning, groping monster of the horror movies. No, he acts just like everyone else. If you prick him, he cries. If you examine his actions throughout the day, he is indistinguishable in habit from any normal person you please. He seems to enjoy a pint and a laugh. He appears alarmed when told of some foreboding danger. But, you see, the poor zombie has no mental states. Or, more precisely, he is never conscious. He feels no pain or joy, he has never experienced any visual sensation, nor any sense of worry or eager anticipation. We might say that your spouse or the lady who works down the hall from you might very well be zombies. But as a matter of biological contingency, in our natural world zombies are physically impossible. For in this world, any animal of our exact physical description, down to the biochemical and neurological detail, is conscious. So, consider that the zombie dwells only in a logically possible world that we may imagine.

So, there is no contradiction in the concept "zombie" in other words. Or so it is believed by materialists and dualists alike. This has lead materialists to feel themselves forced to show how consciousness and brain could be one and the same when in fact we can as clearly conceive of consciousness being stripped away from the brain as imagine an apple washed clean of its waxy coating. The zombie has a brain (and all the requisite behaviors) but he has no consciousness. So, they aren't the same thing. Or if they are, the materialist is bound to show how they are one and the same here while in the zombie's possible world they are not. And from there the ink is spilled by the gallon, filling the philosophy journals and books with the back and forth between the materialist and the dualist. You can practically specialize in zombies these days as a philosophy professor.

But I accept a form of materialism that is orthogonal to this tirade, as well as unpopular, old-fashioned and hopelessly benighted by the illusion that verificationism is not dead. Won't you join me? Verificationism is not dead. Go reread V. Now this:

What would you take as evidence that there was a zombie? Nothing would count as evidence. Zombie is an empty concept. It is hand-waving at its core. Therefore, the supposed threat to materialism is groundless. It's no threat at all. We'll make all this clear in the next post. We also need to understand more about concepts and terms, such that they can be meaningless and yet appear to everyone to have a perfectly clear meaning.

Verificationism

In the last post I suggested a verification principle. It is a component of a variety of verificationism that I would like to propose as quite sound. This old term is applied to the philosophy of the logical positivists, the early 20th Century philosophers who identified the meaning of a term with epistemic conditions under which the term is used. These philosophers were extreme empiricists, by which I mean that not only did they believe that all knowledge is based upon experience (moderate empiricism), but also that objects of which there could be no experience were not to be acknowledged to exist.

The sort of verificationism I propose leaves all of that behind. The meaning of "experiment" or "democracy" isn't a phenomenal feel or even reducible to several phenomenal feels. Even the meaning of "yellow" isn't. And if the meaning of "yellow" isn't the experience of yellow, more abstract and complex terms are also irreducible to experiential states. In addition, I don't rule out that God exists but cannot be experienced by us. In particular, I think that universals (such as "spherical" and "true" and "organic") exist, even though no one can experience them. No, the verificationism I have in mind doesn't rule any of that out.

It's just that I think that there are philosophical concepts and problems that don't mean anything and that therefore inappropriately occupy the philosophical mind. The verificationism I have in mind simply serves to make us a bit stricter about which concepts pass as meaningful. It doesn't replace conceptual incontinence with the extreme austerity of the old logical positivists.

Just consider a philosopher philosophizing about something. Suppose he proposed that something Z existed, or he asked you to suppose that there was a Z. Suppose also that you asked him what he meant by Z, and he told you but it didn't make much sense to you. You might then ask him what would count as evidence that there was such a thing as a Z. If he shrugged and admitted that he had no idea, this should tell you that he didn't have any concept of a Z.

We'll apply this verificationism soon. Also, Kekes on The Art of Life is coming soon.

A Verification Principle

Consider a kind of sentence X

X: Any assertion that a thing has a certain property or is of a certain kind (or lacks that property or is not of that kind.)

In other words, X is the application of an adjective to describe a thing or the use of a noun to categorize a thing (or to deny that the adjective correctly describes it or to deny that the noun correctly categorizes it.) "The action was right" and "Joe is a zombie" are examples.

I propose the following verification principle, which has the form "if p, then q":

V: If S knows what S means by an X, then S has an idea of what S would take as evidence that the X correctly described a given object and what S would take as evidence that the X incorrectly described another given object.

In other words, if you assert something meaningfully by an X, then you have an idea of what would count as evidence that what you've said was false, and what would count as evidence that what you've said is true. I also accept that if S has an idea..., then S knows what S means by X. So, the verification principle could be made bidirectional (p iff q) if you like. However, I am only interested in the first direction: "if p, then q." You'll see why as we go along. What's important is whether terms and assertions have meaning, not (in the other direction) whether we can determine that someone has no evidence for an utterance on the grounds that he doesn't know what he means by it.

Also, I have nothing to say about whether the evidence is analytic or empirical in nature. It doesn't matter. It's a 21st Century verificationism, if you like, without the logical positivism that bedeviled its grandparent almost a century ago. Let's just not talk about logical positivists and their verification principle. Objections to it are relevant only if they are objections to V.

Here is an argument for V. Suppose S asserts that X. Suppose also that we ask S what would count as evidence that X was true and what would count as evidence that X and what would count as evidence that not-X. If S falls silent, shrugs, says "I have no idea," then we begin to wonder whether S has no idea what he's said when he said X. In fact, if a thorough probe showed that S really had no idea of what would count as evidence, then we would be justified in concluding that S had no idea what he meant by X.

Is V analytic? Yes. It's analytic philosophy, in which we analyze concepts to produce interesting tautologies. Oddly, the analytic-synthetic distinction is fuzzy, however, and V is ever slightly empirical in its derivation. In analytical philosophy, we notice which terms (such as "evidence") we would apply in imagined situations, in order to adduce evidence for statements about what we mean by other terms, such as "meaning." This imagining flushes out meaning and therefore helps construct analyses.

I intend to use V to argue for interesting results in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and metaethics. So, it is important to know whether V is true. Are there any problems with V?

Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence: The Perdition of Newland Archer

This is the story of the self-destruction of a man. "Destruction" is seemingly wildly too strong a term, as Archer's life is, after a fashion, "exemplary" (to use Kekes's term.) But this is precisely the point. Fate deals him a good hand, albeit one with a painful trial in it. Yet, Archer lacks the spiritual resilience to get past the trial.

Archer is talented, bright, inquisitive and imaginative, as well as loyal to whom he ought to be. But there is an arrangement of these components of character that would enable him to remain true to his most important values and that he fails to find. He fails to find it because he allows himself to plunge into rage, despair and self-contempt.

Few of us are put to the test: to sacrifice what, above all other things, one wants second-most for what one wants most. Here lies the possibility of perdition and the chance to realize salvation. Archer must choose: He may through betrayal bring shame and disruption to the society to whom he is rightly loyal and also break his new wife's heart. Or he may forego a life with the woman to whom he is ideally suited: Ellen Olenska. he chooses the former, and Olenska, as desirous of him as he is of her, leads him to it. But Archer rails against this fate. He allows the disappointment to grow into rage and despair. These push him near to madness as his internal "demons" drive him to revoke his choice, a move he is prevented from making by Olenska's retreat to Europe and his wife's announcement of her first pregnancy. Thereafter, he fails to be the kind of "fellow he had dreamed of being," instead "inadequate: a mere gray speck of a man." His irrational resentment of fate drives him needlessly to abandon his third-most important value: his delight in adventuresome travel, inquiry and interesting discussion.

Olenska, by contrast, is saved. She endures the fate, foregoing the life with the man ideally suited to her. But she does this with a grace of character and a steady and clear-eyed contact with her conscience, the faculty that in Archer deteriorates under the oppression of resentment. Olenska is able to cut through the layers of resentment and find the settled resolution to her fate as her "equal," rather than the "master" fate becomes for Archer. Upon making the difficult choice fate forces upon her, where Archer finds rage and chasms of despair within himself, Olenska finds abiding self-love. She explains to him:

I WAS lonely; I WAS afraid. But the emptiness and the darkness are gone; when I turn back into myself now I'm like a child going at night into a room where there's always a light.

Just so. The difficult trial causes the painful emotions. But if you remain quiet and do not rage against them, they disperse. Archer, on the other hand, welcomes "fuel for his own [anger]." For Archer, the trial "is beyond human enduring--that's all." But Olenska instructs, "Oh, don't say that; when I'm enduring it!"

While most of us don't face a trial of the severity that Archer and Olenska did, still it remains possible to experience the salvation Olenska did and to avoid the deleterious effects of resentment of fate that beset Archer. Perdition and salvation are attainable even for less interesting characters. Olenska shows that it is a matter of paying attention to one's loyalty to one's "unconditional commitments" (as Kekes calls them) at precisely the moments when adversity strikes and offers us fuel for anger or despair. There is a peaceful contemplation, a serenity just short of meditation, that is possible for anyone who has, although not faced the trial, nevertheless managed to choose, arrange, and adhere to a set of unconditional and conditional commitments that we would call important constituents of a good life. The good life is a moral and practical matter, whereas the avoidance of perdition and the acceptance of salvation within it is a spiritual one. If even an exemplary life can be deeply damaged by resentment, then Archer and Olenska's lives serve as a universal lesson.

Maverick Philosopher Offers Salvation Today

Bill Vallicella gives a helpful analysis of salvation today. He's uncovered a different area of the terrain from what I've been preoccuppied with, and I'm sure there's more to be said. For example, Bill puts his finger on the difference between mystical Asian varieties of salvation and Judeo-Christian varieties. Here Bill has it right that the question is, Who is saved? Also, he mentions anti-religious salvation-deniers, which brings up the issue of the epistemic status of claims to salvation. I find the idea that there are no cases of salvation highly implausible, but only if I get to define "salvation" as I have been doing.

UPDATE: Bill offers criticism of my posts on salvation. He says my concept is thin beer and:

We must not so rig our terminology as to foreclose on the possibility of genuine salvation, salvation as it has been understood in the major religions. I'm not saying that there is salvation in this further, genuine sense. I am saying that we ought not, by a hasty terminological decision, to foreclose on its possibility.

I agree. I want to avoid illicit semantic maneuvers. What I'm trying to do is an explanatory reduction or an empirical reduction, not a definitional one. I do not want to foreclose possibilities but only to explain after possibilities have been pursued. For that reason I cannot take my case for salvation naturalized to be conclusive.

Salvation II

In the previous post I gave a description of salvation in psychological and moral terms. According to it, salvation is an achievement of deep and genuine patience accomplished through a calming of the mind and a contemplation of the fact that the frustration, resentment, and anger with which it frequently reacts to the course of mundane events are: (a.) inappropriate, given the fact that on the whole life and the world are very good and (b.) unnecessary, given the fact that the mind can replace resentment and the others with patience. The multiplicity of short- and medium-term goals and low- and mid-priority values that give order to our lives consume so much of our time and demand so much careful attention that, since coming anywhere near fulfilling all of them completely is impossible, we must handle frequent failure. Without having a proper perspective on these failures, frustration, resentment, and anger arise and even snowball themselves into fully-fledged unhappiness. Salvation replaces the discontent with patience and contentedness even amidst the daily failures that will continue to batter the mind.

This description of salvation being purely psychological and moral, what we have here is salvation naturalized. The claim is that salvation can be fully described in non-religious and non-theistic terms: terms that are all descriptions of the profane and devoid of the slightest allusion to the sacred. This is not a definitional naturalism. I don't say that religious definitions of salvation are by definition incorrect. Rather, I mean that either they are not obviously superior to the naturalistic definition of salvation or, at worst, they may be eliminated from our description of salvation as unnecessary.

Religious definitions of salvation will have a fourth component that the naturalistic definition (#1-3) lacks:

4. The events of #1-3 are caused by the sacred or God. Deep and genuine patience is the presence of this sacred being in one's mind, heart or soul. His power or care enables one to handle mundane disappointments with calmness. Salvation is an awakening of faith in a certain supernatural being.

The naturalistic view of salvation simply leaves out #4. It says that #4 may perhaps be true, but there is no reason to think so on the evidence we have at the moment. As a description of salvation, the naturalistic one is not obviously or even probably incomplete on the facts as we know them. Cases of genuine salvation may be frequently described in supernatural terms, but it is not obvious that they are supernatural events. The theist ( who accepts #1-4 as a description of salvation) and the naturalistic atheist who subscribes to the description of salvation I've given in #1-3 have different senses of the term, but they apply it to the same event.

There are both atheists and theists who have experienced salvation. They have different metaphysical claims about what happened to them. The theist will say, "God saved us both," and the atheist will reply, "No deity was involved." So, whether I've succeeded in naturalizing salvation stands as an open question here. (On the other hand, if the theist admits that #1-3 are a complete definition of "salvation," while #4 is merely an additional description of salvation that is not by definition correct, then we could say that the salvation naturalized presented here is definitional.)

Salvation III will discuss the salvation and perdition of Edith Wharton's characters Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer, respectively. The Age of Innocence shows up early in John Kekes's The Art of Life, so the novel will serve as a segue from this series on philosophy of religion to our series on Kekes's book. (By the way, Scorsese's movie is no substitute for the book in this connection. The fine movie leaves out certain glimpses of Olenska's salvation and Archer's perdition.)

Salvation I

There are various sorts of sublime transformations of one's psychology, I suppose. The sort I have in mind involves three things:

1. The redirection of one's attention from the flow of thoughts (reasoning, desires and emotions) that usually fill the mind as it occupies itself with its countless concerns.

2. The resulting recognition that until now one has been inadvertently subject to that flow of thoughts such that the perspective of complete immersion in it has kept one from noticing that this world and one's existence in it are vastly better than nothingness.

3. The resulting beginning of deep and genuine patience: the recognition that upon re-immersion of the mind into the flow of mundane thoughts, one need not be subject to the frustration, resentment and anger that they so often inflict but may instead rest assured by one's allegiance to the values one cherishes.

I'd like to develop the idea that these together describe salvation. #3 requires a little more explanation. One's external perspective on the flow of thoughts - the extraction of the mind from the flow and awareness that that flow is no longer present while yet one's mind is still present, makes it obvious and simple that one is not a reed adrift in that flow but rather a container and controller of it. From this external perspective, one may consider the proposition that subjecting oneself to the flow of thoughts and coping with it only by doing things that will maximize the agreeable thoughts and minimize the frustration, resentment, and anger is a strategy that cannot but fail to result in happiness since frustrations and resentments will continue to sting forever, abated only marginally by one’s efforts. One must also recognize that one’s own allegiance to cherished values and action in accord with them is a strategy likely to create a happy life, and that in view of this recognition, the events that formerly would have caused frustrations and the like are not able to do so anymore. This is not a merely cognitive change. It is a psychological reorganization in which the disposition to react to adversity with resentment is all but eradicated.

This salvation is not an emotionally powerful event. On the contrary, although it is likely accompanied by a profound sense of peace, it is chiefly the development of an aloofness, a tendency not to generate certain emotions (frustration, resentment and anger.) The reason it counts as salvation is that #1-3 describe a psychological transformation in which the basic facts of the existence of this world and one’s existence in it are recognized as enormously good, while the emotive reactions that are a primary cause of unhappiness are almost entirely left behind. I don't see much to argue about in that point. The controversy lies in the religious or theistic person’s likely contention that #1-3 are an incomplete description of salvation.

More on this later in Salvation II.

Redemption

There is a closer connection between evil and nihilism than is obvious. Evil is serious harm that makes it less likely that its sufferer will lead a good life (this being the Kekesian definition of evil.) We are subject to impulses to obtain pleasure. To refrain from submitting to them requires that one see that there is a good life to be made from a structure of character and habit that requires foregoing any opportunities to experience pleasure. Nihilism is a belief that causes a person to lie to himself, saying that such a good life is not really good or not really possible. Prudent self-interest being thus undermined, only the moral stricture against harming other people is left to prevent one's fulfilling the impulse to do evil. This stricture is not strong enough in many cases to prevent the action. In any case, one is quite vulnerable to the urge to take pleasure by harming oneself (alcohol abuse, cigarette smoking, and slothful habits being examples.) So, since it is not obvious that one can have a genuinely good life, nihilism lurks. But it lurks unobviously. The origin of some wrongdoing in nihilism is therefore also unobvious.

The gist of the matter is that people sometimes do evil because they think it doesn't really matter - that nothing really matters and that immediately obtained pleasures are the best option. This is why people of religious faith are likely to see those without it as teetering on the brink of nihilism and sin. They think that in a society that lacks it the center will not hold and all hell will break loose. The unobviousness of the mechanism by which nihilism effects these results impairs debate over this point, to say the least. Both sides are prone to misunderstand and disparage the other.

Faith is the result of a psychological transformation in which the efficacy of nihilism is broken because there is a religious experience of the possibility of a genuinely good life. The first component of this experience is metaphysical. It is that the creation of this world is purposive and good. The second component is much more intimately psychological. It is the unlinking of the mind from mundane frustrations, resentments and anger. These are connected, in that the experience of the goodness of this world makes the resentments and the rest seem petty and ignorant. But one doesn't have to be so very metaphysically minded to accomplish the psychological component of faith through techniques of calming and mental release: meditation and prayer.

What of atheism, then? What is the disagreement over nihilism and goodness? The atheist can recognize that the fact that this world exists is good. He can also withdraw his mind from the mundane frustrations and cease to be subject to their return. Besides the disagreement over whether a God exists - an abstract and lifeless question akin to "How many angels can fit on the head of a pin?" and almost entirely to the side of the real disagreement between the atheist and the theist - there is a disagreement over one or the other of the following:

1. The correct description of this redemption: whether the theistic talk can be
eliminated from it.
2. Whether any redemption is necessary. In this case, the atheist who maintains
that it is not is either incorrect or an extraordinarily talented person who has
always by nature been in possession of redemption.

More on this later. Also, we will be returning to our series on John Kekes, and on the two issues in conservatism. As well, I will ask for your help in certain matters of philosophy of language and metaethics.

Note

I'll be away from computers until Thursday (4/5). When I get back, we'll continue our little series on religious talk, theory of conservatism, and the works of John Kekes (his The Art of Life up next.)

Our Creator

Feeling a bit nihilistic? Let's continue with this little series.

p: "You do have a purpose. God created this world, he is your creator, and he has a purpose for you in it."

The atheist who takes issue with this has an easy task of undermining it as a straightforwardly denotative claim. He may say that the fact that the creator intends that he take on certain purposes is of no concern to him. "The creator of the universe intends that I do X" does not entail that "doing X is worthwhile." Even if we add a supplementary premise that the creator is perfectly good and wise, the conclusion still does not follow. Moreover, there isn't the slightest bit of evidence that there is a God, so even if the argument were valid, it has a premise which is as about as unwarranted as the belief in ghosts. Robots are under no moral obligation to obey their creator's commands. Etc.

But somehow one suspects that something has been overlooked in such a treatment of the theistic boilerplate p. If we respond to boilerplate with critical boilerplate, when in fact momentous and profound principles are at issue, something is amiss.

What has gone overlooked is the connotation of p. It is difficult to imagine someone stating that p and not meaning by it the connotations that the existence of this world is unfathomably good, that the rough suitability of human nature to thrive in this world is an opportunity to be grateful for, and that there are paths to happiness given by our having been made to be creatures of such a kind. And p is a beautiful way of expressing these things. A tale of a supremely good and wise being's creation of this world and all of these circumstances is a fitting allegory.

On all of these things the atheist can agree. He can also agree that expressing the anti-nihilistic vision that these statements and p attempt to convey is not simply a matter of stating blandly that life is acceptable and happiness is possible. The bland statements too often fail to convince the nihilist, fail to give him to see what he needs to see in order to find his nihilism unfounded. Rather, a cognitive adjustment is required in which one is able to let the torrential flow of trivial thoughts taper off and subside. They too easily subject one to the temptation to frustration, anger and resentment, all of which are vectors pointing straight toward nihilism: the temptation to sin.

More later.

Romans 12.2

People who share a common experience and commonly ascribe to certain descriptions of it can discuss it, even though there may be a lurking ambiguity or outright disagreement about it owing to their disagreeing over its complete description. For example, if I believe tomatoes are vegetables and you take them to be fruits, we may still discuss tomatoes because we agree about many of their other properties and are in harmony over many of our experiences of tomatoes. We may cross swords over their genus and even, as the cognitive infects the gustatory, disagree on whether they taste like fruits or like vegetables.

A similar consonance mixed with equivocation can be found in conversations about God, though exceedingly rarely. Consider this passage from the Bible that speaks of salvation and moral transformation through God.

And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. (Romans 12.2)

It is possible for an atheist to see this as sound advice and to agree with the theist that there is more truth in it than falsehood. The God-talk language game is one that the atheist can play, as well as the theist. He can play with conviction and not just as though it were a mere play that he tacitly dismisses is as devoid of truth-bearing statements. In particular, it is possible for an atheist to find value in Romans 12.2 the following lesson:

It is a good idea to do the following:
1. Keep one's mind from being immersed in the river of mundane thoughts in which it is almost constantly swept away and which so frequently subject it to resentments and frustration.

2. Reflect on the facts that the existence of this world is unfathomably better than nothingness and that one’s having this life in this world is unfathomably better than not having it.

3. Realize that the state of patience and eager acceptance of this world that results from 1 and 2 makes one better able to respond to any situation with greater wisdom, strength and courage.

These practical principles are not a translation of Romans 12.2. This is not a reduction. But it is an atheist’s recognition of the profundity and value of the scripture.

Of course, there is much more to the story.

"God"

"God" has a connotation in the sentence "There is a God." It is an evocative sentence which does much more than attempt to refer to a thing of a certain description. It entails that the fact that there is this world, rather than nothing, is very good, and that the situation in which we find ourselves makes living in this world well worthwhile and the lives we have in it things to be deeply grateful for. When the priest kisses the cross or the Jew reads the creation story, this connotation is never far away from these signs.

As an attempt at a reduction of religious language to naturalistic language, this gloss on "There is a God" fails, however. This connotation of "There is a God" is, when the theist utters it, not "what he means." He means to refer to a supernatural person who created this universe. So there is no reduction of "God" to the goodness of the fact of this existence or the appropriateness of being glad for it.

Yet there is more to this story, as we'll see in the next post.

Religious Talk

One Wittgensteinian view of religious language (language about God and salvation) is that it shouldn't be considered incorrect or without real referent but rather a different sort of language game or usage altogether from the one which is committed to truth, real referents, consistency of meaning, clarity to reasoning players of the game, and standards of evidence. I've long thought this a plausible interpretation of religious language. The fatal flaw of this theory is that too many players of the religious-language game simply mean their talk to be truthful and to refer to real supernatural things, such as God, and to supernatural events, such as salvation. Yet there is something so compelling to me about the idea that if you dismiss religious language on the grounds that it does not refer to anything real, you miss something truthful about religious language.

I've made a little progress in figuring out what is missed. There are certain components of some religious experience that produce non-trivial truths. People who have had these experiences can discuss them with religious language. The discussions successfully convey truths. It may be that people who have not had these experiences can be caused to have them by hearing religious language. And all this can be so even if, as I think is the case, there is no God or other supernatural objects or events. I'll show you what I mean in the next few posts.

In this connection, I fondly remember Professor Ramon Lemos (1928-2006). He took every opportunity to point out that there are truths that you can "just see," self-evident truths, his favorite example being the truth that orange is more like red than it is like green.

UPDATE: By odd coincidence, Bill Vallicella posted on this topic today. Go read the whole thing.

Bum Rush God of the Machine

Aaron Haspel is back. Aaron has taken me to the woodshed many times. Aaron has introduced the blogosphere to some great poetry. Aaron is one of the few people who have been able to bring poetry to life for me. Aaron posts on all manner of things. It's quite a blog. Now, with new graphic design!

Two Issues in Conservatism

It strikes me that there are two issues that may be puzzling. The first is conservatism without God. I think some people may wonder about that, thinking that you have to have old-time religion to be conservative. In fact, I believe that many of them think the notion of atheistic conservatism is eccentric or even nonsensical. In fact, the opposite is true; the status of conservatism is logically unrelated to God. So, I'll have a post about that in a while.

The other issue is a thornier and not entirely clear to me yet. It is that conservatism is not on the right, as opposed to the left. If been told several times by people wiser than me that the connection between conservatism and "the right" is a ruse perpetrated by the left. A regular named Jerry ("jerry") over at Roger Simon's site told me this a year or two ago, for example, saying that "right" was coined by Stalin to distinguish himself from other leftists with whom he was incompetion. What makes the issue even more interesting is that "left" must disappear when we dissolve "right" into nonsensehood. Anyway, I'm not the historian that Jerry is. But I am a philosopher, and I have something to say about the matter. It does seem to me that the philosophical status of conservatism is not to the right in any sense at all. There will be a lot to think when we get to that post, as we will do soon.

Meanwhile, youse chew these two issues over on your own. Then stop by.

Also, I'll be continuing my series of short studies of the works of John Kekes. First up will be his recent The Art of Life. John Kekes is the greatest American conservative philosopher (though I admit that that's not saying much.) Peruse my archives for posts presenting his ideas.

No, Seriously, Bigwig's Back

It's unbelievable. He's even serving up the stories. These stories are compiled into a book in my mind called "Guy Stuff". Many of them are really about my daily experiences, not his, and I don't know how he found out about them. All of them are fun to read.

But let's hope he keeps up the current-events analysis. Like I say, no one can crawl up someone's asshole with a microscope like Bigwig can. Plus he makes inferences that no one else seems to be able to notice until he does.

Flipper Babies

Richard Chappell asserts, just as my good friend Bob does, that it's okay to produce a person with injuries as long as that person's life is worth living. But he assumes that "the damage is moderate enough that the resulting life would still be well worth living." Notice the terms "moderate" and "well" there.

Take flipper babies, babies born with stubby arms and legs due to thalydomide poisoning. Suppose the baby has no arms or legs (or whichever horrific ailment you've supposed.) It doesn't matter how, but imagine the harm is grievous enough to make the life just barely worth living. Death by 12. Frequent pain. Minimal ability to function. But, as luck would have it, activity providing enough entertainment to register a lackluster and dreary "acceptable" on the scale of goodness of life. By no means deeply satisfying. By no means.

Now, if you knew that this was the only sort of baby you could conceive, then your choice to do it would seem to be wrong, at least by my lights. The child's looking you in the face and saying in anguish, "How could you do this to me papa?" would make sense. "But I love you and you're all I could make." "I know you love me papa." Then the head turns away. You chose to make it the case that someone has no arms or legs. You chose to make it the case that someone has a life only barely worth living. You did wrong. At least, it isn't clear that you did not, and Richard hasn't proven other wise.

The practical point of this business, to me, is sperm bank conception. It seems to me a grievous injury to choose to make it the case that someone has a father who doesn't ever love, ever see, or ever want to see him. The harm seems grievous enough to make this form of conception wrong. (Check my little series of posts over at Right Reason.)

Here my point is just that it is not in the clear that it's okay to do harm to someone as long as that he doesn't exist yet and the harm is necessary to create him. Richard's Pinnochio example doesn't do anything to refute that contention.

By the way, if you like philosophy blogs, you'll love Richard's.

Bigwig's Back Some

It's good to see Bigwig analyzing current events for us. In the past he has demonstrated uncanny and unique powers of insight into them.

God and Adulthood

Belief in God is a way of clinging to a vestige of childhood. Atheism is full adulthood. Neither is more praiseworthy than the other, so don't get me wrong. The vestige of childhood that theists cling to is just a dream, an idle fancy, that does not need to have deleterious effect on their character (their backbone, independence, self-reliance, or the like.) Likewise rejecting this vestige and embracing atheism do not improve one's character. They are simply more realistic attitudes toward something that has little practical importance.

God has little practical importance, you see. Many theists would agree. They think that God bids them make up their own minds about what to do. Even when they claim that God shows them what to do, their decisions about how to act are indistinguishable from independent decisions, there being no evidence that God helps them make the decisions.

So, I have nothing polemical to say and I don't mean to denigrate theism. My point is that atheism is the recognition that if your loved ones die there is no one there for you. There is only rocks. What human beings do matters to no one else because no one is there. In particular, there is no one whom we devoutly wish to please and show our adoration and aspiration to be equal. He's not there to show pride in us. There is no harmony or orchestration of human life within a meaningful higher order. There is a higher order, but it isn't meaningful; it's physics. Atheism is like the death of your parents. Dad's dead. There's no one there now. Just you. Your kids need and love you, but you have no one.

What is interesting is whether this makes life pointless. Many theists would say that it does. But it does not. It is rational to attempt to fulfill your large and complexly orchestrated set of desires, is it not? You don't need a divine parent overseeing the matter to make it worthwhile to do so. Or if you do, then God's life is drearily meaningless, as he has no parent. One might utter some Aristotelian mumbo jumbo about God being necessary or creating himself, but even so, he still wouldn't have anyone else to be proud of him or love him. He would be all alone.

In any event, there is a certain adulthood in recognizing that the parent is not there, in accepting that only oneself is there to oversee one's thoughts and actions.

Stem Cells

If the argument against fetal stem cell research is based upon the view that destroying the embryo (as a result of conducting scientific experiments on it) is the taking of a person's life, then this assumes that it is murder. It also follows that destroying the embryo without using it for scientific experiments is murder. Similarly, the view that all abortion is murder follows (as long as you assume, as I do, that there is no successful defense against this implication based on the right of the mother not to have a parasite use her body.)

So, the argument against stem-cell research has to assume that the brainless cells in question are people, if the argument is about murder. This is a difficult position to maintain, given that many cells are similarly brainless yet not people: liver cells, skin cells. And these also can get brains with the cloning technology we will get in the future. Or, at least, the contingency of technological possibility there should not matter. Even if the technology is forever beyond us to clone a person with a brain from a liver cell, it is in principle possible, as possible as it is for an embryo to become such a being. In short, if brainless embryos are people, then all human cells are people. Both need certain conditions to bring about the fruition. Both have very similar, complex internal mechanisms that will bring it about under the respective conditions. That the embryo is an organism does not appear to be relevant.

On the other hand, in this connection the amount of medical research that could come from fetal stem cells is irrelevant if the embroy is a person. We may not kill people for medical research. So, the appeal to medical usefulness is misguided. Still, though it's misguided, it is aimed at a weak argument: that destroying a certain kind of cell is murder.

If, on the other hand, destroying an embryo is not murder, then neither is abortion in the stage before there is brain tissue. Perhaps, rather, the argument is that it is just immoral to destroy human organisms even when they are not yet people and do not yet have brains. This is a reasonable argument. There is something unseemly about destroying human fertilized eggs. It may even be immoral, after the fashion of buying great art, taking it home, and burning it for fun. But whether this should be illegal is hard to say. It's an open question, though I would not be in favor of this infringement of liberty when what is at stake morally is not clear but merely "unseemly."

To this argument, the medical usefulness of fetal stem cells is relevant. But again the argument from unseemliness is anything but clearly well-founded. Why bring up the extraneous matter of the usefulness of scientific research? How can you weigh the value of the future, unknown research against the value of keeping non-person human organisms alive? These are imponderables.

So, the debate is uninteresting to me. None of the arguments is interesting. Only one has obvious weight, namely, the argument that a cell without a brain is not a person and therefore cannot be murdered. So, I'm not interested in the topic. By all means, default to liberty here and oppose prohibitions on the research. And cutting off government funds is close enough to such a prohibition as long as our medical research system is as socialized as it is.

Huh?

Sheesh. Just when I thought I'd seen enough moronitude, there's these guy's. You know, if you have a sense of humor that likes potty jokes, the Phil Hendrie Show, or pure piffle, I just don't know what to say about you. And yet I cannot look away.

God

Has this been said? The reason I'm an atheist is straightforward. The proposition that there is a god is as unlikely as ghosts, Martians amongst us, and reincarnation. There isn't the slightest evidence for these hypotheses which fly in the face of so much else that we know to be true. So I believe all of them to be false.

I admire religious belief in God. Most religions I find beautiful and noble.

And yet there are few atheists. And most atheists don't fancy religion.

Being Fun

Many, many years ago (2002 or 2003), blogger Michael Blowhard posted about something like this: Why are lefty/liberal types more fun?

It takes a bit of grit in the oyster to make a pearl. Lighten up. There's the rub.

The look on the face of the lefty/liberal says, "I'm not going to take the central task of life very seriously. In fact, I don't even have a grasp on it at all. I can relegate it to "be kind," and be done with it. Let's get on with enjoyments that are cut away from these encumbrances. In fact, I'm not even thinking of these encumbrances at all. Are you? I hardly feel them."

There is a set of dispositions, inclinations, that come to the fore when one unburdens oneself of conserving the precious heritage of virtue. They are exhilarating frequently exhilarating, unlike the sensations offered by the recreational intentions of the man who considers it to be the case that outside of the burden of conserving virtuous ways of life there is nothing else inspiring. They open up possibilities of behavior not likely considered by him. I'm not talking about porn and drugs. This has nothing to do with the titillation of immoral behavior. It has to do with the possibilities opened up by shattering the fragile edifice that is our traditional ways of life. There may be untold heights to be soared thence. Who knows? Go to a party of lefty's. Feel this.

What lies on the other side, however, may be more exhilarating: The prospect of a life well lived. (Of course, lefty folk can live lives well. But that is not their usual intention. Their usual intention is to enjoy life and to make a difference.) When your goal is a life well-lived, you tend to be less that exhilarating to meet. You offer no relief from the burden. You dwell in the hum-drum, where a life well-lived must dwell. Even if I am as conservative as you, you less often offer a moment's relief from my own burden than a lefty friend, who takes me outside the box right away, will do. I want grit. I want to say, "Aw, fuck it." You can't say that when you take your burden seriously. It's heavy. You can't lighten up.

Michael was right that more needs to be said about this.

Two More Things about Nihilism

Alright, I post about nihilism some. Okay, a lot. One of my fellow bloggers over at Right Reason (I hardly knew ye...) said I was a nihilist albeit a conservative. Anyways. Two points more.

The first is that a healthy (or more precisely, virtuous) adjustment to life requires, as they say, “not taking things too seriously.” It requires steeling oneself to the hard nocks of outrageous fortune. It requires equanimity and composure when most people would find it astonishing that one is able to exhibit them. It resembles the grizzled jadedness of the nihilist. You have to “take things in stride.” Again, as they say. They say these things because they’re right.

The loss of what matters most will happen. You must be able to take it. You must resemble the nihilist. He doesn’t care about it.

This resemblance is not merely superficial. Both virtue and nihilism understand that this is all there is. There is nothing else. You will not be bailed out. Virtue lies precisely in being able to produce an admirable life with the deeply flawed hand that reality deals us. The Pollyanna hasn’t the tools to produce virtue. Even the person whose expectations lie between the realist and the Pollyanna does not. When he gets hit with what he scoffed at as only worth the pessimist’s planning for, he is unable to produce an admirable response. But he shares with the realist an upbeat attitude nevertheless. Virtue is not pessimistic.

The other thing about nihilism is that, as I replied to my fellow blogger, I not only reject nihilism, but there is nothing that I would count as evidence that it is true. We have a large and coherent set of desires and there is a large set of ways of life that we find fulfilling of these desires. The desires are manifold and well-knit together, along with the ways forming culture. It is possible for many of us to succeed for the most part in exemplifying this culture, this fulfillment, in various ways peculiarly suited to our individual tastes. Given that fact, nothing counts as evidence that nihilism is so. Not death, not the absence of a god or afterlife. Nihilism is a confusion, therefore.

OT: Air America

Okay, I listened to Air America last night.

Randi Rhodes said that the House had only narrowly defeated the motion to pull the troops out of Iraq. The vote two-hundred-something to two hundred something, she said, with several Republicans crossing over. Maybe she was thinking of the narrowly-passed budget bill which had a vote of 216-215. The vote to pull out of Iraq was defeated 403 to 3. Anyway, Rhodes took the closeness of what she thought was the vote to indicate that "it's over" for Bush's war and that he should get out and "not let the door hit him where the Good Lord split him." Maybe there was some other vote on Iraq on November 19th or 20th that I'm not aware of. Otherwise. Rhodes embarrassed herself.

Later a host name Laura came on. She said she was going to give an alternative Iraq policy. I was pleased. I eagerly awaited some healthy, substantive deliberation between left and right over Iraq. But then she stated that to this end she would enlist the thought of Gore Vidal, Robert Scheer, and Ted Rall.

Oh, well.

Natural Law Theory is a Kind of Divine Command Theory

Natural Law Theory holds that beings such as us have ends from which our obligations may be inferred. I'll give you an example.

Suppose a natural law theorist holds, as he is apt to do, that homosexuality is wrong because heterosexuality is our natural purpose. This is to say that our natures are such that homosexuality is unnatural behavior for us and therefore immoral.

The obvious and common retort is to charge natural law theory with the naturalistic fallacy. This is to charge that it invalidly infers from the fact that something is unnatural in some biological sense to the conclusion that it is wrong. The reply from the natural law theorist is that the inference is indeed valid because here by "biological" we include the notion of God's creation.

However, this reply is just to say that we may infer our moral obligations from what is natural because God has chosen which things to make the natural things.

Another example will help. A natural law theorist is liable to argue that a human embryo is a rational being and therefore, in spite of the fact that it has not brain, has a mind and a right to be treated as any human being with a mind ought to be treated. His reasoning is that the embryo is rational in that its nature has been selected to be such that it will someday reason. His reasoning is not that the embryo has a genetic tendency to go on to become rational. The difference between these two kinds of reasoning is that the natural law theorist's reasoning assumes that God's choosing a thing's natural tendencies give that thing its end. In other words, it is only because of God's choice that the being in question has such and such an end. That is the Divine Command Theory.

Iraq War

Just a bit of refereeing the "debate." I say that with scare quotes because it isn't really a debate. There has never been a plausible moral case against the liberation.

1. A point of logic. The carping by the American left continues unabated. It is stupendous in its nonsense. Let's consider the claim, "Iraq had nothing to do with terrorism."

It makes no sense to say that Iraq had nothing to do with terrorism. It begs the question so blatantly that it should take your breath away when anyone whose job it is to consider these issues says this. Bush gave an argument that it does have something to do with terrorism. You can't just deny his claim without refuting his argument.

But you can't refute the argument: With an oppressed Middle East, the terrorists can win. But with a free Middle East living under rule of decent laws, they can't win. Iraq was by far and away the best place to start the liberation, for geographical, strategic and historical reasons.

2. A Moral Constraint on the "Debate." There has never been a plausible moral argument against the liberation. This is for obvious reasons. It is impossible to refute the claim that it is permissible to liberate 25 million people from a mass-murdering tyrant whose heirs were psychopathic sadists. You'd have to show that the invasion would kill as many or more than the tyrannical regime would kill given another 30 years' reign.

It is impossible to refute the claim that a mass-murdering tyrant with a WMD program, who has liassons with terrorists and shares with them the same enmity towards us, and who therefore could help those terrorists put WMD in an American city, should not be violently deposed by us.

3. Miscellany.There have been plausible arguments from prudence that liberating Iraq was too much against American self-interest to count as prudent. But I don't think those arguments succeeded, and anyway they are beside the point. Those arguments are for military strategists to evaluate; I'm not qualified. They are not philosophical or moral topics.

By the way, I was once scolded by a anonymous journal referee for using the term "self-interest." He considered it obfuscating jargon, preferring I say "interest." But that's not right. I have self-interests and non-instrumental interests in others' welfare. Both are interests. An argument from prudence against an action that will help others attempts to show that the sacrifice to the agent is too great. It attempts to show that, though morally permissible (and supererogatory, or "above and beyond the call of duty") the action is too great a sacrifice to be considered rational.

Intelligent Design Theory

One side says it's not science. The other side says it's good science. Actually, it's bad science.

The theory is a testable hypothesis. There would be evidence for the theory if all the facts about biology were in and there were origins of life forms that were inexplicable other than by appealing to a supernatural designer. Everything has a cause. If we were to gather all of the facts in biology labs and, sifting through these facts, find that they are unable to account for the origins of life forms, we would be warranted in appealing to supernatural causes.

However, ID of today is, to put it mildly, premature. Biologists haven't gathered all of the facts yet. To assert at this time that there are mysteries, irreducible complexities, or what have you shows considerable doxastic incontinence. When you jump the gun, you get refuted the next year by other biologists. For example, Behe's theory that evolution can't explain certain complex arrangements in nature involved his assuming that evolution couldn't explain how a complex arrangement could arrise by evolution when it could not exist without any one of its components. But other biologists demonstrated that he shouldn't have been so credulous.

People like Behe should put their manuscripts aside and wait a couple hundred years. Maybe by then biology will be finished and leave an impossible remainder of mysteries requiring supernatural explanation. Given that it's got just about everything sewn up at this point, I wouldn't bet on evolutionary theory failing to finish the story complete. But who knows? It's possible. Some people, like Art Bell or whoever, think the planet was seeded by a dying race of Martians. God, Martians, ordinary evolution? We'll see. So far no sign of God or Martians yet.

Alas

It's a no-go. Several readers suggested I post something once a week, instead of signing off entirely. But it's clear that I'm not going to be able to hack it. I'm up 'til 1am every night with the friggin' Schrodinger equation or some wiggity-wack ketones. I'm pouring myself into chemistry now, and for the next several months, so I can make the career change to 'chemist'. I'm totally exhausted, and I can't even finish my Kekes series. So, I'll have to bid a final goodbye to all my dear readers and thank you all so much for coming along. I'm choosing brute necessity over delight. Without Philosoblog, my life will be worse. But without a smooth career change, disaster looms. I can't tell my two-year-old, "Um, I'm not going to fit that concept of a 'father as provider' anymore." How will I respond when the little tyke says, "Let me get this straight. You quit a well-paying career and now you're serving fries?!" I have nothing to offer our market economy besides a mediocre scientific acumen. (I thought maybe I'd try to make it in pro ball, since I'm only 37. But, nah.) The chemistry jobs are there, but I'll have to hustle. So, fare well, thanks again, and I'll no doubt see you in the blogosphere.

This and that

Canadian, eh? Check out Curt Gebeshuber's site, and don't miss the initial picture of matrimonial bliss. Makes me want to get married again.

You wanna hear singin'? Go rent the 1997 Peanuts cartoon, "It was my Best Birthday Ever, Charlie Brown." When you hear Linus's new heartthrob sing Puccini's "O mio babbino caro" you will swoon. Great song, great singer. Hey, I take it wherever I can get it.

Warrior

God of the Machine has commented on the excellence of our warriors, and so has Aristotle. Aristotle even said that the courage of the warrior is the quitessential moral virtue. Of course, experienced warriors, pacifists, and others report that war is hell and should not simply be glorified.

Make no mistake; both points of view are right. War is hell. I hope my son becomes a warrior. War is amongst the most awful of things. Facing it and standing fast on the side of right, even during the most intense onslaughts, is at the apex of human attainment. To face hell, in order to protect one's people against undeserved assault, and to have the nerve to fight with excellence, is fine. Those who simply glorify war and deny its horrors, and those who disparage the warrior, are not to be taken seriously. Take for example the leftist twits who say that the manufacture of military weaponry is evil. (Some of these twits are full professors of philosophy at U. of Toronto - check the letters to the editor of this week's Globe and Mail.) There is a reason they are able to say this. It's that they aren't dead. And the reason for that is that the warrior protects them. Sometimes people overlook the horror of war and simply glorify it. But when they are brought up short by the gore, they should avoid inferring that it is inappropriate to venerate our warriors and recognize that what they do is fine, even most fine.

Posting

Thanks, again, to all of you who so kindly asked me to keep blogging. You've reversed the tide. Resolved: to blog on, albeit maybe only a couple posts a week. (If you don't know what I'm talking about because you haven't been here in a while, go here.) I'd like to continue with John Kekes. (One more post on Facing Evil and then it's on to A Case for Conservatism.) This Fall, I'd like to dig into John Adams.

A Steynism

Here's a chuckle for you: a Mark Steynism from about six months ago. Steyn maintained that bin Laden was not alive but was instead somewhere in Afghanistan "pushing up daisy cutter bits." I giggle over that one once a week or so.

Permissible and Obligatory

These are two categories of right action. Obligatory actions are a kind of permissible action. (If an action is obligatory, you can bet it's permissible.) The invasion is permissible for the allies to undertake, since it reduces the physical insecurity of those innocents affects; an action can't be wrong if it only helps innocents. I don't think the invasion is obligatory. We sacrifice too many of our men in undertaking it. This sacrifice outweighs the good it does for innocents. The reason is that the number of innocents under threat must be very, very high to make it obligatory for us to risk around 1,000 of our soldiers to help them. How high, I don't know, but you get the idea: much, much higher than 1,000. Millions. In other words, the invasion is a moral option. We may invade, or not. Whether it is prudentially rational for us to invade (as I think it is) is not relevant to the moral question of permissibility. It may be imprudent, even foolish not to invade and still permissible. (On the other hand, it may be obligatory for our government to invade if the government has a duty to protect us. But leave that aside. Consider the U.S. as a single person.)

The shame of Canada, then, is not that it fails its duty to aid Iraqi innocents. It's shame is that it argued against, and rejected, the permissibility of the invasion; it thus impeded the mission psychologically and distorted moral facts. It's shame is that it does nothing to support the invasion, in the way of moral, logistical or financial support. It's shame is that it is a security freeloader. It won't fight, but it will enjoy the security of reduction of terrorism. And as Aristotle would have put it, Canada's shame is that the invasion is an example of fine action; Canada backs down, in cowardice, hatred and envy, from an opportunity to engage in fine action with its friends. Canada has a duty to help the invasion in some way. Chretien was upbraided today in Parliament by a right-wing Alliance party member. He immediately justified his withholding support for the invasion on the following grounds: that Canada is a sovereign state that acts independently. This non sequitur is always the first reason Canadians give for maintaining their broken socialized health care system: difference from the U.S. This is shameful. Oddly, Canada had a duty to help the invasion where the U.S. perhaps did not have a duty to undertake it.

(Notice I don't speak of the shame of the French and Germans. They are shameless, and there is no point speaking about shame in their connection. They are morally dysfunctional societies.)

Some kinds of permissible action are supererogatory: beyond the call of duty: for the sake of others and requiring concession of one's own interests. The invasion of Iraq is not supererogatory, since it is in the U.S.'s interest to take out the Saddam regime. But since the invasion is not obligatory, the fact that similarly distressed peoples go without U.S. rescue is not an indication of U.S. hypocrisy. The U.S. has a right not to exercise its option to take out other murderous regimes. That it decides to exercise the option in the case of Iraq is therefore no grounds for the prevalent charge of hypocrisy heard today on the left. On the contrary, the fact that the U.S. clearly takes the rescue of Iraqis as one reason for invasion implies that it ought to be thanked by the rescued people, as I'm sure it already is and will be. One thanks a fireman who risks his life for one, even if he has additional, self-interested reasons for saving one.

Ugh

Like I say, I think Philosoblog has only a couple weeks left, because I'm far behind on sleep, have to change careers, learn chemistry, move 600 miles, etc., all in the next couple months. So, I should quit blogging.

But, then, deep in my Gemini heart I know that's a lie. Geminis are driven to do many things at once.

No it isn't a lie. I guess. Anyway, thanks to those who've so kindly expressed regret that I'll be signing off.

Stalinism

The anti-war crowd exhibits a Stalinism: a disposition to psychopathic callousness to the suffering of innocents whenever compassion would hamper the leftist agenda. I just asked a lefty colleague about the Iraqis who are happy to be liberated. He denied these reports and shrugged the idea off. I repeat:

Knocking out Saddam's regime makes innocent people in the region safer, even taking into account the short-term dangers of the invasion. This is because the regime will kill many more, if it is allowed to continue into the indefinite future, than will be killed by the invasion. (Gulf War 1991 civilian deaths: less than 3,000; Saddam kills 3,500 per month.) There is therefore no grounds to protest the invasion. There isn't even a remotely plausible case that it is wrong. The anti-war protesters are motivated by dogma, hatred, envy and stupidity. (We may psychologize when our opponent in dispute lacks any plausible argument whatsoever. He must hold his position for reasons other than argument: psychological reasons.)

Objections:

"But the U.S. doesn't take out many other evil regimes in the world." This is a red herring. It is permissible to destroy those regimes, too. At best you could say that the U.S. is remiss in not doing so. But this wouldn't have the slightest tendency to show that it shouldn't knock out the Iraqi regime.

"But the U.S. has self-interested motives: to dissarm Saddam/steal oil/take over the world." Red herring. The rightness of an action is independent of its motives.

"Ah, but, you see, the U.S. does intend to take over the world, and taking over Iraq is a step in that direction." Like Afghanistan and Bosnia, I guess. This is tin-foil hat stuff. This is genuine delusional mental illness caused by hatred.

"But it's against international law." False, but even if true, irrelevant. If an action would otherwise be morally permissible, the fact that it is illegal hasn't even the slightest tendency to override and show that it is wrong. And in this case, international law is a joke because there is no international government. "But it's illegal" is a moral reason only when the action in question would contribute to anarchy. But there already is anarchy in the international sphere.

"But then any country will be able to invade any other country, now that they know UN approval isn't necessary." This is loopy. Is there any evidence that the U.S.'s disposition to punish aggressors will encourage aggressors? Even very, very stupid aggressors, who say, "Well, the U.S. gets to invade people, so we do, too."? The idea that bad regimes will be encouraged to invade decent countries is bizarre and there is not the slightest bit of evidence for it. Moreover, if the U.S.'s actions encourage decent countries to take out evil regimes, then that's good, not bad.

John Jay Ray

See John Jay Ray's post about mental illness and the anti-war position.

Simple

The 1991 Gulf War killed less than 3,000 Iraqi civilians. Saddam's regime kills more people than that every month, on average. Therefore, anyone who says that it is impermissible to invade in effort to knock the regime out is either evil, mentally ill, or stupid. There is no plausible case against invasion. Therefore, the anti-war movement is motivated by hatred for successful Americans. The hatred comes from envy. The envy comes from self-loathing.

In envy and self-loathing, Canada has spitefully left Iraqi children to be killed by Saddam into the indefinite future. Canada deserves to be punished for this treachery and cowardice.

Anti-War Vitriol as Mental Illness

The big, unnoticed story about this moment is that the anti-war hysteria is mass psychosis, social disease, bonafide mental illness.

Eleanor Clift exhibits a delusional personality disorder. Rod Dreher takes a glance at the extent of the social psychosis. Toronto protester, seething with anger on CBC radio: "It's just an imperialist action, it's totally pointless." That's bonafide mental illness. Try to think about removing the Butcher of Baghdad as "pointless". Notice that the U.S. did not take over Afghanistan and does not have an empire. "Tony" (below) says that disobeying the UN by taking out Saddam is encouraging "tyranny". This is double-talk. Saddam's crimes go unacknowledged. One screams with hatred at a careful, international effort to take the Butcher out. The hysteria prevents rational thought. And, yet, the hysteria is long-term, settled; the rational thought is not just mometarily eclipsed but fundamentally crippled. This is mental illness.

Canada's Shame

This is the most shameful hour in Canadian history. A dozen British soldiers died in an effort intended, amongst other things, to stop the torture and murder of hundreds of innocents. Canada could not be bothered to lift a finger, mainly because it is envious of the U.S. Cowardly. Evil. The two 78-eight-year-old Canadian men in my jazz trio are ashamed of Canada. When the war is over, and the success apparent, Canada will be shamed. We should pull our businesses out of Canada. We should move GM and Ford to Australia, Britain, Poland, Spain, etc. This will ruin Canada. In overwhelming numbers, Canadians supported Chretien's stand against the effort to stop the Butcher of Baghdad. To hell with Canada, the land of "We stick with socialized health care because we are envious of American success and need something special to be proud of." I can't wait to be back in a country of moral substance.

UPDATE: On CBC television news this Friday night: images of southern Iraqis joyously celebrating their liberation by allied forces, and gleefully tearing down a poster of Saddam. How can Canadians look at themselves in the mirror? Canada begins the century by going on record as standing against one of the greatest military liberations of an oppressed people in history.

Iraq

Boy, am I extremely proud and extremely grateful to be American, and eager to get back in six weeks time. Here's hoping we don't lose too many of our guys and gals in the war.

It is obviously permissible to take out murderous dictators, such as Saddam Hussein, Mao, Stalin and Hitler. The only plausible argument against the right to invade Iraq is that is will cause as many deaths of innocents as will be caused by the indefinite continuation of the Hussein dynasty in Iraq. There is little evidence that it will do so. So, the invasion is robustly justified, in light of the depth of evil of that dynasty.

I've been listening to the CBC radio call-in show for a couple of hours. None of the anti-war callers makes that, the only remotely plausible argument. They only make stupid 'arguments,' such as that the invasion is illegal or that America, being evil, lacks the moral high ground, or that Bush is just an imperialist, or that the UN sanctions against Saddam are working, or that the UN said, "No," and we ought to obey it. Try listening to the CBC for an hour, hearing ten callers call in and argue that merely because America has done some bad thing many years ago, it lacks the moral license to take the Butcher of Baghdad out. This should fill you with revulsion and despair at the depth of evil of which simple, ordinary folk are capable. After much consideration of the anti-war 'arguments,' I've been driven to the conclusion that the anti-war position is largely stupid and evil. Of course, there are a few against the war who are neither evil nor stupid but merely understandably confused. But the majority are simply stupid or evil. Unavoidably, their position is that:

We should let the Butcher of Baghdad and his sons continue to butcher people.

Since the only other option is the use of force, there is no way around this. This is what you must believe if you are against the invasion, unless you have a plausible argument why taking Saddam out would cause even more grief to innocents. Very few make that argument, and it is weak. So, the anti-war folks are largely evil or stupid. They are advocating evil, perhaps to some degree without understanding. They are therefore stupid and/or evil.

We all know that more than 50% of the anti-war crowd, upon reading what I've just written, would reply, "If you think that Bush's motive is to stop the Butcher from killing innocent Iraqi's, then you're the stupid one." They would consider this adequate refutation of my argument that the invasion is justified by the fact that it will take out the Butcher. But this 50%+ statistic is conclusive evidence that my thesis is correct: the anti-war crowd is either evil or stupid. Anyone who thinks that it's wrong to kill Hitler unless one has selfless and pure motives is an idiot or a Nazi.

Canada is against the invasion and has decided not to help the U.S. take the Butcher out. Spain and Australia, and many other countries, but not Canada. Fuck Canada. I can't wait to leave this moral wasteland. There are many good and wise Canadians, and for their sake, I'm sorry to say this. But democracy here has spoken in overwhelming numbers. Canada demands that the Butcher of Baghdad be allowed to continue to torture innocents to death. This demand is either stupid or evil. I'm out of here in six weeks. Fuck this place. And to hell with all the assholes who oppose the removal of the Butcher merely because they hate America. I can't wait to see the looks on their faces after America pulls off another in its long string of successes, the ones that drive them insane with envy and hatred, insane to the extent that they would allow the Butcher to torture children to death, rather than see Americans succeed yet again. The human soul is at best half evil. The anti-war people prove it as readily as Saddam.

Suppose it was widely known in the 30s that Hitler was a butcher and no one demonstrated against his crimes. Then suppose that some demonstrated against the U.S. effort to invade and take him out. I don't know what else to consider those people but Nazi sympathizers. "Oh, I'm no fan of Hitler, mind you; he's a bad guy. But we shouldn't invade and take him out." That's a Nazi sympathizer and one who lies about it. Now just insert "90s" for "30s" and "Saddam" for "Hitler". To hell with the anti-war crowd. They are no better than Nazis, save that their stupidity is a mitigating factor.

UPDATE: Stockwell Day (Candian Alliance Party politician, arging in favor of invasion) argued on CBC radio this Friday morning that the US action in the 1991 Gulf War cost 3,500 innocent Iraqi lives, the exact number of innocents that Saddam's track record shows that he kills every month on average. That the UN prefers to allow Saddam to stay in power for the indefinite future means that the UN is evil. This is not a matter of principled difference of opinion. This is a matter of evil, stupidity, hatred and jealousy intending to rule the world. Fuck the UN, and especially the rep from South Africa who said, when asked by the CBC reporter this week how he could oppose the invasion in light of the moral question at stake, said, with a laugh, "Morals are subjective." That's a demon cackling.

UPDATE: An American named "Tony" called in to the CBC radio call in show this Friday at 3:45pm EST. He voiced his opposition to the invasion of Iraq. He stated that we must obey the UN's laws, unless we are to allow "tyranny". This clearly demarcates Tony as the devil. Think about it. Of course, Tony went on to state that Bush was not democratically elected but selected by the Supreme Court. He thinks this is relevant to whether it is justified to take out the Butcher of Baghdad. Tony has "I am evil and stupid" tatooed across his forhead.

Don't. Stop.

Since yesterday, there's been a little voice, or some writing on the wall, or something. Call him "Plod". He says, "You don't have time for this blog." "Odd," say I. "I don't recall asking for your opinion." "Dude, you haven't even had time to read many of your favorite blogs (over there on the left) for six weeks." “Thanks for reminding me.” “You have to sell your house and move your family 600 miles in the next two months.” “Fascinating. You’re a tremendous conversationalist.” “And then there’s the little matter of grading hundreds of papers this April. And how can we forget about finishing up our study of organic chemistry by May, and also getting a good grasp on thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and chemical kinetics by the end of July. Did I mention that you need to pound the pavement for a job in chemistry this Spring?” “Shut up, you busybody!” “Heh, struck a nerve. Say, you’re coworkers remarked on how tired you looked today. You don’t have time for this blog.” “That’s it, just stick the knife in and twist it!” "Well? How are you going to handle all these tasks? “Shut up,” I explained. “You're going to make a blogwidow out of your wife.” “Who? Oh, yes. Ach! Plod! Maybe I don’t have time for this blog.”

Nothing, Really

Here's hoping that the number of casualties amongst the allied forces and the innocent Iraqis is unbelievably low.

A couple of comments have disappeared into Haloscan's netherworld (one was Alan's). Sorry if this happens to you.

Does Stumbling Tongue exist? Go to the left and click it to find out.

Posting is light at Philosoblog because I'm trying to sell my house, take in intro quantum mechanics, guzzle organic chemistry, raise my boy, teach three classes, etc. There'll be a final post on Kekes's Facing Evil soon, and then we'll move on to his A Case for Conservatism.

Bush and Blair can as little decide to bring peace to the Israelis and Palestinians as square the circle. People whose principle objective is to wipe you off the face of the earth can't be negotiated with. "Oh, but they don't want that. Surely they're reasonable and will settle for a West Bank state. It's Bush and Blair's fault for not moving the process forward." No, it's not, any more than it was America and Britain's fault in 1939 for not negotiating peaceful coexistence between Hitler and Eastern Europe. Hitler's goal was to have Eastern Europe. What room had he to negotiate? Either you have or you do not have. "But you can offer them part of the land." This was done. Very bad move. It was done in the case of Hitler, and also in the case of the Palestinians. Israel already gave the Arabs they're "Austria and Chekoslovakia": West Bank and Gaza. Surely people are good deep down and reasonable? No. Bush and Blair (if it's not a cunning PR move) are avoiding this fact. Many innocent Israelis will die as a result.

Tongue

I've given up hope. I don't think the blog is coming back. R.I.P..

Epistemology

Just one more breather from moral philosophy: the celebrated 'problem of induction'.

What would count as evidence that inductive reasoning was unreliable? Nothing would count. Any evidence put forth against the reliability of induction would be either deductive or inductive inferences. Deductive inferences won’t get you anywhere. In that department, there is only Hume telling us that induction is not deductively airtight. Hume famously pointed out that the evidence afforded by our experience of the past does not give us certainty of the future, where “certainty” refers to the logical impossibility of error. All one can distill off from this argument is that induction is not deduction, which is trivial.

As for inductive evidence that induction is unreliable, i.e., not conducive to reaching the truth, well, this is an incoherent idea.

So, the question, Are inductive inferences rational? or Is induction truth-conducive? is a non-question. There is no problem of induction. Inductive reasoning is by definition rational, reliable, truth-conducive. "Reasoning" means "using deduction or induction".

Pipes

I just saw Daniel Pipes speak. There are two points of great moral depth underlying his message that I've never noticed before:

1. Evil simply cannot be tolerated; it must be faced and relentlessly opposed.

The Palestinian attitude toward Israel is evil. It should be opposed with all force necessary and with no negotiations. You don't negotiate with someone trying to kill you. You use brute force to shut him down.

2. People are free to decide how to act.

The Palestinians can simply accept the existence of Israel and stop killing Israelis. They can build their own society. It's up to them to do.

These are fundamental truths. They are regularly denied by many analysts of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Let's take a break from moral philosophy for a moment.

Consciousness

Consciousness (i.e., all mental states) is just states of the brain, functional states, like software being run, but nevertheless physical like software, rather than non-physical. The program running your web browser right now is physical, and, by the same token, so is the consciousness in your brain. Here's why.

If consciousness were non-physical, we could conceive of a physical, human body operating normally, exhibiting the behavioral and brain states of a normal person but being devoid of any consciousness. "Hello," it might say, as it smiled and shook your hand, with the lights on but nobody home. In other words, if consciousness were non-physical, it could be peeled away from the brain in a thought experiment such as this. We could conceive of the brain working its neural net as usual but without any consciousness being generated by its activities. Such a being we could call a "zombie," but it wouldn't be like the zombies in the movies who act sleepy. Ex hypothesi it would act just like you and I.

This is all boilerplate in contemporary philosophy of mind. The problem is the whole field zigs where it should zag. It accepts that zombies are conceivable and then either tries to squirm out of the resultant dualism somehow or just gives up and accepts dualism. But we cannot conceive of zombies. To conceive of a kind of thing requires that one have an idea of what would count as evidence that there was a thing of that kind. To understand "apple" requires knowing what counts as evidence that there is an apple on the table, for example. But no one has any idea what would count as evidence that someone was a zombie. Look into its eyes, shake the hand, but, try as you might, you have in principle no way of telling that your new acquaintance is a zombie. Does he not cry when hurt? Does he not swoon during courtship? Ex hyposthesi he does. So, the concept of "zombie" is meaningless. The word "zombie" is as meaningless as "round square". Therefore, "consciousness is non-physical" is incoherent.

This proves that consciousness is nothing more than synapses firing. It is inconceivable that mind and body exist separately.

Hugh

I'm sorry this guy only took one class of mine (two years ago: business ethics). He came across me by Googling for "blog Huron College," and was surprised by my right-wing virulence. One of my old profs is not a lefty? Holy crap! Here's Hugh's Studied Authenticity. Me likey!

The Conservative Philosophy of John Kekes (#10)
The book Facing Evil, post D. Previous post here.
[All of these posts are free-standing; you can jump into the series at any point.]

Given the pervasiveness of evil in humanity, we can cope with it with a variety of alternative strategies. One is the “pragmatic,” a progressive, social engineering-type strategy, which aims to conquer evil by gaining and applying knowledge of human social psychology. The problem with this strategy is that it is ambitious and would give us power, when we, being the very ones prone to evil, are therefore certain to use this power and license to do great evil. The problem is the failure to face evil.

Another strategy is the rationalist, or ironic. It aims to conquer evil by putting aside all of our desires, moving to the level of pure reason, and looking upon society from a lofty, impersonal, desire-free and therefore bias- and evil-free vantage point. This is the stuff of Kant and the contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel (who calls it “taking a view from nowhere”). There are three problems with this approach to evil. It assumes that there is such a thing as desire-free, objective, practical rationality, when in fact Hume has demolished the idea. It also assumes that by attempting to reach a desire-free level of “pure reason” we will not become ironic and nihilistic, like the psychotic or psychopath looking down ironically at ants and burning them to death with a magnifying glass. Indeed, I submit that it is no coincidence that leftist, rationalist regimes are nihilistic and tend to mass murder (and, yes, Marxism is a form of rationalism in that it demands that our traditional desires be relinquished and replaced with more rational ones). This is the reason it shouldn’t surprise us that Stalin referred to the death of one as a tragedy and the death of millions as a statistic. Rationalism means well, but by voiding itself of natural, traditional desires, it tends to nihilism (again: Hume showed that without desires there are no reasons). Finally, rationalism gives us no good reason why it should be rational to relinquish those desires or why we should need a justification for them. Kekes asks rhetorically, “What sort of justification would be required for caring reasonably about what matters to us?” I’ve been making this point to anyone who will listen for many years. All that matters is what matters to us; this is at the core of conservatism. The history of moral philosophy has been crippled for its inability to see the point of it. Think of utilitarianism and Kantianism. There are other examples. In any event, you can see that the rationalist strategy ignores the immanent possibility of evil. It takes a step toward nihilism and toward preventing millions from doing the only thing it is reasonable for them to do: fulfill their values.

Another strategy for coping with evil is the romantic. It fills up with the feelings of challenge, adventure and heroism of facing evil. It is glad there is evil, so that there can be such heroism and adventure. It thus veers towards embracing evil, rather than fighting it. And it thus tends to overlook it. In a fascinating discussion, Kekes shows that Martha Nussbaum is so enthusiastic about Euripides’s Hecuba that she overlooks the evil and despair of Polyxena. Polyxena is made to bear her breasts before a crowd and she is then has her throat slit by Achilles’s son. She is utterly hopeless and in despair. Nussbaum sees her as full of hope, triumphant. Nussbaum doesn’t mention much about the great evil of the throat slitting, preferring to focus on Polyxena’s covering her private parts in her dignity as she bleeds to death.

This brings us to the tragic approach to evil: to submit to it as inevitable and unchangeable. Kekes reads tragedies as advocating a realistic and tragic view of life, according to which we should only face evil. The tragic view is too pessimistic, preferring to dwell on the idea that we are as likely to resist evil as the young Oedipus was when he fled his home to avoid killing his father and lying with his mother. Kekes’s view (to be explained in the next post) is similar to the tragic, in that it is not overly optimistic, recognizing that efforts of partly evil people to change evil are likely to succumb to evil, too. But Kekes isn’t so pessimistic. There is room for hope, for pushing the enemy back a few yards: the enemy within and without, namely insufficiency of character, expediency, and malevolence: evil.

(I’m not sure about Kekes’s reading of the great tragedies. Are they recommending forlorn resignation? Or is tragedy a literary motif, calling forth the tempered, realistic, and moderate resolution to resist evil that Kekes advocates?)

Bigwig

Has Iraq. He's said this before: We'd be justified in invading Iraq, even if we knew that Iraq posed no threat to us at all. When you add in the threat and the right to self-defense, it's an overdetermined case for invasion.

He says, "The only legitimate excuse for opposing the removal of Saddam Hussein, the only one, is that you hadn't yet realized how immoral your position actually was." There is an excuse in the case of those opposing the war on reasonably plausible arguments. Whether to invade a country is a complicated matter. But I think most opposition to the war is not based on plausible argument. In the case of those who oppose for easily refutable reasons, bad arguments, peace dogma, and the like, there is no excuse. Believing oneself to be in the right is not an excuse. If we could verify that Lenin believed himself in the right, would that be case that he was not evil? No. Only if one arrives at the wrong moral position by following arguments that almost anyone might be fooled by does one get a pass for acting on the wrong moral judgment. There is a great deal of evil about, and it's inexcusable.

Ray

Jon Jay Ray has slightly changed his blog's address. The new one is this.

Hey

Check this out: Libertarian Parent in the Countryside. She's just seen Vagina Monologues "[I]it wasn't at all as bad as I would have expected," Alice says. I guess she must have expected it to be abyssmal, then!

UPDATE: On second thought, "abysmal". Thanks to Jay Nordlinger at NRO for unknowingly giving me the tip today!

Torture
God of the Machine has just the cop for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Evil

On the radio show Coast to Coast they were talking about the human shields in Iraq, the Americans protecting the enemy. The host and guest said the shields made their blood boil. "Are they traitors or just stupid?" "Just stupid." "Yes." "They mean well."

You see, that's what Kekes is talking about (see Kekes posts below). We are living under a regime of thought according to which someone can choose to do evil and get a pass, on the grounds that he's stupid and means well. But the shields are obviously not stupid. And they are in full awareness doing evil. So, they are evil. Do they believe they are doing right? There is no determinate answer to that, I think. There are elements of malevolence, hatred, and envy, as well as moral judgment in their decision. But it isn't straightforwardly true that they think they are doing right. Even if they do think they are doing right, their cognition of right is in such disorder that they are disposed to do evil. They are not deluded, mind you; their thinking is perverse. One is responsible for the perversity of one's thinking. It's not like being slipped a hallucinogen which causes one to have a psychotic episode resulting in murder. No one is responsible to be cognitively prepared to resist that sort of influence. The shields are evil and traitorous.

The only other question is whether it's okay for me to hope that they die when we bomb. This is like the question of whether it is okay to torture Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, to death. It would be good if moral monsters knew that an unspeakably miserable death awaited them were they to act on their inclinations. Yet, wiser heads than I say that an execution of this kind would be wrong. But I worry that the temptation to refrain from meeting the darkness with the full force required to repel it is cowardice disguised as wisdom. One thing I am sure of is that it is okay to torture Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to make him speak. In fact, it's obligatory. It may even be obligatory to torture him to death afterwards, let alone permissible. Won't moral monsters think twice, knowing that if they act, the unspeakable awaits them? Shall we allow another monster to kill thousands because we recoil at the prospect of delivering this punishment? Be careful: To say that you don't want to descend to that level, that you'd rather take the high road, is either begging the question or worse.

UPDATE: See the link just above. I suppose Applebaum wouldn't mind allowing Stalin to kill millions more, if that were the necessary consequence of her declining to torture him. In any event, she supplies no argument for the anti-torture position.

One Good Turn
...responds to my previous post. What he says is true.

Do and Allow

The Counterrevolutionary says that the fundamental error underlying leftism is its belief that "if you claim that your cause is humane then all your arguments and subsequent actions are excusable." This is quite a Kekesian diagnosis. (See my series of posts on Kekes below.) For Kekes, as for CR, people should be judged on the extent to which they are disposed to cause evil, not on whether they "meant well".

I add that there is another fundamental error: the erasure of the do-allow distinction. This is the deeply held value that doing harm is morally worse than allowing it. (E.g., not putting the neighbor's kids through college is not morally equivalent to actively depriving them of a college education; does the denial of this distinction ring a bell?) The distinction is one that we cherish and live by. The threat from leftism is one of violence. The distinction is part of what makes life worth living for us; it represents liberty, the right to live unbeholden to the desires of others. Since there is no argument against the distinction, the stance of leftism is simply in basic opposition to us. There is nothing left for it to do but violence to us, in order to bring about the desired "progress". We won't part with fundamental values without a fight to the death.

The leftist erasure of the distinction flows from facts such as these: The rich allow the poor to be poor. People maintaining traditional Western values allow allow alternative lifestyles to go unappreciated, uncelebrated. Israel allows Palestinians to suffer. The happy and fulfilled allow the unhappy to remain unhappy, and they do this happily. These facts drive the leftist to shrieks of outrage.

The leftist disguises envy and hatred as moral indignance. The unhappiness in the world can be eliminated if only the well-off would fulfill their duty and stop allowing the harms. Their allowing the harms is supposed to be morally equivalent to actually doing evil.

But we will not part with the do-allow distinction. In addition to the fact that we cherish the value and have been given no reason to relinquish it, there is another reason not to relinquish it. Doing away with it puts the good at the mercy of the wicked. People have a tendency to be lazy and wicked. The wicked and lazy may take what the good have procured, if do-allow is done away with. The good may not defend themselves against this attack if do-allow is done away with. The result is any one of the hell-holes known as communist states. Murder to get there, misery after you arrive. Liberty rights are not merely self-interested. They protect us all from evil, human nature being what it is.

CR may be right that it is time to stop playing the game of debating with leftists. There is no rational debate here. It's simply a cultural war. Many millions have died already.

UPDATE: The do-allow distinction should not be confused with the position that no one has a duty to help others (i.e., the position that it is never wrong to allow harm). It may be gravely wrong, even punishable, to allow someone to die. This does not entail that allowing harm is morally equivalent to doing harm.

Crap

My employer, Huron College, has decided to lower admissions requirements for people who are not white men, on the grounds that the college ought to represent the various kinds of people in Canada and the various things about people that are important to them. Most importantly, their grounds are that "All people are of equal dignity and worth." Oh, yes, Osama bin Laden and the little brats who waste taxpayer money by coming here, not reading, not showing up to class, and defecating on educational values - these people are of equal dignity and worth to the students who study hard and perform wonderly, to John Adams, and to the people who took down the plane in Pennsylvania on 9/11. Equal dignity and worth. A civilization going down the toilet.

Jean Chretien said yesterday that Saddam should not be removed. In substandard English, he said that we should disarm him but not remove him on the grounds that, once you start changing regimes, where do you stop? Moron. You can't disarm Saddam unless you remove him from power. Chretien runs a country? I'm glad it isn't my country. Oh, yes, and "where do you stop?": Is that supposed to be an argument? From a head of state? On an important policy question? Oh, my god.

Some bitch named Parrish who is a Member of Parliament up here in Canada said of Americans that we are bastards and she hates us. She also claimed (as NRO dug up) that the U.S. gives Israel billions in military aid for the purpose of pounding on defenseless people huddled in tents. The reaction from Canada? A groan here and there, but mostly a yawn.

The lesson: attacking rich white men is in vogue. And it masquerades as taking the moral high ground. This is a widespread social disease. I suppose the cause is communications and envy. The modern world gave people the communications tools necessary to see spectacular freedom and success. They saw and envied. They also were treated to an education which, while not enough to compensate for their lack of cultural substance, did enable them to articulate their envy in crafty ways. In addition, there was French and German philosophy, 1750-1980. Rotgut. The two causes created the deplorable situation we face today. And there's probably more to it.