Prolegomena to Any Future Metapsychics
Posted on 28 October 2011
I remember one conversation in particular during a college bull session, when I voiced the opinion that temperance in the appetites being necessary for happiness in life, abstinence from strong drink and sexual excess would therefore likewise be necessary, I was harangued with a five-minute stemwinder by a young zealot, who, foaming at the mouth and red in the face, thundered at me that disbelief in God was the only rational position a soul could take on the issue. Eventually, through his clamor, I was able to impart to him that I was an atheist of absolutely pure conviction, and an evangelist of godlessness. The passionate partisan of disinterested rationality was dumbfounded, for he equated the idea of government of the passions by the reason with an irrational belief in God, and he equated the idea of degrading self-indulgence in sensual pleasures with the idea of dispassionate reason.
Yet was it unreasonable of him to assume that any man who supported temperance and chastity was a Christian? Perhaps not.
Consider the following quote:
The Right-Left axis aligns an astonishing collection of beliefs that at first glance seem to have nothing in common… Why on earth should people’s beliefs about sex predict their beliefs about the size of the military? What does religion have to do with taxes? Whence the linkage between strict construction of the Constitution and disdain for shocking art?
This quote (or so I am told) comes from Steven Pinker’s book The Blank Slate. Mr Pinker’s argument (or so I am told) is that there may be a genetic predisposition toward one political leaning or the other. I have not read the book and voice no opinion on it.
Without reading this particular author’s answer, let me confess that I find the topic of exploring the originals of ideas a fascinating one. As far as I know, it has never been made the subject of a rigorous study. Nor do I propose to make such a study now. I do however propose to coin a neologism to describe such a study: Let it be called metapyschics, since it looks at the root causes of ideas in the psyche or mind of man, that is, the rules or logic or hidden ideas behind the ideas we know. This essay is no more than a prologue suggesting a profitable line of research for those investigating this new discipline.
On the proposition in general that one’s political and cultural beliefs are genetic, I must confess I am genetically programmed to reject this idea with umbrage and disdain, and therefore there is no point in debating it with me, nor offering evidence.
I am also, sadly, programmed to suffer the illusion that I have free will and that I came by my beliefs honestly.
A word about my history is needed here:
My wife was born and raised as a hippy Christian by a Buddhist Jew, and I was raised in a military family as an atheist libertarian Houyhnhnm of the Stoic philosophical school by an agnostic Vulcan. She and I spent our college years debating matters economic and esoteric, and, agreeing on nothing except our love for each other, fell blissfully into courtship and wedlock and an endless round of role playing games and novel writing marathons. The match was made in the heaven in which I, at that time, did not believe.
Since neither she, a devout leftwing Christian, nor I, a semi-anarchist Stoic atheist, fit anywhere on the normal Left-Right spectrum of the Culture War, we were constantly mistaken for followers of schools of thought we either did not follow or soundly rejected.
And, even from a young age, she wondered why the particular ideas of Left and Right tend to be clustered together. As quoted above, why on earth should people’s beliefs about sex predict their beliefs about the size of the military?
Myself, I never wondered, being told since youth up what the reason must be.
And the reason is not genetic disposition any more than it is the jar of malign planets shedding influences from sovereign natal constellations.
Moderns believe in genetics only because it is not fashionable to believe in astrology.
If the same men who lived now had been raised during the Renaissance, they would be solemnly assuring us that a weakness for Guelph politics or for the practices of Ganymede were due to a retrograde planet in Virgo, or an unlucky opposition to Gemini.
After becoming a father, and after 9/11 and realizing to my shock that my fellow libertarians had no interest in joining forces with me to protect my children from either prenatal infanticide or sexual perversion or drug pushers or suicide bombers, the limitations of the principle of ‘Do As Thou Wilt be the Whole of the Law’ became shockingly clear to me. It is a peacetime philosophy only, and only among men who adhere to certain basic ideals springing from the Western cultural tradition, i.e. men who adhere to Christian cultural norms even if not Christian men.
So it is not by indoctrination or upbringing or any other early influence which persuades me to become an arch-conservative and ardent Constitutionalist, but, rather, the logical deductions from identifiable axioms which form the skeletal principles, and the lessons of history and niceties of judgment which flesh out how those principles are to be applied.
Unlike a cradle conservative, my conservatism is creedal.
You may, dear reader, disagree with the axioms, or, more likely, regard the judgment calls as disproportionate, that I regard trivial dangers as grave and grave dangers as trivial. Reasonable men in a jury can disagree on whether the law applies to the facts they are given, and reasonable judges can disagree on interpretations of the law: only a child takes honest disagreement to be a sign of mental derangement or moral corruption.
My point here is not that my answers are correct. My point is only that I have them. If I am wrong, I am wrong for a reason I can articulate.
If I am wrong, one can blame my judgment, but not my genes. I had the same genes before and after my conversion to conservative thinking.
Because my conversion was deliberate, step by step, each adoption of each conservative value was, to me, for a known reason springing from a known principle. There is no mystery to it, and I need neither the mystical stars of astrology nor mystical molecules of genetics to explain it.
So let us examine, not what conservative principles are, but why certain ideas tend to be clustered as they are. The answer, I think, will surprise no honest man:
A man’s several beliefs about art and culture and politics and sex and war and taxes are based on his underlying view of man. Of necessity his view of man must influence his view of the basics of the human condition.
I offer the thoughts following to investigate and explain and perhaps to support this theme.
The first part of the answer is, unsurprisingly, the most basic. It is also the hardest for the skeptic to accept, and one which the mood and atmosphere of our modern age is dead set against.
You see, unlike what everyone from Sesame Street muppets to tenured professors to professional pundits has told you, and unlike what every tale from earliest comic book to haughtiest progressive film has told you and taught you and urged you to believe, you are at the core a rational being.
Now, let us be most careful, since this is a most easy principle to mistake. You are not Spock. You are not a rational being in the sense that you make all your decisions (or any of them) with the dispassionate detachment of a judge on the bench or a scientist at a workbench. I am not claiming you think logically and unemotionally. That privilege is reserved for Houyhnhnms and other fictional creatures.
When I say “you are a rational being” I mean not that you control the faculty of reason. Perhaps you do to some degree, perhaps not. I mean you are controlled by the logic of your philosophy.
You might object that you have no philosophy. This is impossible. You may have one that you have never questioned, never articulated, one whose reason shapes your conclusions without your awareness, but you don’t have none.
For the purpose of clarity, let us use the word ‘worldview’ or ‘world’ to describe both the articulate and the inarticulate system of ideas and judgments and perceptions and conclusions you and I and all other rational beings use to observe, assess, react, and decide how we live our lives.
Your worldview operates by its own internal logic. Once you accept the axioms, you tacitly accept the conclusions. Certain conclusions you can fight, or resist, or bend aside from their natural course, but this comes at a cost, both in expense of mental effort and in loss of mental integrity; and therefore it is correspondingly unusual.
To restate: The reason why ideas tend to be clustered together is because ideas have a nature of their own which cannot be wished away or set aside by an act of will. Ideas have a certain logic to them, a natural ‘fit’ which allows some clusters of ideas easily to fall into place. The outliers occur when that logic or natural fit is defied or denied on a case-by-case basis. The thinker has to go to the trouble to carve out an exception: if he fails to do so, the ideas, of their own innate power, will tend to draw together.
In other words, reason is supreme. Even those who deny reason are subject to it. If one idea logically implies another, it is costly or tedious or difficult or even impossible to hold to the one and reject its conclusion. It can be done, but only by taking the effort to invent or adopt a special pleading or special exception to apply to that case: and this effort is by its nature inefficient.
Let us call this the principle of Natural Logic of Worlds.
We can state the principle thus: Worldviews are holographic and organic. Holographic, because from one part the rest can be deduced; organic, because once you accept one basic belief about the world, you are under a strong inclination or influence to accept the logically related beliefs; this is because these logically related beliefs grow one out of the other like the members of an organism. The relation of these beliefs one to the other is not a matter of human decision or willpower. Thoughts have a life of their own, a logic of their own.
Now surely you are thinking, “But, wait! No one has ever taught me the opposite of this belief that you call the Principle of Natural Logic of Worlds. Neither any muppet nor any tenured professor has told me anything of the kind.”
I beg to differ. The lesson is there, continually repeated and continually emphasized, but always tacitly. It is the essential belief and foundational axiom of modern philosophy and modern worldviews, and it dates back to Kant.
The opposite belief in the Natural Logic of Worlds is the belief that Man Makes His Own World.
When you are told ‘Believe in Yourself’ this is a slogan that can only be uttered by someone who tacitly rejects the notion of the Natural Logic of Worlds. The slogan ‘Believe in Yourself’ is not merely asking you to avoid a crippling lack of self-esteem which may make you unsuccessful in business and in mate-seeking. It is asking you to accept that life is what you make of it; that you create your own reality.
When you are told, ‘Don’t Stereotype’ and ‘Don’t be bigoted’ and ‘Judge Not, Lest ye be Judged’ these slogans are not merely asking you to be as careful and dispassionate and objective as a scientist or juror when coming to assessment of the character of others, and not merely asking you to leave vengeance to the Hand of the Almighty who can read the hearts of men. These slogans are also telling you to be ashamed if you notice that certain ideas in the thoughts of men and certain behaviors in their actions are clustered together with certain professions, philosophies, backgrounds, cultures, cults, and races. These are NOT calls for objectivity. These are calls to join the general mutually shared game of pretense which pretends that life is malleable and human nature is fluid and that life is what you make it and that you make your own reality.
When you are told, ‘that idea is old-fashioned’ or ‘everything is relative’ or ‘this belief is Eurocentric’ or ‘all points of view are valid’ these slogans are not merely cautioning you to read up on the latest findings in your field nor merely asking you to listen to all witnesses with evidence to give to the court of your conscience. These slogans are not telling you Einstein’s theory of physics. You are being told that the place from which you stand to make the observation, or the person who makes the observation, determines what the observation shall be: him, the observer, and not the thing observed. You are being told human nature, including yours, is malleable, and that your reality is of your own making.
Let us call idea that Reality is of Your Own Making the Gnostic Principle, or Gnosticism. (The terminology is inexact, but indulge me.)
If it is difficult or impossible to believe that state censorship of speech and thought is wrong without also believing that private ownership of firearms is right, then this is because there is a natural connection in logic between those two ideas, an organic connection between them perhaps not obvious at first. The Principle of Natural Logic says you do not get a vote on whether this connection exists or not: if you believe in the First Amendment, sooner or later you either abandon integrity or abandon opposition to the Second Amendment.
Nothing could be a graver insult or a more ridiculous absurdity to someone who believes in the Gnostic Principle. To tell a man who makes his own world that there is something in his world he cannot make or cannot unmake is effrontery. It may even be oppression.
“Surely a rational creature” (so argues that Gnostic) “can select what beliefs he wishes based on what judgments he makes? There are many a Leftwing who believe most strongly on your right to free speech, but who also believe strongly that the danger of gun crime outweighs the benefit of a provision meant only for State Militia to arm themselves against possible insurrection and tyranny, never meant for personal protection! The one idea is unrelated to the other! Each idea is judged on its own basis, without prejudice!”
The Gnostic worldview is parallel to the worldview of the modern materialist, who says the mind is nothing but matter in motion, in that both downplay the reality and the tenacity of ideas. The modern so-called scientific thinker tends to overestimate the solidity and persistence of the material worlds.
For example, I have heard some materialists claiming, despite astronomical evidence to the contrary, that the universe is infinitely old, and must continue to exist forever: the materialist metaphysical principle of the eternity of matter in this case trumps the best model based on current physical evidence of a Big Bang and an eventual entropic Heat Death.
Likewise, the modern so-called scientific thinker tends to dismiss evidence of consistent laws operating in realms of the purely mental, such as formal logic, geometry, economics, ethics, and so on, because the metaphysical principle of materialism relegates to thought a role only as a side effect of matter or an illusion. Only matter has substance: thought has no substance. The rules of logic or geometry or economics are no more real to a materialist than the rules of chess.
Again, I have heard materialist, with no sense of shame or pause for thought, arguing that the rules of geometry are either contingent on sense impressions or arbitrary conventions.
Psychologically, the freedom of all thought to be utterly arbitrary and fully arbitrary flatters the craving for godlike power in the souls of the Gnostic and the materialist and the modern so-called scientific thinker. He cannot tolerate to be told there are matters where he had no vote. While he might be willing to accept brute material facts exist independent of his veto, because he respects matter as real, he cannot accept the idea of brute ideal facts. The fact that his thoughts must perish when his body perishes (so argues the materialist) proves that thoughts are not facts. For him, only the harp is real; the music perishes when the strings are still.
I say that the roots go back to Kant, because it was Kant who posited a noumenal reality beyond the reach of our sense impressions, which neither empirical evidence nor rational deductions of pure reason could reach. Once reality is separate from the perception or model of reality, and reality is unreachable, it is short step to conclude, as Nietzsche does, that reality is only whatever flatters the willpower, and that a man makes his own meaning in an innately meaningless universe. It is equally short a step to conclude, as Sartre does, that man cannot make any meaning in the meaningless universe, therefore man must find meaning in himself. At a blow, such doctrines shatter the epistemological basis of moral reason, and open the Pandora’s box of self-indulgence. If there is no God, and all things are permitted, then the modern philosopher is free to copulate with his concubines and catamites and carriage horses without fear of reproach from his own conscience.
Reading the biography of modern intellectuals from Rousseau onward, it is easy enough to believe that their true motive for all their apologetics was nothing more than excuse making for their sexual malfeasance and abominations. But, whether that is the intent or not, that is the outcome: modern epistemology says we cannot know reality. Where there is no knowledge, there can be no judgment, and no condemnation.
By coincidence, the two dominant worldviews of the modern political scene, socialism and capitalism, both lend themselves to the Principle of Gnosticism.
The Socialist wishes to remake man and to revise society into utopia. This cannot be done unless man is malleable. New standards cannot be written unless the old standards are not standards are all, but merely opinions relative to their age and place, an unevolved form that is destined to change to new forms.
The Capitalist wishes that the customer is always right, and he wishes no disputes over metaphysics to mar the smooth and peaceful workings of the marketplace: the destruction of the Reformation and Counterreformation convince the Capitalist not only not to have an Established Church, but not to have an established set of moral values, aside from the minimal values of honesty in business and diligence in labor and sanctity in property ownership and fairness in hiring needed to allow the market to operate efficiently.
Hugh Hefner and Bill Clinton, who would have been scourged as a pornographer or hanged as an adulterer in a Christian civilization, are feted and applauded for being sexual revolutionaries in a postchristian postcivilization which Capitalism foments.
The pornographer wins the admiration of Homo OEconomicus because he has turned his magazine empire and gambling dens into a financial treasure, and he lives in a mansion. Like the friends of Job in the Book of Job, the Capitalist has the unfortunately tendency to regard mere material wealth as a sign of favor. It is the reward from the only god he adores, the marketplace, for the only virtues he regards, industriousness, productiveness, popularity, shrewdness, sharp dealing, dumb luck, and the ability to please one’s customers and to break down their sales-resistance.
The adulterer is praised as a martyr because of his suffering at the hands of evil Grand Inquisitors of a new ‘Sexual McCarthyism’ — because the Capitalist mentality holds any matter not effecting job performance to be private, therefore of no concern to the buyer/voter. (I coin the awkward term “buyer/voter” because Capitalism regards democracy as merely another market place, with votes instead of dollars that one wins using modern marketing techniques.)
The idea that a man who cheats his wife lacks character, and therefore will cheat his constituencies is an idea that says, in effect, a Natural Logic of Worldviews connects ideas and principles and actions. The idea that adulterers are corrupt and cannot serve as Commander-in-Chief flies in the face of the Gnostic Principle.
In other words, the Gnostic Principle is the principle that all ideas are atomized. Just because you believe one thing, or take one action, does not necessarily mean you will believe or do another. To say otherwise is an affront to the godlike sovereignty of the all-powerful self-will in the realm of ephemeral ideas.
The Principle of Natural Logic is the principle that to will the end is to will the means to that end. You are free to stand or fall, but not free to set your own standard; free to see or to close your eyes, but not free to hallucinate; and you have a right to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.
So much for the abstract; let us look at the particulars.
We will use the examples taken from the quote above: those who favor fornication over chastity have a strong incentive, that is, a reason of internal logic, to disfavor the military and prefer it kept small; likewise those who favor chastity over fornication have a strong inclination to favor the military and prefer it large. Christians tend to favor low taxes and small, unintrusive government; whereas Antichristians tend to favor high taxes and all-intrusive government. Strict Constructionists tend to prefer classical themes and models in the fine arts; Activists tend to prefer horrific rubbish that insults and shocks the aesthetic sense.
These various ideas seem to have no relation on the surface. Why cannot a small-government low-tax fellow like John Galt not also admire shockingly revolutionary new forms in art? Why cannot a Spartan fellow both favor harshly militaristic government and sexual perversion?
What is the natural logic of these ideas?
To repeat, ideas are either assonant or dissonant. Any of these ideas that are normally not found together can be found together in statistically odd or outlier populations, provided the thinker has thought of a justification or philosophy or matrix to enable him to reconcile dissonant ideas. All an assonance of ideas does is make it easier or create an incentive for certain ideas to fit with each other. A dissonance of ideas raises the price by demanding an extra mental effort from the thinker who wishes to hold both.
The six ideas in our example are sex and war, wisdom and lucre, law and art. These ideas are so basic to the human psyche that one finds them imagined as archetypes or pagan gods in the racial psychology: Venus and Mars, Saturn and Pluto, Jupiter and Apollo. I submit that one’s basic view of human nature, the one basic idea of man’s role in the cosmos, informs or influences these other six fundamental ideas.
Christianity introduced to the world an idea implicit in Jewish theology that man is responsible for himself and his ultimate fate after death. This is antithetical to the Eastern idea of Karma, or the classical idea of Fate and Necessity, or the modern ideas of Marxism or Freudianism or ‘Selfish Gene’ Pseudo-Darwinism, all of which give one reason or another to say that man is the passive patient of forces that decide his fate, either because of past lives, or because of ancestral genetics. The Christians say that if you go to Hell, you have none to blame but yourself. (Calvinists say those created for damnation never stood a chance to escape to begin with, but are still to blame, a paradox which lies outside the scope of this essay to explore, but which does not form a true exception to the general rule.)
Christianity also introduced the idea implicit in Jewish thought the God is no respecter of persons, and married this to the Classical Athenian notion of each man being equal before the law (isonomia). This idea is antithetical to pagan and oriental notions of caste and priest-kingship which sets particular divine individuals, demigods or favored races, on a higher spiritual footing than others. Christianity is uniquely individualistic in its approach. The thinking of the Enlightenment was truly revolutionary, but in one sense was profoundly conservative, since it draw out the liberal political implications of Christian metaphysical belief. Since the day when St Ambrose humbled Theodosius, or St Gregory humbled Henry IV, no Christian sincerely believed that kings and emperors were specially or particularly favored of God, or granted the spiritual superiority of a Brahmin or Pharaoh.
Not even the Anglicans, who were so extraordinary that they decreed Henry VIII to be the Pope of England, and Queen Elizabeth Popess, were so unchristian as to think these secular rulers possessed spiritual sanctity above the normal run of mortals: rather, it was that the thought the Pope in Rome to be overweening, not the King in London undervalued.
The other crucial and particular revolutions in the Christian worldview which sets it strikingly apart from its pagan and Jewish roots is the role of women.
The subject is difficult to discuss since the shrieking madness of modernism has bent its every effort to spreading lies and jabberwocky on the topic, and it would require volumes to answer every bogus argument and baseless accusation laid against the Church. We moderns have been told that divorce liberates the modern woman, and chastity chains her, and that motherhood is only sacred when the mother (usually a single mother) enjoys the privilege to kill the helpless child in the womb at her pleasure. We have been told that to come virgin to the marriage bed is not just unusual, but appalling, and to expect children to wait until eighteen to rid themselves of hated virginity is absurd and naïve.
In other words, we have been told nonsense so appalling that the sheer effrontery of the illogic and the falsehood protects it from criticism. You can debate with a man who says dawn is when the sun first appears at the horizon; you cannot debate with a man who says noon is midnight.
One can but stare, as if at a train wreck, at the modern spectacle of so much human misery, broken families and broken hearts and wasted lives, sacrificed on the altar of sexual liberation. Yes, modern sex has been liberated from logic, from self-control, from medical prudence, and from life itself. And we think ourselves enlightened because we lack all prudence in matters of sex, and infect our underage daughters in countless numbers with venereal diseases.
The imps in Hell crook their beaks in mirthless smiles and dance leaping jigs with knees akimbo about the fires, laughing cold laughter, at the signal success of this victory. To make man miserable with sin is would be the delight of the fallen angels, if those sad creations could know delight; to make man boast of his sin as if it were virtue would be their delight far greater.
Time forces me to be cursory where I should be expansive: I will say only that the pagans were cruel to their womenfolk, as they were cruel to all weak things, and indulged in polygamy and divorce and abortion and other practices whose purpose and effect is to desecrate virginity and motherhood alike. The Christian respect for life and rejection of divorce and insistence on fidelity and chastity, monogamy within marriage and abstinence without, is unique. The Protestant acceptance, first of divorce, then of contraception, now of homosexual marriages between female priests, has weakened and mocked what was once universal Christian teaching and practice, but this does not change the uniqueness of the teaching nor its fundamental nobility.
So, the view of man that emerged during the Imperial Roman period, and was developed through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Reformation, and ages of Discovery and Enlightenment and Industrialization that followed was a Christian view. Man (male and female both) was regarded as an individual, and Woman was regarded as sacred, either as maiden or matron, virgin or mother, not something merely to be used for a human end.
The Christian view of man is profoundly mature, and, based on two thousand years or more of experience and wisdom, is balanced and proportionate, nuanced and pragmatic, idealistic where it needs to be even to the point of extravagance, silent where no consensus has emerged nor revelation revealed, and proven again and again to work.
The modern view, springing from Nietzsche and Darwin, Freud and Marx, put an end to the common acceptance of man as sacred or unique, much as Copernicus had put an end to the heliocentric theory. Man was no longer the center and cynosure of the cosmos. God was dead; man was a naked ape; virtue was unhealthy self-repression; philosophy was the ideological superstructure of selfish class interests. There was no cosmos, no order, merely an abyss filled with the particles of Lucretius falling like snow, without divinity nor humanity nor virtue nor thought. And all poems died, and all sculpture became merely screams of horror or Rorschach blots, which mean nothing but what you say they mean.
The modern view of man is Antichristian. That is all there is to it.
It is profoundly shallow. It is the philosophy of children who have never studied philosophy, combination of simplistic ideas, rank nonsense, hatred and arrogance, mentally unbalanced, crude and unformed, and its highest ideal aims at the destruction of idealism. It is extravagant where it should be cautious, craven where it should be bold, incoherent in theory and impractical in practice, leading nowhere but to misery, self-indulgence, violence, and death. And it prides itself on being the stark opposite of all these things.
Again, a volumes could be written about the difference between medieval political theory, which supported sacral kingship and universal imperium, and modern republicanism, which rejects monarchy with passionate zeal. It would be a long and difficult process even to sketch the evolution from medievalism, which was perhaps the most organically sound and well-structured polis man could devise, to the creeping totalitarianism of oligarchic England and absolutist France in the early modern period, to the modern reaction against those impositions on ancient rights and liberties, which found its flower in the American Revolution and the French Revolution.
I cannot now dwell on the point, and, again, must be cursory: the American Revolution was a rebellion of conservative Christian landowners eager to preserve their ancient rights and liberties as Englishmen, which spring out of a cultural tradition and common law and canon law reaching back to Medieval and Roman Imperial models, or to the free elections of burghers and bishops, or to the civic militarism of Athens in the classical world. The French Revolution was an anticlerical revolt meant to uproot all ancient institutions in the name of reason and modern science, and redesign and sculpt mankind to be fit for utopia, with the machine of the guillotine as its instrument of sculpture.
All modern political thought springs from these two revolutions in theory. The American theory was that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and that governments are instituted among men to secure these rights. The French theory was that all intellectuals are superior to the rich and powerful, whom they must torture and kill in countless multitudes in retaliation for the unfairness of life on earth.
The Russian Revolution followed in spirit and in method the French, and the rise to power of Fascists in Italy and Germany followed the Russian Revolution in rhetoric, means, methods, and aims, differing only in how rapidly and to what extent the revolution to create utopia was to be carried out, or which groups were to be slain by machines descended from the guillotine, but more modern.
The American Revolution was profoundly influenced by Christian thought, and the institutions developed from it have proven so far to be unable to take root in any culture outside of a Christian one. The French Revolution was anticlerical and antichristian, the Russian moreso, and the Fascist only somewhat: all three proposed to remake human society on more scientific and rational lines, the Russian and Fascist theory explicitly embracing Darwinism as the exemplar and excuse for aiding the natural cosmic process, in Russia, of evolution of society to a higher economic plane, in Germany, of eugenics.
In Christian theology, there is basically one and only one decision to be made, either by man or angels: to serve or to disobey. The Virgin says, ‘be it done to me according to they word’ and so is elevated to the post of the queen of angels. The Devil says, ‘I will not serve’ and so is cast down from being the prince of angels to being the prince of darkness. The choice is simple and binary: yes or no. God elevates the humble, and casts down the proud.
The modern view of the world, and the view of man’s place in the world, is divided between these two.
On the one hand is the American Revolutionary view, which is the mature view, and the Christian view.
It says man is responsible for himself, and invested with sacred rights that no man can rightly take away. Man is fallen from a high estate, fallen so profoundly that no human power can restore him.
On the other hand is the French Revolutionary view, which is the immature view, profoundly Antichristian — albeit, of course, taking most of its axioms from Christian thought nonetheless, merely twisting or ignoring what happens to be inconvenient.
It says that man is not responsible for himself, and that something else, genetics or environment or economic conditions or social rank, produce undesirable outcomes, and that technical competence in manipulating these factors which control man, genetics or environment or economic conditions or social rank, will produce desirable outcomes. Man is an evolved ape who will rise naturally to a higher estate, and human power, used with technical cleverness, will shorten the time of this rise.
The American Revolutionary view says that the state belongs as a servant to the people. The French Revolutionary view says the people are cogs in the machinery of the state, and the people therefore belong as property to the state.
So then: the natural join between the idea of chastity, which is a form of self control, and the idea that since Caesar cannot be trusted with power over the lives of men therefore each man must do for himself as best he may and left to enjoy the fruits of his own labor, which is a form of self control, is the idea of maturity. Mature men uphold both self control and self reliance.
Immature men seek to submit to all powerful passions and to escape consequences and condemnation; they furthermore seek to magnify the power of Caesar in the hope that the State will act as nanny and nursemaid to solve immediate ills and usher in the eventual utopia. Immature men condemn self control as oppression and regard the concept of self reliance as impossible or unrealistic.
High taxes goes hand in hand with a powerful and all meddlesome Caesar; low taxes ensure that the government will be kept small, modest, and no threat to the public.
Part of self reliance is self protection. Mature men know that war is inevitable, and that if you want peace, you must prepare for war. They see a large military as an inevitable if evil necessity. For the immature man, nothing is inevitable and nothing is necessary, on the grounds that a sufficiently clever technical competence in social engineering can solve social problems, including war. The immature man is also a coward, and is envious of heroism, and suspicious of the institutions on which military values and virtues and institutions rest. Being immature, he can see only the surface phenomena, and thinks that only the surface is real. A shallow and superficial solution to the problem of war is to disarm. If there are no soldiers, the idea runs, there is no war.
More profoundly than this, however, runs the idea which is the true source of the divide. The American Revolutionary idea, being profoundly Christian, cherishes obedience. The French, being antichristian, rejects obedience, and cherishes revolt for the sake of revolt.
The military is both built on the concept of obedience as its paramount concept, and serves as an instrument to crush insurrection and revolt. Those who romanticize revolt cannot concentrate on the idea of an external enemy. No external enemy is real to them in their imaginations. The enemy, the only enemy, is the established order: the state, the king, the father figure. To admit that external enemies were a credible threat would be tantamount to the admission that the established order has a legitimate purpose and a legitimate role. Admitting this cuts against the fundamental glamor of revolt against the established order.
The mature view of the world and man’s place in it says that there are many enemies and evildoers, including the evil inside one’s own heart, and one must be watchful against foes foreign and domestic, and to watch without ceasing.
The immature view says that there is only one enemy. He has a different name for every different flavor of the immature view, but all evils in the world are laid at his doorstep, whoever he might be: The Man. The Establishment. The Jew. Wall Street. The Phallocracy. The Father Figure. The Authority. God. Merely do away with him, and all peace and justice and wealth will fall into our laps from smiling rainbow clouds where flying ponies play.
It is the conspiracy theory theory of history: one bad guy is responsible for all ills in life. The bad guy must be in charge of life, since the ills are ubiquitous. Overthrow this bad guy, and, like the sacrifice of a scapegoat, will carry all live’s woes away. The bad guy is always The Man, never oneself.
Obviously a large military is not needed as proof against The Man, since the military is The Man.
It is the most simplistic, the most stupid, and the most shallow approach to the problem of evil in life and how to deal with it imaginable.
In America, the chief check on the growth of the power of Caesar is the Constitution. The mature man, being mature, trusting to experience and to practical wisdom, rarely will repair a watch that keeps time: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. He sees the Constitution as the chief bulwark against the seeping flood of tyranny.
The immature man, who wants the government to run his life for him, sees the Constitution as the chief barrier to social progress. He is in favor of the seeping tyranny, because, being immature, he has no experience to tell him that tyranny is a bad idea, that Fallen Man cannot be trusted with power, nor will the immature man heed the wisdom of experience.
The chief weapon to dismantle the Constitution is the indirect erosion of pretending it says something other than what it says: this method allows activists to see in the Constitutions umbras from which new rights emanate, and once a new right is established, this can ride roughshod over all other institutional checks and balances.
The chief defense against this form of attack is Strict Construction, that is, to read in the Constitution what it actually says, not to invent new meanings out of one’s own proud imagination.
Aesthetics is once again a topic so profound and various that volumes would be needed to explore it. Here again I can only be cursory. Art is the concrete and particular emotional representation of one’s abstract view of life.
Christian art followed classical models and introduced Gothic extravagance and perfected naturalistic representation and profound romanticism to produce works of fine art in all fields markedly superior and in far greater number and fineness than any work of antiquity or the East. The art was disciplined yet creative, and sought to express beauty both natural and supernatural. It requires a maturity to work such art, to go from novice to journeyman to master, and an education to appreciate such art.
If an artist makes a reference to a classical Roman poet, for example, one needs must know the poet to catch the reference, and this requires work.
Modern art is deeply immature and ugly, although it proceeds allegedly by breaking forms and disobeying disciplined rules or techniques, allowing art forms to produce umbras in which emanations can be found, wherein can be seen whatever the viewer wishes to see, but nothing pretty. In reality, the idea is based on Communist theories of agitprop: the artist’s political mission is to create nausea and disgust and disquiet, and to subvert the established norms, so that fair seems foul and foul seems fair.
To pretend to appreciate such chaotic trash requires a studied hatred of all that is good and fair in life, and a marked absence of talent or patience. That what hangs in modern art galleries could be fingerpainted by a retarded child is not seriously disputed. The viewer must take on faith that what he is seeing is profound with some meaning beyond his ken, and must pretend he sees the deep meaning, lest he scorned and cast out among the hoi polloi, where there is wailing and the gnashing to teeth. It is the visual representation of the jarring ugliness and meaninglessness of the godless world, a cosmos without order, the abyss of Lucretius in which mindless snowflakes of eternal matter pointlessly falls or causelessly swerves.
Modern art is an expression of the same temper of immaturity and rebellion as all these other modern ideas: it is taking a guillotine to the muses.
The Modern mind, obsessed with foolish Hegelian notions of evolution and eternal upward progress, regards the destruction of old forms as always beneficial: hence the legal theory is to rewrite law from a meaningful form to whatever is most destructive of the law, or respect for law, and the aesthetic theory is to remove order, form, symmetry and discipline in all arts and to adopt formless nonsense whatever is most destructive of man’s sense of beauty.
It is most important for the modern mind to call beauty merely an expression of the all-conquering all-subjective will, so that a sonnet may have thirteen stanzas if I say so, and a jagged question mark be a nude descending a staircase. Anything else might hint that something beyond man exists and greater than he.
Beauty is also of God and leads back to him by stirring man out of his narcissism and self-absorption, and the modern man is therefore under a strong strategic necessity to abolish and diminish beauty, or to make it subjective, or meaningless. The thought that beauty, particularly natural beauty, by definition cannot be random and therefore must be sign of a deliberate design is to be avoided at all costs.
Again, the nexus between the seemingly unrelated ideas is clear enough once one examines the root idea.
The root idea is maturity versus immaturity, self-discipline versus self-indulgence, complexity versus simplicity, order versus revolt, Christ versus Nothing.
I’m going to use the word “Metapsychics” in my book that I’ve decided will be called “Metaphysics and Metapsychics.” You have a keenness for tying together whole worldviews.
You also have my permission to use the word Metapsychics if you ever write a space opera or a comic book about metahumans who have powers that are WAY COOLER than normal psychic powers, such as interplanetary-range pyrokenetics.
I have not written the book yet (I’ll need a little time), but in case you’re curious about my use of the word (which, I’m sorry to say, has nought to do with superhuman powers), you can attend as you see fit.
http://amtheomusings.wordpress.com/2011/10/31/metaphysics-and-metapsychics/
I’m only a bit put out that I hadn’t already come up with the word myself.
Dear Mr. Wright:
Thank you for yet another excellent essay. As a Catholic and conservative there is practically nothing I disagree here with you.
Except one, admittedly small point. I think you placed too much of what is good and true as descending from the American Revolution. You too easily overlook conservatives who are not Americans. That is, after reading Russell Kirk’s THE CONSERVATIVE MIND, I became aware of how much we own as well to men like Edmund Burke, and not just John Adams. Kirk focused in his book on BOTH strains of conservatives, British and American. And included in his analysis the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville.
I do realize this was mostly done to keep your essay from becoming too impossibly long. All the same it did seem a bit parochial. And I also agree that the Gnostic ideas you so incisivly skewered has enervated and debased conservatism in both the UK and continental Europe.
Sincerely, Sean M. Brooks
I did not mean to steal any thunder from Burke or other English writers: I just assumed everyone knows the American revolution was Englishmen revolting against an un-English king to retain our God-given natural rights as Englishmen.
I was actually thinking about asking you to please elaborate on the differences between American and European Conservatism.
Hi, SFAN:
I hope Mr. Wright won’t object to me answering your question. I would recommend reading Russell Kirk’s book THE CONSERVATIVE MIND to see how much American and British conservatives have in common. The “differences” are mostly in stress and emphasis. One thing Kirk did not quite like was the stress on economics by US conservatives.
Sincerely, Sean M. Brooks
Understood, Mr. Wright. I am rather a fan of Edmund Burke. And, btw, in your discussion of war, I caught you quote from Flavius Vegetius’ DE RE MILITARI! (Smiles)
I think Flavius Vegetius’ DE RE MILITARI (written circa AD 383)to be fully comparable to Sun Tzu’s THE ART OF WAR.
Sincerely, Sean M. Brooks
“The rules of logic or geometry or economics are no more real to a materialist than the rules of chess.
Again, I have heard materialist, with no sense of shame or pause for thought, arguing that the rules of geometry are either contingent on sense impressions or arbitrary conventions”
I am not entirely sure if I am addressing the same subject as what you meant by your statement, I think so but I could be wrong.
There are an uncountably infinite number of logical statements that are not provable from any set of consistent axioms. The axioms themselves are statements that are not provable by any of the other axioms. I have experience working with not only additional axioms of standard math but also completely different sets of axioms that contain arithmetic but have different results otherwise. It is quite possible to create axioms that give results that are contradictory to the standard results (and everyday experience) but that are internally consistent. The axioms that get accepted for use then have to be the ones that most closely correspond to physical experience and/or intuition. If there are multiple competing axioms that give the desired result and do not give any results that are too odd then it is somewhat arbitrary which one gets accepted, and given further data from the physical world the axioms used can change.
They are not however completely arbitrary and there are still rules and principles to be followed in formulating axioms (such as non-contradiction). One does not change the people by changing the rules of the system that one is calling economics, and attempting to get people to conform to the supposed rules of economics tends to cause major problems, but the other way around does, sometimes, happen (the way people behave changes some of the rules of economics).
An uncountable number of statements? What sort of language even lets you express an uncountable number of statements?
One of my favorite quotes (I think it was by Quine, but I’m not sure) says that mathematics gets its certainty by not saying what it is talking about. What this means is that mathematics is absolutely true, but that this does not guarantee you that any particular application of mathematics to any particular problem will be correct. You have to apply mathematics properly to the problem and that application is outside the scope of mathematics.
We have learned through modern logic that any consistent set of axioms can be used as the foundation for a theory. The axioms don’t have to be “true” in a real sense, or even motivated by real things. However, that does not mean that all axioms or all theories are arbitrary; a given theory is only useful in a given domain if the axioms of the theory are true in that domain.
For a very simple example, consider the mathematical proposition that 1+1=2. In bare English, you might interpret this as saying that if you take one object from this group and one object from that group and put them together, then you have two objects. However, that’s only true if the two objects don’t merge, or reproduce, or one of them doesn’t crawl away, or … you get the picture. The proposition 1+1=2 is an abstract truth, but it has to be applied properly to the real world.
“An uncountable number of statements? What sort of language even lets you express an uncountable number of statements?”
What makes you think it is a single language? Or is restricted to recursively enumerable languages?
As to the rest I believe we are covering much of the same ideas in what we are saying.
That is not what I said; I said that there is no geometry separate from the behaviour of matter. Euclid’s fifth postulate does not exist in a separate world of ideas, it is a limit of measurements in flat space.
“The root idea is maturity versus immaturity, self-discipline versus self-indulgence, complexity versus simplicity, order versus revolt, Christ versus Nothing.”
Via the (sometimes self-)deception, spectacular in its simplicity, of confusing the rejection of an unjustly imposed artificial order with the revolt against a justly perceived natural order, thus fostering the impression that all order is unjustly imposed by definition…
…or of confusing the virtuous attempt to teach someone self-discipline for the learner’s benefit with the vicious attempt to condition a reflex response for the conditioners’ benefit, thus fostering the impression that all self-discipline is merely inculcated enslavement…
…or of confusing the desire to find the simplest possible answer with reflexive suspicion of any complexity beyond a certain level as arbitrary obfuscation, thus fostering the impression that all complexity is obfuscatory, unnecessary and false and ruining the ability to tell the simple from the simplistic….
…or of confusing the mature desire for personal responsibility with the immature desire for personal authority, thus fostering the impression that “maturity” is merely shorthand for the approval of hidebound elders bound by outdated traditions and irrational mores.
All evil consists in finding a powerful and passionate response in the breast and convincing the mind that because that passion is good here, it is always good everywhere. The politicization of that evil happens when the poor sinner becomes convinced that those who resist his passion in one context must, in their secret hearts, hate and fear the passion in all contexts, and would see it destroyed everywhere, not just disciplined here and now.
I agree entirely. To me, this essay is a small masterpiece. I will keep it among my favorite readings to re-read and annotate. I particularly liked the parts on war (‘si vis pacem para bellum’, sad but so true) and on aesthetics.
I have only one comment, something to add from my favorite philosopher, Maritain. He wrote that Kant gave a ‘dogmatic’ armature to philosophical errors introduced by nominalism and, more importantly, by Descartes. The psychological stability of the Christian mind was shattered by Luther and carried to folly with Rousseau and the Romantic movement. (Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau. 1925).
You make a lot of interesting points here, most of which I am going to ignore. Instead, let me first say that I enjoy your writing not only for its fluency, but because I think I have found in you my spiritual shadow – almost every one of your opinions is 180 degrees opposed to my own on some ideological axis. Which reminds me: Do you realize that you are incredibly binary in your thinking? Perhaps you would enjoy the Archdruid’s latest post (http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/10/trouble-with-binary-thinking.html), in which he gives some advice about overcoming this all too common affliction.
I can’t help noticing something else about your writing: you have an obsessive fear of sex! You can scarcely write a paragraph without manifesting this terror, or revealing your dark authoritarianism toward sexuality. I suppose that’s understandable, since sex is perhaps the most primal, irrational and fecund force of human nature – the antithesis of the sterile rationality you apparently worship. I wonder which is the cause of the other: your ideology or your fear of sex?
Finally, I would just like to point out that a fanatic disciple of the pedophiliac sorcerers of the Roman cannibal Christ cult is in a poor position to moralize about sexuality, rationality or anything else under the sun. Kindly go f*** yourself.
Your eternal adversary,
Sean the Gnostic Nihilist Cosmicist Satanic Sorcerer of the Apocalypse
“Which reminds me: Do you realize that you are incredibly binary in your thinking?”
Let me see if I understand your point. You are saying: All thinking is either nonbinary or binary. Binary thinking expresses all thoughts in terms of either/or. Nonbinary thinking is GOOD and binary thinking is NOT GOOD.
Then follows ad hominem drivel: to make a basic observation about the difference between sex and non-sex, and to draw the moral conclusion that the motive of one ought not be applied to the other, far from being common sense, here is denounced as so utterly wrongheaded that could have no motivation other than fear.
I thought I made it perfectly clear in my many articles that my attitude is experiential and my conclusion empirical.
I tried living by indulging my every twisted and perverted sexual impulse, using your theory that all desires are licit and that, if indulged without a false consciousness of guilt, would make one happy. It did not make me happy. It could not make anyone happy, because non-sex is not sex, and one cannot achieve an innately self-contradictory desire.
So, rather than trying to alter reality, I thought I should try to govern my appetites. And then helpful persons like yourself tell me and continue to tell me that indulging my evil and insane desires will make me happy, and that self control is evil and insane.
You are like a man who offers a drunkard with an uncontrollable addiction to alcohol another beer, on the theory that if he were LESS sober, he’d be happier.
Then having denounced the authoritarianism of disapproving of homosexuality, you denounce the Catholic Church because we have homosexuals among us. Hm.
If you are my adversary, the victory is already won: because you cannot defeat eternal truth with utter nothingness, armed with nothing but a sneer.
I think it is wrong of you to tempt me, sir, to intellectual pride by claiming to be my diametric opposite.
Yours, John Charles Justin-martyr Wright
PS: The reason why I became a Catholic rather than a Wicca after I lost my atheist worldview, my dear sorcerer, was because our magic is stronger than your magic.
We defeated the pagans before, and every time we have met previously, both in battle and in debate, and we shall again.
I thought I told you to go f*** yourself? Haha, I kid.
In all seriousness, it is absurd of you to claim that your magic is stronger than mine when I invoke the Outer Gods and the Great Old Ones, who swam in primordial oozes and interstellar abysses aeons before the first hominid ancestors of the Yahweh cultists had their first faint glimmers of god consciousness amidst the brute exigencies of life upon the African plain. Compared to that, you are but an infant making an idol of your first crude toy while I aim a loaded laser rifle at your skull.
If I were in your shoes I’d give serious thought to what I’m going to do when the Great Old Ones return, and all men are shouting and killing and reveling in joy and the earth is aflame in a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom, because I submit to you that that day is very close at hand!
I edited out your expletive because it is one of the few rule I have on my site. That, or holocaust denial, get you banned.
As for whose magic is stronger, I agree your hokum is as potent as a laser-raygun, or some other nonexistent weapon.
We can heal the sick, reform lives, raise the dead. Your visions of Apocalypse are lame compared to our visions. Our crucifixes repel vampires, and our exorcists can cast out your demons and send them whining and scurrying back to hell.
We can also reform lives, bring peace, and forgive sins. Streams of living water descend bright and clear from the throne of our Holy One, our Father, who is your Father as well, and by the shores of that river grow the trees which blossom in all seasons, and whose leaves are for the curing of nations.
What are you offering to replace that vision? A mosh pit?
The oldest vision on record. “You shall be as Gods!”. If you weren’t such a binary thinker (every other attempt has ended in damnation, why risk it?) you would realize it will work with the right people, and who could me more right then you, you precious, unique pearl?…….
Chapter 9, 13, 16, 17 of the book instead of Chapter 22, apparently. I suppose 18 and on were given by the demiurge as opposed to Satan, it is all there in his nice little title.
And I invoke Santa Claus, who was giving presents to good kids long before Lovecraft had yet set pen to paper? I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to accomplish here.
That day is indeed close at hand Sean, as is the day to shortly follow thereafter when the King of Kings and Lord of Lords will split the mount and fight the battle and cleanse the Earth with a baptism of fire of all such wickedness. Make sure you have get the whole story before throwing your lot in with Babylon, Zion will be saved even if it be by fire from Heaven.
If you truly believe this, I wonder if you are willing to put money where your mouth is? Perhaps you think it is hard for the winner to collect in a bet on when the end of the world will take place, but there’s a trick. Suppose you believe that the world will end in 2013, and I believe that it will last at least until 2015. Then I pay you 100 dollars now. If the world ends on your schedule, you have profited. However, on New Year’s Day, 2014, you are obliged to pay me $200; thus I profit from being correct. The amount of the payoffs can be adjusted to reflect mutually acceptable odds.
So: You believe that there is a nonzero chance of the world ending on a “day close at hand”. Would you like to be more specific, and place a wager?
Considering as how Jesus told John in Revelation the He was coming quickly and the time was at hand then I am not sure that is a wise bet (besides gambling being considered a sin).
If the Jews are correct in their dating of when they retook Jerusalem then I would be willing to say that probably by 2089 it will happen, but certainly before 2968 (see Luke 21:24-32). I am as certain that it will not happen before 2014 as I was that it wouldn’t happen on last Friday (or whenever it was that the preacher was saying it would happen after getting it wrong in may).
Haven’t we had this conversation in various forms two or three times before?
What is the point of your baiting here? I’m sure you’re aware that Christians and Mormons, with the exception of some confused but kindly radio hosts, do not put a date on the end of the world. Since you already know he’s not going to give you a date or make you a wager, why do you ask?
May I not take a man at his word? If he says, and I quote, “that day is indeed close at hand”, I assume he does not mean “sometime in the next millennium”. Note that “sometime in the next decade” is sufficiently specific to wager on; I’m not demanding he predict the exact day, an upper limit will do.
Or, of course, he could admit that he was speaking thoughtlessly, and that his “close at hand” is no more than threatening rhetoric.
Or, y’know. It could always be that he was quoting the person he was responding to. Could be that, too.
Sometime in the next thousand years is an upper limit. I had a response, I have no clue if it will ever show up. 2088 seems to be a decent best guess as to when it will happen by, this based on when the Jews took back Jerusalem and Luke 21, with the JST giving added clarity.
Or it could be that we were both, in essence, quoting the Revelation of St. John.
We have had this conversation at least twice before.
Indeed, no man knows the hour of the modding.
I don’t think so, unless your ‘we’ refers to yourself and Sean; are you perhaps confusing me with someone else?
By this conversation I mean I say something and then you try and get specific predictions or make a bet. The exact details of what was originally said or what specific prediction was given is different. December 8, 2010 appears to have one such exchange. I pretty sure there was another such exchange in May or June (ish), if you wish I can track it down.
I don’t remember the occasions but I’ll take your word for it. My point remains: Why are you so unwilling to stick your neck out and make a testable prediction with money attached? If you truly believed what you were saying, you would presumably be happy to make money off the idiot atheist. I’m happy to make money off the idiot theist, although 2088 is unfortunately too far off for me to bet on. Although I do note that if you think it must certainly happen in 76 years, you should assign a probability of about 13% to the first ten years, so we can find some fair odds for 2022.
First, I don’t gamble. Second, considering my everyday actions, I would say that I have a lot more than money invested in the (overall) idea. Third, it isn’t with certainty, that is just a guess based off of one scripture of when it is likely to have happened before (by me), it could quite easily be wrong.
I don’t think the probability is distributed like that. There is still much to happen so that it isn’t likely that the second coming will happen before 2022, unless I die in which case it can be viewed to have happened for me when that occurs.
If you put money in the stock market, you gamble. The difference between the stock market and Las Vegas is that at a blackjack table you have a negative expected rate of return (unless you are the dealer, of course). Both, however, are gambles: In the case of Las Vegas on the turn of the cards, in the case of Wall Street on the continued growth of the economy. Certainly Wall Street is a much better bet, but it’s still gambling. And I would have thought you were more certain of things like “Jesus will return” than of “The economy will continue to grow”.
Your point about the non-flat distribution of probability between here and 2088 is fair enough.
All that aside, I observe that we have gone from “close at hand” to “by 2088 with certainty, probably, but it’s just a guess and could be wrong.” I suggest that you don’t really believe in the second coming, you believe rather that it is virtuous to proclaim such belief. The difference between Harold Camping and you is that Camping has the courage of his convictions.
I am more certain that Jesus will return then I am in the economy and I do put my money where my mouth is every time I get paid. I do not however practice priestcraft.
Considering that the Revelation of John contains statements to the effect that the second coming was close at hand I don’t think I should be criticized for using that same phraseology, especially since who I was responding to had done the same.
I gave you my best guess, what more do you want? Even if I knew for certain that my guess was correct what would you have me change, exactly, about what I do and how I live my life? I don’t see how saying it is in 76 or 30 or 600 years should make any difference at all in how I am living my life right now. Even if I thought it was tomorrow I don’t know that would change what I do at all.
It is soon, much closer then it was ~1890 years ago. Many things have already happened that are found in prophecies from then and from much earlier than then and I don’t see how you can ignore them or somehow say they are not valid. The Jews are being gathered, they have their nation again, and they have Jerusalem again, things that were foretold ages ago. Less then even 150 years ago the crazy Mormons, who courage of their convictions was taking them into a utter wasteland, were the only ones that thought the Jews would be gathered to their homeland again. The lost tribes of Israel will be restored, Zion will be built, and Christ will reign personally on the Earth of these things I am sure.
I don’t think you have a clue what I do or have done that is according to the courage of my convictions.
No, there is an essential moral difference between investing and games of chance. Games of chance are zero sum games. Whatever you win, someone else loses. Seeking to win at the expense of another is essentially selfish. By contrast, normal financial investment is a creative activity. You don’t seek to take money from another but to create money by lending value (or at least liquidity) to a productive enterprise and taking profits from the increase in value.
Agreed. Astonishing that someone could confuse gambling with investment.
There is another difference aside from the game theory sum. The two are entirely different economic categories of behavior having only the most trivial surface similarities. Gambling is deliberately set up to be as arbitrary as possible, or handicapped to even the odds, deliberately so that factors beyond human control will determine the outcome. Investment is when you loan someone you trust to buy stock to turn a profit in return for his promise to pay you back with interest. The more you know of him and his company, his prospects and his prospective customers, and the better you anticipate his work effort and the customer’s desires, the fewer factors beyond human control enter the estimate.
A storm or flood or insurrection might indeed destroy the stock, or the customers not be persuaded to buy the good or service offered, but to call such things a coin toss or a roll of the dice (unless one is speaking in jest, or as a metaphor) shows a primitive voodoo fear of the market place and its operations. All human behavior, including getting out of be in the morning, involves an element of speculation, because the future is unknown. To call this gambling or wagering is figurative speech at best.
“…who swam in primordial oozes and interstellar abysses aeons before the first hominid ancestors of the Yahweh cultists had their first faint glimmers of god consciousness amidst the brute exigencies of life upon the African plain.”
You spent more time trying to write this sentence than it was worth in retrospect.
The fellow is apparently claiming to be a Cthulhu cultist, which means he worships a squid-headed alien invented in the 1930s for the purpose of entertaining fiction, and then he turns around and claims his religion is far older than a Near Eastern tribal religion dating back at least to the early Iron Age.
Hm.
Obviously, his claims are not to be taken seriously, and I wonder if he’s merely having us on to amuse himself. The question is whether it’s possible to talk sense into him.
Dear Sean the Sorcerer,
Lovecraft didn’t believe in his own creations, so why should you? If you are deceived, perhaps by the so-called “Simonomicon,” into believing that Lovecraft was drawing on esoteric sources not widely known rather than on his own imagination combined with an occasional historical or occult reference for verisimilitude, you can easily disabuse yourself of your misconceptions by reading a biography of him, or by looking into his correspondence.
Hahahahaha. H. P. Lovecraft didn’t invent his mythos any more than Moses did; he was simply the first Westerner of note to reveal the truth of the abysmal cosmic religion whose existence predates humanity, earthly life and probably the Big Bang itself. Whether or not Lovecraft knew he was a prophet is irrelevant because his revelations speak for themselves.
You won’t be able to talk your “sense” into me so long as I am under the influence of entities from dimensions at best tangent to our own. I could request an exorcism, but I doubt very much that your Christian sorcerers, armed only with crosses, holy water, the Rituale Romanum and the names of Johnny-come-lately gods, saints and angels, would have much luck against elder deities from orthogonal universes.
I am wondering how you are able to be under the influence of these entities if they are from dimensions at best tangent to ours, but I don’t think I’ll ask, since I now strongly suspect you’re merely posting here to amuse yourself.
Or perhaps you really do have as much trouble distinguishing fiction from reality as you say you do. If you really can’t bear the thought of following any of the real, time-honored and sophisticated religions or philosophies, but have to get your ideas from movies and paperbacks, you should perhaps think about finding inspiration in some works of fiction less shallow than Star Wars or less openly silly than Lovecraft.
Given that this person has elsewhere gone as “Sith Master Sean,” I think it’s safe to say that either he does NOT both follow a squid-headed alien invented for entertaining fiction AND practice the evil perversion of a life force invented for a different entertaining fiction, in which case he’s being silly and his words are not worth taking seriously, or he DOES believe in both of them and is thus insane and his words are not worth taking seriously.
Maybe the Cthulhu cultist bit is just a Halloween costume, and the Sith Master will show up again in a few days.
I guess I didn’t realize this was the same guy. But before he was talking making Star Wars references and now it’s Lovecraft . . . I suspect this is just a troll, giggling because he’s getting us to answer him seriously.
The lesson to be learned here: The dangers of your mother not kicking you out of the basement at the appropriate time. I wonder if the Sorcerer notices anything about his own writing. Primarily how the FBI usually wishes they had knowledge of it before the body-bags come out. Does your mother know you are losing your mind?
You are in need of mental help. Or you need more challanging material at your high school.
Catholics do not have sex with condoms and they do not kill their unwanted children. It’s not them who are afraid of the “fecund” power of sex.
Methinks he neglected to look up “fecund” before he used it.
Heh, I noticed that too. I also remember an episode of the Daily Show in which Christopher Hitchens said that Christians were “afraid of the womb.”
What terminology do you reserve for anyone who send their children to public schools, given that about one out of ten children thus sent report being sexually molested by the staff, and making them about 100 times more dangerous to children?
Wait, one out of ten? That’s a lot.
Do you have materials you can refer me to? I have a passing interest in the subject, but can rarely find more than rhetoric.
Dr. Carol Shakeshaft conducted the study as part of No Child Left Behind — “Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature.”
John, I do believe he is accusing you of using Aristotlean logic rather than Null-A.
I’ll note that in the real world (as opposed to the world of Null-A) there are several useful alternatives to binary logic, among them:
3-valued logic (true, false, unknown),
4-valued logic (true, false, indeterminate, contradictory)
fuzzy-valued logic (more or less true)
probability logic (more or less likely to be true)
However, the logic used to express these alternative logics is always, you guessed it, binary.
C’mon man, this is just blatant trolling now. The earlier stuff, where you claimed to be a Satanist and Sith Master and worship evil, was at least humorously ridiculous. I know it’s very hipster of me to say it, but your older stuff was better.
“Free to copulate with his mistresses and catamites and carriage horses?” I don’t know, this seems offensive to me.
I mean, “Concubines, Catamites, and Carriage Horses” has triple alliteration, and thus would be a better name for a band.
Excellent! I will make the change immediate;y!
It’s quadruple alliteration if you count “copulate.”
It is thanks to reading your many essays that I got an A in my Critical Thinking class, and far more importantly came to view the world the way I do. My only regret is that I can’t repay you in kind, down here in the comments section.
On a slightly off topic note, if it isn’t too much trouble I’d be interested in a recommended reading list. The more I read your posts, the more woefully uneducated I feel about the basis of Western thought.
I would be delighted to share my recommended reading list:
http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/academic/readlist.shtml
I had an aunt go to St. Johns, My grandfather said it was the equivalent to driving a high end car into the ocean each year. The local library had the great books of the western world so I read most of them, but not in order and I notice the reading list is somewhat different. Have to ask based on the ordering, do students see the Senior year as a let down? are they frustrated by it or do they see it as being the best year?
Why is there nothing by Georg Cantor, Bertrand Russell (and Whitehead), Alonzo Church, Alan Turing, Kurt Godel, John Maynard Keynes, John Stuart Mill, Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein, Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege, or Avram Noam Chomsky?
I can see Mills or (possibly) Russell making the list, but not sure about the others. I’m honestly surprised Mills isn’t there to begin with. However, I would imagine the reason those authors are not on there is that they were all modern writers (i.e. 20th century). No, the argument is not how old the books that are on there are. As I understand it, one of the main intents of the Great Books program was to include books with TIMELESS appeal, and not ones that merely confirm MODERN sensibilities. 20th century books might or might not fit that bill.
For that matter, if we’re to include Keynes on the list, why not Hayek or Mises? If we’re to include Wittgenstein and Chomsky*, why not Korzybski or SI Hayakawa? If I had my way I’d throw Aldous Huxley on the list too, but I’ll be one of the first to admit, for as much as it influenced me, it might not make the grade. Though, George Orwell might be a genuine oversight.
Again, the intent and purpose of the Great Books program is to discuss books that possess relevance to the human condition, timelessness, and their infinite readability. The standard is set ridiculously high for a reason (and the main reason why I would go to one of the Great Books colleges if ever afforded the opportunity…I’m sick to death of craptastic textbooks, teachers with agendas, and mediocre news clippings).
*From everything I’ve heard these guys can’t elucidate any truth, because they’ve long since abandoned the notion that they can make declarative sentences…ie how can you speak a truth, if you don’t even know what “is” means? *sigh*
Mr Wright made a post about this back in 07: http://johncwright.livejournal.com/70389.html
Cantor would be more background for everyone not involved in economics that I listed, I could see leaving him off though.
Church and/or Turing as in the Church-Turing Thesis (Turing Machines) is the basis for your computer. Turing also has “computing machinery and intelligence” which asks the question of “can machines think”, I suppose it isn’t timeless though as presumably that question will be definitively answered at some point in the future.
Kurt Godel’s paper is actually relatively short and it is relevant to both Russell and Turing-Church, it is certainly timeless.
Keynes we can hope is transitory and possibly Marx gives enough to understand everything Keynesian.
Wittgenstein and at least some of Chomsky we can also hope are transitory, they are however highly influential in the current culture but perhaps not timeless. Some of Chomsky’s work helps one to understand Occupy Wall Street for instance. Other parts of Chomsky’s work is actually useful and used (a lot).
I cannot speak for anyone else: in my eyes, the Senior year was a remarkable letdown. The quality and clarity of the thinking dropped sharply. My belief that the modern world degenerated mentally and morally even while it improved in the physical sciences and industrialization stems from my Senior year.
It is as if they all went mad. For many years I wondered at the reason, never finding one I thought satisfactory. It was not until I read GK Chesterton that I found out: in one of his most famous misquotes of all time, Chesterton says that when Man will not believe in God, he does not believe in nothing, he will believe in anything. Modern philosophers adopted a procedure of rational skepticism sternly divorced from human nature, experience, wisdom, and logic, and attempted to deduce what human nature and the universe must be like, starting from the assumption that all assumptions were false. The results were nonsense: Marx writes a book on economics saying that all books on economics are an ideological superstructure meant to support class interests. Taking his own work at his word, he is admitting he is writing rationalizations. Freud writes a book saying all human thought is rationalization of subconscious irrational impulses thwarted by the repression of virtue. Taken at face value, this is an admission that Freudian psychology is a set of excuses to justify vice. Hegel writes that all philosophy is the evolution toward an absolute idea, that proceeds by a dialectic of opposites. Taken at face value, this means that contradicting Hegel will improve him. Behaviorism says that man is a meat machine an not a rational animal. Taken at face value, it means nothing at all, since rational animals investigating the mind of rational animals cannot assume away the subject matter of the investigation. Logical positivists makes the absolute metaphysical statement that all absolute metaphysical statements are false. Wittgenstein thunders that to make any absolute statement of moral principles is, in principles, absolutely wrong. And on and on.
I can think of no modern philosophy that did not attempt to approach the study of man as if from the point of view outside of man, in a vain search for objectivity, which, if take at face value, eliminates the investigator as a logically possible entity capable of such an investigation.
These are mistakes a schoolboy with one semester of philosophy can see, and errors that can be exploded in a single paragraph. How do they hold such a stranglehold grip on the modern imagination?
The answer is simple. The all start from an incorrect theological principle that God may or may nor exist, therefore man can be understood from the point of view of man, and yet from the point of view that is objective, i.e. not-man. If you look at man from the point of view of God, you may indeed get some insight. If you look at man from the point of view of an imaginary solipsist who believes nothing, not even that man exists, you get no insight.
The known is known in light of the unknown. No one can stare at the sun with a naked eye, but it is by sunlight that we see colors. The attempt to see colors without light is doomed to failure: it leads to the conclusion that all colors are black. Likewise here: the modern attempt to treat man merely a natural phenomenon, like an animal or a machine or a by-product of an economic process, leads to conclusions that are false to facts, and howlingly wrong and obviously self-refuting.
If you accept the first four axioms of geometry without Playfair’s axiom, you get non-Euclidean geometry. If you accept none of the axioms, you do not get even more non-Euclidean geometry, you get nothing. The modern world is like a geometer who rejects all axioms whatsoever: intellectually, it is nothing, or it is on the road to nowhere.
Back when I went to St. John’s, it was only like driving a decent Ford sedan into the lake every year. It’s gotten unconscionably more expensive since then.
St. John’s never claimed that the program represented everything worth reading – just that the books provide an irreplaceable foundation for understanding Western and world thought. A graduate will, after all, have the rest of his life to read the other stuff.
Freshman and Sophomore year are totally excellent. Things started going downhill in the 2nd half of junior year – Kant. After putting in the effort needed to understand the Prologemena, I didn’t have the intellectual gas left to give Hegel a fair shake (I’m remedying that shortcoming now, and, in a not unrelated development, peeling YEARS off my stay in Purgatory, if I’m so blessed). That Hegel seemed – and still seems – needlessly obfuscatory didn’t help matters.
Senior year is kind of a blur. The science stuff, especially Einstein’s Special Theory, rocked. Philosophy? Not so much. Did a preceptorial (special class outside the regular everybody-takes-the-same-thing curriculum) on Aristotle’s Physics – one of the high points of my education to date.
My memory of Saint John’s is similar. I remember how, when I pointed out that Kant’s arguments are not rigorous because he does not define any of his terms, I was scolded for being an obscurantist. I do like his idea of categories, and I think he was on his way to refuting the logically absurd total skepticism of Hume, but the prose was so turgid and opaque, the hair splitting so filled with pettifoggery, that the clear logic of Aquinas and Euclid shined by comparison. One can disagree with Hobbes, but he defined his terms and drew out a logical argument.
We read the Federalist papers for Senior Year, which I liked, and Freud and Nietzsche, who were clearly second-rate thinkers that possessed some inexplicable power to provoke adoration in otherwise intelligent intellectuals — I never understood the appeal of Freddy’s admixture of rant and myth and crap, and unsupported statements and brain-bursts of poetical glossolalia. It was not philosophy, whatever it was, and it sure was not science.
The other thing worthwhile in Senior year was Tolstoy. WAR AND PEACE was worth the price of senior year tuition just by itself.
Dear Mr. Wright:
Took a look at the recommended books list. I’ve read some, like Homer, Dante, and Cervantes, but not all of the others. I was surprised the MEDITATIONS of Emperor Marcus Aurelius was not included, however.
In past essays, you wrote that as a Stoic u favored Epictetus. So, I wondered what you thought of Marcus’ MEDITATIONS, which I’ve read at least twice.
Sincerely, Sean M. Brooks
He was on the list when I was there. Even Saint John’s has been influenced by the poison of political correctness: they booted Marcus Aurelius to make room for someone else.
i admire MEDITATIONS very much. I wish they were more widely read. Any philosophy that both an Emperor and a slave can agree upon is immune from the accusation of being parochial.
Someone who was not on the reading list in my day was W, Dubois, who is only on the program not for the merit of his writing, nor its influence on Western thought, but because of the color of his skin.
Dear Mr. Wright:
Thanks for your comments. I too am disgusted Marcus Aurelius’ MEDITATIONS was removed from the recommended books list for PC reasons. You mentioned Dubois as one writer you would not have recommended, and there were other authors I was surprised to find listed. Altho I would need to go look the list up again to be sure of names.
Frankly, your comment about His Imperial Majesty’s MEDITATIONS being removed due to PC reasons made me darkly wonder if that was because of what Marcus Aurelius wrote of his father Antoninus Pius in MEDITATIONS 1, 16: “And I observed that he had overcome all passion for boys.” We both know too well how unPC it is to be critical of homosexuality! And the very idea a man can overcome this disordered passion would also get you cast out into outer darkness by “progressive” types!
I like to check the accuracy of later translations of the MEDITATIONS by how they render the line I quoted above. Alas, recent translations usually bowdlerize the text with “pleasures” or “joys.” Yet another example of the sickening march of Political Correctness!
Sincerely, Sean M. Brooks
No, no. I did not say MEDITATIONS was removed for PC reasons. I only said it was missing. I realize that complaining that a nobody who I never heard of who was added for PC reasons in the same post makes it look like there is a cause and effect there, but I am not claiming there is a cause and effect, only an opportunity cost.
Rabelais was also on the list when I went to school. He is a writer whom I would not mind see taken off the list to make room for writers like Seneca and Cicero.
Dear Mr. Wright:
Yes, I see what you mean. I did jump too quickly to the conclusion Marcus Aurelius’ MEDITATIONS was removed for unworthy PC reasons. We don’t absolutely KNOW that was the case.
Cicero and Seneca? No objections to them being on the list. But how about Boethius’ THE CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY? I’ve read him as well with great pleasure.
Sincerely, Sean M. Brooks
I’d like to second that and mention that this blog was a great supplement to my philosophical education at seminary.
Thirded. Your parental duty argument against abortion was very helpful in a philosophy class, and your writing in general has been very helpful in my learning as a philosopher and fantasist.
Bravo. If you are saying that Kant is the source of our modern disaster, I could not agree more. There was a reason Mendelssohn called Kant “the all-destroyer” – he is. In every branch of philosophy he is like a toxic, invisible gas that kills everything. I felt literally sick reading his ethics even though it was merely the same shrewd trick he pulled in his metaphysics.
It is also one of the dumbest philosophies ever dreamed up – don’t let the one and a half page sentences, convolutions, and utter mountains of almost indecipherable jargon fool you, people. It is retarded.
The only reason to read it is to be armed against it. But it is so stupidly self-refuting. Kant’s philosophy exists in the phenomenal world, therefore we cannot know Kant’s philosophy in-itself, noumenally. We cannot know what Kant said according to his own philosophy and neither could he.
I read somewhere that he had said one of his missions was to save religion from the onslaught of reason, and that he sought to limit reason to make room for faith. He didn’t do that, he destroyed religion as well.
You spoke of the Protestants, may I suggest, if it helps, that they represent Kantinized Christianity?
“You spoke of the Protestants, may I suggest, if it helps, that they represent Kantinized Christianity?”
I’d say that may more apply to modern wishy-washy Christianity, which Protestants in touch with their roots are not. A po-mo Christian will latch onto the concept of God as unknowable, and conclude that we cannot know the will of God (even though He’s kinda, y’know, told us), so there is no need to place a high value on obedience and decry what everyone once knew to be sins because the only thing known for certain is that God is loving and accepting of everyone. This cancer appears to have infected Protestantism much deeper than Catholicism, which surprises me little. But Protestants in touch with their Protestant roots are very insistent that “Thus saith the LORD” and never swerving from what they have concluded the LORD hath saith or however you work the tenses.
A distaste for Kant is one point of several where Objectivists and Thomists can agree.
[...] reading the inestimable John C. Wright, who writes faster than I can think, on one of his whirlwind tours of Philosophy, History and Modern Culture, when a connection I had not made dawned on me: That Hegel rejects logic and embraces the dialectic [...]
Chesterton in Everlasting Man distinguished between Paganism of God, of Gods, of Demons and of Philosophers.
Your argument is confounds very different paganisms and thus gets confused.
I’d be curious to know what the short step is from “X is beyond our powers of observation and reason” to “X is whatever we want it to be”. It sounds more like a serious misunderstanding than a “short step”.
Kant wasn’t, by the way the one who posited this sort of noumenal reality. Berkeley argued from the primacy of sense impressions to the conclusion that the sense impressions are all there is. He then concluded that since the world is just a sequence of sense impressions and since there has to be some underlying truth to tie it all logically together, that therefore all of our experience is given to us in real time by God. In other words, God didn’t just create the world and let it run on its own, each new second, each new sense impression by every human being is part of an ongoing creation. Therefore, in Berkeley’s philosophy God is the underlying noumenal reality.
Surely it would be easier for an atheist to start from Berkeley’s system to get to the idea that we “create our own reality” than from Kant’s. But since Kant was Continental like the early irrationalist, they cited him more, so he gets the blame.
“I’d be curious to know what the short step is from “X is beyond our powers of observation and reason” to “X is whatever we want it to be”.”
My guess — and it is only a guess so more knowledgeable refutations are welcomed — is to note that for something to be truly beyond observation and reason it has to be totally disconnected from us in any logically causal sense, otherwise it would be possible to infer knowledge about the Noumenal cause by observing material effects, like divining the existence of an invisible planet from the gravitational wobbles it causes in other planets’ orbits.
If you don’t know how or if the Noumen affects the Materium in any proposed instance, then no hypothesis about the nature of the Noumen can be falsified in any way, and thus we accept or reject particular hypotheses based on how well they can be used to serve our needs or desires rather than on objective assessment of accuracy. A slightly more technically accurate phrasing might be that for ethical purposes, a completely unknowable Noumen may as well be treated as whatever you wish it to be, since it cannot make any difference either way.
In your analogy the unknown thing is a sort of thing that we might have knowledge about. We know about other planets, so we can extend our knowledge of other planets to make predictions about the unknown planet. Noumena are not in that category. Noumena are things that we can know nothing about in principle, nor anything like them. Anything that we can observe is by definition a phenomenon, not a noumenon. It is simply a category mistake to take our knowledge about phenomena and apply it to noumena because there is no reason to think that noumena have anything at all in common with phenomena.
Here is an analogy. Let nature be represented by a mysterious ticker tape machine outputting little symbols on a paper tape. We observers only have the symbols on the tape to reason about, we can’t get into the guts of the machine (just like in nature itself, we only have our sense impressions to reason about). Observation might tell you that a string of four a’s is always followed by 4 b’s, and you could posit this as a natural law: a’s cause b’s, until further observation shows that there are exceptions to the law and you have to refine your theories. You could develop an in-depth science of these ticker-tape symbols.
However, no matter how well you come to understand the patterns of characters on the tape, it will never help you to understand the machinery inside the box that is producing the tape. Keep in mind that in this example, you have no knowledge of machinery at all. The only causality that you know about is the causality between symbols on a tape. Any theory you come up with about machinery is going to involve symbols on a table –which is not even in the right ballpark.
The symbols on the tape are phenomena –they constitute everything that you might ever, in principle, have any empirical evidence about. Whatever goes on underneath that is noumena, something that in principle you can know nothing about because we have no investigative tools capable of exploring it.
“However, no matter how well you come to understand the patterns of characters on the tape, it will never help you to understand the machinery inside the box that is producing the tape.”
Agreed; and if you can never know anything about or understand that machinery, then the only criterion that lets you choose between the hypotheses of “This machine was obviously the product of a Creator, and we should examine its output for guides to how we should live” and “This machine is a random accident of even greater machines, and we should treat its output solely as raw material to subjugate, discard or exploit as we desire” is internal preference, not logical assessment.
Which was my point: if you define the Noumena as everything which cannot be observed or reasoned out, you may as well define it as whatever you wish since nobody’s observations or reasoning, not even your own, can contradict you, by definition.
Good layout of the issues with Kant. I’ll only add: it’s even worse than that. The purplest passage in Kant’s Prologemena is where, towards the end, he addresses the accusation that he is a solipsist. No, I’m not, he says, because *something* must exist out there because mumble mumble mumble. Or, more accurately, some neumenon must exist, because otherwise I, Kant, am a solipsist, which I’m not, therefore, there’s something out there which has managed to breach the unbreachable void and communicate its neumenal existence to me.
Stoooopid.
“Stoopid”? That’s rich, said about someone who is widely acknowledge as one of the greatest thinkers in history by someone who has nothing better to offer in opposition than a ridiculous caricature of his position.
Meanwhile, what exactly is your solution to the problem he was trying to solve, which is how one can have genuine a priori knowledge about nature?
And for that matter, maybe you can explain how form and matter are different from phenomena and noumena. I’ve always wondered about that. Would an Aristotlean say that we can have knowledge about matter when all we know about the matter is the form that it takes?
[...] I have received it from that prolific sci-fi writer John C. Wright, specifically the post Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, and he insisted that I use it. (Should John be reading this, which I doubt, for only my girlfriend [...]
“The difference between Harold Camping and you is that Camping has the courage of his convictions.”
No, the difference is that Harold Camping claims to know the date of the end of the world, and John Hutchins doesn’t.
Oops. This is in the wrong spot.
I disagree quite strongly. If you do not believe the thing is indeed close at hand, in a sense that reasonable persons will agree on – not “sometime in the next millennium” – then you should not use the phrase. As for the ‘Revelation’, I suggest that this ought not to be a defense for your own sloppy language. If the author of Revelations genuinely thought that the vision he had seen was to arrive shortly, then he was clearly mistaken in any sane interpretation of “close at hand”; if he did not think so, he was just lying. 2000 years may be a short timescale to a god, but the bible was not written for gods, it was written to communicate with humans. When it says “close at hand”, and the thing predicted does not arrive for 2000 years, then I suggest that the prediction should be considered wrong.
I would like you to stop using the language of certainty when you are not in fact certain. You want to have it both ways: When you are not challenged, you breezily assert that something is “close at hand”; when questioned about the exact meaning of that, we suddenly find that you intended to say “within the next 70 years… probably”. This is dishonest.
Fair enough, but I wasn’t proposing a game of chance, nor a negative-sum one. Either Jesus returns or he doesn’t; the proposed game would transfer money to the one who is better informed on the matter. This is not immoral any more than transferring money to the one who best judges the available investments. In the case of dice or roulette, there cannot be any better information, assuming of course that the dice are not rigged. Thus Mr Hutchins’s objection that he does not gamble, which presumably rests on a moral objection either to games of chance or to negative-sum games, does not hold.
“When you are not challenged, you breezily assert that something is “close at hand”; when questioned about the exact meaning of that, we suddenly find that you intended to say “within the next 70 years… probably”. This is dishonest. ”
When I am responding to someone that says “because I submit to you that that day is very close at hand!” in reference to things that based on what he said and his title can rightly be thought of referring to parts of the book of Revelation then using the same phrase is not “breezily assert”ing anything.
I intend to say that based not only on the the Revelation of St. John but also on modern revelation the second coming of Christ will happen soon as measured by the giver of all true revelation. As measured by man, I can not say what is to be defined as soon when dealing with historic time scales. As measured by the life of a man then it can be viewed that the second coming occurs for that person whenever they die.
Your problem then appears to be more a problem with me believing in the Revelation of St. John than it is with anything else. That or you should be asking Sean when he thinks “close at hand” is as that would provide more information as to when (if he were to be right) my “close at hand” is. Considering as how you are an atheist then it is in the interest of your belief system and viewed as virtuous in the same to proclaim the revelations of God to be wrong, even if large parts of the revelation are already fulfilled.
Such belief is not among your more attractive traits, true.
That is untrue.
You aren’t an atheist any more? To what religion did you convert?
Haven’t you read your Narnia? Aslan calls all times near.
I’ll notice, though, that you seem to have completely ignored the point that the person he was quoting used exactly the same phrase. I wouldn’t call it an error for someone who even did not believe the day was “close at hand” to use such a phrase not to declare beliefs but to pose a rhetorical challenge, as Mr. Hutchins did – the point of his post was not “The Second Coming is close at hand!” but “My God is bigger than all your gods put together!” Roughly paraphrased.
Of course, now I’m wondering what the response would have been if you’d posed a similar wager to our good buddy Sean.
Well, it seemed to me that our sorcerous friend was unlikely to actually believe what he was saying, unlike Mr Hutchins. Nonetheless, here is his chance to make some money off his esoteric knowledge, if he is still reading; if he cares to offer a specific date for the gobbling-up of the Earth, I’ll bet against him provided it’s not too far in the future. Bets of ten years’ duration are, I think, my outside limit; note that the structure of the bet requires me to pony up right away, while if I win, I need to track down a chance-met stranger from ten years earlier, who is perhaps unlikely to be frequenting the same parts of the Internet.
Two points. First, you imply that I think games of chance are immoral. Just to be clear –I do not believe that. Games of chance are morally different from investing just as boxing is morally different from fighting in self-defense. Neither is strictly immoral, but they are morally different in the sense that when you decide if it is OK in these or those circumstances, gambling and boxing are moral in fewer circumstances than investing and self defense are.
Second, I don’t see a moral difference between games of chance vs. wagering on predictions. Both may or may not involve skill or knowledge of the players. Both are zero-sum games (games of chance may have a negative rate of return for the gambler in a casino, but they are still zero-sum, not negative-sum because the casino has a positive rate of return). If a person does not gamble on games of chance, I would not expect them to take those sorts of wagers either.
If the author of Revelations genuinely thought that the vision he had seen was to arrive shortly, then he was clearly mistaken in any sane interpretation of “close at hand”
In this case, the prophet may be fallible without the prophecy itself being so, as the mistake would lie in St. John’s perception of the prophecy rather than the prophecy itself. However, my understanding is that St. John used the phrase to reemphasize the theme of vigilance concerning the Second Coming found in the Gospels, such as Matt 24:36-44 (“But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.”, etc.) and Matt 25:1-13 (“Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”, etc.)
“Revelations” is incorrect, though a common mistake. It is the Book of Revelation, or Revelation – in Greek, apokalupsis, which is singular.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Revelation
[...] to follow the logic. This is not theory – as the master logician John C. Wright explains in the already linked essay, logic has its own momentum or gravity, making it work to be inconsistent -it’s an uphill [...]
“the American Revolution was a rebellion of conservative Christian landowners eager to preserve their ancient rights and liberties as Englishmen”
So England was either unfree or England was free but denying freedom to English
settlers.
I suppose as an American, you are likely to defend your revolution but Chesterton
in his Short History of England remarks that it was not the question of English Govt
doing anything but of Americans wanting to separate.
Also, Belloc, a Catholic writer maintained that there is no necessary antagonism
between Catholicism and the theory behind the French Revolution (The French Revolution).
“The American Revolutionary view says that the state belongs as a servant to the people.”
But does the Catholic Church agree?
You, in a previous exchange, maintained that the State possesses authorities not delegated
to it by the people and this is a common conservative understanding.
The implication is not the State is servant to people but rather it is their Father or a Roof
(to express as Solzhenitsyn does in November 1916).
Frankly the limited government as expressed in the American Constitution applies
only to the Federal Govt and the Constitution is silent as the the local and state govts.
They can be as unlimited as the local residents like.
I have seen no reason to believe that the Founding Fathers rebelled for any other reason than the explicit reasons they gave: that the English King was trampling on rights granted to colonists in their charters, or granted by the unwritten constitution of England to all Englishmen. Being men of a particularly erudite and logical generation, they grounded their specific objections in a general theory of government legitimacy and authority which perfectly encapsulates the thought of the English Enlightenment. (And to answer your question, there is no trace of Catholic sentiment in either the American mutiny nor the British authority. Both were overwhelmingly Protestant. The Marylanders and Anglocatholics did not influence the outcome of the revolt.)
“You, in a previous exchange, maintained that the State possesses authorities not delegated to it by the people and this is a common conservative understanding.”
To call the Ninth and Tenth Amendment a ‘common conservative understanding’ is a bit of an understatement. It is settled law, written in black and white, and not open to serious legal dispute. (It is, of course, ignored by the forces wishing to expand the scope of the federal government beyond Constitutional ground, but this is never done by serious argument: the point is merely ignored.)
I am afraid I don’t understand what you mean by the state being a father or a roof. That is not a sentiment ever heard expressed in America. Even those bent on erecting a totalitarian state here, still use the language and slogans of the state being our servant. We the people are the sovereign. Here in America, both Left and Right agree on that point beyond any dispute, even if they mean something different by it.
“Frankly the limited government as expressed in the American Constitution applies only to the Federal Govt and the Constitution is silent as the the local and state govts.
They can be as unlimited as the local residents like.”
This is a gross misstatement of the law.
After the Civil War, the American common law incorporated, in part or in full, certain of the Bill of Rights provisions as blocking of limited the states governments from intruding on specific rights. Whether or not the Third Amendment (against quartering troops in private homes) applies to state government is undecided, but state legislatures making a law infringing an the free exercise of religion, for example, is settled law: it is unconstitutional.
You are forgetting the transaction costs: Time spent in rolling the dice or otherwise playing the game, and the capital of having a casino in the first place. The individual gamble is zero-sum, in that it transfers a fixed amount of money from loser to winner; but the activity as a whole is negative-sum.
Ok, time to make some careful distinctions. A game of chance, sensu strictu, is one that involves no skill on the part of the players; for example, wagering on the roll of dice. Poker, although it has a large element of luck, is not a game of chance in this sense – in fact such games are quite rare. There is a luck-skill continuum in games, which stretches from pure chance on the one end – dice, roulette – to pure skill on the other, as in chess and checkers.
Now, there are several moral objections one can have to gambling; possibly Mr Hutchins will let us know which he subscribes to. One is that it is negative-sum, in effect destroying resources. Another is that winners and losers do not correlate to any virtue. A third is more practical, that gambling can become an addiction which, like any addiction, can destroy homes and families. To the extent that Mr Hutchins’s objection to gambling is based on any of these, I do not think that he ought to object to the particular wager I had in mind: The bet is zero-sum, transfers resources to the better-informed man (thus it is not uncorrelated with virtue), and seems rather unlikely to become addictive. If he has other objections, of course, they may still hold.
[...] John C. Wright at the top of his game. [...]