Reasonings Archive

The Opiate of Intellectuals

Posted January 26, 2023 By John C Wright

Scholars have debated the centrality of his rejection of religion to the Marxist scheme.

I propose atheism is fundamental to Marxism, but it is an odd form of atheism, for it follows the form of Gnostic heresy. Marxism, in other words, is an atheist religion.

In  the Introduction his A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right [First published in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, February 1844] in the opening sentence, Karl Marx states: “For Germany, the criticism of religion has been essentially completed, and the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism.” (italics in the original)

With these words, Marx himself defines the atheist rejection of religion as a prerequisite to all criticism.

“All criticism” here means all further effort of his grandiose scheme of remaking the suffering world of man into utopia.

More to the point, overlooked by scholars, these words also adumbrate that religion is absolutely central to the Marxist scheme because it is a religious scheme.

The world-revolution of Marx is an ersatz Armageddon or Gotterdammerung. His utopia is an ersatz New Jerusalem.

Marx is not a political reformer, but a heretic.

He is not proposing a new form of government, but a new god.

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Revisiting Saint Anselm

Posted December 16, 2022 By John C Wright

The Ontological proof of the existence of God as propounded by Saint Anselm is one that should be familiar to all serious students of philosophy, of which I endeavor to be one.

It is famous, if not notorious, for being devout and deep while being equivocal and absurd.

Schoolmen and savants, including the famed Emmanuel Kant, accuse it of containing a classical blunder of logic, which is sometimes called the Existential Fallacy, namely, that one cannot define something into existence.

What is often forgotten is that equally famed philosophers, from Descartes to Hegel, including great schoolmen like Alexander of Hales and Dun Scotus, supported it.

I confess I had forgotten, or, rather, never knew of further arguments in St. Anselm’s favor.

Hence, I was taken quite by surprise, when I was reading St. Anselm’s Proslogion to my youngest boy as a bedtime story, to find the argument far more gripping and convincing than when I read it in my callow youth, as a college sophomore.

I am now no longer convinced that we critics of St. Anselm are correct.

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Campbell’s Hero’s Journey is Bunk

Posted November 25, 2022 By John C Wright

We were discussing Campbell’s conception that a wheel-shaped pattern called the Hero’s Journey underpins folk tale and myth for all foundational heroic stories, across all cultures and generations.

I admit to be deeply unimpressed with Joseph Campbell’s writing, after reading three or four of his books. Allow me to say why.

His conceit is that “The Hero’s Journey” begins when some difficulty, a curse or pollution, arises within the safe walls of the home or ordered community where the young hero resides. The hero is reluctant to quest for a solution at first; then goes along the road to adventure; along the way, he receives wise counsel from a mentor, perhaps a wizard or supernatural animal; he enters the perilous realm of the unknown as if entering a cave; he encounters allies and enemies; he suffers a supreme challenge, or death; he is reborn anew; he walks the road of return to find again the known world, now armed with the magic sword, special wisdom, or elixir of life needed to cure the curse; he benefits the community, restores order, and becomes king.

As our own Mary Catelli observes, the problem is that every story could be tortured into the Hero’s Journey.

Please note that, if read in a sufficiently loose way, these steps are not any particular portrayal of human psychology. These steps are the rising action, climax, falling action of any drama.

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Fascism is Leftist

Posted October 25, 2022 By John C Wright

It would be nice, if, once and for all, the smear used by the Left of calling everyone who supports fascism “anti-fascist” and everyone who opposes fascism “fascist” were abolished and forgotten.

This lie, as all commonplace lies in the modern press and modern politics, is Leftist.

The designation of Left or Right, originally born in the politics of monarchic France, was co-opted by the Socialists to apply it to themselves, in order to cloak their totalitarian death-cult dogmas in the glamor and demeanor of pro-liberty and pro-equality measures popularized by the writings of Locke and Montesquieu and the success of the American Revolution.

Only by avoiding definitions, can the confusion of terms continue.

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Racism is not Racial

Posted October 23, 2022 By John C Wright

Some claim that the White Race is a kind of clan, hence a natural clan loyalty binds all Whites together, for membership in a clan creates a common interest demanding submission to the need for mutual action, regardless of circumstances or personal preferences. You skin color is your uniform.

The claim goes further: Even those Whites not predisposed to vow fealty to Whiteness must do so, since the other races shall combine against us, or already have. Examples of Jews protecting and promoting each other, Blacks receiving special and privileged treatment in corporate hiring, college admissions, and favorable news reporting, are used to show the combination against Whites. No one may print nor purchase WHITE LIVES MATTER on a tee-shirt.

Hence, we Whites form a group as defined by our mutual enemies, so we might as well be loyal to it, and use race as a paramount consideration when determining our group membership and group actions.

So runs the argument.

I beg to differ. The White Race is not a clan. It is nothing of the kind.

A clan is a group of people related by blood. A race, in the older sense of the word, is a group of people related by language and culture and largely by blood but not necessarily by blood (as a Dark Irish is still considered an Irishman, despite Spanish blood in his veins) .

In the older sense of the word, a Catalan, a Saxon, a Norman, a Prussian, a Langobard, a Cornishman, all were considered races, what we now call ethnicity.

In the new sense of the word, a race is a breed of mankind with some visible outward sign, more or less arbitrarily selected, to group a large number of ethnics groups together, hence the Whites, Reds, Blacks, and Yellows.

This was done for historical, not scientific reasons: Christendom spread south and east and crossed the Atlantic to discover the New World, and so divided the several (but related) races thus encountered into Asian, African, and American.

Where Semite races and Pacific Islanders fit into this rough category is a matter of debate. Sometimes Jews, Persians and Italians are considered ‘White’ and sometimes not, depending on the preference of the speaker and the phases of the moon.

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Sayet, Green, Winchester, Rand

Posted October 7, 2022 By John C Wright

Ever since seeing Evan Sayet’s seminal lecture on the Regurgitating the Apple (introducing ideas later explored more fully in his book THE KINDER-GARDEN OF EDEN), I have been longing to find an elegant explanation for the myriad, complex, and bewildering paradoxes and self-contradictions of Leftist thinking.

In particular, I wonder why, in the arts and entertainment, my own field, Leftists were once able to produce serviceable stories, or even great, but now are no longer.

Allow me to offer some short quotes or observations, attempting to sum up an admittedly complex topic.

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The Trashcan of Time

Posted September 22, 2022 By John C Wright

A thought experiment in time travel:

The lid of the time-door drops a payload atop it one second into the past. The receiver is directly beneath, such that any payload in the receiver blocks the trapdoor and it cannot open.

If the lid is not open, the box is empty, so the lids opens.

If the lid is open, the box is blocked, so the lid cannot open.

What does an observer see?

Assume the timeline splits at the moment of the experiment, so that one experimenter places the payload on the trapdoor, but two experimenters in two parallel continua see two different results. What does each one see?

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Postscript: Myriad Multiverses

Posted September 9, 2022 By John C Wright

A postscript related to a recent column.

My theory is this: time travel stories propose that there is no privileged frame of reference: any point in time the time traveler enters becomes his present, all before that point is past, and all after is future. But please note that any events affecting the time traveler himself, including his memories, retain their normal arrangement of past, present, future.

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Multiverse and Nihilism

Posted September 8, 2022 By John C Wright

There is a paradox to mortal life: We are eternal beings trapped in the tyranny of time.

In this life, we cannot outrun Father Time’s iron sickle. At best, we can speculate on how it would be to slip the chain of time, to visit the future, change the past, revoke irrevocable decisions, take the path not taken.

As oddly often happens, two films dealing with the selfsame theme have appeared in the theaters at the same time, neither one copying the other. In this case, both are multiverse stories. One I have not seen and one I have.

The first is DOCTOR STRANGE AND THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS starring Benedict Cumberbatch, and the second is EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE, ALL AT ONCE starring Michelle Yeoh.

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An Experiment in Language

Posted September 2, 2022 By John C Wright

Only two terms have been substituted in the following transcript. Please examine the results carefully. 

The words below do not represent the views of any real person. They are being used as an example.  

************************************ 

My fellow Americans, please, if you have a seat, take it.

Tonight, I’ve come to this place where it all began to speak as plainly as I can to the nation about the threats we face, about the power we have in our own hands to meet these threats and about the incredible future that lies in front of us, if only we choose it.

We must never forget, we, the people, are the true heirs of the American experiment that began more than two centuries ago.

We, the people, have burning inside of each of us the flame of liberty that was lit here at Independence Hall. A flame that lit our way through abolition, the Civil War, suffrage, the Great Depression, world wars, civil rights. That sacred flame still burns. Now on our time as we build an America that is more prosperous, free, and just. That is the work of my presidency, a mission I believe in with my whole soul.

But first, we must be honest with each other and with ourselves.

Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal. Emmanuel Goldstein and the Zionist Jew represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic. Read the remainder of this entry »

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Antiphilosophy Disguised as Science

Posted August 13, 2022 By John C Wright

A reader with the binary but cartomantic name of “The Deuce” remarks:

“Darwinism is actually a philosophical claim dressed up as a scientific theory. Specifically, it’s a philosophical claim that teleology in biology can be explained and accounted for via the fully mechanistic and non-teleological.”

Hear, hear and bravo.

I think of Darwinism as the first case of an epidemic disease of skilled scientists acting as unskilled philosophers, and spreading confusion and self-contradiction into the minds of the common man, using prestige in one field, to spread nonsense in another.

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On Usury and Other Dishonest Profits

Posted August 10, 2022 By John C Wright

For the record, usury is not capitalism.

This is from Vix Pervenit (Pope Benedict XIV – 1745):

I. The nature of the sin called usury has its proper place and origin in a loan contract. This financial contract between consenting parties demands, by its very nature, that one return to another only as much as he has received. The sin rests on the fact that sometimes the creditor desires more than he has given. Therefore he contends some gain is owed him beyond that which he loaned, but any gain which exceeds the amount he gave is illicit and usurious.

II. One cannot condone the sin of usury by arguing that the gain is not great or excessive, but rather moderate or small; neither can it be condoned by arguing that the borrower is rich; nor even by arguing that the money borrowed is not left idle, but is spent usefully, either to increase one’s fortune, to purchase new estates, or to engage in business transactions. The law governing loans consists necessarily in the equality of what is given and returned; once the equality has been established, whoever demands more than that violates the terms of the loan. Therefore if one receives interest, he must make restitution according to the commutative bond of justice; its function in human contracts is to assure equality for each one. This law is to be observed in a holy manner. If not observed exactly, reparation must be made.

III. By these remarks, however, We do not deny that at times together with the loan contract certain other titles-which are not at all intrinsic to the contract-may run parallel with it. From these other titles, entirely just and legitimate reasons arise to demand something over and above the amount due on the contract. Nor is it denied that it is very often possible for someone, by means of contracts differing entirely from loans, to spend and invest money legitimately either to provide oneself with an annual income or to engage in legitimate trade and business. From these types of contracts honest gain may be made.

While the Holy Father’s bull on this issue is worded elliptically, the issue is not difficult. The talk of parallel contracts refers to a practice, meant to avoid technical violation of laws against usury, where the interest was written up in a separate contract parallel to the contract for the principle. The holding that parallel contracts are lawful when part of legitimate trade, hence not a return above what one has received, applies to interest payments. In such a case, charging for interest is legitimate, not usury.

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Bio-aesthetic Theory

Posted August 8, 2022 By John C Wright

A reader reports he came across the following argument, and solicited my opinion of it:

” It seems clear to me that beauty must have a total explanation in evolutionary theory. A beautiful forest scene? Simply a sign of a bio prosperous environment likely to contained resources needed for human survival. Human beauty itself? A combination of objectively attractive traits that indicate genetic health or reproducibility, mixed with ones subjective tastes (which are likely controlled by some form of genetic selection for any individual person, looking for someone with proper genetic compatibility). People who claim they find certain buildings aesthetically pleasing are simply confusing their appreciation of the role of the building with how they feel about its design”

This may be a crackpot argument. But frankly, I am not sure what the argument is trying to say.

I do not know what he means by “beauty”; nor what “total explanation” means in this context; nor is it clear what, if anything, evolution theory has to do with anything. It does not seem to be a related concept.

However, assuming he means those words in their ordinary sense, his comment has seven obvious flaws. Let me count the ways.

The first obvious flaw with this theory is telling us where something comes from does not tell us what it is.

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On Words

Posted July 25, 2022 By John C Wright

A large fraction of difficulty in reasoning arises from the misuse of words; a smaller but more dangerous difficulty arises if misuse is avoided by margins so large, that use is lost.

Of misuse, some is deliberate, and some is negligent.

Life on earth is life beneath the Father of Lies, who, for a time, hold dominion here, and deceives the nations.

A high priority of the Prince of Darkness, perhaps paramount, is to teach mankind to ape him, so that man naturally welcomes lies in the form of flattery or newspaper headlines, tells lies in order to win friends and influence people, advertise goods, and advance political or social agendas, and believes lies and comes to love them, in order to create an inner world of self-esteem where one’s own self-identity is unmoored from the constraints of reality.

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Objectivism as Heresy

Posted July 23, 2022 By John C Wright

Ayn Rand is the very definition of a heretic. A heretic is someone who takes one part or one principle of the tradition, treats it as supreme, and uses it as a weapon to override all other parts or principles.

Outside the Biblical worldview, men are not seen as being made in the image and likeness of God. Either men are created in hierarchies, in which the gods place some families or bloodlines over others as part of a cosmic caste system, or men arise from chaos, or accident, without any place or purpose. Absent the principle that all men are sacred, even the most lowly, in the name of the sacred image stamping them, there is no reason justifying respect for the lowly. It is for this reason that slavery was never abolished, nor even regarded as morally dubious, before Christ, not in any century or land in antiquity.

From this principle of Imago Dei, Christianity deduces both respect for the individual, including respect for individual rights (here seen as natural, not granted by birth or king’s fiat) as well as compassion for the poor.

Heretics take the one principle, individualism or compassion, ignore its source, the doctrine of Imago Dei, and use it to excuse violation of the other principle.

In the case of Marx, he took compassion to the poor, and elevated that to a supreme principle overriding individualism, hence overriding any right to life and property. In the name of the people, all these things can be trampled.

In the case of Nietzsche, he took individualism as a supreme principle to override compassion, but also reason, morality, and faith in God. In the name of the will to power, all these things can be trampled.

In the case of Ayn Rand, she took reason as a supreme principle to support individualism, and hence to override altruism, self-sacrifice, compassion to the poor, and faith in God. In the name of reason, all these things can be trampled.

In reality, anyone taking reason as supreme should and would naturally follow the reasoning of Aristotle to it’s culmination in the reasoning of Thomas Aquinas and the Thomists, of which no more rational and logical tribe of man has ever existed. Reason, or Logos, when taken as supreme, naturally allows the philosopher to be be led, step by logical step, into confession of Christ, or Logos. It is the only logical worldview. All others are self contradictory hence irrational, either openly (see Zen Buddhism) or tacitly (see Objectivism).

In Zen, the rational mind is seen as a chattering monkey standing between the soul and the self-abnegation of enlightenment.

In Objectivism, both ironclad adherence to one’s sworn word is paramount, it being crucial that as all productive men must be able to make contracts in a trustworthy fashion, hence one’s sworn word can never be betrayed; while at the same time and in the same sense, and adultery, divorce, contraception and aborticide are permitted as needed, as the romantic impulse is paramount, it being an expression of one’s inmost highest values and sense if life which can never be betrayed, and one’s sworn word in such areas as marriage covenant is of little account.

In reality, outside of the Christian worldview, there is no justification for individualism, no reason to regard the soul as paramount, immortal, or significant, no reason to justify private property as sacrosanct, no reason to respect women, or children, or slaves, and no reason to feel compassion for the poor and lowly.

One may, perhaps, as sentiment, respect the lowly or free the slave outside Christendom, but one cannot give a rational account of why such a thing should be a duty.

Likewise, outside Christendom, one cannot give a rational account of any duty upholding the rights of the individual against the collective — a pagan democracy was based on the power of the commoners as opposed to the noble, not based on the principle that all men are created equal. See, for example, the death of Socrates at the hands of a democratic vote.

Those who recover from Libertarianism or Objectivism often feel betrayed, as if victimized by the sharpster who exploited the naivety and natural selfishness of callow youth.

Such a feeling of betrayal is entirely justified. A heretic is always a traitor, because he takes a tradition to which he owes loyalty, pretending to remain loyal to it, but is only loyal to a part, using that to betray the other parts.

Treason is surely the worst of crimes, because it is always perpetrated against you by someone you trust. If there is anything worse than being stabbed, it is being stabbed in the back.

In the same way the communists take all opposition to communism, from Nazism to Monarchy to Republicanism, and merely call it “rightwing” or “conservative” or “reactionary” — as if Nazism and Communism were not variations on tyranny diametrically opposed to Republicanism — Ayn Rand takes all opposition to Libertarianism, from Communism to Christianity, and merely call it “collectivism” or “mystics of the mind” or “mystics of the body” — as if Libertarianism and Communism were not variations of paganism diametrically opposed to Christianity.

Ayn Rand herself is guilty of the fallacy she labels “the stolen concept fallacy” where one takes a concept that only makes sense in a given context, divorces it from its foundations, and uses the concept as a free-floating axioms to deduce the opposite of what that concept means. Individualism without Christianity is a mystical and arbitrary postulate, a mere excuse for selfishness, which is clearly against the moral intuition of mankind. Ayn Rand commits the naturalistic fallacy, by positing that certain virtues are necessary for survival, ergo those virtues are moral imperatives. But this axiom is mystical, an intuition, based on hedonism, or based on nothing.

Her vision of man as a heroic being is not justified by her axioms: from hedonism, or the axiom that one ought to do what is needed to preserve one’s life, the deduction that one ought to live well, and a free and honest and productive man, simply does not follow. Hedonism can, at most, propose that one should pursue pleasures in a fashion that preserves a long-term ability to pursue pleasure in old age, which, at most, will produce a philosophy of self-centeredness moderated only by a mild temperance — drink in moderation now, so one can continue drinking many years to come — but not the heroism which is the core of Ayn Rand’s vision.

The heroic man Ayn Rand sees an her exemplar, John Galt, in the climactic scene of her magnum opus ATLAS SHRUGGED, suffers literal torture and symbolic death (for his heartbeat stops being heard at one point) in order to shield the girl he loves from arrest, abuse and torture. He faces death for his beloved.

In one of the most transparent examples of special pleading every penned on paper, Galt is made to say that his motive for self-sacrifice is not self-sacrificial, on the grounds that he himself willed the act of self-sacrifice, placing a higher value on the life of his beloved than on his own — aha! but this is still technically selfish, the rational pursuit of self-interested self-preservation, on the grounds that his adoption of the values dictating this outcome was voluntary.

Anything and everything could be justified as self-interest on this grounds, including acts directly contrary to self-interest, such as self-sacrifice. It is a tautology that voluntary acts are voluntary. The question is whether one voluntarily puts self above others, or others above self.

Logic, and the long experience of mankind, shows that one who puts self above others serves neither. One who puts others above self serves both.

Heroism involves self-sacrifice for the greater good. Ayn Rand, in attempting to portray self-interest as heroic, proposed a paradox even her admittedly agile wit and artistic genius could not circumvent.

Outside the Biblical worldview,  individual rights cannot be sacred, because the lowly, the foolish, the stupid, the criminal are all less useful to others and to themselves as the noble, the wise, the learned, and the upright.

If an honest pagan or secular agnostic asks why a halfwitted and dirty criminal, born a bastard and raised in the gutter, should not be sterilized and sent to the galleys as a slave, given this is the only use he can be to society, what pagan or secular answer can be ventured?

Why should we support nature grants him natural rights, if, from the looks of things, nature supports a Darwinian war of all against all, red and bloody in tooth and claw?

The vision of Ayn Rand of man as a ruggedly heroic individual, neither asking nor giving alms, just and perfect in all his ways, neither needing nor granting compassion (save, perhaps, to those who support his worldview) simply cannot arise from reason alone, or nature alone.

Reason says useful men are more useful than useless ones, who, as Aristotle shows, are naturally meant to be slaves to their civilized betters. Nature says there is no compromise, no peace, no quarter, in the Darwinian struggle of the fittest to survive.

The vision of Ayn Rand also, it must be said, cannot arise except from an unchaste woman, sterile and void of children.

Motherhood is self-sacrifice. Motherhood is heroism.

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