Reasonings Archive

The Riddlework of Time

Posted July 9, 2022 By John C Wright

Time confounds man. The central paradox of man is fourfold:

First, reason sees eternal truths; conscience whispers of eternal law; love bespeaks eternal beauty. These airy things are above our grasp, yet no stoic has the self-command nor quietist the resignation as never to yearn for them.

Second, foresight foretells mortality, which condemns all victories to vain oblivion. We make provision for our posterity, even as our forbears did for us. Each generation forges a link in the golden chain between parent and progeny, between tradition and growth.

Third, volition permits man to see and decree between alternative forks the flow of time may bring, whereas beasts are governed by instinct. Volition allows us to volunteer to ignite the fire of current sacrifice which future blessings may demand.

Fourth, wisdom grants awareness of the flowing stream of time, of which the innocent beasts are blissfully unaware. Wisdom recalls things past and forewarns of things to come, allowing us to learn, to regret, to fear, to hope.

The paradox is that all fours blessings are also curses.

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Aristotle in a Non Aristotelian Age

Posted June 6, 2022 By John C Wright

It is only with the greatest reluctance that I reach the conclusion that the modern theory of multivalued logic is illogical, in that it is elliptical and superfluous to restate in confusing jargon what Medieval Schoolmen stated clearly, and in Latin.

Allow me first to explain my reluctance.

In my youth, the science fiction novels by A.E. van Vogt, World of Null-A and Players of Null-A much impressed me, planted the seed of my interest in philosophy, and did much to shape my personality. No books were more influential in my development.

For me, these books are illumed by the elfin cherry-rose twilight dawn hue of magnificent nostalgia. I owe them much, and speak no ungrateful word against them.

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The Leaf of Happiness

Posted May 28, 2022 By John C Wright

WARNING! Spoilers below the link. 

In her Newberry-Award winning children’s book WHERE THE MOUNTAIN MEETS THE MOON, Grace Lin reports the old Chinese fairy tale concerning the Leaf of Happiness.

Once, long ago, a family grew famous for their happiness: uncles, cousins and grandchildren never quarreled, nor was their ever an angry word among them. A bellowing and roaring magistrate, learning this, craved the secret of their happiness for himself. He dispatched soldiers with a small box to the family, commanding the secret of happiness be placed within and carried back to him, or else the soldiers would destroy the home. The grandfather of the happy family happily wrote the secret of happiness on a single leaf of paper which he placed in the box, but, by mischance, the box fell from the hands of the soldiers as they hurried back to the magistrate. The box broke open, the wind snatched the leaf of paper away. Before it vanished, the soldiers saw an odd thing: the paper was written with but a single word on both sides, inscribed over and over again. But what the word was, the soldiers could not see, and the secret of happiness was lost.

When I heard of this tale, I scoffed, doubting that even a storyteller as charming and skilled as Grace Lin, or the wise and ancient mothers inspiring her, could propose a lost word that a cynical and wry graybeard like myself would find satisfying.

After a tale such as this, what one-word answer could possibly be offered as a fitting culmination to the tale, and sum up the secret of happiness?

I am happy to report my scoffing was untoward: let all honest men learn from my error, and creep to conclusions rather than leap, testing each step on the way.

Before the end of the book, the word is revealed.

Do not click this link if you mean to read the book, for my next word is the secret to happiness.

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Seven Answers to the Problem of Pain

Posted May 22, 2022 By John C Wright

A reader with the sunny, angelic, yet septentrionic name of Uriel7 makes a comment worth repeating in full. I present it here as a miniature guest essay:

There are seven answers to “the problem of pain” or “how to be happy”.

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Calling God to the Witness Stand

Posted May 12, 2022 By John C Wright

I have had two strange conversations lately.

Without revealing any personal or embarrassing details about when they took place or with whom, let me say that one was with a theoretical physicist convinced that he could prove God existed by means of empirical observation, using a God-proving machine. He did not describe details of the machine’s operation, so do not ask me.

The other conversation was with a skeptic who held that if God were real, He would make His existence too obvious for doubt; and since He has not, He is not.

Both these positions run afoul of the Catholic teaching that God, as the First Cause and Last End of all things, can, from created things, be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason, even if other details of His divine nature cannot be.

On the one hand, First Causes and Last Ends are not open to empirical senses, even if created things are; on the other, what human reason can know, it can know, not must know. Reason cannot be forced.

The first conversation was neither interesting nor rewarding, since when I asked the physicist how empirical proof can prove a non-empirical reality, or how physics can prove a metaphysical proposition, I was brusquely informed that metaphysics was a null-set, matter without content, and that philosophy was merely abortive and lazy form of physics. I asked politely for his empirical proof that all philosophy was physics, and was belittled for asking, but not answered. Instead the man waved his credentials at me, and boasted many a boastful boast about himself.

I suppose if, like a stage-magician yanking a white hare out of a tophat, he can yank God Almighty out of the mouth of a cyclotronic supercollider or radiotelescopic dish, complete with roaring throne and blazing coronet and living creatures many-winged and filled with blazing eyes, surrounded by fiery rainbows, emerald and amber and jasper, and wheels within wheels and thunders and quakes and voices like the rushing of mighty waters, so that all the skeptics fall groveling  on their faces and beg the mountains to fall on them, in such as case as this, our bold scientiferrifick pioneer of empirical theology will have a good and proper right to boast.

How can one not help but wish such a windbaggish crackpot good luck? We all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly.

The second conversation was more interesting, because at least it gives one pause. Is there something God could do to make Himself too obvious for doubt? I suggest that depends on one’s standard for doubt.

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Malthusians and Cornucopians

Posted May 2, 2022 By John C Wright

Overpopulation concerns, particularly on the fake holiday of Earth Day, were recently once again noised about in the news.  In honor of this ever-looming yet centuries-old threat, I offer a reprint of an essay of mine from decades ago.

Nothing has changed since then. The certain doom of the planet is still twelve years in the future, even as it was twenty years ago, even as it was half a century ago.   

Correction: one thing changed. Shale oil extraction, now called fracking, in this column was a speculation, and is now fact. Since my prediction was perfectly accurate, I merely changed the tense of those sentences from future to past. 

*** *** ***

A Cornucopian is the opposite of a Malthusian.

The term Cornucopian was coined to define the position of economist Julian Simon whose famous wager with doomsayer Paul Ehrlich in a sane world would would have put paid to the Malthusian predictions of the latter. (You can see more about the Simon-Ehrlich wager here.)

The term Malthusian was coined to define the position, now mainstream, based on airy speculations by Rev. Thomas Malthus as laid out in his 1798 writings, An Essay on the Principle of Population which holds that population grows geometrically while the growth of other resources, such as arable land, cannot be but linear.

A Malthusian concludes that population growth (especially of races distasteful to Malthusians occupying Africa, India and Ireland) always outstrips available resources, and this inevitably leads to disastrous scarcity, resulting in mass famine, war, and apocalyptic megadeath.

More people means less stuff.

A Cornucopian says that population growth, while it creates dislocations and even disasters (such as the enclosure laws of England) does not necessarily lead to the scarcity of  any particular resource, nor all of them.

More people does not mean less stuff.

Let me make a startling suggestion — that we look at the evidence that overpopulation exists, ever had existed, or ever will exist.

What evidence is there?

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All Property is Theft

Posted April 28, 2022 By John C Wright

We have heard property rights be dismissed by the catchy phrase that all property is theft.

We have not heard it said from whom the thieves took it.

Those who voice this phrase may be libertarian or leftwing or anarchist or totalitarian from some non-mainstream variation of these schools of thought.

Such would deny a man the right to the fruits of his own labor; or to prevent the copying on his intellectual property; or to prevent trespass on land inherited from his forebears; or to prevent trespass on land pioneered from the wilderness, and made fruitful; and some would deny all of these by denying property rights altogether.

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Against Utopianism

Posted April 12, 2022 By John C Wright

A common argument heard in favor of Socialism, uttered even by those who call themselves detractors of Socialism, is that Socialism works (or should work) in theory, but does not or cannot work in practice.

The reason advanced to explain the failure is that ‘human nature’ is insufficiently benevolent or wise or moral to practice the doctrines of Socialism.

Let us analyze and define this argument before criticizing it:

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Irrational Pi Irrational Physicists

Posted April 2, 2022 By John C Wright

From my youth up, I have noticed professional physicists adding amateur metaphysical speculations to their theories, where, as far as I could tell, their theories required no such assumptions.

Moreover, they regarded metaphysics as contemptable, as mere word spinning, even while they indulged in schoolboy errors in the field.

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The Logic of Logic

Posted March 24, 2022 By John C Wright

Reason is a mystical mystery to the secular mind.

One of the many ironies of the modern age is the triumph of unreason over reason in the name of reason; the skeptics have grown so gullible that they will now believe anything, no matter how openly  foolish, facetious and false.

This includes the idea that unreasoning nature implants reason in man, and that this faculty is reliable. A more foolish idea is that this faculty is not reliable. The first idea requires that reason arise from unreason; the second idea requires we rely on an unreliable faculty of reason to reach the conclusion not to trust our conclusions.

The ironies of the modern age spring from a central, reigning irony:  the glorification of Man over God has overthrown three foundations of the Western worldview.
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The Ship of Theseus and the Demon of Descartes

Posted February 6, 2022 By John C Wright

Philosophy traditionally was divided into seven major branches:

  • Epistemology: the study of knowledge. What is truth?
  • Logic: the study of formal reasoning. What follows truth? Wither leads it? What conclusion must be true if a given statement is true?
  • Metaphysics: the study of first principles. What precedes truth?  Whence come it? What premiss must be true when a given statement is true?
  • Ethics: the study of virtue. What ought men do to be true?
  • Natural Philosophy: the study of the visible order of creation.
  • Aesthetics: the study of beauty, both in creation and created by man.
  • Theology: the study of the invisible order of creation.

Theology includes the study of revealed truth, which of necessity touches all these foregoing studies. Theology alone unifies all branches of philosophy, hence is rightly called their summit, culmination, and queen.

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Tying the Knot

Posted December 15, 2021 By John C Wright

Written for a nonfiction anthology on Wonder Woman in the popular culture which since fell through, this column debuts here to my readers as a courtesy. 

Why She Will Never Wed Steve Trevor

1. MRS. STEVE TREVOR

Diana Trevor.

Somehow, that name does not have the same authentic ring as Mrs. Lois Kent.

The mental picture of Steve Trevor sweeping the Wonder Woman off her feet and carrying her over the threshold seems comical, not sweet. In contrast, the picture of Lois Lane being carried up, up and away in the arms of her super-strong lover has a certain majesty and inevitability to it: many a girl wants to be swept off her feet and carried into the clouds. Let us look into the matter.

To do this, we must look at what the character of Wonder Woman was meant to be, what she symbolized to her creator, and what later writers have altered her to be, as the verdict of three generations of readers influenced the direction of the comic. We need to note what makes for good drama in a love triangle. A contrast with other romantic melodrama in comics might be instructive. And we need to analyze how the romantic tension in Wonder Woman falls short. Perhaps we can even be so bold as to suggest a remedy.

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Right to Life or Duty to Rear

Posted December 1, 2021 By John C Wright

As a matter of legal reasoning, please note that current law, including truancy laws and child welfare laws, will punish a parent who neglects, abuses, underfeeds, beats, or fails to educate his child.

These laws impose positive duties on parents to protect and rear the child, regardless of the citizenship of the child, nor is there any legal test of capacity or personhood for such things. It is not legal to kill a child who is insane, retarded, nor autistic due to mental incapacity. The childrearing duty applies to all children, regardless.

When does this duty obtain?

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Required Reading for the Day

Posted November 23, 2021 By John C Wright

From the pen of Larry Correia, The Spiked Club of Clarity, as we call him, and Master of Penitential Fisking:

Fisking one of the many Dumb Hot Takes on The Rittenhouse Case

My comment: This case has provoked several columns from me, more than usual for a topic of public interest, but that is for two reasons. First, I regard it as the trial of the decade, the trial that put the US court system on trial.

Second, this victory is our Midway Island, that is, the turning point in the Culture War. If we are bold, smart, quick, and unflagging as we press the advantage, it may hap that the forces of sanity and decency will have the orcs and trolls and creatures of darkness howling and scurrying in full rout. Let us drive with verve mercilessly them into the filthy holes and fetid sewers whence they crept, and make them fear the sunlight for a generation.

Herebelow is my dogpiling on the anonymous Internet expertificator, who apparently wrote his doggerel of dog-latin before the trial began, but now is still being broadcast like tares among wheat among the lefty social media. Click through the link above to Monster Hunter Nation to see the original, to which I here respond.

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Part Seven and Conclusion: Cosmos and Chaos

We conclude our overview of Problem of Pain inherent in the Monotheist worldview, versus the Problem of Piffle inherent in the Atheist. The previous entries are here:

This overview is not the final word on any of these topics, nor even a close examination: Each point raised has possible rebuttals and counter-rebuttals not here addressed.

This overview, at best, is meant to be a rough survey of the lay of the land to identify where apologists for either view would be wise to prepare answers for deep questions.

While not underestimating the difficulties of defending the monotheist view — for while there is an answer to the Problem of Pain, there are no easy answers — this overview demonstrates the atheist worldview, due to shallow and foolish philosophical roots, faces difficulties more numerous and more fatal.

Simply put, there are too many deep questions to which atheist worldview provides trivial answers or none at all.

A logically consistent atheist worldview portrays the cosmos as nihilist hence irrational, unreal, unknowable, nonsensical, immoral, antinomian, ugly and hopeless.

The human soul cannot flourish in such a cosmos: the atheist avoids despair only by embracing pointless hedonism or paltering hypocrisy.

The atheist answers to the deep questions of life are piffle. That is his main problem.

We conclude with a list of such unanswered questions.    Read the remainder of this entry »

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