John C. Wright's Journal

One duty an honest man, especially one who brags he is a philosopher, dare not shirk is to admit he is wrong with the humility of a philosopher when proven wrong.  In a posting today, I expressed misgivings about letting my kids read all about Lavender Dumbledore.

The reader deiseach heroically steps forth to drive away the harpies of error preying on my feast of thought.

My comment: 

Well, who am I to argue with the Catechism? I owe Rowling an apology. She is not an agent of the darkness at all, but of the light, since she is showing both the harm that disordered appetites can cause, and displays clearly the correct and moral duty of a man suffering such disorder, which is to be chaste.

I must laugh at myself, and not because I am funny, but because I am wrong.

"I am so, so glad to know that my loathing for Ulysses is not because I am uncultured Philistine. I, perhaps, made it slightly farther than you, searching for the brilliance I was told lay inside, but if I did, it was not by much."

Philistine? The problem is that I am a philistine, and proud of it. I read an enjoy Pulp rubbish like THE SHADOW and DOC SAVAGE and children’s books like HARRY POTTER and THE HOBBIT, not to mention comics by Alexander Raymond and Jack ‘King’ Kirby. I enjoy popular action-adventure garbage like Homer’s ODYSSEY and patriotic pro-Roman propaganda like Virgil’ AENEID, and horrific Jack Chick godbotherer Xtian tracks like Milton’ PARADISE LOST. I am impressed with pagan filth like HYPERION by Keats and historically inaccurate drivel like IDYLLS OF THE KING by Tennyson. I also great the classics of great literature like Asimov’s FOUNDATION series and Heinlein’s STARSHIP TROOPERS.

However, all these trashy penny dreadful books I read, popular both my highbrow and lowbrow alike, have one thing in common. They have plot, character, drama, and moral purpose, and some even brush the heights of beauty with outstretched wing.

After Nietzsche killed God in an under-reported Deicide somewhere in the mid-1800’s, however, the intellectuals and thinkers of the West turned away from everything wholesome, normal and good, and erected new and shocking idols to whatever was tasteless, meaningless, anti-heroic, and antinomian. ULYSSES by James Joyce is their paramount written work, even as NUDE DESCENDING A STAIRCASE is their paramount work in the visual arts. The point of their art is what that eminent modern thinker, Dr. Frost of the National Institute of Controlled Experimentation, would call ‘Objectification’. The point of their art is to replace the natural human passions and appetites, which we have because we live on earth and yearn for heaven, for those which would obtain if we lived in hell and yearned for deeper hell: in poetry, clamor; in music, cacophony; in painting, smears; in novels, neurosis; in philosophy, unreason; and in all things, vice.

The real philistines took over the holy land, ejected the chosen people, and declared their worthless garbage to be wonders of wonders, and declared all the good and normal and wholesome works of art and literature to be populist trash unfit for their rarefied consumption: and they call us philistines and cowards, for not adoring their crude ugliness.

The reality is that we common folk with common tastes, we are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. The literati of the elite world of literature, they are Pharisees, and no doubt when on the Judgment Day comes to the world of art, the Nine Muses of the Hippocrene will cast them into Tartarus, where there will be wailing and the gnashing of teeth.

The secret of the modern age, and the key to understanding the modern intellectual clime, is merely to realize that the lunatics have taken over the asylum.

These works of modern so called art are called art because and precisely because they are the opposite of art: they are insolent trash. They are deliberately ugly, deliberately untruthful, deliberately vicious. They are philistines at their most philistine, because they, not us, they, cannot appreciate what is beautiful, true, and virtuous in art …. or in life.

In a recent post I expressed reservations about reading Harry Potter to my children, since JK Rolwing decided to betray my trust in her by publicly announcing that Albus Dumbledore, one of the best and most beloved characters in the book, suffered from homosexuality. Those who point out either that Dumbledore never acts on his impulses in the book, or that the affection for Grisenwald (or whatever his name was) was not portrayed sympathetically miss the point entirely, so entirely that the fall into the trap set by Rowling. The point of her comment was not to show that homosexuality is admirable — even the most ardent pervertarians rarely say that — the point is to show that homosexuals are nice and normal people, and that therefore to condemn their vices is intolerant.

The devil need not convince you wrong is right; he need only convince you wrong is not as wrong as it at first seemed. He need only convince you that you can not and dare not condemn the sin lest the sinner also be condemned.

A concerned readers asks: 

"What exactly are you saying here? We should not read books with gay characters? We should not read books where gay characters are admirable, honorable, or couragous. They can be included as long as they are villians? What?"

Here is what I am saying.

I want my children to grow up knowing right from wrong. Chastity is right: sexual perversion is wrong. Homosexuality is a sexual perversion, ergo wrong. My mission in life as a father is to tell them it is wrong, but also to train their passions so that they habitually reject it as a vice. The primary tool to train the passions is the imagination: children learn virtues through stories.

Now then, arrayed against me are those who call themselves the Enlightened. I call them the Armies of Darkness. Their mission in life is to corrupt my children, to teach my children that I am wrong, and to train the passions of my children so that my children habitually recoil from making any judgments about virtue and vice, which, in effect, encourages vice. Their mission is to make vice seem normal– To make evil seem good.

The primary tool, nay, the only tool, that the Armies of Darkness can use is the imagination. No slave of darkness is  bold enough to actually debate the issue on a rational ground: those who attemptto debate it merely indulge in name-calling. Hence, debate is not a tool they can use for their goal.

The tool they use is the imagination: all that need be done to achieve the goal is to take some loathsome perversion, such as homosexuality, and to connect it, no matter how tentatively, to some beloved or amusing character.

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Here is the review I wrote for Joyce’s ULYSSES:

Dear readers, let me propose to you a simple test. Below are three quotes from Ulysses by James Joyce, and a fourth written by a computer program with no human editing, merely random words strung together without sense. You tell me which is which:

1. Slowly I dream of flying. I observe turnpikes and streets studded with bushes. Coldly my soaring widens my awareness. To guide myself I determinedly start to kill my pleasure during the time that hours and miliseconds pass away. Aid me in this and soaring is formidable, do not and singing is unhinged.

2. Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailer and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer.

3. Pat is a waiter who waits while you wait. Hee hee hee hee. He waits while you wait. Hee hee. A waiter is he. Hee hee hee hee. He waits while you wait. While you wait if you wait he will wait while you wait. Hee hee hee hee. Hoh. Wait while you wait.

4. yes I think he made them a bit firmer sucking them like that so long be made me thirsty t1tties he calls them I had to laugh yes this one anyhow stiff the n1pple gets for the least thing Ill get him to keep that up and Ill take those eggs beaten up with marsala fatten them out for him what are all those veins and things curious the way its made 2 the same in case of twins theyre supposed to represent beauty placed up there like those statues in the museum one of them pretending to hide it with her hand are they so beautiful of course compared with what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a cabbageleaf

*

(It should be noted that this is the third time I have posted a review containing a quote from the book: the automatic filter which blocks out obscenity will not allow me to post my prior review here, because it contained a direct quote. That should tell the discerning reader something about this book.)

What Science Fiction & Fantasy books would you read to children?

This is kind of a hard question to answer because the boundaries of the genre called Science Fiction simply does not apply to the kind of books children tend to like.

For example, is ON BEYOND ZEBRA by Dr. Seuss a science fiction story? It has a conceit more imaginative than anything I have read outside the pages of VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS by Lindsay: namely, what if there were an additional alphabet, an undiscovered alphabet, beyond the boundaries of the alphabet we know. The idea is just as whimsical and imaginative as the conceit for Scott Westefeld’s MIDNIGHTERS, which asks what if there were an additional hour hidden in the crack of midnight that only certain people could enter. For that matter, how is the conceit of HORTON HEARS A WHO all that different from GIRL IN THE GOLDEN ATOM by Ray Cummings?

DOCTOR DOLITTLE’S ADVENTURES by Hugh Lofting or TREASURE ISLAND by Robert Louis Stephenson are equally beloved children’s books, even though, if we were to define SFF strictly, the veterinarian who speaks to animals is a fantasy element, his flight to the moon is a science fiction element, whereas a one-legged pirate seeking buried treasure has nothing science-fictional about it.

For children, all stories are stories, and the spice of fantasy flavors all of them. A tale about a runaway boy and an escaped slave rafting down the wide Mississippi is no less fantastic or romantic than a tale about a hobbit being hired as a burglar by a throng of dwarfs and trooping off toward the Lonely Mountain.

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Remember all those people of "alternate sexual orientation" who not only assured us that normalizing sodomy would not lead to normalization of other perversions, they grew rigid and white-faced with outrage at the suggestion that one perversion encouraged other perversions, and they took it as a deadly insult that their sexual malfunction would be called perversion at all?

They told us that slippery slope arguments are innately bogus. They told us that courts of law never operate by precedent. They told us that the conscience never operates by logic, such that if you undermine the reason for condemning a given sin, you also undermine the reason for condemning any other sin of the like genre. Remember all those discussions?

Remember when we all changed the English Language, and adopted comically elliptical euphemisms to avoid giving offense to those who take offense at plain truth plainly spoken?

Remember how every loud-mouthed politically-correct Tolerance Nazi repeated in robotlike unison that it was impossible that homosex marriage would lead to further erosion of sexual norms?

Well, this article suggests that there is a slippery slope involved. I cannot vouch for this article, since I cannot find the referenced language in the legislation. Read it and make your own judgment.

Here is quote from the article:

During floor debate on H.R. 1913, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act, Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) admitted that this so-called "hate crimes" bill will protect the 30 mostly bizarre sexual orientations listed by the American Psychiatric Association. […]

"The term sexual orientation," this proposed amendment said, "as used in this act, or any amendments made by this act, does not include apotemnophilia, asphyxophilia, autogynephilia, coprophilia, exhibitionism, fetishism, frotteurism, gerontosexuality, incest, kleptophilia, klismaphilia, necrophilia, partialism, pedophilia, sexual masochism, sexual sadism, telephone scatalogia, toucherism, transgenderism, transsexual, transvestite, transvestic fetishism, urophilia, voyeurism, or zoophilia."…

This is serious business. Mr. Speaker, we can’t legislate love, but we can legislate against hate. This legislation may not rid us of the intolerance and prejudices that continue to taint our society, but it will provide an added deterrent to those for whom these feelings manifest themselves into acts of violence. They will be fully aware that, should they commit a hate crime, there will be no lenience and they will not slip through the cracks of the American legal system.

Further, passage of this Hate Crimes bill will increase public education and awareness and encourage Americans to report hate crimes that all too often are silent.

The article explains some of the terms:

• Apotemnophilia is the erotic interest in being or looking like an amputee.
• Asphyxophilia is a sexual practice, of arranging to produce asphyxiation during sex.
• Necrophilia is the sexual attraction to corpses.
• Pedophilia is the sexual attraction to minors
• Telephone scatalogia -The love of making obscene phone calls.
• Zoophilia -Also known as bestiality

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I am going to Balticon — the Baltimore Science Fiction convention with my lovely wife, world famous authoress L. Jagi Lamplighter, who in our house is called She Who Must Be Obeyed. To be held Memorial Day Weekend May 22-25, 2009 At Marriott’s Hunt Valley Inn, Baltimore, MD.

Click her for a Pic of L. Jagi Lamplighter!

The new Star Trek movie is not just good, it is excellent. I say this with the full authority of someone whose entirely life was based on Mr. Spock, a fictional character from an imaginary planet. I say this as a man who not only saw "The Questor Tapes" but also "Genesis II" and "Planet Earth". I am a Star Trek fan of the first caliber. I was prepared to dislike and over-react to every minor deviation from the established canon of Holy Saint Roddenberry.

No dislike and no overreaction is needed. The film is good, perhaps great. It is the best version of Star Trek since, well, Star Trek, and I would say the second best of the Trek films, ranked one notch below WRATH OF KHAN.

I will write a review in the near future. Until then, let me merely add one more pair of hands to applaud what turned out to be a very, very pleasant surprise.

From a review by Nialmor of the WATCHMAN funnybook, oops, I mean Graphic Novel  Read the whole thing here.

My comment: Anyone who mentions both Chesterton and The Shadow in the same paragraph has won my favor, and therefore shall be made one of my ministers and granted way-cool ninja-jedi Mind Control powers, once my dirigible planet enters the solar system from the transplutonian darknesss. Perhaps I will make him master of Australia, and wed him to my beautiful but evil daughter, Princess Aura. 

Mark Shea has written about some contemporary Catholic Science Fictioneers, and mentions yours truly.

The article is here. I like this paragraph.

The paragraph which was about my favorite topic, me, was this one:

Original thinker? I suppose if we define the term ‘originality’ to mean that I know good places from which to steal myideas, well, yes.

But winsome? Me? I am not even sure what that word means.

Let me fly to my dictionary:

Hm. Let me look farther:

While I was recovering from surgery, I had a chance to see V FOR VENDETTA, starring Hugo Weaving’s voice and Natalie Portman’s bald head. I must say that rarely have I hated a movie so much.

Usually when I say I “hate” a movie, it is in the half-serious half-pompous and utterly frivolous way that, for example, a fan of Green Lantern “hates” Kyle Ryner (who is not the real Green Lantern) or the way that fans of Spiderman “hated” the black costume (until it became a supervillain in its own right). In other words, geeky fans are just having fun by disliking something they know, deep down, is not very serious. Fanboys “hate” things because they are things that insult our intelligence, or they are pious-PC dreck, or they treat our beloved schoolboy comic characters with contempt.

But I was appalled by this movie in a most serious way, appalled with a revulsion I can hardly explain. It did not offend my aesthetic sense, but my moral sense.

I am not saying the movie offended the principles of story-telling, such as by being ugly or boring (it was, of course). I thought the movie offended humanity itself, by acting as an apologist for evil, by glorifying terrorism, by upholding as noble the doctrine of nothingness which forms the empty core of nihilism.
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Most of you reading these words will probably never have a chance to play in a role playing game moderated by obscure midlist author John C. Wright, esq. But fume not! For now, all the characters I made up and never wrote up have been written up for me in their own adventure by L. Jagi Lamplighter, my lovely bride. There are also characters she took from some hack named Shakespeare, but he lived before Obama took charge of the planet, so who cares who that is?

Miranda Prospero, the willful and regal (and immortal) heir to the vast financial empire of the Prospero family has for ages used her white magic to protect mankind from the world of darkness of which man knows nothing. She is stirred from her complaisant life by a mysterious note from her father, warning her of a threat from the Queen of Hell, and of beings known only as "The Three Shadowed Ones." Now she must search for his missing and scattered relatives, unaging magicians living in secret among mortal men, to discover the source of her sorrows and her father’s true legacy. The action ranges from a Circe-like island in the Gulf of Mexico, where her cruel sister keeps ex-lovers as animal companions, to the high house of Father Christmas at the North Pole, where the elder beings gather for the Winter feast.

Here is the cover art.

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oscillon writes in and comments: 

"It makes us uncomfortable to need axioms at the bottom of the pile. They are different than everything that lies above them and they look suspiciously like a cheat. We naturally want to break them down and figure out what they’re made of, to reason beyond them. Your solution (and Lewis’s) is to posit God. Ok, I can’t say you’re wrong. But that solution is just as far outside the system of logic above it than directly accepting them on faith."

Ah, friend, this is not a problem with God but a problem with axioms. You see, by their nature axioms cannot be deduced, since they are first principles that must be adopted before reasoning on a given topic begins.

However, axioms are open to other forms of reasoning. Axioms can be but are not necessarily a matter of faith. They can be approached via reasoning: it is merely deductive reason that is closed. Inductive reasoning or reductive reasoning will offer us generous room for logical conclusions concerning which axioms are true or must be true.

In addition to deduction, there is (1) inductive reasoning (2) hypothetical or reductive reasoning and (3) illative reasoning. All of these are valid means to achieve wisdom, if not apodictic certainty.

(1)    For example, I can use an inductive argument to show that other minds aside from mine exist in the universe, or, to phrase it another way, to show that solipsism is false. Induction does not lead to perfect, mathematical certainty, but wisdom does not rest on certainty, but on what is sound and sane. I see my inner self from within my own soul, with direct apperception of my own thoughts; and I acknowledge I have an external form that others can see and know. These others have an external form that I can see and know, and one of their forms includes speech and other signs of rationality, which cannot be explained except by recourse to the assumption or axiom that they also have an internal self. This is as valid an induction as the induction that the sun rises tomorrow.  It does not admit of the certainty that mathematicians crave because only those things that cannot be any other way possess that degree of certainty. There are things that are true because any other possibility isimpossible, such as twice two is four. There are things that are true because the other possibilities are untrue, such as that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. For discussions of astronomy, I can take the persistance of the motions of the sun and stars as a given.

(2)       For example, I can use a reductive argument (reductio ad absurdum) to show that “truth can be known” is axiomatic, for if I posit hypothetically that there is no truth, or no truth the human mind can reach, I am left with a paradox. The statement that there is no truth, if true, is false. To avoid that paradox, I must accept that (at least one) truth can be known. I must accept this as an axiom, for, without it, reasoning is not possible. For discussions of any kind, I can and must take the objectivity of truth as a given.

(3)    Illative reasoning is a term coined by Cardinal Newman to describe that act of induction or pattern-recognition that takes place when one idea draws together or satisfies several otherwise desperate strands of reasoning. For example, How do you know your dog loves you? You cannot be certain in a Cartesian sense or by deduction. The dog never says he loves you. But it is only a fool who cannot tell whether his dog loves him, and a bigger fool who says no master can ever tell whether his dog loves him.

The obvious answer is: "If my dog did not love me he would not act as he does." If you think about it, you will realize this is neither Cartesian deduction, nor inductive reasoning, nor an argument from reductio, nor is it an arbitrary assumption nor an axiom. It is a judgment that draws together and accounts for many facts and lines of reasoning that otherwise have no explanation, or none but an awkward and unconvincing explanation.

I personally am astonished and aghast that this type of reasoning has never before been identified, or never identified correctly, since it is the primary form of reasoning and argument used in everyday life to confirm everyday matters of judgment.

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In yesterday’s episode, John C. Wright, windbag, made the following statement: "In Germany, meanwhile, an enemy of humanity artist poses human corpses in postures of copulation, called "Copulation Art." I notice that this offends no principle of the hedonist or utilitarian philosophy, nor can Objectivists mount a coherent argument against the practice. The article is here. (h/t theofloinn)"

A real Objectivist was kind enough to prove me wrong. robertjwizard writes:

Do you think there actually are principles to a hedonistic or utilitarian philosophy? I mean outside of "do what you feel like" for the first and "do what you feel like and do a little calculus to make it pleasurable for as many others as well" for the second. My own view is that it is a barren, dangerous, non-philosophy that offers man no guidance at all. It does not tell man what to value, nor how to value. A philosophy that offers no values to pursue, nor any virtues to perform is without principle and is not rightly a philosophy.

That said this copulation art is nothing short of pure, unadulterated nihilism. It is destruction of the most offensive kind. I don’t care what the "artist’s" motivation is, even one of simple greed. Every part of it is what sex is not. Sex is an act that consists of a union of mind and body, spirit and the flesh, between a man and woman who share kindred souls – love for each other.

Now the spectacle of two people writhing together on the floor with no values involved like two pigs (apologies to pigs, I mean no disrespect) in slop is bad enough. But it is almost to witness a sacrament next to this in its damnation of man.

This shows sex as not only without values but without the possibility of values. And not only as without body, but without life meaning sex as decay as a perverted thing of an automaton pumping away with rotting flesh into rotting flesh. It is sex as death, and death as sex. It takes both mind and body out of the equation of sex and turns it into a celebration of decay, death, rot, of nothing. It is art for Gary Ridgeway or Jeffrey Dalhmer.

This is as much argument against this as I can muster in one sitting. Sorry, I thought I could do better, but something like this evokes more of a primal scream of rage in me than a dispassionate response. I would say lastly though that any Objectivist that was ok with this is not an Objectivist. Put me on record, no Objectivist could possibly find anything at all of value in this. Not if Objectivism has the slightest bit of meaning. Now, a libertarian…. well that can be a different animal altogether…

My comment:

I concede the point: Your argument is against the copulation art, and is coherent, and is based on Objectivist principles, which take an heroic (non-nihilistic) view of man as central. I was wrong.

"Do you think there actually are principles to a hedonistic or utilitarian philosophy?"

There are two definitions of the word "principle" which are brothers, but do not look alike.

The first is to define principle as the axioms or first assumptions of a system of reasoning. Hedonistic or utilitarian reason does indeed have axioms: equating the good of an act with the pleasure it produces is an axiom, not a conclusion, of their reasoning.

The second is to define principle as an elevated, noble, or supreme standard of behavior, a standard that does not change even in adversity, the glittering banner of battle never to be deserted even if it costs you your life. By this definition, a hedonist or a utilitarian cannot have a principle: one cannot have as a "principle" for which one is willing to suffer and die the smug feeling that nothing is worth suffering nor dying for.

"This is as much argument against this as I can muster in one sitting. Sorry, I thought I could do better, but something like this evokes more of a primal scream of rage in me than a dispassionate response."

Your argument is a good one so far as it goes, but the reason why I am no longer an Objectivist is that I found such arguments did not go far enough. You are correct to scream in primal rage, because you are correct to see the obscenity of cadaver copulation as a lie, and a vicious lie, aimed at robbing sex of the real and objective value, sacred and mysterious, that it really has. You know that what is being attacked is precious, and you correctly observe that the attacker is anti-man, anti-mind, anti-life.

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