Archive for August, 2012

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Neil Armstrong 1930-2012

Posted August 30, 2012 By John C Wright

There is too much to say, and my words too little for the passing of a man every inch a hero. Any science fiction fan should admire the first man to do what so many of us have so often dreamed, and left a footprint on a world beyond this world.

Let us keep his dream aloft. No man born after 1935 alive now on this world has set foot on any other. 43 years after he walked on the moon, we should have been erect his tomb and monument there, in the great gray silence.

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Illustrations of the Natural Law

Posted August 29, 2012 By John C Wright

This is taken without amendment from the first Appendix of C.S. Lewis’ THE ABOLITION OF MAN. The purpose here is to show the universality of certain moral precepts, especially those on which even men who say they doubt the universality of such precepts rely first in their lives, and second in their discussions of these and other matters.

Illustrations of the Tao

The following illustrations of the Natural Law are collected from such sources as come readily to the hand of one who is not a professional historian. The list makes no pretence of completeness. It will be noticed that writers such as Locke and Hooker, who wrote within the Christian tradition, are quoted side by side with the New Testament. This would, of course, be absurd if I were trying to collect independent testimonies to the Tao. But (1) I am not trying to prove its validity by the argument from common consent. Its validity cannot be deduced. For those who do not perceive its rationality, even universal consent could not prove it. (2) The idea of collecting independent testimonies presupposes that ‘civilizations’ have arisen in the world independently of one another; or even that humanity has had several independent emergences on this planet. The biology and anthropology involved in such an assumption are extremely doubtful. It is by no means certain that there has ever (in the sense required) been more than one civilization in all history. It is at least arguable that every civilization we find has been derived from another civilization and, in the last resort, from a single centre—’carried’ like an infectious disease or like the Apostolical succession.

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  • Gian posted on August 31, 2012
    In reality one understands humanity or any other universal by studying all the things it can become--by following the branches…
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Vacation and the Naturalist Fallacy

Posted August 29, 2012 By John C Wright

Just a note to those interested in any ongoing argument here at the my Journal that this is vacation week for me, and I have been out of communication for several days, and shall be for several more.

Lest I be misunderstood, one of the ongoing conversations concerned a question of Natural Law, where I asked the gentleman (or lady, or robot. On the Internet, one never knows) named wrf3 if he had an obligation to answer me honestly, and I assured him I would not answer him honestly in the absence of such an obligation.

After some hemming and hawing, distraction and diversion, he did sort of provide two answers, one in terms of game theory, saying that if it were my purpose to communication, then honest communication is a logical necessity, and one in terms of saying that I had a contract with Jesus Christ to be honest to those who treated me dishonestly. This, I admit, may not have been quite his point, but he expresses himself so elliptically that I assume I can be forgiven for assuming.

Oddly enough, he DID answer, albeit he phrased his reply in gibberish without realizing what he was saying. But, a deal is a deal (or so the maxims of the Natural Law state) and so I am required to answer.

My lack of an answer was not due to his failure to live up to his side of the deal, but was due to no access to computers.

This one evening only, I waste an hour out of a sense of duty to reply:

Please notice that both these responses from wrf3 presuppose the Natural Law and are meaningless without it.

To express that if one has a given purpose then to act rationally in reference to that purpose may be true as a statement of fact, but it is not a maxim of behavior, not an imperative, unless one first assumes an imperative to do the purpose proposed, and one assumes (as I do) a moral duty to be rational, that all one’s act be non-self-defeating.

To express that one should obey a sovereign, human or divine, or to abide by a covenant or contract likewise is meaningless unless one first assumes a maxim of behavior, namely, an imperative that one ought to obey legitimate authority, one ought be true to one’s oaths or covenants.

If there is any other basis on which a maxim of behavior, that is, an imperative statement, can be made except on the basis of an axiom containing an imperative, I cannot imagine it, and I challenge any reader to provide me with an example otherwise.

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Polling my Readers

Posted August 25, 2012 By John C Wright

My local bookstores are neither carrying my latest COUNT TO A TRILLION, nor the paperback of my beautiful and talented wife’s latest masterpiece, PROSPERO IN HELL. So I would like to conduct a completely nonscientific poll and ask anyone willing to leave a note here on my blog: Did you see either book in your local bookstore?

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More on Natural Law

Posted August 24, 2012 By John C Wright

A reader weighs in with a comment on Natural Law which is more clearly written than what I could say. Allow me to reprint his words here without further comment from me:

Here’s hoping our host won’t mind if a longtime lurker waxes philosophical a bit in defence of the natural law. While it’s true that the natural law arises somewhat spontaneously in men through the moral intuitions, it seems to me that these are only failsafes should we happen to discard our intellects. Mr Wright’s account of the natural law might benefit from the introduction of some metaphysical components that to clarify matters to the honest sceptics in his audience. If one allows for an Aristotelico-Thomistic view, the Natural Law should be rationally defensible (and, I believe, has been held to be so by philosophers from Aristotle to Aquinas) even to one who initially doubts its existence or has corrupt moral intuitions.

The traditional natural law theory is grounded in the idea of teleology or Final causality, which is the idea that things are, by nature, directed towards specific ends, and the idea of Formal causality, that things have a particular substantial form in virtue of which they are what they are. Together, they are the two forgotten members of the Four Causes which have been banished by the modern materialist or mechanistic paradigm to frankly disastrous effect. Of course, the two causes that remain, Efficient and Material causes, are unintelligible without these former two, a consequence which the materialists seem to be for some reason blissfully unaware of.

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The Self-Impeaching Denial of Natural Law

Posted August 24, 2012 By John C Wright

Part of an ongoing conversation.  A reader with the abbreviated name of wrf3 has illogically denied the existence of Natural Law in a fashion as to show he knows not what the term means. Attempts to explain the term to him have met with failure.

He imagines it to be an axiomatic system like geometry for deducing specific conclusions, rather than a set of moral intuitions by whose means the justice or otherwise of Positive Law (that is, law posited by men, manmade law) can be measured. Absent Natural (or nonmanmade) Law such Positive (or manmade) Laws as we see made by princes and parliaments and enforced by police or by custom cannot be criticized nor affirmed.

Basic on this misunderstanding, wrf3 puckishly offered that he would believe in Natural Law if he saw it in operation, for example, if Dr Andreassen would convince me of the moral probity of fornication, or I him of chastity.

What if we agree on some other point? Does this not prove the existence of Natural Law just as well (or just as poorly)?

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Lex Naturalis and Postmodern Post-Sanity

Posted August 22, 2012 By John C Wright

In my experience man and boy, I know of no topic more likely to provoke incompetent and incoherent reply than the topic of Lex Naturalis, or Natural Law.

I have a theory, nay, a speculation merely, as to why this is.

Natural Law is a term of art used by philosophers and theologians to refer to that objective moral standards by which Positive Law, that is, laws men posit, manmade law, is to be judged as good or bad, fair or unfair.

In jurisprudence this same distinction is called by other names: an offense that is malum in se or wicked in and of itself is contradistinguished from an offense that is malum prohibitum or wicked only because it is prohibited.

Murder is malum in se: if the killing of a human being with malice aforethought takes place on the high sea or in some unclaimed wilderness where no human law has sway, a court of law can still justly punish the crime. Its criminality is innate to the act.

Driving on the unlawful side of the highway is malum prohibitum: which side of the road is forbidden is different in England versus New England.  No court of law could justly punish the act if a man drove on a private road on his own land, or if a scientist landed a wheeled vehicle on Mars and trundled it down some turnpike built by long vanished Barsoomians.  An act that is malum prohibitum is wrong only when and where prohibited by Positive Law.

If no Natural Law existed, all discussions of the goodness or fairness of Positive Law would be silenced.

A man might say he preferred one statute or court ruling to another, but this would be a mere psychological report of his arbitrary and subjective tastes, like saying he preferred pie to cake.

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Who is Like unto Tolkien?

Posted August 21, 2012 By John C Wright

I find I am reduced to merely repeating articles from Bruce Charlton’s blog on days when I find that gentleman’s thoughts more interesting than my own. And this topic interested me immensely:

Is there anything *like* Tolkien?

This was a burning question for me aged c. 14 years once I had read and re-read Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit) to the point of wanting to read something else.

What did I find?

*

Having seen a reference to Spenser’s Fairie Queene on the LotR blurb, I picked this up to look-at in a second hand bookshop – I pretty quickly put it down again!  But I was never foolish enough to tackle Ariosto (to which C.S Lewis bizarrely compared LotR – what on earth did he think he was doing?!)

Then having done some background reading (for example, in Lin Carter’s A look behind the Lord of the Rings) I tried some older fantasy and also some more recent fantasy.

I read Lord Dunsany’s King of Elfland’s Daughter but it was hard work and made no impression – I failed to read E.R Eddison’s Worm Ourorboros. I actually enjoyed Evangeline Walton’s Island of the Mighty – which was a retelling of the ‘Mabinogion’ Welsh legends – but it was nothing like Tolkien.

*

In sum – I found only a couple of books (or a couple of pairs of books) which were post-Tolkien and resembled him enough to satisfy re-readings.

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The Pigpile of Subjectivism

Posted August 20, 2012 By John C Wright

Part of an ongoing discussion. A reader comments:

All subjectivists, in my experience, believe that subjectivism is true for all people at all times, and furthermore that it is all people’s duty to acknowledge this.

I remember a philosophy class that turned into a pigpile on me until the teacher intervened in the discussion because it got too fierce — and I meekly observed afterwards that it was very odd to be told that I was wrong for saying that points of view could be wrong. Fortunately, they were smart enough to be abashed. (One classmate, not one of the pile, chuckled.)

My comment: I suspect, from your description, that the pigpile was surprisingly fierce because you touched a nerve. By commenting that there was such a thing as right and wrong, you challenged the highest and most revered idol of modern idolatry, the nothingness at the core of all postmodern thought.

If there is such a thing as right and wrong, then Political Correctness is not politeness and enlightenment, it is Orwellian deception and self-deception.

If there is right and wrong, the main argument in favor of sexual license and sexual perversion (namely, ” ‘taint nobody’s business if I do”) is no longer available.

If there is such a thing as right and wrong, all cases of historical injustice have to be judged on their merits, not condemned because it forms the “narrative” of the stronger or weaker party; indeed, the whole process of investigating the motives and character of the person condemned rather than their argument shifts the intellectual past-time of the leisured intellectual away from gossip and back toward the merits of the argument.

When their central idol was challenged, all the modern halfwits and lackwits are required by their sense of honor to defend what the truth of their creed, namely, that there is no such thing as honor and no such thing as truth.

It is to their credit that any of them perceived the irony or got the joke of the manifest self contradiction involved. Most moderns are as lacking in humor and self reflection as they are in reason.

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Atheist Rational and Otherwise

Posted August 18, 2012 By John C Wright

A reader asked me my definition of an atheist. Allow me to play Lineaus and identify the various subspecies.

An atheist is someone who disbelieves in any god. I would make a distinction between a rational atheist and a fashionable atheist, based on his motive for disbelieving.

A rational atheist is one who, if asked, can provide some warrant for his disbelief, give some argument or chain of reasoning to justify his disbelief. He does not believe in god for an impersonal reason.

A fashionable atheist is is who, if asked, reacts to the question with erratic hostility and antic halfwittedness, jerking his knees and elbows at strange angles, lolling his tongue and crossing and uncrossing his eyes in protuberant and alarming display of eccentricity. This behavior is accompanied by accusations, ad hominem, insults, sneers, carping, capering, expressions of hate and scorn and contempt that anyone would dare raise such a question. This is also accompanied in a manner risible were it not so pathetic, with what psychologists call projection, where the fashionable atheist accuses all and sundry in the immediate area of being filled with hatred and bigotry.

After he is done voiding his bowels and rolling sticky warmth, tearing his hair and shrieking his praise of himself as a paragon of cool intellectual ratiocination, bystanders, embarrassed, avert their eyes, pretending something that fascinates them is in the grass underfoot or the sky overhead.  Or, if the reaction of the fashionable atheist to a request for his reasoning is in word-noises, the glossolalia he eructutates approaches this same level of dignity and reasonableness. And he says religion is a “meme.”

The causes of fashionable disbelief are emotional, personal, and usually quite frivolous. He is scornful of religion, ignorant of history, and proud of his ignorance. He is indifferent to morality and decency if not (through an odd inversion of psychology) actively proud of his immorality, a righteous defender of perversion and unrighteousness.

He is not just shallow, he is shallow in all aspects of his philosophy. If I may be permitted the oxymoron, the fashionable atheist is profoundly shallow.

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Wright’s Writing Corner: The Three Levels of Character.

Posted August 15, 2012 By John C Wright

After a long break the beautiful and talented Mrs Wright takes a brief look at 1, 2, and 3-D characters

http://arhyalon.livejournal.com/261281.html

An excerpt:

One-Dimensional Characters- are just that. They have one-dimension to them. The girl with red hair. The angry guy. They are very seldom memorable, because they do not have a second quality to distinguish them from every other character with the same quality.

If the only thing that sets ‘red-haired girl’ apart is her red hair, she is indistinguishable form all other girls with red hair.

One-dimensional characters appear in almost every work, because not all characters need fleshing out. The messenger who brings the news of the king’s death does not need a personality if he’s never to be seen again. Being ‘the messenger’ is just fine.

He could be the messenger with red hair or the messenger who was missing an arm. But he is still a one-dimensional character because he is indistinguishable from other one armed messengers, having no other qualities.

If the character changed their distinguishing characteristic, the reader could not recognize them. If red-haired girl showed up as a blonde, we would never know her.

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Please donate

Posted August 15, 2012 By John C Wright

This is a major who was killed by a suicide bomber while in service overseas. Please pray for him and donate. Proceeds go to his widow and orphans, two-year-old twins. (hat tip to Mark Shea.)

http://www.youcaring.com/fundraiser_details?fundraiser_id=7264&url=kennedysangels

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Saint Brendan’s Fair Isle

Posted August 14, 2012 By John C Wright

The story of a floating island made of rock, a raft larger in area than the New Jersey, would have been dismissed as a sailor’s sea-yarn if you heard it in a smoke-filled public house in Cornwall from some tattooed sea-dog named Ishmael or Queequeg from Nantucket or Rokovoko.

And yet here it is:

From The Australian by way of Live Science by way of Mark Shea’s Catholic and Enjoying It:

AN undersea volcanic eruption has created a raft of porous volcanic rock in the Pacific Ocean that’s larger than the surface area of Israel, but navy officers say the phenomenon is not a danger to shipping.

Pumice is a porous grey-coloured form of volcanic rock formed when lava and water are mixed. Most pumice is light enough to float on water. The area of floating pumice is 250 nautical miles (463km) in length and 30 nautical miles wide (55km), and covers 25,465 square kilometres.

Spotted by a Royal New Zealand Air Force Orion, the raft was located about 85 nautical miles west to southwest of Raoul Island and investigated by the HMNZS Canterbury, the New Zealand Defence Force says.

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An apology to Atheists

Posted August 14, 2012 By John C Wright

Recently in this space, I made the bold claim that atheism by its very nature, since it defies all tradition and repudiates all the greatest thought of all history Western and Eastern as superstitious nonsense, subjects the atheist to an irresistible temptation to pride and vainglory.

Two readers objected, and their objections proved to me my that the claim was, alas, overbold, and cannot be maintained. I hereby retract the comment.

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Book Review CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 3

Posted August 13, 2012 By John C Wright

The inexhaustible Mike Allen brought this to my attention. From http://littleredreviewer.wordpress.com/2012/08/13/clockwork-phoenix-volume-3-edited-by-mike-allen/

Allow me to quote the part that concerns my humble contribution to the anthology Clockwork Phoenix 3:

Murder in Metachronopolis, by John C. Wright – one of the longer works, and purposely presented in an unusual way. Jake Frontino has been brought to the city outside of time, Metachronopolis, the city of the Masters of Time, to work for them as a Private Investigator. They’ve sent him through time on missions to stop terrible things before they happen – to kill the mothers of dictators, to foil marriages and stop meetings from taking place. The Masters of Time supposedly have no enemies, but Jake has met those enemies, been party to their plans for a coup. The story is written in numbered portions, so the reader immediately knows we are not getting the story in chronological order, we are not getting “the truth” in the right order. And you know what I did the moment I finished this story? I read it again, flipping the pages back and forth so that with the help of the section numbers I could read it in chronological order, in the order that things happened to Jake. And it was a completely different story. I love it when that happens, when I can experience the same story in a completely new light.

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