Monday, January 30, A.D. 2012

Illustration of the Unprincipled Exception

Last week, Auster revisted an old post where he addressed the unprincipled exceptions of the Left: “The unprincipled exception as dramatized in Atlas Shrugged” Auster begins by summarizing the unprincipled exception, which he frequently mentions as it is necessarily common in leftist policies:

Since liberalism contradicts the nature of reality, it must lead to the death of society if its principles are consistently followed. Therefore a liberal society, in order to continue functioning and surviving, must make lots of exceptions to liberal principles. But since liberal society prohibits all non-liberal principles, these exceptions, upon which the very existence of the society depends, have no principle to back them up. Thus the only way a member of liberal society can slow its march to destruction is through means that to him must seem unprincipled. Liberal society remains viable only insofar as unprincipled exceptions prevent it from consistently following its own principles; and it only seems viable to its members insofar as they employ unprincipled exceptions to disguise from themselves its true nature and inevitable end.

Auster has compiled a list of articles that deal with this issue, “The unprincipled exception: a key to understanding liberalism.”

I find it perplexing, though, that so few people wake from their contradictions. It is the same mystery as to why men remain in the cave in The Republic. Why did the Athenians allow Socrates to be sentenced to death? Why did the Jews choose Barabbas over Jesus? The stupidity, wickedness, and cowardice of the herd are evident in most places at most times. Such is the lot of fallen man. Happily, though, what I call existential logic sparks a discomfort in some people, which results in a journey that leads them out of darkness and into the light.

Posted by Joseph on Monday, January 30, Anno Domini 2012
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Wednesday, January 25, A.D. 2012

Thirty-ninth March

On Monday, I attended the thirty-ninth March for Life. It is strange to think that I have gone to about half of the Marches for Life in history. I last was not able to go fifteen years ago because I was in Europe at the time. As such, I have a good understanding of how the march has evolved. One strikingly visible change has been the numbers, appearance, and age of men and women in the consecrated life at the march. Roman Catholics have always been the overwhelmingly dominant group at the march, and they continue to be so. However, their priests, friars, sisters, monks, and nuns are more numerous every year. Their garb has become much more traditional, reflecting the return to traditional practices that is so evident in Roman Catholicism. When I arrived at the pre-march rally, I could not find the Orthodox group at first, and I moved around the Mall trying to spot them. The proliferation of cassock wearing Roman priests complicated my efforts. I finally got so tired of scanning such groupings of men that I approached some Latin priests and said, “I’m glad that you guys are wearing cassocks, again, but it makes my life harder when I’m trying to find the Orthodox group.” The priests had a jolly laugh and then pointed me in the right direction to find the group.

The religious folks are also getting younger. I told my friend Andrew that I saw hundreds of pretty young nuns on Monday and such made me very happy. Not in a weird, Catholic school girl uniform fetish sort of way, mind you! Rather, youth is vibrant and attractive, and I find the sacrifice of youth and beauty to the consecrated life particularly beautiful. The practice is clearly dysgenic, which is unfortunate, but sacrifices are necessarily important losses. I also talked to a group of handsome, masculine, well groomed Jesuits about the state of affairs in that long suffering order so dear to my heart, and I have further confidence that the younger Jesuits will end that particular community’s recent rebellion. The new generation holds much promise.

Furthermore, these folks are, in fundy terms, “on fire for the Lord,” and they are actively recruiting. At the exhibit hall for the March for Life, religious women were passing out vocations material specific to men and women. One order had a brochure labeled “Joseph” and another labeled “Mary,” each well suited to reaching their targeted demographic. For instance, the men’s material uses very martial language. One of the responses to “Why devote yourself to God in religious life?” is “To bolster the ranks of the Church Militant in choosing for your tour of duty during this short life to fight on the front lines for God and His Church.” Amen! This is how to recruit strong, energetic young men to the consecrated life! I am happy that the Latins have finally rediscovered their testicular fortitude after a long exile in the estrogenized desert.

As for the Orthodoxy community, I was pleased by Metropolitan Jonah’s address. When the introducer stressed that the invocation would be a historic first joint witness and prayer of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox bishops at the March for Life, I was alarmed, thinking that the Metropolitan had gone rogue and was about to cause the heads of all the Churches’ external relations departments simultaneously to explode around the world. Yet, the bishops were very clever. They stressed that they were having a joint prayer, but Metroplitan Jonah delivered it with Timothy Cardinal-elect Dolan standing next to him. That way, unity was shown without causing scandal to the Orthodox, who are wary of joint prayers. After the prayer, the two men hugged and shared the kiss of peace. It was satisfying to see the Latin and Orthodox bishops exercise such diplomatic intelligence. Harmless as doves and wise as serpents! Perhaps, the Metropolitan’s recent political turmoil has taught him to be shrewd.

The Orthodox marching, group, however, continued to be dysfunctional. On George Michalopulos’ site, I saw that a deacon had mentioned the march. I responded thus:

Father, if you have any influence on the group, could you please remind the banner carriers that they are always negligent of the crowd behind them? For years, I have thought about writing a letter, but I don’t know to whom I should send it. I have attended the march pretty much every year since I was a child, and I have marched with the Orthodox group most years over the past decade. However, for the past five years or so, the banner carriers—probably due to their being feisty seminarians—behave as though they are not leading a crowd of people through a gigantic mass of folks. They always leave most of the group behind, especially at the beginning. This year was no different, but thankfully they stopped at the corner on Constitution because they left the bishops! Maybe that was their plan for regrouping, but they need to wait every year for the group to collect.

I understand that they want to get to First Street to have time for the service, but there was plenty of time. Also, if they are worried of the Capitol Police kicking them off the corner as has happened before, why don’t they move to the plaza across from the Supreme Court? I know that we are there for a cause, but we are also quite a visible spectacle to thousands of positively disposed people who have only heard of Orthodoxy. Every year, I witness dozens of interested folks, mostly enthusiastic Latins, engage the group with questions and encouraging words. We would increase our visibility near the Supreme Court and allow for more onlookers to join us in prayer since it is the end of the marching route there.

This may not be able to be helped, but stationing the group far from the rally (like this year) keeps us from being able to hear the rally (and the Metropolitan’s prayer) and makes us largely invisible to the marchers and to the Orthodox in the crowd who are looking for us. I searched for the group for at least an hour in that muddy mess before I located them on Seventh Street far from the rally. On the way, I came across several disparate groups of Orthodox Christians, including nuns from All Saints Greek Orthodox Monastery on Long Island, who would have otherwise marched with us had the group been present and visible at the rally.

I know that organization is largely alien to our ethos, but we can do better. So, if you know how to rectify the situation, it would be highly appreciated.

Maybe, the deacon can forward such concerns to someone who can improve the group’s planning.

For the past four years, I have been able to play tour guide a bit for my brother’s high school group before and after the march. This year, the boys arrived in Washington a day early, which allowed them to see more of the city. If you take such a long bus trip, you ought to spend more time in the capital than simply the hours of the march. Plus, getting a decent rest in a bed makes the day of the march better in every way. I met the group at Union Station after the divine liturgy, which worked well since the group attended mass at the basilica in the morning. From there, I showed them some Capitol Hill sites on the way to the National Mall. We had the chance to visit many museums and monuments until I returned the very exhausted group to their hotel that night. Unfortunately, I only saw the group for a minute while they were passing the Orthodox memorial service at the end of the march, but I hope that their Monday went well.

Among other observations, I must say that I prefer freezing temperatures to the rain. The rally was a mud pit, and umbrellas and crowds go poorly together. Still, I was surprised by the turnout. Every year, people say that the march is getting bigger, and that usually seems to be the case. I remember that the march in A.D. 2001 was particularly impressive, but I attribute that to the inauguration crowds’ participants’ double dipping. Moreover, folks back then anticipated some positive political change with Bush’s election, and such energy likely affected a numbers boost at the march. Nonetheless, recent years have seemed larger than before.

I was also pleased that the route was lengthened this year due to the Mall’s restoration project that forced the rally back to Ninth Street. The eastward creep of the march over the past decade has bothered me a lot, as I mentioned in recent years in “The March and the Media” and in “Thirty-eighth March.” I wish that they would return to the Ellipse.

Unlike the last few marches, I did manage to see a counter protester this year. After the march, as I walked to the Hyatt Regecy to see the exhibit hall, I passed one scruffy looking, thirty something man who was wearing two cardboard pieces like the Soldiers of Hearts in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. The boards stated something about voting for “choice.”

I noticed a few signs that made me smile, but I cannot recall them now. I should have taken pictures. I did see a group of children with stuffed minion dolls (from Despicable Me) on which they had written, “Minions for Life.” That was cute. I also noticed a large banner held by Anglican converts to Rome that stated, “Thank you, Holy Father, for Anglicanorum Coetibus!” When I saw the Yoopers for Life sign, I had to ask the group if they had brought pasties for everyone. Sadly, they said that they had run out.

As always, my fellow Ohioans made a strong showing. The young priest who accompanied my brother’s high school group said that the Archdiocese of Cincinnati had 1,700 student tickets, with additional staff, clergy, and chaperone tickets, of the 20,000 total tickets. If we add 150 more for staff, that makes 1,850 of 20,000, or 9.25%. That is amazing. If we added the tickets for other Ohio cities, it is possible that a fifth or even a quarter of the participants were Ohioans. Yet, it confirms the anecdotal evidence of seeing so many Ohio groups so well represented at every year’s march. Midwesterners, in general, have a strong showing, along with groups from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Maryland, and Virginia, as one would expect. Foreign delegations included Canadians, Germans, Italians, the French, Brazilians, Mexicans, and I believe Guyana, whose drum playing visitors I had never seen before.

In summary, the day went well despite the rain. I wish that every day in Sodom, there were so many righteous men in the city.

Posted by Joseph on Wednesday, January 25, Anno Domini 2012
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Monday, January 16, A.D. 2012

Saint Martin’s Day

For this holiest of days on our modern civic calendar, I recommend that you read Paul Gottfried’s “The Patron Saint of White Guilt” from Taki’s Magazine. After such edification, if you still hunger for a chance to indulge more piety, enjoy One STDV’s “Example of MLK as Deity,” inspired by Gottfried’s brief article.

One would think that such sanctimonious madness exists only on the political Left, but Leftism has colonized mainstream conservative institutions and minds. For example, Glenn Beck named Saint Martin of Sorrowful Memory as one of history’s four champions of peaceful revolution along with Moses, Jesus Christ, and Ghandi. Of course, Beck is an American and a Mormon, which means that his historical compass wavers after we go back more than two centuries. Still, I find it surprising that a prominent American “conservative” media figure like Beck includes Ghandi and King among the most important men in any category that spans human history or that he reckons that Mose’s and Jesus’ accomplishments involve “peaceful revolution.”

Update: It appears that the unrepentant Right shares a mental morphic field at times. A day after posting my homage to Saint Martin, I read Richard Spencer’s “The God of White Dispossession,” which starts with, “On this, the holiest day of modern America’s liturgical calendar, we should revisit Samuel Francis’s writing on the significance of Martin Luther King Jr.” Later, Spencer also criticizes Glenn Beck, though more generally than my post does. I suppose that the Left’s worship of King and Beck’s unconsidered enthusiasm for him make them standard targets for conservative disgust. Moreover, I believe that Gottfried and Francis were friends. So, even our auctores were related.

Posted by Joseph on Monday, January 16, Anno Domini 2012
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Friday, January 13, A.D. 2012

Traditionalist Manifesto

Christ is born!

Merry Christmas on this seventh day of the Nativity and happy birthday to my nephew, Austin. Many years and blessings to him! He was born on Friday the thirteenth of January (December 31 on the Church’s calendar), and so the cycle has revolved, again.

Yesterday, Lawrence Auster explained a bit more of his recent change in outlook in “Small moves away from liberalism are not going to turn around the society as a whole.” Auster states that he no longer thinks that our civilization will repent from its spiral toward nihilism and barbarity. He therefore counsels what we may do without falling into despair. The ever insightful Kristor adds the following comment:

Back in 1973, when I was a teenaged commie, I used to engage with my commie friends in political discussions that would go on for hours and hours. The only thing I remember from those discussions is a dictum that arose from within me one day, unbidden, yet fully formed, when we were talking about what it meant to be a radical: “To be a radical is to be forever unsatisfied with the content of history, yet reconciled to the process of history.” This attitude will be familiar to readers of VFR from the phenomenon here oft noted, of the fact that liberals understand there to be no limit, no stopping point, to the process of social reform. What has happened and is now happening, however many improvements there might have been, is totally unsatisfactory, and awaits the incipient onset of a gnostic New Age, in which every sordid thing that has come before will be repudiated and destroyed. Nevertheless, however, the ugly things that are happening now are the birth pangs of that New Age, and since birth is painful, it is to be expected that the process should make most of us quite uncomfortable (and even, many of us, dead); yet for the sake of that glorious New Age, we should not chafe at our discomforts of ugliness, but rather shoulder them cheerfully, happy with the way things are tending. That’s a radical: forever unhappy with things as they are, while delighted with the endless evolutionary/revolutionary process of history as it works its way toward a new utopian order.

It strikes me that this dictum is just as applicable to Traditionalist radicals as it is to those of the Left, albeit along a diametrically different vector; for the Traditionalist sees history as having Fallen from a Golden Age, and tending toward an ultimate, inescapable eschatological catastrophe, while the Leftist sees it as going the opposite direction. As pessimists about the prospects for a merely human project of saving the world, Traditionalists are more apt to respect and cherish the beauties it has so far produced, that are in the nature of things always eventually lost to the flux of time, and skeptical about their “new, improved” replacements. Until the Enlightenment, such was the prevalent attitude—the traditional attitude—in all cultures and throughout history. The hope added thereto by the Christian Gospel, of an ultimate, permanent, and total redemption of history at the eschaton, completed that vision, healing and correcting the despair that it had recommended to men, and nerving them to the creation of new and sublime creaturely beauties: cathedrals, songs, voyages, poems, discoveries, philosophies, enterprises of all kinds.

Our job then—indeed our duty—as Traditionalist radicals is, to name the uglinesses now pervading our world, not surrendering to despair thereat, but rather rejoicing nonetheless in the marvelous and orderly beauty that still, always, nevertheless surrounds us, and determined to enact such new beauties as may be within our poor powers. We are all of us engaged throughout our lives in a steady progress toward our own personal holocausts, in which every good thing we have loved will be immolated. Yet we may have confidence that, as all of history is an instrument and expression of Beauty Himself, so must that Beauty which is the source of all things eventually, utterly prevail in and through all things. We may therefore—indeed, we should—make our way toward our common doom, singing and rejoicing, if only to adorn this world’s everlasting resurrection. For, thanks to the Divine omniscience, no worldly good can fail of resurrection in the life to come.

And that, in the final analysis, is why we humans have children, and want to have children. It is why we want to preserve them, and to preserve our culture, and our lives. It is why we are ordered toward reproduction, survival, prosperity, enjoyment. Mere death makes all these things vain, empty, stupid. If death were the end of the story, none of these things would be worth doing, much; so that as our culture has come to believe in the ultimate finality of death, it has done less and less of them. But if death is not the end of the story, and the goods of this world are destined to permanent life in the world to come, then all these vital pleasures are objectively and immensely important—not all-important, to be sure, not first things, but important nonetheless.

What then ought we to do about the death of our culture? Do what is good, and beautiful, and virtuous. Nothing will be wasted, no good thing forever lost; everything will be remembered, and accounted for. From the good and virtuous things that we engender—children, mostly, but also our work, our charity, our thought, our art—something appropriate will arise. We may trust in that.

Kristor beautifully reminds us of the Christian hope and offers sage advice on how we may act as instruments through which the Lord transfigures the world into his perfected creation. Moreover, I found it more than a little ironic that Kristor begins his comment, “Back in 1973, when I was a teenaged commie,” in a thread about the hellish trajectory of the modern West. If a Communist can become what Kristor is now, then anything is possible! But, of course, we have always known this. The hagiographies of the saints remind us over and over of the power of repentance and of the transformation that God affects upon men and women who allow him to do so. Mary of Egypt and Moses the Black come to mind.

I had a friend in college who was raised in an extraordinarily pious Roman Catholic family. His mother appeared to me as the very incarnation of the traditional Catholic maternal presence. His parents and siblings would continually pray together; road trips would be opportunities to say the rosary as a family. Very Catholic! Then, one day, my friend told me about his parents’ youth. His mother was a radical feminist in college, rebellious against traditional society and the Church. The Lord works many wonders, and the human mind may be surprisingly resilient in struggling for truth in the midst of lies. Given such examples, it is reasonable to hope for the salvation of our civilization in time and not only in the eschaton.

Posted by Joseph on Friday, January 13, Anno Domini 2012
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Wednesday, December 7, A.D. 2011

Kristor on Mystery

Auster frequently addresses the Darwinian question on his View from the Right, but a tangential post from a few days ago caught my eye. In it, the ever insightful commentator Kristor elaborates on the Bonaventuran distinction between apprehension and comprehension:

When we speak of knowing something, we may mean either that we apprehend, or that we comprehend. To apprehend is, literally, to “grasp at or toward.” To comprehend is to “grasp together.” Apprehension happens when we know of something, but do not understand it; we can touch it, but it escapes our grasp. Comprehension happens when we know of something and have some understanding of it; when we are able to wrap our minds around it.

So, then: we can apprehend that there is—that there must logically be—something outside our world, and greater, for only thus could there be a context, a way, a receptacle in which the world could come to be. We may come to understand certain things about that transcendent reality. But only a few things, and them but dimly. We cannot ever understand it in its fullness, or even come close. There is no way to grasp him, who has our whole world in his grasp.

The only sorts of things it is possible for us to comprehend are those that are lesser than we. These we may encompass. Part of the reason we have theories about the world is that the theories are small and intellectually manageable, as compared with the complex concrete realities to which they refer. The theories are smaller than we are. The realities to which they refer never, ever are.

To apprehend something without understanding it, is to be confronted with mystery. Sometimes we can dispel the mystery a bit by our own efforts. Our understanding may even be good enough to give us great power. But no matter how deeply we plumb a phenomenon, howsoever humble, we can never find its bottom. Take a pebble. What is it? What is its complete, exhaustive description? The answer cannot be completed, even in an infinite span of time. Nicholas Rescher points out that the number of true statements that can be made about anything is infinite; and Gödel proved that no self-consistent answer to any question can ever be completed. Thus the more one learns about something—about anything—the more one learns that there is more to learn about it. Think of something homely and familiar—say, knitting, or model railroading. One could never get to the bottom of them, never finish them, never express all their beauties. Every concrete actuality is infinitely deep.

And the reason this must be so is not far to seek; for every instance of definite being must necessarily arise in the context of, and as a derivate of, the limitless indefinite. Being as such is the necessary prerequisite and source of every particular being. Reality is infinitely deep, because its depths are in the fathomless abyss of God. So, a pebble is as rooted in God, and as full of his presence and expressive of his glory, as the highest seraph. One of the reasons scientists—even the atheists among them—do science is that, in delving into the depths of the real, they apprehend that glory, wonder and power at the root of all things. Depth calls to depth.

No matter what it grasps at, knowledge never suffices to its object. Only being suffices; for a being can suffice to itself, indeed must do so if it is actually to be. The only way to comprehend a thing fully, then, is to open oneself to it and make oneself a part of it, to partake in it. Comprehension is trans-rational, trans-cognitive. It happens when we allow ourselves to be comprehended by something larger than we are.

Such is worship. It is effected by sacrifice.

Curiously, as mystics all tell us, in the utter turn of the soul to God is delivered a full comprehension of all lesser things.

It seems to follow, then, that progress toward knowledge is an infinite activity wherein we come to know more and more what we apprehend. We never exhaustively comprehend eternal truths, but we conform our minds to being as we continue to understand it better. Only God comprehends completely.

Posted by Joseph on Wednesday, December 7, Anno Domini 2011
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Friday, December 2, A.D. 2011

Holiday Tree?

I recently received a message wherein an acquaintance mentioned a “holiday tree.” I wanted to respond by asking which holiday. Is it a Presidents’ Day tree? A Saint Patrick’s Day tree? How about a Halloween tree? Do we decorate this said holiday tree with Independence Day ornaments while we sing Memorial Day carols? Do we place Labor Day gifts under this tree?

I find it difficult to be a modern American. So much that is considered polite or decent in our society stinks of rank stupidity. The underlying reason for “holiday tree” appears to be a desire to be inclusive. However, who tells rabbinical Jews that they are not invited to Christmas parties? Do the Salvation Army Santas refuse to say “Merry Christmas” to Hindus? Are Muslims not allowed to partake of our gingerbread? The “exclusion” inherent in Christmas celebrations is only one of identity. It will remain exclusive in the sense that it is not something else as long as it continues to exist. To remove that exclusion, one has to destroy Christmas. Perhaps, that is the plan. Regardless, calling the feast or its trappings by a generic name does not remove this exclusive aspect. It only makes for ridicule. Imagine if a dormitory with an international student body decided that it would have an annual “national holiday” celebration for all the students to celebrate their respective nations. However, this “national holiday” always curiously landed on the fourth of July, when the dormitory would facilitate a cookout of hamburgers and hot dogs and sponsor an evening fieworks display. Obviously, Sousa would always be played. It sounds rather cosmopolitan and inclusive, no?

Earlier in the week, I was listening to Rush Limbaugh’s radio broadcast, and Limbaugh stated that he could not understand how any American could hate America. I honestly do not understand such rightwing conservative blindness. When America has largely become a society wherein most people will change their speech, behavior, and views—their way of life inherited from their ancestors—to accommodate a small, whiney, and wicked contingent of ne’er-do-wells, it is no longer very lovable. Conservatives like Rush ignore what America has largely become. It is repulsive, and it does not deserve to survive. Of course, there are many “Americas,” and the way of life that conservatives value continues to exist. However, it has long ceased to be dominant. Traditional America is now the counterculture, but its adherents refuse to accept that they have lost the country.

Posted by Joseph on Friday, December 2, Anno Domini 2011
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Wednesday, November 9, A.D. 2011

Gynocracy and Liberalism

I recently discovered an entertaining, old View from the Right thread about “gynocracy” and liberalism. It features some frank discussion on what “feminism” has wrought in the West. Among other worthwhile aspects of the post, Auster once again shows his knack for analyzing the Left:

Liberalism means seeing the world as a single collection of individuals, all possessing the same rights, and distinguished only by their “individual worth.” Liberalism rejects, as a fundamental principle, the idea that individuals may belong to different categories—categories not chosen by the individual himself—that may affect the individual’s rights. So, from the point of view of liberalism, there is no reason why women cannot be, say, soldiers or police officers, so long as the women in question can “do the job.” This leads to a few women, who have the requisite qualifications, becoming soldiers or police officers, which in turn leads to changes in the institution to adjust to those women (e.g., separate bathrooms and sleeping quarters, the elimination of hazing at VMI), and thence to an attack on the “culture of masculinity” in those institutions and to never-ending demands for ever more women to be admitted and to be promoted at the same rate as men. Starting with a liberal individual-rights paradigm aimed at the non-discriminatory inclusion of qualified individuals, we end up with cultural radicalism aimed at transforming or destroying the institution itself.

In the area of immigration, U.S. immigration in 1965 was opened up equally to immigrants from all countries on the basis that the only criterion for admission should be the “individual worth” of prospective immigrants, rather than their nationality, race, or religion. But since these notions of individual worth were necessarily minimalistic (since the very purpose of the law was to eliminate group discrimination, not to admit high quality immigrants, an impossible task in any case when you’re talking about mass immigration), the people we permitted as worthy individuals in fact carried cultural differences with them that inevitably have changed American culture and created demands for far more sweeping changes, in the process also leading to the prohibition of any criticism of these changes. Once again, pure liberal individualism, based on “individual worth,” leads to cultural radicalism and the loss of an institution’s or a whole society’s legitimate liberty to govern itself.

By contrast, traditionalism acknowledges that we as human beings are not just individuals possessing rights and desires, that there are things about us that matter that do not come from ourselves. Our nature as men or women is not created by ourselves; it is a given that comes from outside ourselves and that structures our existence. From the point of view of traditionalism, such larger categories as sex, religion, nationality, ethnicity, and race (not to mention species) matter. How much they matter varies. In some cases they may not matter at all, and the issue can be determined on a pure basis of individual rights; in other cases they may matter very much, and liberal rights must take a back seat to other considerations. How much they matter in any case is something to be determined by prudence. As President Kennedy once said about brains, there is no substitute for prudence.

Therefore the proper role of women and men in society is a legitimate topic of political discussion. But liberalism denies that it is a legitimate topic, because liberalism denies the existence, or at least the importance, of those larger categories or essences.

Of course I am not denying the evils that have been done in the name of putting people into determined categories of race, class, sex, and so on. Liberalism is however an extreme solution to that problem which creates horrible problems of its own. The result of denying that group categories can ever matter socially or be a legitimate topic of discussion can be seen in the paralyzing political correctness that controls Britain and other European countries at this moment, with the U.S. not far behind.

May Auster keep writing and enlightening for many, many years!

Posted by Joseph on Wednesday, November 9, Anno Domini 2011
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Monday, November 7, A.D. 2011

Looking at the Left: Occupy Denver

Last week, Auster linked to a fascinating photographic article by El Marco of Looking at the Left. You may see the motley crew whose images he captured in “Evil Clowns and Radical Ringmasters of the Anti-Capitalist Revolution in Denver.” After reading about these Occupy Wherever types, I often wonder what they would be like in one on one conversation. I have known many “radicals,” some personally pleasant and some reprehensibly foul. Foolish political and anthropological views do not necessarily correspond with vice, and there are many sweet souled anarchists and socialists on the American campus. As my friend Andrew often remarks, the reason that democracy is mad is the same reason that we ought not to hold political opinions against their adherents. It is unreasonable to expect everyone to be a philosopher or to have been raised and educated by the sane and the wise in contemporary America.

Posted by Joseph on Monday, November 7, Anno Domini 2011
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Monday, October 31, A.D. 2011

Painting in the Dark

Happy Halloween!

I do not have anything to add about our favorite less than Christianized pagan feast that I did not already mention in “All Hallow’s Eve.” Enjoy your All Saints’, your All Souls’, and even your Samhain.

However, the shadowy character of the holiday reminds me of an image that came to me during a recent discussion about mathematics. Nominalism is so rampant in the spiritual air that we breathe that I frequently find myself arguing with folks who hold that men created mathematics—ex nihilo, I suppose. In my last quixotic attempt to open the eyes of the blind to realism, my interlocutor suggested that mathematical concepts were entirely conventional. If that were true, then we should be able to dispose of them and to create another system of mathematics from scratch. Yet, even when we tweak various axioms that underly a particular mathematical approach, as in non-Euclidean geometry, the fundamental logic of mathematical relations continues to operate. There is much controversy in the philosophy of mathematics regarding the relationship between mathematics and formal logic, and I do not understand the problem enough to have any conviction on the matter. Yet, I cannot see how we could maintain logic or an understanding of mathematical relations without the other. I do not know if one implies the other, but, intuitively, they seem to coexist, at least in our thought process. To say that mathematics is entirely conventional is to say that we can think independently of what we mean by mathematical relations, and I do not see how such is possible. It is like asking a computer to function without programming or like asking a painter to copy a visible setting in the absence of light. We cannot think beyond the confines of thought. Could we have thought without mathematical reasoning? I am not sure if the simplest act of recognizing identity involves a mathematical judgment, but I am not comfortable in maintaining that we could still keep reason without such a significant constituent of it. We may manipulate which principles we apply in a given situation or thought experiment, but we do so still knowing and thinking with the suppressed principles in mind. Can we do violence to νοῦς without losing our mind entirely?

Posted by Joseph on Monday, October 31, Anno Domini 2011
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Monday, October 24, A.D. 2011

The End of the Future

Earlier in the month, billionaire genius Peter Thiel published a short essay in National Review, “The End of the Future.” It makes for an interesting and sobering read. Thiel notes that the current political and social orders in Western countries depend on easy economic growth, which requires constant technological innovation. Thiel investigates the state of technology and shares some frank and rather unpleasant commentary about the near future.

Posted by Joseph on Monday, October 24, Anno Domini 2011
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