Items Posted by Jim Kalb
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From: Jim Kalb
Subject: Re: Paleo resistance to empire
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <003901be35ea$aa5a3310$d4ac99ce@sethwill> from "Seth Williamson"
at Jan 1, 99 07:55:28 pm
Status: RO
> Conservatism likes to wrap itself in a vast intellectual tradition.
> Burke, Weaver, Voegelin, and on and on
Giving people what they want individually in a safe, orderly,
comprehensive and universally applicable fashion may in fact be the
political _summum bonum_ but I don't see what it has to do with those
guys. So one problem is that it's very hard to take the tradition
seriously and also be a serious and respected participant in American
public life.
> What a disgrace that conservatism has come to mean a tacit
> endorsement of permanent empire.
One consequence of permanent empire came up in Senator Moynihan's most
recent comments on impeachment, to the effect that the United States is
an indispensible nation and there has to be a commander in chief. If
you want a universal empire you have to have a sacred emperor I think.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From owner-newman@LISTSERV.VT.EDU Sun Jan 3 14:38:53 1999
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From: Jim Kalb
Subject: Re: Paleo resistance to empire
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <003b01be367d$091cb200$d4ac99ce@sethwill> from "Seth Williamson"
at Jan 2, 99 01:23:43 pm
Status: RO
Seth Williamson writes:
> I was thinking as I drove back from Winston-Salem today about how
> hard it is for any society to keep sight of the permanent things in
> the maelstrom of change created by free markets and technological
> advances.
Everything today favors a universal system in which the only realities
are immediate sensation and impulse, and purely formal structures that
relate desires, resources and satisfactions. That after all is what
the "culture war" is about. For that matter, it's what TV, world
markets, medical technology and welfare bureaucracies are about, at
least in concept. Are particularistic and transcendental loyalties to
matter, or is the human world to be understood as a closed uniform
technological system? To choose the former is to embrace "hate."
My current crackpot theory, by the way, is that a system of the sort
described could work if and only if artificial intelligence is
possible. The latter condition ought to be determinable
mathematically, or at least it ought to be demonstrable if AI is
impossible. So the ultimate outcome of the culture war, the permanent
transcendental validity of tradition, religion, poetry, what have you,
and no doubt lots of other things turn out to be a problem in
mathematics. You will find out the answer shortly, when you get my
800-page manuscript in the mail ...
> Certainly a powerful chief executive helps if you want empire.
> Although England had empire without an immensely powerful executive
> after the Glorious Revolution.
Maybe the empire dominated by the Roman Republic is a precedent. In
order to become universal, consolidated and everlasting it had to
acquire a divine emperor. Britain had two empires, neither of which
was universal or consolidated, each of which lasted 100-150 years, the
first of which ended with the American Revolution and the second of
which disappeared as its class and racial basis lost legitimacy.
An empire necessarily involves government that is both decisive and
irresponsible. The government can't be responsible to the people
because there's no people capable of deliberation and decision for it
to be responsible to. The Brits had a small coherent ruling class
governing an imperial people, the English, who were categorically
superior to the other peoples of the empire. I suppose the same was
true of Republican Rome. The ruling class may have quarrelled, but
they knew who they were and what their standards were, and Roman
citizens were in a different class from the subject peoples.
Today I suppose we are also developing ruling elites who are different
sorts of beings from the populace in that the authoritative social good
is simply what they posit as good. That makes them as good as divine.
At Yale Law School the fundamental principle seemed to be that the law
was a matter of what "we" want. Then there was that Supreme Court case
a few years ago (Carey?) in which the Court commented that the
acceptance of Roe v. Wade was a challenge to which the American people
must rise in order to realize their nature. The idea was that they are
a people by virtue of the constitutional order, and they must see the
constitutional order in the decisions of the Supreme Court.
> A "they're-all-nuts-except-for-me-and-you-and-I'm-beginning-to-wonder-
> about-you" situation. Alas, what is there to do but praise God and
> keep on keeping on?
All we can do is our best. Certainly less crabbiness would help.
Craziness can't be an ultimate concern since in a wholly secular order
it is those in power who have the final word on what constitutes
sanity.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Tue Jan 5 15:56:29 EST 1999
Article: 13170 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: T. Jefferson
Date: 3 Jan 1999 21:39:51 -0500
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The following article has to do with the Thomas Jefferson/Sally Hemings
story:
Evidence of a bum rap for Jefferson?
Washington Times
Jan 3, 1999. Reed Irvine
The respected British scientific journal, Nature, is suffering acute
embarrassment over the articles it published last month claiming a
study based on DNA analysis had proven beyond reasonable doubt that
Thomas Jefferson had fathered a son by Sally Hemings, one of his
slaves.
Its January issue will acknowledge that its Novermber issue overstated
the evidence of Jefferson's paternity.
The article was introduced with this statement by the editors of
Nature: "The scandals involving American presidents are nothing new.
In 1802, President Thomas Jefferson was accused of fathering a child
by Sally Hemings, one of his slaves. A molecular genetics study in the
Nov. 5 issue of Nature finally puts the affair to rest, establishing
beyond reasonable doubt Thomas Jefferson's relationship to Sally
Hemings' sons.
The article by Dr. Eugene Foster and others described a study of Y
chromosomes from the male-line descendants of Jefferson's paternal
uncle, Field Jefferson, and male-line descendants of two of Sally
Hemings' sons, her first-born, Thomas Woodson and her last son, Eston
Hemings Jefferson. Five male descendants of Jefferson's uncle were
used in this study because Thomas Jefferson had no sons to carry on
the line. The chromosomes of the five descendants of Field Jefferson
were found to share an uncommon distinctive characteristic.
That characteristic was not found in any of the five descendants of
Hemings' first son, Thomas Woodson, proving Jefferson was not his
father -- the allegation published by a Richmond newspaper in 1802 and
a claim that Woodson's descendants believed to be true. There was only
one descendant of Eston in the study. His Y chromosomes had the
distinctive Jefferson characteristic. That was what Nature trumpeted
as proving beyond reasonable doubt Thomas Jefferson's relationship to
Sally Hemings's sons.
The article itself was a tad more cautious. It allowed that there were
other remote possibilities that someone other than Jefferson fathered
Eston, but the authors said, "In the absence of historical evidence to
support such possibilities, we consider them to be unlikely." But the
title of the article threw all such caution to the wind. It read,
"Jefferson fathered slave's last child."
This resulted in numerous articles based on the belief that Jefferson
was guilty as charged. Historian Joseph Ellis wrote, "Our heroes --
and especially presidents -- are not gods or saints, but
flesh-and-blood humans, with all the frailties and imperfections that
this entails. Others were more critical, calling Jefferson a hypocrite
and perhaps even a rapist. One of the worst was written by Christopher
Hitchens and published in the Nation. He suggested that Jefferson be
described as "the slave-owning serial flogger, sex addict and kinsman
to ax murderers."
Richard Cohen, writing in The Washington Post Magazine, implied that
Jefferson had impregnated Sally Hemings when she was only 14 or 15
years old. He didn't know that the Nature article had reported that
the genetic evidence proved that Jefferson was not the father of
Sally's first child, Thomas Woodson. Mr. Cohen said he had always
believed Jefferson had fathered Sally's children and that it was now a
dead certainty. He said the Hemings story made Jefferson harder,
meaner, selfish -- an exploiter.
Messrs. Hitchens, Cohen and others like them will not welcome the news
that the editors of Nature have admitted that the Foster article
omitted facts that make it clear that the analysis of the chromosomes
did not come close to proving Jefferson fathered any of Hemings'
children. Since publishing Mr. Foster's article, the editors have
learned that Thomas Jefferson was only one of nine living Jeffersons
who might have fathered Eston, passing on to him the chromosomes with
the distinctive Jefferson characteristic.
The most probable candidate, according to Herbert Barger, an authority
on Jefferson family history, was Jefferson's forgotten younger
brother, Randolph. He says Randolph's wife died around 1793 and he
didn't remarry until 1810. He was a frequent visitor to Monticello,
and a slave oral history described him as liking to play the fiddle
and dance with Jefferson's slaves. Mr. Barger told Mr. Foster about
Randolph and the seven other Jefferson men who could have fathered
children by Hemings. A Nature editor says Mr. Foster did not share
this information with them and that he approved the headline that
declared without any qualification that Jefferson was Eston's father.
Nature's admission that its article was flawed and misleading will be
particularly embarrassing for historian Joseph Ellis, author of
"American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson." Persuaded by the
Foster study, Mr. Ellis had switched from a critic of the Hemings
story to a believer. He co-authored an article for Nature that
accompanied the Foster article. The article called attention to many
parallels between Jefferson and Bill Clinton, but it omitted one of
the most striking parallels that nearly all the media had overlooked.
That is the allegation that Mr. Clinton, like Jefferson, fathered a
black son. The family of the boy's mother wants a paternity test for
Mr. Clinton. They believe DNA will prove the president is the deadbeat
dad of 14-year-old Danny.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Wed Jan 6 08:40:27 EST 1999
Article: 13176 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: T. Jefferson
Date: 5 Jan 1999 20:01:39 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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In <36929AF5.EC8BC34@infinet.com> "Tony W. Frye" writes:
>The fact that Jefferson was slave owner in and of itself makes him a
>two-faced hypocrite when compared to his professed beliefs in
>equality. While the revolutionaries in France were banning slavery,
>there was the pro-French Revolution Jefferson comparing black people
>to animals.
The problem with Liberty and Equality, understood in the manner of the
French Revolution and modern Leftist thought, is that they are
peremptory demands of political morality that can never be established
in any actual society. So those who commit to them can be ineffectual
idealists, or inhuman murderers in the manner of the French
revolutionists, or liberal hypocrites. I suppose stupid and
self-satisfied is also an option. Seems to me Jefferson was better
than most, though.
>People get more upset about him possibly breeding a black kid then
>when he bombs them to maintain high poll ratings. That, more than
>anything else, is the saddest story.
In fairness, there's no DNA test to confirm the "wag the dog"
interpretation of recent imperial aggressions, and there are reasonably
respectable people involved who deny that interpretation. Also,
solidarity in dealing with outsiders is easily abused but it's also
necessary. There's no similar public-spirited motive to abuse in the
Son of Bill situation.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Fri Jan 8 09:53:13 EST 1999
Article: 13192 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: T. Jefferson
Date: 8 Jan 1999 04:24:10 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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In <36956789.8803013@news.revealed.net> shabunas@revealed.net (John Shabunas) writes:
>If the editors of "Nature" magazine did not verify the truth or even
>the facts of an article prior to publishing, should we believe any
>else they publish. Once again, we see a failure to verify the
>correctness of the article's major premise.
It's a *very* odd situation, because the problem with the articles was
glaringly obvious on their face. The one that included the analysis
gave the facts, which strongly supported the conclusion that S.
Hemings' youngest son was fathered by a male-line relative of T.
Jefferson's paternal uncle, and then said at the end, almost in so many
words, "well, it could have been Tom, and since we don't have a lot of
info on the other possibilities, it's unlikely to have been any of
those other possibilities." Had the editor stopped reading by that
time? The article was entitled "Thomas Jefferson was the father of
Sally Hemings' youngest son," or something of the sort, and the mag
also published a short interpretive piece about how we now know Tom did
it and what that means.
It's hard to make sense of such conduct. Everyone is stupid sometimes
and if you're unlucky the stupidist thing you do in a particular year
is done in public. Maybe at Nature they just heard about "spin" but
since they're ivory tower scientists they had no idea how to do it so
they botched their first attempt.
You can read the articles and responses at www.nature.com, by the way.
One of the responses points out the interesting possibility that slaves
were inherited, so half the male mixed-blood slaves at Monticello could
have had the Jefferson genetic marker, not from Tom but from previous
generations of Jeffersons. There's no way of knowing.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix!not-for-mail Mon Jan 11 15:14:48 EST 1999
Article: 13205 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: T. Jefferson
Date: 11 Jan 1999 13:14:36 GMT
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In <36977d84.3730407@news.revealed.net> shabunas@revealed.net (John Shabunas) writes:
>Normally, I do not read "Nature" magazine, but I respected it as a
>periodical where I thought it published "correct" facts. My problem
>is that I am loosing faith in the what I read in every publication
>(even though I am a cynic, occasionally I do believe what I read).
Men have always lied but a situation in which truth and falsehood lose
their distinctiveness even in concept has its own special quality. To
put a grand perspective on things, it seems that declining confidence
that there is an Absolute Truth somewhere to which our human truths
relate led first to emphasis on procedure -- on scientific method,
scholarly standards and the like -- but now is ending in anarchy since
it turns out this world is not enough even for its own purposes.
_Chronicles_ has covered what seems to be an increasing problem of
plagarism and fraud in academia and science. For a discussion of some
recent interventions by well-known academics in public affairs, see the
John Finnis article at
http://www.cycad.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/finnis-shameless
on historians' briefs filed with the Supreme Court in abortion cases
and Martha Nussbaum's perjury in the Colorado Proposition 2 litigation.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix!not-for-mail Mon Jan 11 15:14:51 EST 1999
Article: 16017 of nyc.politics
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.usa,alt.politics.org.fbi,alt.gathering.rainbow,alt.hemp.politics,nyc.politics
Subject: Re: Hustler on Slick-Willies
Date: 11 Jan 1999 11:46:52 GMT
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In "Torres-Astacio" writes:
>He should have never been asked that question in the first place,
>since it is just his business, and his business only.
Then get rid of him because he favored and signed that 1994 legislation
that made the sexual history of defendants discoverable in sexual
harassment lawsuits.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From owner-newman@LISTSERV.VT.EDU Mon Jan 11 21:06:43 1999
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From: Jim Kalb
Subject: slavery
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy"
at Jan 11, 99 06:12:40 pm
Status: RO
Francesca Murphy writes:
> I had been maintaining against Jim Kalb that slavery is absolutely
> contradictory to the dignity of the person
My objection to this was that it seemed overly conceptual for practical
social life. It might show that there is no slavery in utopia or in
the Kingdom, or that it's bad to establish slavery where it doesn't
exist (Saint Paul said harsh things about manstealers). It showed that
if you own a slave it would be wrong to exercise your full legal rights
(Paul tells masters to do otherwise).
But the Constitution of the United States of America as presently
authoritatively interpreted is also absolutely contradictory to some
wonderful things. That doesn't mean I shouldn't (in general) feel
obligated to obey the laws of the United States or entitled to claim
rights under them. It seems that an institution based on an evil
principle can retain authority if it is fundamental to the actual
social order.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From owner-newman@LISTSERV.VT.EDU Tue Jan 12 17:17:58 1999
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From: Jim Kalb
Subject: Re: slavery
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <19990112160309.RHBY1406@localHost> from "Rhydon Jackson" at Jan
12, 99 10:03:00 am
Status: RO
Rhydon Jackson writes:
> I think Paul's response to slavery might have more than a purely
> pragmatic character.
As Francesca seems most recently to suggest, he apparently thought use
could be made of the institution. The slave could perhaps learn freedom
in self-giving, the master the humanity and indeed mysterious
superiority of a person he had considered his property. In any case the
master could learn virtues like forbearance.
There's a difference between slavery and say murder -- the former is an
abstract legal relationship the substantive content of which could
become almost anything. In classical antiquity there were slave
pedagogues, slave physicians and so on. In the Muslim world slaves
have often been high government officials, even (as in the case of the
Mamlukes) absolute rulers.
> But, are there any general concepts for practical social life?
There are, but which ones govern your conduct and how depends on the
situation. If someone appoints you Lawgiver then you're not in the
same position as a subject of a universal despotism. The Lawgiver has
a right to say "no slavery" and then that's the way it'll be. The
situations of a citizen of a limited constitutional republic and a
voter in a mass democracy are each something else again. The last may
be a Lawgiver or at least a tiny fraction of one.
> What does it mean for an authority to be fundamental to the actual
> social order? Does the term "actual social order" refer to the
> accidental qualities of a society or to underlying realities of a
> transcendental kind?
By a.s.o. I meant society as a functioning complex of attitudes,
expectations, loyalties, beliefs, habits, etc. By saying an authority
is fundamental I meant that denying its binding quality would seriously
derange the a.s.o. As an aside, it's doubtful that slavery was
fundamental to the a.s.o. of the Old South in the intended sense since
slavery was a "peculiar institution." The Old South was part of a more
inclusive political society that did without slavery, so it seems the
Old South had resources available that would enable it to do so as
well.
> Bradford latter responded to the effect that people at least have a
> right to an inherited, traditional social context.
To me it seems there are universal rights, things like "no one should
be treated simply as a means to others' ends," but they're too abstract
to rule out much apart from extreme cases like the Khmer Rouge. In
more normal cases they can of course provide guidance for the conduct
of officials as of other people.
> How does one decide when to confront a tradition?
Tradition is always about something other than itself, in general I
suppose the Good as understood and practically realized by a people.
It's never altogether consistent since we don't understand and realize
the Good perfectly. So "confronting a tradition" will usually be part
of a conflict within tradition. How you resolve such things is a
matter of judgement. Wise men do it wisely.
> How does one decide when a political authority is illegitimate?
This is not I think a *special* problem for a traditionalist view.
It's not that easy for anyone who is presumptively subject to an
authority to constitute himself judge, jury and prosecutor, try the
authority, and find it wanting.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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In <916102772snz@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> raf391@hormel.bloxwich.demon.co.uk (rafael cardenas) writes:
>But I should be surprised if disingenuousness (and worse) of the kind
>Finnis attributes to Nussbaum could not be found in academic
>controversies long before the rise of the postmodernist attitude to
>truth and fact.
All human vices are no doubt found at all times and places. Still,
sometimes special circumstances bring on a flowering. Basic
understandings of what the world, man, life, language, truth etc. are
like do it seems to me affect how people act. It was troublesome that
after all this Nussbaum got appointed to a joint professorship in Law
and Divinity in Chicago.
For more see Robert George's "Shameless Acts" Revisted: Some Questions
for Martha Nussbaum at
http://www.webcom.com/zurcher/philosophy/nussbaum.html
A while ago I looked around for rebuttals of what these right-wing
character assassins were saying about the very eminent and
well-connected Professor Nussbaum, but couldn't find much. It seemed
to me that they were sufficiently well-known themselves that if they
were engaging in gross distortion many people would have said so
publicly.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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From: Jim Kalb
Subject: Re: slavery
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <19990113191937.XIIA1406@localHost> from "Rhydon Jackson" at Jan
13, 99 01:19:00 pm
Status: RO
Rhydon Jackson writes:
> can't we make similar statements about any situation a person finds
> himself in?
Usually yes, which is why it is normally acts and not situations that
are sins.
> the Mamlukes. (I had forgotten about them. Can you provide a summary
> of their situation?)
"Mamluk" is just Arabic for "slave." From early times Muslim armies
included slave units. Quite often they were not only slaves but
foreign slaves ethnically unconnected to the subject peoples. I
suppose the idea was that they would be more professional and more
loyal to the government, who made them everything they were. Muslim
governments were typically dynastic empires with no organic connection
to the territories they ruled and corruption etc. was therefore a big
problem if you rely on locals.
If a despot subject to the temptations to which a despot is subject has
efficient military subordinates there's an obvious problem. So it was
pretty common for Mamluk generals to seize effective power and keep the
Sultan or Caliph or whoever on as at most a figurehead. The best
example was the Mamluk rulers of Egypt, who ruled from 1250 to 1517.
They set up a Caliph to replace the one who disappeared when the Mongol
Hulagu murdered everyone in Baghdad, but he was obviously powerless.
Actually even after the Ottomans took over they tended to rule through
the Mamluks who were still there even though in decline (for example,
they did away with the rule that said that the son of a Mamluk could
not be a Mamluk). So when Napoleon invaded Egypt it was the Mamluks he
faced. The French Revolution meets the Slave Kings of Cairo.
> >If someone appoints you Lawgiver then you're not in the same
> >position as a subject of a universal despotism. The Lawgiver has a
> >right to say "no slavery" and then that's the way it'll be. The
> >situations of a citizen of a limited constitutional republic and a
> >voter in a mass democracy are each something else again. The last
> >may be a Lawgiver or at least a tiny fraction of one.
>
> I'm not sure of your point here. Do you mean to say that any
> authority is validated by its mere existence?
The basic point is that "slavery is a bad institution" would have
different practical implications for Lycurgus and for Roman provincials
c. 50 A.D. The position of a voter in a regime based on popular
sovereignty is I suppose somewhere in between.
> didn't the Old South perish in the Union victory?
In addition to the freeing of the slaves there was the devastation of
the war, the death of a huge number of the best Southern men, rule by
the conqueror and so on. Before the war there were other
possibilities, at least abstractly, legal protections for slaves and
gradual emancipation for example. I suppose the need to present a
solid front to the outside world and the oddity of the Peculiar
Institution at the time, which made any amelioration a slippery slope,
made such things politically impossible. Too bad. Lack of moderation
is the death of political regimes, but nothing lasts forever.
> What about RE Lee's choice? Or the American vs the French revolution?
> Even closer, how about the First Things flap? The current situation
> with abortion seems to have a lot of parallels with the antebellum
> slavery question. Or maybe a literary exploration...Antigone?
Lee chose his homeland and the principle of self-determination upon
which the American polity was based, so it's hard to criticize him.
The Union position, certainly at the beginning of the war, was simply
that the Union should be preserved. What's so great about that, unless
you happen to like extensive systems of power?
The American revolution was initially a movement to preserve
traditional practices of self-rule, although it eventually became
radical, in part because of radical aspects of the American tradition
itself and in part because a revolution needs a justification and the
intellectual culture of the time tended toward radicalism. Honorable
men could have gone either way and did.
The French revolution I don't like. The Estates General could have
reformed things, put revenue on a better footing, and then gone home
with an agreement to meet periodically with some share in government.
That was basic to Burke's position -- it would have been so easy to
make solid improvements that kept and relied on the materials already
present.
The First Things flap arose because the participants were all liberals
who think government is necessarily based on the will of the governed.
Saying "the actual constitutional order of the United States is based
on evil principles like unconditional self-ownership and therefore as a
natural lawyer and Catholic I can't possibly understand it as willed by
me" becomes, as Norman Podhoretz asserts, the equivalent of
bomb-throwing. Give up liberalism and the problem disappears.
Antigone I'm not ready to discuss. The Greek dramas have too much in
them.
> some antagonists are more 'traditional' than others. Consider Burke
> vs. Paine.
True enough. Anything that happens except foreign invasion is no doubt
a conflict within a tradition. And the real question is not "what is
traditional" but "what is prudent and just." The objection is to modes
of thought that overemphasize man's ability to construct from scratch a
morality, a social order, what have you. Also to those that make it
impossible to recognize a common transcendent authority. Our way of
thinking about political things should be consistent with sound polity.
> A person like Rawls has only to inspect the case. The more an
> authority leads to equality, the more legitimacy he awards it.
To what extent is that an illusion? Comprehensive principles are
abstract and their application requires judgement. Even if you knew
the long-term effects of one measure or another, which you never do,
certainly not with any assurance, equality has many dimensions. Equal
ability to achieve your goals or equal resources? Equal freedom to
develop your gifts or equal status? Besides, basic freedoms trump
equality for Rawls, and what the conflicts are and how they should be
resolved in concrete cases is impossible to resolve by rule. PC is an
example. Is free speech or equal respect more important? Open debate
of political principle or protection of the disadvantaged?
Thus spake Francesca Murphy :
> But if it is wrong to use someone purely as a means to an end, it is
> just as wrong to treat someone as a brain-means-to-an-end as a body-
> means-to-an-end.
> Turn it around another way. Is it right for those of us who work in
> universities to let our employers use us purely as book-producers and
> producers of the saleable product of lecturing (I'm not quite sure
> what Greg does, but there are obvious analogues).
The objection to slavery in contrast to a private property/free labor
system is not that the one guarantees treating persons as means only
while the latter forbids it. In either legal regime that might or
might not be what happens in a particular case. The objection as I
understand it is that slavery makes it more likely and often more
extreme since it makes the voluntary cooperation of the worker less
necessary. He can't quit, and you can beat him or sell him down the
river. My point as to slave pedagogues, prime ministers and
podiatrists is that the nature of the work makes voluntary cooperation
more important and thus reduces the likelihood that the slave will be
treated merely as a means.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From jk Wed Jan 13 22:05:36 1999
Subject: Re: your mail
To: BE
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 1999 22:05:36 -0500 (EST)
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Hello!
You write:
> In my search for the roots of what I describe as "the new left" I
> believe it all began with Rousseau and the French Revolution. The
> philosophical thought was followed up by Hegel, Marx and Neichtze
> (sp?). In one way or another, all argued that the only way to
> achieve *true* freedom was to serve the state. Individuals find
> collective worth in the community. Those who may not necessarily
> wish to take this course may be "forced to be free" as Rousseau said.
You have to make distinctions. Nietzsche's views were quite different
from the others. He was an extreme individualist, a right-wing
atheist. Marx thought true freedom would be achieved only in the
future communist utopia, in which there would be no state because there
would be no classes and no conflicts of interest and therefore no need
for force. In the meantime the state was only the representative of
the dominant class and so had no special moral standing for him.
> It is still my belief that "the new left" is nothing more than a
> prelude to totalitarianism.
The 60's new left was a mess. There was a mixture of
proto-totalitarian and radically antinomian views. Maybe all that
shows is that tyranny and anarchy are closely related.
> Facism and communism, while sharing a loathing of one another, are
> essentially the same.
In many ways yes. Communism has an ultimate goal different from that
of fascism, but that goal grows ever more distant and hard to conceive
and in the meantime as in the case of fascism the ruling party and thus
the state is the supreme standard. To make the supremacy of the state
concrete the communists like the fascists instituted divine leaders and
extreme militarism so the state would have one will and an effective
organization to carry out that will.
> The love affair of the academic left with socialism and communism led
> to the conclusion that facism is an extreme form of conservatism.
Part of the reason for the liberal obsession with Naziism is that the
two philosophies have a lot in common. Both accept the view that what
makes something good is simply that someone wants it, that there are no
otherworldly standards to judge things in this world, that morality is
a social construction, and that the only objective value is the
negative value of defeat, suffering and death.
Liberals accept the principle of individual equality, and conclude from
those other assumptions that there should be a universal rational
system giving everyone what he wants as much and as equally as
possible. Nazis deny that principle, and so conclude that the highest
good for a group is to get its own way, and to signalize its power to
do so by defeating, torturing and exterminating other groups. Both
conclusions seem rational to me based on the assumptions. Since the
only difference between the two is the principle of equality, it seems
to me liberals are honest if unimaginative in their belief that anyone
with doubt about radical egalitarianism must be a Nazi.
> But I wonder, then, is there a difference between liberalism and "the
> new left"? Multiculturalism, tolerance, pc, feminism -- all these
> things embody the new left, and will ultimately lead to tyranny.
> Does the Hubert Humphrey or Adalai Stevenson liberal become a tyrany
> though? Or could we say there is a difference between "welfare
> liberalism" (FDR, etc.) and "the new left"?
My own view is that classical liberalism, New Deal liberalism and
contemporary PC liberalism are distinct phases in a common historical
movement. The one leads to the other. My "PC and the Crisis of
Liberalism" in _Pinc_, which is available on my page, goes into that.
The basic idea is that if you accept that "good" simply means what men
want, and since all men equally want things their desires have equal
standing, your goal will be a system that as much and as equally as
possible gives them what they want. At first you'll just do away with
traditional religious restrictions and social distinctions so each man
can pursue his own happiness as he conceives it. (Classical
liberalism.) Then you'll try to transfer resources to those who have
less to make them more equally able to pursue their happiness. (New
Deal liberalism.) Then you'll expand your notion of the disadvantages
to be rectified to include disadvantages due to social attitudes that
make it harder for some people to pursue their conception of their
happiness. (PC liberalism.)
If you accept the basic principles of relativism as to what's good and
equality it seems to me hard to avoid moving from one step to the next.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From jk Wed Jan 13 21:43:04 1999
Subject: Re: Professor Nussbaum
To: gbc
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 1999 21:43:04 -0500 (EST)
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> Sounds to me as though, with her willingness to perjure
> herself for her ideology, Professor Nussbaum would fit in well in the
> Clinton Administration.
She's a lot like BC -- someone with great personal charm,
attractiveness and presence who is used to talking her way out of
anything because she knows what will play and doesn't care what's true.
Also, limitless contempt for normal society. That's a requirement for
a scholar who grossly perjures herself in a constitutional case as she
did and then blatantly lies to her colleagues and everyone else who
asks about it. And then she got appointed to a joint law and divinity
professorship at U of Chicago!
> Seriously, what do you think of the new level of open lying,
> even under oath, from the interlocked cultural, political &business
> elites, in defense of their goals & power? What does it tell you
> about their view of the rest of us? And what about the polls that
> show the public "doesn't care" about perjury from the President.
> Your Ottoman Empire America may be closer than you think -- we don't
> care what the Pasha does off in Istanbul so long as we have good
> crops & a fat life...
I think the obvious.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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In-Reply-To: <494e6d64.369cb911@aol.com> from "GEVeith@aol.com" at Jan 13, 99 10:17:37 am
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GEVeith@aol.com writes:
> 1. Rejection of the concept of the transcendent objective, signified.
>
> 2. Rejection of the 'bourgeois' notion of the individual.
>
> 3. Resulting in the sumum bonum being the group will to power.
>
> These are elements.
It does seem to me that the result follows. Since modern secular
liberals find it hard to imagine the validity of the transcendent
objective signified, their view that anyone who doubts the notion of
the free, equal, self-legislating etc. liberal individual is likely at
bottom a fascist is understandable. In their world that is indeed the
consequence.
Another aspect of the situation is that part of the rejection of the
transcendent has to do with insistence on what is visible, concrete,
demonstrable. That insistence has its own consequences. The will of
the group can best be made concrete and unified through identification
with the will of a particular man. Hence the leader whose will is law.
Everything gains value by becoming an instrument of that will. Hence
militarization etc. Further, those, liberals and fascists alike, who
reject objective goods and identify the good with what someone wants
tend nonetheless to accept an objective summum (infimum?) malum in the
form of defeat, pain and death. It follows that the triumph of the
group will to power can most clearly be made objectively valid through
infliction of those things on others. It's all quite logical.
I don't know what topics you touch on in your book, but these are ones
that have struck me.
> The key is understanding Fascism as a reaction against what they, in
> their own terms, considered the "Jewish influence" on Western
> culture.
What did they do with the Greeks? Are there grounds for the impression
fascists and feminists seem to have that European culture was immanent
and collective before it was corrupted by something or other?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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In-Reply-To: from "sschaper" at Jan 14, 99 09:19:01 am
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> > What did they do with the Greeks?
>
> Have you not read Plato's _Republic_? Is it not a description of a
> fascist State as ideal?
I don't think so. A fascist wouldn't have written a dialogue intended
to show that the life of a successful unjust man is less worthy of
choice than the life of a just man thought unjust who ends abandoned,
beaten, blinded and crucified. A long and arduous educational process
whereby one becomes capable of a vision of transcendent Good is not the
same as the _Sieg des Willens_.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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In-Reply-To: <369e117e355b001@mhub3.tc.umn.edu> from "Contra Mundum" at Jan 14, 99 09:47:09 am
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> >What did they do with the Greeks?
> Isn't this the reason that Heidegger is the philosopher both of the
> Nazis and of the new liberals? His notion of the Greek Fall into
> rationality?
No doubt. One of these days I have to read him. It makes it seem odd
though to blame everything on the Jews.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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> >> Have you not read Plato's _Republic_? Is it not a description of
> >> a fascist State as ideal?
>
> The part I remembered was his discussion of taking babes from their
> mothers, and rearing them by the State, with the theory of
> 'earth-birth' so that the State would be their all-in-all, their
> group for the will to power.
He did have his theory of the noble lie. The educational system wasn't
going to make everyone fully rational and the others had to have an
motivational understanding of things as well. A distinction from
fascism is that there was an ultimate contemplative truth behind the
whole system. That seems to me important -- for example, it means that
success can't be the final standard. "Sieg Heil" is non-Platonic.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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In-Reply-To: <7ca2c429.369e1ea7@aol.com> from "GEVeith@aol.com" at Jan 14, 99 11:43:19 am
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GEVeith@aol.com writes:
> The old paganism did assert the unity of the self, the community,
> nature, and the gods.
How much of this is known? I'm an ignoramus, so if the best thing is
to refer me to a standard account that's fine.
My impression is that both Greek and Norse pagan culture were intensely
competitive and tended toward pessimism, which doesn't sound like grand
unity. Their gods were known to be distinct from ultimate reality.
They were bound against their will by fate and necessity. The Norse
gods were all going to be destroyed, to make way for a new and better
creation. In India as in Greece Indoeuropean paganism eventually led
to transcendental religion and ascetic ideals. My impression is that
the feminists therefore push back the golden age to preIndoeuropean
neolithic types, which is fine but I don't think any of the facts are
known.
So my impression is that to the extent we know something about paganism
it was visibly unstable and led to what succeeded it. It wasn't a
matter of suppression and corruption. Christianity answered questions
paganism raised but could not answer. So an essential part of modern
neopaganism is forbidding the asking of questions. When you hear
certain things you just reach for your revolver. Or declare them
pseudoissues or whatever.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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From: Jim Kalb
Subject: Re: slavery
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <19990114182056.BLEZ5654@localHost> from "Rhydon Jackson" at Jan
14, 99 12:21:00 pm
Status: RO
Rhydon Jackson writes:
> Yet I don't feel comfortable simply identifying the ancestral with
> the good. Indeed, I'm certain that at times resistance to authorities
> which are sanctioned by tradition and/or positive law is justified.
> In fact, how can you fault a slave in the South for trying to escape?
> Let us make it concrete, assuming Frederick Douglass's narrative is
> truthful, how can you fault him?
Tradition is not a formal rule or something that makes thought
unnecessary. It is in part a denial of the universal applicability of
formal rules. It doesn't absolutely exclude any form of thought.
Tradition isn't about itself, it's about things like justice and
prudence that take on useable and concrete and knowable form through
it.
To my mind it's a question of who you trust, where you look for
guidance, what categories of thought you rely on, the extent to which
you have to rely on habit, sympathy and inarticulate perception to come
to conclusions that make sense, whether you think of justice as
something that can be fully known through explicit reason or something
not wholly within our grasp that we approximate to the extent we can do
so through long efforts and living in communion with others.
As to F. Douglass, I haven't read his narrative. I've mentioned my
view that Southern culture didn't fully support slavery. The
Declaration of Independence after all was written by one of the most
admired Southerners.
> If Lee made justifiable choices, what made them so? What about some
> one like Rommel, who made similar ones? The Nazi example is far too
> handy. I don't mean to equate American slavery with the attempt to
> exterminate European Jewry, but no other example comes to me at the
> moment.
The Nazi case was different from any difficulty with established
traditions because what they were doing was novel and proclaimed to be
such. Also, hard cases make bad law. As to what particular people in
Germany should have done there are no doubt complications. Ami Bill is
fighting the evil Nazis and keeps on doing so even though he reads in
the paper about the civilians the USAF is shredding and broasting in
Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo and so on. Squarehead Willi is fighting the
evil Bolsheviks and Anglo-American plutocrats and he sees an atrocity
or two and hears bizarre rumors of others on a huge scale. Who should
do what?
In Rommel's [sp?] case I don't know what he should have done. In part
the problem is that I don't know much about his actual situation. If
he were ordered to commit atrocities he shouldn't have done it. If he
were ordered to round up the Jews and turn them over to Eichman, I
suppose compliance might have been more excusable than the conduct of
the American and British authorities involved in Operation Keelhaul
etc. If the problem is participation in warfare having no serious
defensive purpose to set up a new world order he should talk things
over with General Schwarzkopf etc.
> what of the arguments presented in First Things? Can we articulate to
> some degree the distinction between "light and transient causes" and
> evils which are insufferable?
Quite a project, not one I'm ready to undertake. I just haven't read
and thought about the various discussions on tyrannicide and so on. Why
the emphasis on extreme cases? Possibly at some point I'd be justified
in killing all my relatives but why is that the key point I should sort
through and dwell on? It seems to me the search for advance answers to
extreme cases is part of a demand for a machine that will substitute for
thought.
> But am I a radical for declaring that I don't intend to be enslaved?
> If I don't want to rely on Lockean arguments, what can I rely on?
You don't need the thought of John Locke to tell you slavery is a bad
thing. Saint Paul hadn't read Locke and he condemned manstealers.
> I hope that I'm not trying anybody's patience by prolonging the
> discussion.
Not mine. It's all to the good if I'm pressed and called to account.
If everyone else is bored it's easy for them to delete the messages.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy"
at Jan 14, 99 08:25:06 pm
Status: RO
> When you say 'Providential (capital P) social role', do you mean
> social role given by God? If you do, then you are identifying not
> ancestral tradition not only with the good in some general sense but
> with the divine will. Social role/rule is thereby given sacral
> authority, or divinised.
Is that necessarily so? The specific social order might not be divine
but one's placement in the contingent social order might nonetheless be
attributable to divine providence.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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In-Reply-To: <199901142059.OAA12980@aae.wisc.edu> from "Ardella Crawford" at
Jan 14, 99 02:59:53 pm
Status: RO
> > I am denying that 'the nations', as such (apart from Biblical
> > Israel), are used by divine providence.
>
> What do you mean when you say that the nations, except for Israel,
> aren't used by divine providence?
I'm puzzled too. Is a man ever used by divine providence? The
specific groups, subgroups, family etc he grew up in and their ways and
beliefs are part of what made him the specific concrete man he is. His
specific loyalties, ties and formative connections are not altogether
external to him. So if d.p. uses the man it seems it uses all those
things.
A nation is a sort of moral unity. We have some kind of obligation it
seems to me to do things for our nation just because it is ours. Why
is a portion of moral reality foreign to divine providence?
Also, when d.p. acts it acts in a setting and presumably its act uses
the setting because but for the specific setting the act would be
something other than what it is.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From owner-confucius@lists.gnacademy.org Thu Jan 14 20:26:40 1999
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From: Jim Kalb
Subject: Re: Confucius: 11:15
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Status: RO
> 11:16. Dz-gung asked, Of Shr and Shang, which is worthier? The Master
> said, Shr goes too far, Shang does not go far enough. He said, If so,
> then Shr is better, is he not? The Master said, To go too far is as
> bad as not to go far enough. [Legge 11:15]
Another interpretation: the moral fanatic is not worthier than the
moral slacker. Perfectly good sense, assuming you say it to someone
like Dz-gung inclined to be impressed with moral fanatics. To me this
seems like vintage Confucius. You start with what is natural and
normal, and don't leave it but bring out what is in it.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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In-Reply-To: <19990115170422.BNOP8311@localHost> from "Rhydon Jackson" at Jan
15, 99 11:04:00 am
Status: RO
> >Southern culture didn't fully support slavery.
>
> I'm not sure where the lack of support is. The Declaration example
> doesn't work for me, because I agree with Bradford and Gary Wills
> that the Declaration does not address American slavery.
I agree it doesn't address slavery, but it expresses a basically
Lockean view of political society that has been quite influential in
America, to put it mildly, in the South as elsewhere. That view is at
odds with slavery.
> >is one society better at inventing and allotting roles than another?
> >In that case, there is something higher than the particular
> >historical good embodied in one set of ancestors. And there is
> >something in the name of which one can, on occasion, rebel against
> >the 'traditional' order.
>
> I'm tempted to say yes, but what of Jim's warnings about the problems of
> universally imposing a generalization from one society's traditions on to
> another?
Tradition is about the transcendent and we need tradition because it's
the way the transcendent becomes available to us. Tradition works up
hints and thoughts and experiences that are hard to grasp into
something concrete and useable. If the transcendent could be put into
a fully explicit rational demonstrable order like say optics it
wouldn't be the transcendent.
The consequence I think is that we can't dispense with tradition or act
as if we had a general power of judging it -- it is the greater part of
what enables us to judge. On the other hand we can't think of it as an
ultimate either. To the extent it is valid it is ordered toward
something other than itself. And on occasion -- by the nature of the
thing there can't be a rule for this -- our recognition that tradition
is not ultimate must have concrete consequences.
> Slavery certainly seems inconsistent with some aspects of the English
> political tradition, which, I suppose, is why they forbade it after
> ~1830.
Actually I think it was in the 1770s or thereabout that Lord Mansfield
ruled that the laws of England did not allow for slavery. The colonies
of course had their own different laws.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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Subject: Re: slavery
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In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy"
at Jan 15, 99 10:18:00 pm
Status: RO
Francesca Murphy writes:
> that vertical element by which Paul did something new. This is not to
> say that what such empirical scholarship can discover is of no
> interest, it is just to say that the vertical element of divine
> providence is beyond its scope.
The vertical element is of course absolutely essential, not just in
Paul but in each of us. What incarnates the vertical element, though,
is the horizontal, so to me it makes sense to say divine providence
uses the horizontal.
Perhaps "use" was a misleading word. Your point may be that Ancient
Israel like the Church, Paul and each participant in Newman have a
vertical element but England and America don't. So divine providence
might use America or Liechtenstein, as it might use a rock, but America
can not be an agent of divine providence any more than say the
contactual relationship between me and my ISP could. That point is
more comprehensible and may lead to what you say next:
> Why not say that a portion of moral reality is truly secular?
> Why can't political obligations just be that - political obligations?
> Why do we have to bring divine providence into them in order to make
> them morally significant?
It seems odd to me to make life and death obligations truly secular.
Political obligations can't help in the end but be so. Even if the
Pope gets rid of capital punishment a political order for whom no one
is willing to die and that is never willing to sacrifice life will not
last.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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From: Jim Kalb
Subject: Re: slavery
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <19990115225154.HYYB1406@localHost> from "Rhydon Jackson" at Jan
15, 99 04:52:00 pm
Status: RO
Rhydon Jackson writes:
> How Lockean the colonials were in their conflict with England is
> maybe more open to question than Jim suggests.
I'm presently in a "they were all Lockeans" mode. I'm writing
something claiming that's the reason we got Emerson when the _novus
ordo seclorum_ matured.
> He has stated the matter very well, I think. The above two paragraphs
> are remarkably well worded.
If so, I owe it all to you.
> The reason for bringing in extreme cases is the thought that only
> these cases provide occasions for such recognition.
Not as hypotheticals though, as concrete situations. You gotta suffer.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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From: Jim Kalb
Subject: Re: slavery
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In-Reply-To: from "jk" at Jan 15, 99 07:02:45 pm
Status: RO
> It seems odd to me to make life and death obligations truly secular.
> Political obligations can't help in the end but be so.
I mean they can't help but be life and death.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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From: Jim Kalb
Subject: Re: Divine providence
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy"
at Jan 16, 99 09:54:31 am
Status: RO
Francesca Murphy writes:
> I do not see why the obligation to die for one's country may [not?]
> nonetheless be a secular, moral obligation, not a religious
> obligation per se.
An obligation to die looks like an all-embracing obligation of the
whole man. The secular in contrast seems to relate to only part of the
man.
Do you know of secular arguments for such an obligation? Somewhere in
_Theory of Justice_ John Rawls explicitly says he has none, which puts
his political theory rather in a pickle it seems to me. The closest
thing I can recall to a direct discussion by a liberal (Alan Ryan I
think) simply comments that those who raise the issue of ultimate
sacrifice are "bloody minded." Others like Steven Holmes point out that
Carl Schmitt was a Nazi, for a little while anyway, so anything you can
connect to him can and indeed must be ignored. (Liberalism need not be
the only theory of secular moral obligation of course but it's the one
that comes to mind.)
> In this country, at least, the last person to attempt to rehabiliate
> the notion of sacrifice on a politico-religious basis was Kipling.
You may be right that the tendency toward secularization of public life
is invincible. I don't like declaring that tendency theologically
correct though because it seems to me to lead to a morally incoherent
polity.
In the United States the notion that the polity has a nameable vertical
dimension was formally rejected only in the early '60s, in the school
prayer cases. One consequence of that rejection (assuming my view that
"life and death" implies "religious" is correct) is that it has become
impossible to make moral sense of the soldier's life. So there has
been a tendency among our cultural elites toward hatred and contempt
for the military.
Hatred and contempt tend to be reciprocated. At present the tactic is
to demilitarize the military -- make it feminist, make it a laboratory
of multiculturalism, make it a school of remedial education, insist
that the American military can never suffer loss of life in any of our
imperial adventures. It seems doubtful, to me anyway, that that can
work forever. So what we seem to look forward to is a pluralistic
secular society constitutionally unwilling to make serious sacrifices,
morally unable to exact them, and dependent for its existence on a body
of men willing to kill and to face death themselves who are therefore
morally alienated from the society they protect. Sounds like a recipe
for rule by the Praetorians or the Mafia.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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From: Jim Kalb
Subject: Re: Divine providence
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy"
at Jan 16, 99 09:54:31 am
Status: RO
Another query -- which human collectivities have vertical dimensions?
So far we have the Church and Ancient Israel agreed on. Does the
status of marriage as a sacrament mean that the nuclear family has a
vertical dimension? More extended kin groups?
The notion of inter-religious dialogue if valid seems to suggest that
Islam has a vertical dimension. Islam doesn't distinguish religious
and secular, so they believe their commercial law has a vertical
dimension, but maybe that's just an error on their part.
If the American polity fails to have a vertical dimension how about
American society? American culture? If the latter is wholly secular
now has it always been so? How about European society and culture?
Was Christendom simply an illusion?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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From: Jim Kalb
Subject: Re: Divine providence
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy"
at Jan 16, 99 05:45:09 pm
Status: RO
Francesca Murphy writes:
> I suppose that my claim that the nations are not under divine
> providence is equivalent to the claim that that we do not know what
> God's plan for human history as a whole is.
I understood "vertical dimension" to mean something like "aspect
through which a person or human thing (church, culture, whatever) is
more than the resultant of its influences, efficient causes, etc. and
so can be open to God as a subject at least potentially." Divine
providence in the sense we are talking about would then be God's action
enabled by that openness.
It seems to me collectivities can have a vertical dimension in that
sense, that they can have some sort of existence as a subject or
something like it. They can be bearers of meaning, of truth, of
falsehood, etc. We are social animals and it seems to me we are maimed
if our society is reducible without remainder to the persons composing
it and so can not be the vehicle of goods which transcend us. (It's
also true of course that there is something in each of us that
transcends our social setting. Neither is reducible to the other.)
It seems to me the Church satisfies my requirement for what a society
should be so the question is whether non-Churches can too. I don't see
why not. So much of our life including our moral life has to do with
participating in things that aren't the Church.
We don't necessarily recognize instances of divine providence. So to
my mind saying the nations are not under divine providence is not to
say we don't know what's going on but to say we do know something --
that the nations are just mechanical sorts of things like say
purchasing cooperatives that fall below the level of human subjectivity
and so aren't the sort of things that have vertical dimensions.
> I don't see how the factual existence of Christendom as a political
> entity proves the fact that divine providence is related to nations.
I was thinking of it as a human society, a civilization. The question
to my mind then becomes whether that civilization was open to God at
least potentially and could therefore act as a vehicle or embodiment of
his action in the world, so that participating in it could be a means
of grace, or whether it was something like the maintenance staff of
your building that might facilitate the work of those with offices in
it but no more.
> It seems to me that your initial question, 'if American society fails
> to have a vertical dimension..' seems to be asking: if we don't
> believe that God draws the American nation per se as a whole in one
> direction or another, are we not bound for hell in a handcart?'
Not my intention. The thought was that saying America has no vertical
dimension is something like saying it is a mechanical simulation of a
society, that American life as such fundamentally has nothing to say to
us.
> My view is predicated on what you could call a 'Christian
> historicism'. I admire Pindar, and Horace, and the Roman stoics, but
> after Christ, we can only resurrect Graeco-Roman political pietas in
> increasingly hollow forms.
Did medieval society as understood by its members have less of a
quality of divine ordinance than Roman Imperial society?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Tue Feb 2 13:00:48 EST 1999
Article: 13217 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The Metaphysics of Impeachment
Date: 31 Jan 1999 15:37:46 -0500
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In <78jtk4$bhn$1@netnews.upenn.edu> "John Carney" writes:
>It's time we began the restoration of justice as honor in American
>life.
A crucial point, I think. No honor means rule by money and power
rather than law, and thus no liberty. The Icelandic sagas display the
basic mechanisms in a particularly clear and simple setting. Without
honor it is always most advantageous for a particular man in a
particular case to do a deal with the rich and powerful. Free
government thus becomes impossible.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Tue Feb 2 13:00:51 EST 1999
Article: 177819 of alt.society.conservatism
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.society.conservatism
Subject: Re: Conservatism Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Date: 2 Feb 1999 12:59:44 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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In <795i6p$liq$1@news.doit.wisc.edu> mkmarcello@students.wisc.edu (Melissa Katherine Marcello) writes:
> I have to question the notion that there is consensus amongst people
> who consider themselves "conservative."
Quite true. That is why the FAQ explicitly states that there are types
of conservatism besides the traditionalist variety it sets forth,
briefly describes some of them, and invites their adherents to compose
their own FAQs.
I do think (not surprisingly) that the form of conservatism set forth
in the FAQ is more interesting than the others in a variety of
respects, historical, philosophical, etc.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From owner-confucius@lists.gnacademy.org Fri Feb 5 18:43:33 1999
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From: Jim Kalb
Subject: Re: Confucius: re: the logic behind 11:25
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Status: RO
> This is because of something that can be called "reclusive spirit".
> Daoists were well-known for this kind of spirit, while Confucius
> considered it could be practiced in an ideal society.Though deeply
> involved in politics,he prefered a life of retirement. There are many
> pieces of remarks in the Analects showing this idea.
This is very interesting and deserves thought. My usual simple-minded
way of thinking about the ancient Chinese is to believe that the
Confucians thought of culture as the perfection or maybe restoration of
nature, and "politics" as properly not really very political in the
sense of the friend/enemy distinction etc. but rather as a continuation
of culture. The Taoists in contrast thought of culture and still more
politics as the destruction of nature, and therefore bad, while the
Legalists agreed with the Taoists on the relation of nature and
politics but reversed their judgements of value. The Mohists, as
fellow social technologists, tended to agree with the Legalists on this
point.
There does seem though to be a recognition in the Analects that the
utopia in which rule is purely by ritual and moral force is more an
ideal than a possibility. To the extent ritual and other aspects of
formal social order are merely artificial then it seems clear that
Confucius' heart is with the Taoists although his sense of duty and
human solidarity do not permit him the life of the recluse.
The introduction to the anecdote, in which C. urges the others to
ignore the difference in ages, is interesting. It suggests that he is
getting at some notion of the heart of man emancipated from accepted
social relations. So Confucius in this ancedote is not altogether a
Confucian -- he is human first. Perhaps that makes him the best
Confucian, which seems only right.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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From: Jim Kalb
Subject: Re: Recent Articles
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <19990205224856.QXYT6156@localHost> from "Rhydon Jackson" at Feb
5, 99 04:49:00 pm
Status: RO
Rhydon writes:
> How, I wonder, does one distinguish between Oakeshott's criticism of
> rationalism in politics and Voegelin's criticism of natural law in
> ethics? Don't they say the same thing, essentially?)
I don't think Oakeshott was into "openness to the divine" though.
> however racist the Southern slave holders were (Jaffa claims a
> 'scientific rascism' similar to the Nazi's)
Like most Nazi references this strikes me as demogoguery [sp?].
"Science" didn't have the same status for the Nazis, who distinguished
"Aryan science" from "Jewish science," as it does for most people.
Admittedly though the Nazis were not always perfect as Nazis. I
learned just yesterday from the Leo Strauss list that Heidegger
criticized Hitler as not Nazi enough because to at least some extent he
looked for support in something other than mere will for the Nazi/Aryan
distinction.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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From: Jim Kalb
Subject: Re: Henri Nouwen
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <039201be516c$0c208c10$d7f463ce@sethwill> from "Seth Williamson"
at Feb 5, 99 08:00:08 pm
Status: RO
> It seems to me, looking in from the outside, so to speak, that many
> open homosexuals feel intensely lonely, even though they appear to be
> surrounded with friends and acquaintances.
To my mind the difficulty is that a pair of homosexuals don't form a
functional unity in the way a married couple does. Also their union
doesn't point beyond itself and connect to the whole human world
throughout time as a heterosexual union does. It implies a society of
equal contracting individuals with all the loneliness that implies.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Fri Feb 5 21:39:41 EST 1999
Article: 13233 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The Metaphysics of Impeachment
Date: 5 Feb 1999 21:38:26 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 38
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In <36bb5476.15045524@news.srv.ualberta.ca> tasquith@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca (T.Asquith) writes:
>Justice cannot be the same as honor
Sure. The point is that you need the latter for the former, at least
as a practical matter. Otherwise what will keep appetite in line? Why
not do what is easiest, most pleasant, and most rewarding materially?
>Finally, the connection between liberty and honour is very weak.
>Liberty is connected with that ugly term, equality, whilst honour is
>connected with a regimented order.
Only those with honor can be equals. Otherwise unavoidable differences
of wealth and the like will arrange us all in a hierarchy. Or be free,
since otherwise it is too easy for those who happen to have material
advantages to find reliable means of control.
Honor is inconsistent with arbitrary rule because those with honor act
in accordance with their own judgement (which may of course include
recognition of legitimate obligation). Honor requires a code -- that
is, law.
>It is also worth remembering that the Vikings were a particularly
>nasty people--especially in the latter parts of their era. The idea
>of honour as characterized in the bulk of those myths (as they have
>survived) was more symptomatic of the latter phase of their society,
>where they were reduced to roving brigands and pirates.
The sagas are extraordinarily concrete and persuasively realistic
accounts of men who mostly made their living by farming and the like.
You might try reading _Njals Saga_ or _Laxdaela Saga_. Good reads.
Great characters and lots of them. Njal was a lawyer, by the way, and
a lot of the "action" in the book is actually litigation and pre-trial
negotiation. Didn't keep him from being the main hero of the greatest
of the sagas.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Sat Feb 6 05:47:08 EST 1999
Article: 13237 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The Metaphysics of Impeachment
Date: 6 Feb 1999 05:44:11 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 10
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In <79gj8l$s0g$1@netnews.upenn.edu> "John Carney" writes:
>In particular, I think John Rawls did a good job of describing liberal
>justice as justice-as-fairness.
But isn't Rawls a bit of a fuddy-duddy at this point, and Rorty more
up-to-date?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Sun Feb 7 08:09:45 EST 1999
Article: 13241 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: the dictionary is no defense
Date: 7 Feb 1999 08:08:33 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 26
Message-ID: <79k38h$arq$1@panix.com>
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In <19990206175552.20965.00000563@ng19.aol.com> ddavis8570@aol.com (DDavis8570) writes:
>Does all this, from the niggardly debate to the "depends on what is
>is" remind you more of 1984 or farenheit 431 ?
Administered language and historical reality as in _1984_ requires the
abolition of things that can't easily be administered as in _Fahrenheit
431_. We of course are seeing both, at least in effect. DWEM books
can't quite be abolished, but they can be replaced with entertainment
or _I, Rigoberto Menchu_, debunked, retranslated, explained away,
declared inscrutable, creatively misread, made the esoteric property of
professionals, what have you.
Ibsen's _Enemy of the People_ is a great play about modern political
life by the great dramatist of modern times. The water supply is being
poisoned, but it's inconvenient to have it known or do anything about
it, so some combination of who-is-really-responsible-for-what and
what-each-of-them-must-be-held-to-know-and-be-responsible-for is put
together that means the situation can be ignored, all in good
conscience and consonance with duty properly conceived. See it when it
comes to a theater near you. In fact, see everything by Ibsen. He's
the best, and anything that brings us closer to reality is a blow
against the Empire.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Sun Feb 7 14:03:40 EST 1999
Article: 13246 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: the dictionary is no defense
Date: 7 Feb 1999 14:02:17 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 21
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In <79kd82$2mi$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> blagsnatter@my-dejanews.com writes:
>I believe it's "Fahrenheit 451."
Bill's expurgated version is "431." The higher number is considered
too difficult. (joke)
>What does the Latin quote below your name mean?
"You won't know until you believe." It's a way of dealing with the
epistemological problem John Carney was talking about. Traditional
liberals like say Jefferson wanted to base politics through and through
on reason and self-evident principles. The impossibility of that
project has led to postmodern liberalism -- radical skepticism and
politics based on pure personal preference which "we" put over on
everyone else through rhetoric and the like. A more sensible approach
would be the view that there is indeed truth, but faith is an essential
part of how we come to know it.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Mon Feb 8 15:18:17 EST 1999
Article: 13250 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The Metaphysics of Impeachment
Date: 8 Feb 1999 07:22:42 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 46
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In <918430471snz@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> raf391@hormel.bloxwich.demon.co.uk (rafael cardenas) writes:
>> Thatcher and Reagan, although elected with votes gained by their
>> populist rhetoric, actually INCREASED welfare state spending.
>The postwar security system relied on full employment. The deliberate
>abandonment of full employment, first (in fact) by Callaghan's regime
>and later more extensively by Thatcher, necessitated a vast increase
>in social-security spending.
Unemployment didn't increase during Reagan's tenure. On a more general
point, I don't see how "full employment" can be a policy, at least in
the long run, short of full state administration of economic life,
which seems to have its own problems. Employment after all is a
relationship arising among men in complex and changing circumstances,
and for a central power to guarantee that such relationships will exist
(and presumably meet certain standards) for anyone who wants one is no
simple matter.
It is of course possible to have policies that make full or at least
fuller employment more likely, or intended to obviate particular
barriers to it. That's different though from attempting to guarantee
the result at all times and in all localities.
>Another reason for the increase in both UK and US was the aging of the
>population, which was independent of either left-wing or right-wing
>policy trends.
Retirement age is a matter of policy. It's true that no mass party
likes to touch the issue. And accepted standards of personal
responsibility for retirement and responsibility of children for
parents' well-being are intertwined with grand policy issues of how
much responsibility government should have in principle for the
well-being of particular individuals.
>At times in early 19th-century England social-security expenditure as
>a proportion of GDP was as high as the present social-security budget,
>but it was spent by parishes, not by Government, so Government
>spending thus appears very low by modern standards.
This is interesting, and surprising except perhaps as a local and
temporary condition. Is there a discussion somewhere you could
mention?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Mon Feb 8 20:02:00 EST 1999
Article: 13256 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: the dictionary is no defense
Date: 8 Feb 1999 20:01:55 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 21
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blagsnatter@my-dejanews.com writes:
> Truth is only nerve impulses. Principles, the connections of a to b,
> are not truth. We do not know truth through faith, we know something
> else. Something more important than truth.
This seems wrong to me. Mathematical truths are the classic example of
truths that are not of the senses. In the _Phenomenology of the
Spirit_ Hegel debunks the notion that pure sense perception is truth.
We can't talk about it or even refer to it without a more comprehensive
system that includes things that aren't sense perception.
> But I would not say the current manifestation of liberalism,
> postmodern if it is, is based on pure personal preference, rather
> it's based on pure personal ignorance.
Pure personal preference has no cognitive content, so maybe we can find
common ground saying that it's p.p.p. which is p.p.i.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Mon Feb 8 20:03:32 EST 1999
Article: 13257 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The Metaphysics of Impeachment
Date: 8 Feb 1999 20:02:54 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 13
Message-ID: <79o1fu$jf7$1@panix.com>
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vtnet writes:
> What you seem to envisage is a kind of feudal structure where social
> order is retained by psychological manipulation (propaganda) and
> brute force, and where all cooperation among the rational members of
> society are strictly based on momentary self interest.
I started trying to make sense of this by reference to my views and
things I've said but soon lost myself in a speculative fog. In short,
I have no idea what you're talking about.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Tue Feb 9 13:41:05 EST 1999
Article: 13265 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The Metaphysics of Impeachment
Date: 9 Feb 1999 08:29:22 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 25
Message-ID: <79pd7i$k5h$1@panix.com>
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In <36C02B25.9B11756@SPAMzap.a2000.nl> vtnet writes:
>In other words you don't appear to deny the necessity of the existence
>of government
True.
>you question the responsibility that a government should take for the
>welfare of the citizens under its control.
I question that government should be comprehensively responsible for
the welfare of each individual.
>For the weak can expect no protection from such a government as it
>will not interfere on their behalf, while the strong don't need any
>government to do their bidding.
Don't see this at all. A can give B protection without being generally
responsible for B's welfare. Laws against force and fraud and making
B's rights to person and property enforceable are an example. If A is
to protect B against everything then among other things A must fully
control B. That situation creates its own problems.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Tue Feb 9 16:43:49 EST 1999
Article: 13270 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: the dictionary is no defense
Date: 9 Feb 1999 16:14:44 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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In <79q2rh$ods$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> blagsnatter@my-dejanews.com writes:
>But math truths are only conventions. One may have parallel lines
>meet, or not, as the context requires.
But once the geometry is defined by its basic axioms then it's true or
not that for example the sum of the angles of a triangle in that
geometry is 180 degrees.
>Direct perception is as close to reality as it gets, all else is
>hearsay.
But when I look at say an orange jacket the purely sensuous part of the
experience, a patch of orange as part of my visual field, doesn't give
me the reality of the jacket. I can see orange just as well by closing
my eyes and pressing on them with my thumbs. For the jacket to become
present in my experience I need a whole network of concepts,
experiences, expectations, memories.
>Interesting that the historical appeal to Reason begat something so
>unreasonable as liberalism today.
If you try to get by on a conception of what is reasonable that is
insufficient because it excludes too much things are going to get odd.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Tue Feb 9 16:43:50 EST 1999
Article: 13271 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The Metaphysics of Impeachment
Date: 9 Feb 1999 16:41:33 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 54
Message-ID: <79qa2d$cvl$1@panix.com>
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In <36C099B7.8DDE3E8B@SPAMzap.a2000.nl> vtnet writes:
>If we define A as the 'haves' and B as the 'have-nots', then is seems
>obvious that the protection of property is proportionally to what one
>has and primarily to the benefit of A.
On this line of thought any government short of one that decrees
universal absolute equality is going to be based solely on force if
people are rational because it will protect a social order that makes B
inferior to A and therefore will be an instrument of B's dispossession
and oppression.
Also -- even have-nots can benefit from limited government. It lets
them enjoy what they have in peace and in general in their own way, it
doesn't treat them as a problem, and leaves them free to do better
tomorrow more or less in accordance with their understanding of
"better." Also, King Log can after all be better than King Stork.
>And if one is allowed (and compelled by hardship) to sell ones rights
>to person, then the protection of those rights by the state will take
>on the form of negative utility quickly for the dispossessed -- and to
>the benefit of A.
Your point seems to be that if a particular degree of laissez faire
means enduring hopeless mass poverty and people making a living by
auctioning off body parts or whatever, and some kind of government
activity would avoid that result, then that activity is probably a good
idea. Agreed, but don't think the point has all that much application.
I do think government measures to deal with particular situations
sometimes makes sense. For example, the sudden reduction of technical
barriers to world trade means that all the less-skilled workers in the
US are suddenly in competition with the entire population of Bangla
Desh. That seems to make world free trade a bad idea for the US. I
don't see what that kind of consideration has to do with general state
responsibility for individuals.
> such a compromise, I hold, can be found only in moral society and
>not under *any* conceivable legal configuration of the state -- that
>is: I hold that moral society is a-priori to legal society.
I agree with all this. But the priority of moral society won't mean
much to the extent people rely on the state rather than non-state
relationships -- that is, to the extent the state is thought generally
responsible for the welfare of individuals.
>Where we presumably disagree is that you seem to assume that the
>condition of national laissez fair will lead to equality of
>opportunity (over a view generations, to keep it realistic) whereas I
>believe that this assumption is not supported by experience.
Fine, we disagree on that point.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Wed Feb 10 06:17:09 EST 1999
Article: 13283 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: the dictionary is no defense
Date: 10 Feb 1999 06:15:07 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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In <79qni7$bhq$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> blagsnatter@my-dejanews.com writes:
>> If you try to get by on a conception of what is reasonable that is
>> insufficient because it excludes too much things are going to get
>> odd.
>... he wrote, typng quickly. :-) I'm afraid I don't quite follow
> that.
If you have too demanding a standard for justification and reason you
are going to end up acting arbitrarily and irrationally.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Thu Feb 11 05:20:37 EST 1999
Article: 13293 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The Metaphysics of Impeachment
Date: 11 Feb 1999 05:18:59 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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vtnet writes:
> And if this is the case, than each individual must ask himself
> whether the benefits of observing the laws outweigh the benefits of
> defying the law. 'Moral' then is he who breaks the law because he
> knows that this will bring him fortunes (in the form of
> opportunities) that match his virtues (in the form of capacities);
> while immoral is he who observes the law, but by doing so claims
> fortunes that do not match his virtues. For in these instances
> breaking the law will bring benefits to society, whereas observing
> the law might well impair it. Morality in this instance can be
> maintained *only* if the man, rich in fortune, cede some of it
> *voluntarily* to the man that is rich in virtue for the benefit of
> society.
There seem to be two contrasting lines of thought here:
1. Justice means (A) rewards in accordance with productivity and (B)
opportunities in accordance with abilitities, and
2. Since actual societies inevitably misdistribute rewards and their
laws are therefore inevitably unjust, clear-headed individuals will
maximize their return without reguard to those laws.
I don't see what redistribution does on either line of thought. Haves
are often more able and productive than have-nots. To the extent
that's so redistribution would usually be unjust under (1). Also, (2)
seems to guarantee welfare fraud, inflation of middle-class social
benefits (and fraudulent use of those benefits), and diversion of
government funds and the benefits of regulation to the rich, powerful
and well-connected, with most government expenditures no doubt falling
into the latter two categories since strong, intelligent and
well-organized looters are likely to be most successful.
> What he seems to believe is that an internal free market will lead to
> an optimization of society.
Not quite -- just that attempts at comprehensive management are likely
to lead to worse results.
> without redistribution fortunes (access to opportunities) will be
> concentrated on locations in society where virtues are not
> concentrated.
This does seem wrong to me. More than any other form of organization
free markets are good at turning available inputs into maximum value
outputs. They're not perfect but not many other things are either.
The usual objection to them is that they put a price on everything, not
that they make it hard to realize financial values. So if you want
people to end up in positions in which they'll produce maximum output
in financial terms free markets are the way to go.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Thu Feb 11 13:34:31 EST 1999
Article: 13302 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The Metaphysics of Impeachment
Date: 11 Feb 1999 13:31:58 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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In <36c23e18.19202061@news.srv.ualberta.ca> tasSPAMquith@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca (Tom Asquith) writes:
>As for your comment: "only those with honor can be equals". I wonder
>if we are speaking of the same word. "Honour"/esteem by its nature
>requires that you place another person higher than yourself,
Esteem can be mutual. Equality worth having requires institutionalized
mutual esteem, which I think requires as a practical matter a system of
honor -- a complex of public non-utilitarian standards with which one
must comply on pain of loss of honor. Free political life requires the
same. Otherwise it gets eaten up by corruption.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Thu Feb 11 19:22:34 EST 1999
Article: 13307 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The Metaphysics of Impeachment
Date: 11 Feb 1999 19:20:31 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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In <918768400snz@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> raf391@hormel.bloxwich.demon.co.uk (rafael cardenas) writes:
>The more regulated forms of capitalism of the postwar period maximised
>output, in terms of overall financial value measured as GDP, at nearly
>three times the rate of the freer-market systems of the 19th century
>and at twice the rate of the freer-market system that has succeeded
>them.
Do you know of any more parallel comparisons, e.g., of similar
countries at the same time? The obvious interpretation of the postwar
period is that in flush times people think they can afford lots of
things, including regulation, that they cut back on when times get
harder. Is your claim that the good times were ended by cutbacks on
regulation but continued up to that point?
>What the free market _is_ guaranteed to do, subject to various
>conditions which never apply in practice, is to optimize the
>allocation of resources, in a certain technical sense of optimization,
>not to maximise output.
The point at issue, of course, was allocation of (human) resources --
does laissez faire systematically and cumulatively grossly misallocate
persons to positions?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Fri Feb 12 17:04:25 EST 1999
Article: 13308 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The Metaphysics of Impeachment
Date: 12 Feb 1999 07:13:01 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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In <918768400snz@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> raf391@hormel.bloxwich.demon.co.uk (rafael cardenas) writes:
>The more regulated forms of capitalism of the postwar period maximised
>output, in terms of overall financial value measured as GDP, at nearly
>three times the rate of the freer-market systems of the 19th century
>and at twice the rate of the freer-market system that has succeeded
>them.
Another thought, or maybe question -- how does one measure degree of
regulation? There must be theoreticians who argue about that sort of
thing, I just don't know what they say. In the United States there's
been some deregulation of certain industries, but my impression is that
overall schemes of government regulation are more pervasive than in the
pre-70s period. Certainly that's true with regard to the specific
point at issue, the job market. The blossoming of "equal opportunity"
law and development of "unjust termination" principles has been a
post-1970 thing, and there's also been an enormous growth in education
expenditures during that period. Environmental law and "health and
safety" regulation have also been growth industries. The tax law has
become enormously more complicated, mostly so it could be used to
achieve this or that policy goal. Those who know more can no doubt add
to the list.
One distinction that comes to mind -- the things apart from the
continual free market auctioning of everything that ordered the job
market pre-1970 tended more than now to be self-governing institutions
like unions, families (i.e., sex roles and the family wage),
expectations as to who does what, etc. The tendency has been for all
those things to break down or be forcibly broken down and replaced with
a continuous universal auction of everything mitigated or manipulated
by universal comprehensive regulatory schemes like EO and health and
safety laws.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Fri Feb 12 17:04:26 EST 1999
Article: 13314 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The Metaphysics of Impeachment
Date: 12 Feb 1999 17:02:32 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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In <36c35de7.14385824@news.srv.ualberta.ca> tasSPAMquith@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca (Tom Asquith) writes:
>>Also -- even have-nots can benefit from limited government.
>I'd swear that you are becoming less of a conservative and becoming
>more and more classical liberal Jim. :-)
Maarten in effect assumed clear-headed self-interested individuals and
asked why they should obey the law. A liberal's question to which it
was easiest to give a liberal's answer.
>Third, the have-nots do not benefit from limited government
I suppose one could say no-one benefits from limited government because
for anyone you could always imagine a government that differs from
limited government by doing special favors for that particular guy.
Really, this statement seems dogmatic to me. What are the longterm
effects of general government responsibility for individual welfare?
Is it so obvious it will mean more self-respect for those who don't
have a lot, whose way of being has been declared a major social
problem? Will it plainly mean fewer people leading grossly disordered
lives? Fewer girlfriends beaten and children abused? To the extent A
is responsible for B, A must be able to manage B. Is it so blatantly
clear that have-nots are better off if they are comprehensively managed
by professionals?
>But let me turn to your commments regarding laissez-faire. It is well
>worth remembering that on the eve of the millenium, we are not talking
>about 'free trade' in the sense used by Mill, Say, et al., and all
>those others who believed in 'laissez-faire' or 'laissez-faire,
>laissez-passer'. What we are talking about here is merely the right
>to international citizenship of corporations, not free trade.
Maarten and I were talking strictly about internal laissez-faire, in
particular relating to job markets. That was explicit.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Sat Feb 13 08:26:48 EST 1999
Article: 13317 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The Metaphysics of Impeachment
Date: 13 Feb 1999 07:54:43 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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In <918858466snz@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> raf391@hormel.bloxwich.demon.co.uk (rafael cardenas) writes:
>> Is your claim that the good times were ended by cutbacks on
>> regulation but continued up to that point?
>Well, yes
This is quite helpful, actually. Basic political differences are
usually I think due to basic differences in understanding what the
world is like. To me it seems madness to believe that the world can be
managed to assure some comprehensive and unprecedented result like
diffused uniform stable prosperity. That feeling about the world
doubtless affects my interpretation of events.
>Over time, yes. The growing inequality of income, which is already far
>greater than any measurable inequality of natural ability
I'm not sure what's meant by this. Compared with any other kind of
thing -- rocks, chimpanzees, computers, what have you -- I suppose
human beings vary very little in ability. On the other hand when we
work with people we see that there are enormous differences in how much
they contribute. As the work becomes more complex and demanding the
differences only grow. Scholarship or the creative arts are examples.
And those are just differences that appear in a stable situation. When
things are unstable the differences get much bigger because some take
advantage of the new and some are caught in the old.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Sat Feb 13 08:26:49 EST 1999
Article: 13318 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The Metaphysics of Impeachment
Date: 13 Feb 1999 08:20:37 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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In <918859479snz@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> raf391@hormel.bloxwich.demon.co.uk (rafael cardenas) writes:
>it was precisely when (at least traditional male ) employment was
>declining in the 1970s that the pressure for detailed regulation
>increased.
In the U.S. it was the late '60s, a period of great prosperity and the
mainstreaming of leftish radicalism, that led to it. The evironmental
and health and safety movements were a kind of safe radicalism that
everyone could join in and so provided a way of soothing the conflicts
of the time. It's true that full implementation of the new "equal
opportunity," environmental and health and safety regimes (quite
naturally) wasn't achieved for several years.
>Luttwak claims
I haven't read his recent stuff. He was a military theoretician and so
far as I can make out still approaches matters with that point of view
-- the goal is dominance, and the way to get there is comprehensive
marshalling of available resources in accordance with an overall plan.
>But the free market has been instrumental in breaking them down, and
>where it could not, government deliberately interfered with the
>institutions' protective barriers so that it could.
So the main political issue today if you like self-governing
institutions is whether you should favor active government. It seems
not, since the conceptions guiding government will lead to further
destruction. Complaining about the market is all very well, but state
administration is not a step forward from there. And that's what's on
offer apart from a few troglodytes who favor tariffs, restricted
immigration, permissibility of employment discrimination etc.
>But were those laws an offer of apparent compensation for the
>destruction of living institutions -- an offer which could
>subsequently be honoured more in the breach than in the performance?
They would be if the world were becoming more unsafe, insecure, etc.
before the enactment of those laws. I don't think that was usually the
case though. Certainly not in the case of the legislation of the '60s
and early '70s. I think it was more a growing demand that the world
display the features of a fully engineered system -- uniformity,
rationality, predictability and so on. Once the principle of full
government responsibility was established good times meant the
opportunity to implement that principle more fully.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From owner-newman@LISTSERV.VT.EDU Fri Feb 12 14:14:36 1999
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Sender: newman Discussion List
From: Jim Kalb
Subject: Re: Recent Articles
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <19990211163101.GSSE6156@localHost> from "Rhydon Jackson" at Feb
11, 99 10:31:00 am
Status: RO
Rhydon writes:
> >I learned just yesterday from the Leo Strauss list that Heidegger
> >criticized Hitler as not Nazi enough because to at least some extent
> >he looked for support in something other than mere will for the
> >Nazi/Aryan distinction.
>
> Does 'he' refers to Hitler? For Heidegger Aryans are identified
> solely by the nature of their will, whereas Hitler sees a biological
> distinction?
"He" does refer to Hitler. For Heidegger, the claim was, "Aryan" like
all social distinctions was simply a category created willfully and
known to lack objective validity. Hitler it seems didn't dispute the
primacy of the will but waffled on the issue and tried to get at least
a coloring of scientific support. (Note that my account is about
third-hand.)
> Finally, thanks for the Emerson preview. It will take me a whole to
> digest it, but I'm looking forward to it.
Whatever problems the draft has it does include a lot of Emerson
quotes, so it can't be all bad.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From owner-newman@LISTSERV.VT.EDU Sat Feb 13 07:27:29 1999
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From: Jim Kalb
Subject: Re: Lofton/Emerson
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <3fc1bc00.36c4f680@aol.com> from "John Lofton" at Feb 12,
99 10:50:24 pm
Status: RO
> PLEASE! Emerson was a pantheistic nut. John Lofton, Editor/Publisher,
> "The Lofton Letter."
An incoherent Yankee solipso-pantheist? Still, he captured something,
a lot of things actually, and his unit of discussion is the sentence,
so he's quotable.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From owner-confucius@lists.gnacademy.org Sun Feb 14 20:18:03 1999
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To: confucius@lists.gnacademy.org
From: Jim Kalb
Subject: Re: Confucius: An idea about posting to Confucius list
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Tom Roberts writes:
> Consider the emphasis given to filial piety. Should we respect our
> fathers?
This strikes me as a bad omen for the future. People do a billion
things, and the next generation inevitably does 999 million of them.
The billion things are the outcome of 10,000 years of thoughts,
feelings, ideas of what's good and bad, habits that haven't self-
destructed, memories of things that have worked, whatever, all on the
part of millions of people.
So if what your parents' generation did is not on the whole good, if
there's not a lot in it that outclasses your moral knowledge, it's
surprising. How come you're magically so much better? It's also
extremely depressing -- if all that effort of all those people for all
those years has led to nothing of much value, how can any sane person
think the efforts of people today will lead to anything? After all,
almost all today's efforts simply follow from what was done in the
past, and there's nothing special about the part that's new today to
distinguish it in principle from past novelties which it seems have
ended so badly.
You raise the question of what to do if Dad was seriously misguided in
some way. I agree that would be the central question to look at if
most fathers were radically worse than most sons, so that following in
Dad's footsteps would be a bad general principle. That's not the world
we live in though.
Even though it's not the central question it is nonetheless a real
question. The passages in the Analects that come to mind are the one
in which Confucius says that if you think your parents are wrong you
should remonstrate with them and the one in which he explains that the
injunction "always obey" means obey in accordance with propriety, that
is (my interpretation) to the extent consistent with moral order. One
of the later Confucian thinkers, Mencius, raises this issue more
explicitly in the form of one of the early sage emperors whose family
was grossly criminal -- they tried to murder him for example. What the
s.e. did was to show all respect for them and care for them but
certainly not do what they did.
> Much of what the text suggests can be summarized in two phrases: "Be
> exactly what your parents were." and "Do not let anything change."
> The tradition seems to say nothing to young women of our own (or of
> any other) time.
Don't know where Confucius says any of those things. The latter
wouldn't make much sense in the mouth of a reformer, as he was. As to
the former, he did make an ideal of running things the way Dad did for
three years. Probably not a bad general rule -- running the show is
difficult, and you have to learn by doing, and you'll probably do
better waiting until you get a feel for it before making any big
changes.
His efforts had to do with creation of a better ruling class and
cultivation of the qualities needed for that. Why do you think those
qualities are irrelevant to young women?
> Are those of you who are sharing readings of Confucius doing this in
> the spirit of the historian or are you finding help in thinking
> through the problems we face in our own, soon-to-be-another-century
> world?
The latter, at least in my case. It seems to me that in ancient China
there were those (Legalists and Mohists) who took a basically
technological approach to politics. We have plenty of people like that
today, in fact it's our dominant approach to everything. There were
also those (Taoists) who took a radically individualistic and nonsocial
approach to things, and we have people like that today as well. Both
approaches lead I think to catastrophe. Confucius looked for a way to
understand society as neither a technological machine nor a fiction and
foreign imposition but as a moral unity among the members. It seems to
me that's exactly what's needed today.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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From owner-telos-forum@www.ithaca.edu Sat Feb 13 20:33:57 1999
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From: Jim Kalb
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Subject: Re: From_telos-forum: Free Speech and Tolerance
To: telos-forum@www.ithaca.edu
Date: Sat, 13 Feb 1999 20:32:16 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.19990214114912.006dbc90@cc.newcastle.edu.au> from "John W. Tate" at Feb 14, 99 11:49:12 am
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>From Jim Kalb
"John W. Tate" writes:
> Does equal treatment imply equal respect for that which we tolerate?
> If so, is tolerance necessary?
I think tolerance has been redefined as equal respect. It's really not
the same as the old definition. I suppose part of it has to do with
with an expanded understanding what interests should be socially
protected. If equal respect should be socially protected than
depriving someone of it constitutes intolerance. It's an act of
aggression.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Tue Feb 16 07:24:35 EST 1999
Article: 13324 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The Metaphysics of Impeachment
Date: 13 Feb 1999 21:27:22 -0500
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raf391@hormel.bloxwich.demon.co.uk (rafael cardenas) writes:
> But the problem at the moment is that the state is enforcing the
> power of the 'market' against the weak. It seldom enforces it against
> the strong: either they benefit from the market, or they get the
> state to intervene on their behalf.
Don't understand this. Tax burdens haven't declined, in European
countries they're at least 40% of GDP, and they're mostly subsidies and
benefits to ordinary individuals rather than to fat cats and big
companies.
> Study the marketist rhetoric today: while in the 1980s it was a
> rhetoric of freedom, today it is a rhetoric of bullying and terror
Perhaps people could chip in with examples. I'm less familiar with
this than you seem to be. I do agree that there's far more brutality
in common and public discourse than there once was. The development
seems much more comprehensive than marketist bullying and terror, which
in fact I don't run into.
> the differences are considerable, but they don't vary by factors of
> many thousands to one.
And the richest 20% doesn't have many thousands of times the income of
the poorest 20%.
> The effect of the 'free market' is eventually to concentrate economic
> power in the hands of a few middlemen or owners.
If that were so most wealth would be old hereditary fortunes which
isn't the case.
> the apparent differences in _economic_ value between the output of
> different scholars or artists are determined more by the size of the
> market than by the quality of their work.
I meant differences in scholarly and artistic value. When I studied
legal history I couldn't help but notice how much better Maitland was
than lots of other people. There are constant Shaw revivals but I
think Ibsen who also wrote "social issue" plays outclasses him
absolutely. I'm not sure what numerical proportion I'd assign. Ten
times better? A billion times better? Infinitely better? And there
are certainly lots of playwrights who aren't as good as Shaw.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Tue Feb 16 07:24:36 EST 1999
Article: 13329 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
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Subject: Re: The Metaphysics of Impeachment
Date: 16 Feb 1999 07:10:43 -0500
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In <7a9pqm$2mv$1@camel15.mindspring.com> "CardinalT" writes:
>You seem to be declaring two things here. First, that honor is a cause
>or the cause of justice, which view you identify with Plato, and
>second, that honor is an effect of justice, which view you ascribe to
>Aristotle. It cannot be both
Don't see why not. Think of exercise and health, or particular
instances of telling the truth and honesty. Each member of the pair
promotes the other.
>In any case, you have run up against the perennial problem of secular
>thinkers: how to get people to dedicate themselves to an abstract
>principle like honor.
Honor seems good to the honorable, so they dedicate themselves to it.
In order to show that such a taste is more than arbitrary you no doubt
need principles that transcend honor, but you can't talk about
everything at once and not every discussion need include explicit
consideration of the most ultimate principles. You can say "model
airplanes won't hold together if glue doesn't stick" without going into
the chemistry and physics needed to explain why glue sticks.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Tue Feb 16 07:24:37 EST 1999
Article: 13330 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: the dictionary is no defense
Date: 16 Feb 1999 07:22:13 -0500
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In <7a9se2$vr9$1@camel15.mindspring.com> "CardinalT" writes:
>One may not have parallel lines that meet. To be parallel means precisely to
>be incapable of meeting.
It seems that "parallel" couldn't have been so defined by Euclid --
otherwise "parallel lines never meet" would not have risen to the level
of an axiom.
One could think of two straight lines (a "straight line" being defined
as the continuation of a line segment that is the shortest distance
between two points) on the surface of a sphere that are parallel
("parallel lines" being defined as lines such that there is a
perpendicular to one that is also a perpendicular to the other). Such
lines would meet.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Tue Feb 16 20:45:31 EST 1999
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The Metaphysics of Impeachment
Date: 16 Feb 1999 20:43:50 -0500
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In <919202935snz@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> raf391@hormel.bloxwich.demon.co.uk (rafael cardenas) writes:
>> > the state is enforcing the power of the 'market' against the weak.
>> > It seldom enforces it against the strong
>>
>> Tax burdens haven't declined, in European countries they're at least
>> 40% of GDP, and they're mostly subsidies and benefits to ordinary
>> individuals rather than to fat cats and big companies.
>Figures in last week's paper showed the EU average as less than 38 per
>cent of GDP; UK as 36 per cent.
A quick search of the web revealed a 1997 _Economist_ article that
said:
"The EU's burden of taxes and social contributions hit a record of
42.4% of GDP in 1996."
and an official EU pronouncement from late 1997 that said:
"Assuming full implementation of known budgetary measures, the average
deficit/GDP ratio in the EU is expected to fall from 6.1% in 1993 to
2.6% in 1997"
So we get average EU government spending (including transfer payments)
of something like 45% of GDP around 1996-7, with the tax bite the
highest it had ever been. Doesn't sound like rampant state
victimization of the weak at the instance of free marketeers.
>The mere level of tax isn't the only issue, surely. Companies play of
>countries and locations against one another to secure tax reductions
>[etc.]
In the U.S. for what it's worth the portion of the taxes paid by upper
income taxpayers increased during the Reagan '80s.
My understanding is that ultimate incidence of taxes is a hopelessly
obscure topic. The extent to which artificial persons pay them
obviously shows very little. The extent to which high-income taxpayers
reduce taxes by investing in tax-favored activities doesn't show much
either because those activities normally pay less pre-tax and the tax
benefits are intended as in effect a state subsidy. Tax-exempt
municipal bonds for example are a benefit to municipalities much more
than to the wealthy owners of the bonds.
>> And the richest 20% doesn't have many thousands of times the income
>> of the poorest 20%.
>Who ever said they did? The differences in ability between the
>smallest tiny-fraction-of-a-percent and the mode don't vary by many
>thousands to one;
Why is concentration on extreme cases the way to understand the nature
of an economic system? I would think looking at the top and bottom
quintiles would show better what happens in general.
>That would only be so if the 'free market' had been in operation
>without restriction for a long time. In the UK in the late 19th
>century, where it had been, wealth was highly concentrated and most
>was indeed in the hands of old hereditary fortunes.
In the U.S. we've always had a turnover in great fortunes. The Astors
didn't amount to much by the late 19th century. I always thought of
the pre-20th c. English situation as having to do with aristocracy,
landed wealth, primogeniture and other free-market violations although
I admit my actual knowledge is thin.
>Don't you think that corporate mergers are also a concentration of
>economic power, either in the owners or the managers (middlemen)?
The concentrations don't last forever. The conglomerates of the '60s,
Gulf+Western and ITT for example, don't amount to much today.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Wed Feb 17 20:12:17 EST 1999
Article: 13339 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: the dictionary is no defense
Date: 17 Feb 1999 18:16:30 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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In <1dnd9cf.1hg0sdx1lvoen6N@interceptd6.salamander.com> wmcclain@salamander.com (Bill McClain) writes:
>Parallel lines do meet at infinity even in flat euclidean space.
"Infinity" is not a point in euclidean space.
>At what point do they "first" meet? Certainly not at any finite
>distance, else that would not be the "first". Open the angle in case
>3. At what point do the lines "last" meet? It is the same.
There's no point at which they first or last meet any more than there's
a next point in line to a given point.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From jk Wed Feb 17 08:27:08 1999
Subject: Re: Confucius: Posting
To: confucius@lists.gnacademy.org
Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1999 08:27:08 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <199902170644.HAA18373@darc.TOXIKOLOGIE.UNI-MAINZ.DE> from "Robert Rosenstein" at Feb 17, 99 07:44:33 am
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"Gorman, Mark" writes:
> There have been several notes and messages lately that have touched
> directly or indirectly on the issue of exclusion of references to
> women in the Analects and its translations ... I, too, must admit
> that the frequent use of male terms in the daily postings often gets
> in the way of my full appreciation of the text. Are there others on
> the list who feel similarly?
I oppose this kind of bowdlerization. To me it would be adopting an
antiConfucian view before the discussion even gets started.
Confucius isn't feminist because his outlook depends on the notion that
social order grows out of natural immediate human relations, especially
family relations. Feminism makes human relations an artifice based on
abstract egalitarian principles. In particular it debunks the notion
that there is anything natural about the family.
Further, Confucius is essentialist and feminism is antiessentialist.
Inclusivism comes from antiessentialism. If an essentialist speaks of
"men" it is because he thinks there is an important common character
worth discussion. If as antiessentialists believe there is no essence
of "man," then to speak of "men" is first and foremost to exclude those
of whom you are not speaking.
Taoists, Legalists and Mohists resolutely rejected essentialism and
natural social order. Today people tend to agree with them -- hence
such diverse things as Communism, Nazism, '60s antinomianism, feminism
and managerial liberalism. Confucius is specifically worth reading
because he disagrees.
Robert Rosenstein writes:
> Filial Piety is nothing more than the lowest rung in an ascending,
> tightly woven bureucratic system which binds everyone in their place.
> It is an all-male system.
I don't agree that filial piety has a particular connection to a
bureaucratic system, except maybe a negative one. Filial piety and for
that matter Confucius long preceded the imperial and bureaucratic order
established by the Chin and Han dynasties. The Chin didn't have much
use for them, and the Han relied on them as a mitigation for the
radically central, authoritarian and in fact unworkably terroristic
order the First Emperor introduced.
Filial piety strikes me as an alternative to bureaucratic order.
Governance has to take some form; informal natural or customary
connections are one possibility and formal legal order another. Was
the antifilial system introduced by the Chinese Communists less
bureaucratic than what preceeded it? In the West today family ties are
weaker than in the past. Has the result been to increase or decrease
the role of bureaucracies?
As to "all-male" -- filial piety applied to Mom as well as Dad.
Confucius looked after his daughter as well as his son. More
fundamentally, think about the extraordinarily limited practical role
for government the Analects envision. Since the system filial piety
creates is one in which the state bureaucracy is not the pervasive
active principle governing day-to-day social life, the fact that
government officials are thought of as male does not mean that all life
or all governance is male.
I agree that the ideal Confucian official is a male ideal. The ideal
official maintains a rather disengaged arm's-length quality in his
dealings with others. His devotion is less to persons than to
standards. In America in 1999 as in China 500 B.C. those are felt to
be masculine qualities. Is that due to the cultural influence of
ancient China? And are such qualities irrelevant to every legitimate
ideal of government?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From jk Thu Feb 18 07:13:09 1999
Subject: Re: Confucius: The Role of the Analects
To: confucius@lists.gnacademy.org
Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 07:13:09 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <199902172301.AAA12138@darc.TOXIKOLOGIE.UNI-MAINZ.DE> from "Joseph Wang" at Feb 18, 99 00:01:07 am
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Joseph Wang writes:
> The reason for this is that the Abramic religions all include an
> external deity who to revealed to the world by means of "revealed
> truth" which is encapuslated in holy writ. The notion of revealed
> truth is alien to Confucianism, and that has a lot of consequences.
This is an interesting point. There does seem to be at least a minimal
notion in the Analects that Heaven has a will and does particular
things. On the other hand Confucius' ultimate loyalty seems to be to
impersonal good rather than Heaven personally conceived.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From jk Thu Feb 18 08:28:39 1999
Subject: Re: no prep, but a question for you
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 08:28:39 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <01BE5A09.D3F7F200@ns07a125.d.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Feb 17, 99 00:07:21 am
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Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore writes:
> 1) Especially, I would like examples of particular instances of
> particular kinds of speech being forbidden, or punished in some way,
> because of what it expresses toward, or how it is received by,
> certain groups of people.
No snappy examples from my own experience. I don't like the
degendering of language -- all the worry about pronouns and "-man"
formations -- but don't have anything unusual to report about it.
One thing not much covered here is the situation in other Western
countries -- the Canadian whose books of Irish folktales were
confiscated at the border, apparently because there's some connection
between racism and interest in Celtic mythology, the German who was
imprisoned for saying that what happens to us is a result of what we
did in previous lives (he used the Holocaust as an example), the fining
of animal rights crusader Brigitte Bardot for criticizing Muslim ritual
sacrifice, the German legal proceedings against Le Pen for saying that
the gas chambers (at Auschwitz for example) were a footnote to history.
> 2) I'd also be interested in your thoughts --in relation to
> particular instances, or expressed in the abstract-- as to where the
> line should be drawn differentiating appropriate and inappropriate
> limits on people's being able to express themselves without suffering
> consequences because of offending other people; or, put the other
> way, where you think people do have a right to be protected from
> other people's speech, and where you think it should just be accepted
> that in a free society people will sometimes be offended by what
> other people think and say.
A hard question. I don't think much can be done about informal
sanctions when people say something displeasing. You can argue
particular cases, but where you come out depends on feelings as to what
the world is like. Some feelings reflect wisdom and some stupidity but
organized line drawing is hard. Good sense isn't the sort of thing
that can be codified and made enforceable.
I think the laws in other Western countries on Holocaust denial and the
like are stupid, but basically they're laws against blasphemy -- the
Holocaust is now thought to be a revelation of absolute reality, an
event like no other -- and it's difficult to discuss blasphemy without
getting clear on religion so an argument on the subject would very soon
become in substance a religious argument.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From jk Thu Feb 18 12:03:30 1999
Subject: Re: no prep, but a question for you
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 12:03:30 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <01BE5B20.1C6DEDC0@ns07a125.d.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Feb 18, 99 09:21:01 am
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> Your remark about a ban on Holocaust-denial being like the
> forbidding of blasphemy is interesting.
>
> But isn't the one about offending God, the other about
> insulting people or injuring their deepest feelings?
Both go deep, so neither is a simple rational consequence of a single
consideration.
You can't injure God. So blasphemy seems rather to be an attack on the
honor of God, that is on the settled attitudes and understandings that
rightly relate us to him.
And I don't think Holocaust denial just has to do with injured
feelings. It's understood as an attack on our connection to
fundamental moral reality, a connection purchased at hideous cost. In
understanding the laws it's essential to consider that the Holocaust is
thought to be an event like no other, one that defines the human and
moral world in which we live and that must always be born in mind in
every connection. People say things like "after Auschwitz writing
lyric poetry is a barbarism." That may be 90% pose but it means
something that it is said.
Is that an extreme account of attitudes? Probably in most cases. But
I think there's some essential truth in it.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Fri Feb 19 13:22:12 EST 1999
Article: 13345 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The Metaphysics of Impeachment
Date: 19 Feb 1999 13:19:45 -0500
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In <919382855snz@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> raf391@hormel.bloxwich.demon.co.uk (rafael cardenas) writes:
>We would appear on the contrary to get a fall in taxes from 42 per
>cent in 1996 to 38 per cent two years later.
It's hard to believe that happened, a 10% drop from a historic maximum
in a short time that doesn't seem to have been much noticed. The
figures are odd. Anyway, even 38% plus whatever the deficit is doesn't
sound like handing everything over to the market except the greater
well-being of the rich.
>The diversion of income so that it can be taxed in overseas tax havens
>is not a subsidy to the state where the income is actually received.
>Worldwide, that's the chief tax dodge of the very well off. Whether it
>is in the US or not I'm in no position to judge.
Tax havens are not much good for US taxpayers because (1) US citizens
and US residents are both taxed at standard US rates on worldwide
income wherever earned, and (2) an array of provisions taxes them
currently on income of controlled or closely held foreign entities.
That's excluding outright tax fraud, which is much less an issue with
the superrich, whose doings attract attention, audit, and participation
of professionals who don't like exposing themselves to criminal
liability, than the moderately rich. Also, I think it's less a problem
in the US than in Europe -- people have more public spirit with respect
to taxes than say in the Latin countries, and reporting requirements
are much more extensive.
>> I would think looking at the top and bottom quintiles would show
>> better what happens in general.
>A society with a tiny number of immensely rich people and an
>overwhelming majority of very poor people might show only modest
>differences in average income between the upper and lower quintiles;
>but there might be a huge difference between the averages of the top
>0.01 per cent and the remaining 99.99 per cent.
But if that's so the superduperrich don't have much of the total. If
you ask "why is everyone so poor" the answer would not be "the
immensely rich have it all." If they did then it would also be true
that the top quintile has it all.
>In what way is primogeniture a free-market violation if it results
>from landowners' choices? (The development of trusts and entails from
>the 13th century allowed landowners to settle their estates as they
>chose, in defiance of common-law rules). Or landed wealth?
Restraints on alienability mean less of a market. Their purpose is to
prevent transactions that would divide concentrations of wealth. And
landed wealth notoriously turns over less than commercial wealth.
That's why it's been praised for being more stable and so permitting
noncommercial and quasifeudal values and relationships to survive. My
point was that the pre-20th c. situation in England seemed associated
with situations at odds with the tendencies of free markets in modern
urban commercial technological society, which was the thing at issue.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Sat Feb 20 08:47:36 EST 1999
Article: 13348 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The Metaphysics of Impeachment
Date: 20 Feb 1999 08:45:07 -0500
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The one thing that appears thoroughly serious for Mr. Cardenas in
discussions on a.r.c. is his hatred of what he calls liberalism --
basically, 19th c. liberalism emphasizing free markets and minimal
government. He believes that strict laissez faire leads to endlessly
increasing differences of wealth, to growing misery for those at the
bottom, eventually, it seems, the great majority, and in the end
perhaps to extermination. In addition, he apparently sees any possible
existing form of "liberalism" as unprincipled in permitting government
intervention on behalf of the rich but not the poor.
My repeated claim has been that pure 19th c. liberalism if it could
exist would be far more benign and that interventions violating its
principles are generally intended to help majorities although they
aren't necessarily successful.
One consideration is that classical American right-wing theory predicts
that the welfare state will lead to class enmity between ruling class
and people, ending in durable ruling class victory and effective
enslavement of the people. (I think some Europeans have taken that
view as well, for example Hayek in _The Road to Serfdom_ and Belloc in
_The Servile State_, but I haven't read them.)
The theory is that the principle of state responsibility for individual
welfare destroys obligations between particular men based on specific
affiliations such as family, neighborhood, friendship, ethnicity and
religion, and replaces them with abstract bureaucratic arrangements
thought more rational, just, efficient, reliable, whatever. The
problem is that bureaucracy and abstract altruism simply do not have
the force of concrete obligations to family and friends. The attempt
comprehensively to rationalize social life therefore weakens men's
self-discipline and sense of mutual obligation, leading to soaring
crime rates and welfare costs, social ill-feeling, and other serious
ills. Since the welfare state can not recognize the source of its ills
without very seriously weakening its claim to legitimacy, they remain
unremedied and grow worse.
In the end the ruling class gets tired of playing nanny to a pack of
unappealing, ill-behaved and intolerably expensive brats, and cracks
down. Since state functionaries can't reliably distinguish the
deserving from the undeserving, the crackdown is brutal. Welfare
benefits are limited arbitrarily, various requirements are imposed on
those who can't possibly meet them, criminal law enforcement becomes
intrusive, harsh and indifferent to the rights of those policed.
Justified complaints are ignored -- it's too hard bureaucratically to
distinguish them from unjustified ones, and being Mr. Nice Guy is what
got us into this mess. The resulting mistrust and hatred between
people and ruling class exacerbates the tendency toward despotism.
If such a theory were true, and were playing out, there would be
disputes between those who say "the government is obviously
anti-popular and this cutback on government stuff is just a front for
oppression" and those who say "that's silly, look at what all the
money's being spent on, and anyway this whole idea that government
should look after individuals is a bad one and we'd be better off
without it."
The evident difficulty the theory raises is how to make fish soup back
into an aquarium after the aquarium has been boiled. Maybe it can't be
done and today after all these years Russia is still the land of the
future. On the other hand I see no prospects for restoration of a
necessarily temporary post-WWII golden age that depended on the
voluntary social cohesion, discipline and self-limitation a welfare
state destroys (again, because of the inability of a welfare
bureaucracy to know much about those with whom it is dealing).
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From jk Sat Feb 20 10:17:49 1999
Subject: Re: Confucius: Re: A Man for All Seasons
To: confucius@lists.gnacademy.org
Date: Sat, 20 Feb 1999 10:17:49 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <199902200213.DAA08315@darc.TOXIKOLOGIE.UNI-MAINZ.DE> from "Robert Rosenstein" at Feb 20, 99 03:13:05 am
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Robert Rosenstein writes:
> I think that there is general agreement that in the time of
> Confucius, women neither played nor were permitted to play any other
> role than that of mother, agricultural worker, servant, concumbine,
> or entertainer. They were, in effect, excluded from all other roles
> by the pervading culture.
In the premodern civilized countries I know of the household was the
basic unit of economic and social life. Women were responsible for
internal management of household affairs. Since those affairs
constituted by far the greater part of social and economic life that
wasn't trivial. Also, if the family business was something other than
agriculture or show biz, they would take part in it nonetheless. That
meant they sometimes made or sold things, or even provided skilled
services, as well as sometimes (as you say) working in agriculture,
entertainment or personal service. You insist on evidence from ancient
China though, which I don't have, and your point may be that ancient
China was different.
Also -- the language quoted suggests a rationalized modern
market/bureaucratic order in which people have become "personnel" or
"human resources," everyone has a "career," and your "career" is what
makes you what you are. Freedom to pursue a career thus becomes
fundamental and limitations on career choice an oddity that requires a
very good explanation. I don't see why it is illuminating to talk
about other times and places with such language and preconceptions. It
has generally been unusual for someone to have what we today would call
a "career." Mostly, people did what they were born to. Again, late
Chou China may for all I know have been different, although it must
mean something that people say it was "feudal."
> Why should there be an objection to [feminist rewording of
> quotations]? There are two possible reasons.
There are lots of possible reasons for almost anything.
One objection to feminist rewording is objection to feminism, to the
view that gender should be abolished as a principle of social order, so
that everything becomes unisex. It may be obvious that if men and
women have no legitimate expectations of each other as men and women it
will promote stable and satisfying personal and family life, good homes
for children, the greatest happiness, and so on. I don't quite see it,
and experience so far doesn't seem encouraging, but people think
dissent is illegitimate, so it must be true.
Apart from my personal qualms though, the relationship between feminism
and Confucius seems relevant. The insistence that gender be made
comprehensively insignificant seems antiConfucian to me, and so a bad
way to start a discussion of his thought. He opposed dogmatism, and
certainly the specifics of accepted attitudes and customs related to
gender have changed from time to time, but the universality of some
such distinctions and their close association with the most immediate
forms of family and local life suggests to me he would have strongly
opposed attempts to root them out. Maybe that just shows that there's
something fundamentally bad about Confucius, and all discussions of his
thought should procede on that basis, but I would have thought greater
open-mindedness would be called for. After all, we don't have things
so well figured out ourselves, even with regard to the relationship
between the sexes.
> there is nothing inherent in the words man, men or male to indicate
> that they include the female. The education of the child does not
> include such a learning and the dictionaries do not define those
> words as such.
I agree that the word "male" does not include "female," although
there's nothing inherent in any word to indicate anything. As to
"man," most dictionaries list "human being" as the first meaning, in
part perhaps because they follow the historical principle of putting
the oldest meanings first. Since all these worries are quite recent
its continued use to mean "human being" seems an ideological rather
than linguistic issue. In the Fascist period in Italy they insisted
that "voi" rather than "lei" be used as a general second person pronoun
because "lei" really means "she." It was the same sort of response to
the same sort of concern. As to children, they pick up usage from
their elders, although it's true schools propagandize and today it's
feminist propaganda that's dominant.
> We can only conclude that except for their occuational staus and
> other uses, the female of the species didn't exist then - and for
> most of the time between then and well into this century.
Lots of other conclusions are possible, for example that Confucius was
mostly concerned with formal public life, in his conception a very
small part of the total life of a society, and in all times and places
formal public life has been very predominantly masculine. Today people
want to make all life part of formal public life, so they mistake
visualizing formal public life as masculine for visualizing a world
without women. It might be a very good thing for the personal to
become truly the political, but it strikes me as more a Legalist than a
Confucian conception.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Sun Feb 21 13:16:40 EST 1999
Article: 13353 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The metaphysics of impeachment
Date: 21 Feb 1999 13:15:54 -0500
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In <36CF5E10.41279F1C@msmisp.com> cjahnes@msmisp.com (Carl Jahnes) writes:
>I don't quite understand the aquarium image.
Czechs used it around the time of the fall of the communist government.
The thought was that a normal society is like an aquarium, with lots of
centers of life and the overall order a kind of balance or common
custom and understanding among the centers. The communists tried to
process that society and turn it into something specified to make it
more palatable (like fish soup) but in fact only killed all the centers
of life and the things that gave it unity. How does one reverse the
process?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From jk Sun Feb 21 05:53:35 1999
Subject: Re: Confucius: Posting
To: confucius@lists.gnacademy.org
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 05:53:35 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <199902210317.EAA26549@darc.TOXIKOLOGIE.UNI-MAINZ.DE> from "Joseph Wang" at Feb 21, 99 04:17:01 am
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Joseph Wang writes:
> >I oppose this kind of bowdlerization. To me it would be adopting an
> >antiConfucian view before the discussion even gets started.
>
> The problem with this view is that in most cases, a gender-neutral
> translation would be much closer to the original.
Not to the translation being quoted. The question is what's being done
and why. It's not a general effort to improve the translation.
Changing "sons" to "sons and daughters" wouldn't do that (assuming, as
I do, that ancient Chinese distinguished the two). The explicit intent
is to bring the translation into line with current orthodoxy on gender
matters. The issue I raised is whether that intent is consistent with
open-minded discussion of Confucius or whether in adopting it we would
be rejecting in advance something we might learn from him because of
the implications of the current orthodoxy.
Also -- since in English like many other European languages the word
for "man" is also a word for "human being" in general, I don't see why
changing "man" to "person" in each case would necessarily be so much
closer. Neither word can have just the same usage as the word being
translated. Each presumably overlaps.
> while I'm sure that there are some feminists who would construct
> human relations on abstract egalitarian principles, I don't think
> that they all would.
Nonetheless, it must be possible to characterize general tendencies of
thought, including feminism. The proposals in this forum for gender
neutralization of language have had an "of course we all believe"
quality, which suggests considerable coherence of principle.
What are those coherent principles? In America feminism has most often
taken the form of requiring identical treatment of men and women.
Deviations from that requirement (like affirmative action) have most
often been justified on the grounds that they are necessary steps to
uproot discrimination, to build a world in which gender distinctions
will be irrelevant to all but the most personal aspects of life. Given
the pervasiveness of sex roles in all societies that have actually
existed, it seems to reasonable to me to describe such a program as a
reconstruction of human relations on abstract egalitarian principles
> >Further, Confucius is essentialist and feminism is antiessentialist.
> >Inclusivism comes from antiessentialism. If an essentialist speaks
> >of "men" it is because he thinks there is an important common
> >character worth discussion. If as antiessentialists believe there
> >is no essence of "man," then to speak of "men" is first and foremost
> >to exclude those of whom you are not speaking.
>
> I don't think I understand your point.
The thought is that the Analects tilt toward what in the West has been
called "realism," the view that words refer to characters that are not
purely conventional. Contrast the discussion in the Analects of the
rectification of names, which assumes that names have a meaning not
dependent on what someone says they mean, with the Taoist view that
names are at most practical social conveniences or the Legalist view
that names mean what the ruler says they mean.
The tendency in the modern West is strongly against realism. One
aspect of that tendency is the feminist tendency to view gender as a
social construction. Another is the fascination with "exclusion" -- if
"men" doesn't refer to a real and important common character, then it
acquires meaning by arbitrarily labelling some as "men" and treating
them one way and equally arbitrarily declaring some are not "men" and
treating them differently. It is I think the anti-realist thought that
classifications are something we create for our own purposes (meaning
in practice the purposes of those with power) that makes the notion of
inclusiveness so compelling for so many people.
> >Taoists, Legalists and Mohists resolutely rejected essentialism and
> >natural social order.
>
> I would agree with you when you mention Taoists and Mohists, but
> Legalists? Explain. Also, "natural social order" is something that
> you need to be careful about, since it has a lot of connotations that
> I don't think are in Confucianism.
The Legalists thought social order should be a matter of what the ruler
said, implemented by regulation, reward and punishment. Social order
was thus an artifice. In addition, they said that words meant what the
ruler said they meant.
By "natural social order" I meant that social order starts with natural
human feelings and impulses, understood as basically good, developed
and ordered by social interaction and culture, which are also natural
to human beings. It is not a conscious construction created for
purposes someone has chosen.
> What do we really know about China 500 B.C.? I don't think that we
> know enough about China 500 B,C, to talk about these sorts of things.
Certainly not in much detail.
> In Italy and Spain 1998, disengagement and analytic standards are
> felt to be feminine qualities. Romance langage countries produce
> huge numbers of female science and mathematics majors. This social
> expection that men are hot-blooded and women are cold is believed to
> be one of the reasons.
One of the reasons there are novelists is to explore the complexities
of human qualities. I don't know enough about Spain and Italy to
discuss the relation among their understanding of masculinity and
femininity, their understanding of the qualities required for high
public office, the actual demands of high office given one ideal of
government or another, and the ideal Confucian scholar. I can't help
but think that such things can be variously presented.
> Incidentally, one of the reasons I wanted you to define more clearly
> what you meant by "natural social order" is that it has the
> connotation of being fixed and innate. That notion is (to me)
> profoundly anti-Confucian.
Was my response adequate? What you say here raises an interesting
question. Confucius thought culture and especially Chinese culture was
good, even for barbarians. He accepted a great many differences but
always seemed to want to relate them to some ultimate principle
implicit in cultural tradition. To what extent would he have accepted
that somewhere else, in Greece or Israel or wherever, there could be a
very different culture that fostered an equally good but radically
different way of life?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From jk Thu Jun 25 13:36:16 1998
Subject: Michael Kelly's June 24 Column
To: letters@nypost.com
Date: Thu, 25 Jun 1998 13:36:16 -0400 (EDT)
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To the Editor of the _Post_:
Michael Kelly builds a whole column on his belief that in speaking of
"homosexuality" Trent Lott meant to say that a "homosexual's state of
being -- his existence" is a sin. Unless Mr. Kelly has additional
information he doesn't share with his readers I see no grounds for that
belief.
It is just not true that in common speech "homosexuality" refers to
desire as opposed to action. _The Random House Dictionary of the
English Language (College Edition)_ defines "homosexuality" to include
both, as "sexual desire or behavior directed toward a person or persons
of one's own sex." For what it's worth, my impression is that most
people use the word mainly for conduct -- it's what they think matters,
and words like "sodomy" have dropped out of common use.
However that may be, the obvious interpretation of Senator Lott's
comments (again assuming Mr. Kelly has no additional knowledge) is that
he was talking about conduct, and it is unjust to presume otherwise.
Even in New York, and even in a column aimed primarily at liberals,
Southern Republican senators deserve justice no less than other people.
Sincerely,
James Kalb
110 Saint Mark's Avenue
Brooklyn, New York 11217
(718) 857-3813
From jk Wed Jul 15 09:44:17 1998
Subject: Re: Updates to URLs
To: L
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 09:44:17 -0400 (EDT)
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If it's hard for people to find serious and straightforward discussion
of PC and politically incorrect topics they're going to find it
difficult to articulate dissatisfaction with the current orthodoxy in a
useful way. The basic principle of PC is to make thoughtcrime
unspeakable and therefore unthinkable. Every breach in the wall helps,
and if objections can be presented continuously and persuasively and
shown to be intellectually solid they can ultimately have enormous
effect, especially if they are presented in a way that's easy to access
and builds confidence they aren't just the ravings of some crank. An
electronic journal fits the bill perfectly.
Best wishes!
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
"Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry
interests -- in one word, so anti-poetic -- as the life of a man in the
United States." (Tocqueville)
From jk Thu Oct 22 22:17:19 1998
Subject: Re: Tage Lindbom as a sufi
To: d
Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 22:17:19 -0400 (EDT)
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> But for me it is more important to adhere to islam( seen as the only
> way), than to speculate to much, although I read and like Guenon,
> Schuon, Nasr and some others. And I belong to a tariqa well rooted i
> othodox sunni islam.
I agree with the general principle. Schuon for example is a very
intelligent and perceptive man, but religion is a matter of what one
ultimately thinks is true. He seems to suggest that behind particular
religions is some truer religion that he can tell us about. I don't
think that's possible. Why should he be able to give us a truer truth
than the founders of actual religions and the traditions they
established? One must I think be of some particular religion and
regard that religion as the truth behind which one cannot go. He's
nonetheless well worth reading.
> I hope I dont become to curious and personal if I ask about your own
> religious background? Are you a pro-Catholic Anglican?
Yes. Which is a problem, because it means I belong to a tariqa no
longer well rooted in orthodoxy. I am still connected to it though by
personal ties and by lack of readiness for one of the alternatives.
The Anglican Way isn't what it was. That brings into question I
suppose how well founded it was in the first place. Very depressing
because it is the form of Christianity that made the civilization I
love most and am most at home in.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From jk Thu Dec 3 08:19:45 1998
Subject: Re: Constitutional Law
To: j
Date: Thu, 3 Dec 1998 08:19:45 -0500 (EST)
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American con law is so repellant to me now that I don't think much in
its terms. One possible interesting line of investigation is that 1992
case reaffirming Roe v. Wade in which the court talks about how the
country must see itself in the constitution and the constitution in the
court. There must be discussions of _extra ecclesiam nulla salus_ and
papal infallibility that are relevant. I think that was the same case
that had the famed mystery of the universe passage.
Another line of thought has to do with the Colorado proposition 2 case,
which as I recall went off on whether it was legit to make it harder
for some people to attain their political goals than others. I thought
that was the specific function of constitutional rights, to make it
hard for some people to attain their political goals.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From jk Thu Dec 3 15:43:59 1998
Subject: Re: Constitutional Law
To: j
Date: Thu, 3 Dec 1998 15:43:59 -0500 (EST)
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On the Col. Amend. 2 thing, it struck me that a key point was that as
in Roe v. Wade the court got around technical, doctrinal, precedential
etc. problems by having the stupidest man they had draft the
groundbreaking opinion. The problems then vanished because in
subsequent cases they could rely on precedent. In the original privacy
cases they used Douglas and his penumbras of emanations, who was
shameless rather than stupid. I'm not sure Con Law casebooks include
sections on that particular technique of legal growth.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From jk Fri Dec 4 17:29:24 1998
Subject: Re: Constitutional Law
To: j
Date: Fri, 4 Dec 1998 17:29:24 -0500 (EST)
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> One problem with this theory is that the justices are a lot more
> willing to overturn the seemingly infalible pronouncements of earlier
> justices.
One of the reasons the Court gave in the Casey case for sticking with
Roe v. Wade was the need for infallibility, at least in cases when
pressure for reversal from non-elite sources made it harder to wave
your hands and claim it was really just a development of doctrine.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From www@dejanews.com Tue Dec 8 10:11:49 1998
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From: jk@panix.com
To: jk@panix.com
Subject: Plato
Date: Tue, 08 Dec 1998 15:11:09 GMT
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Status: RO
I like Plato, and reread the Republic every few years. There's a lot of
extremely penetrating analysis in it, of the nature of democratic politics
for example, that you don't find elsewhere. Also, his account of social
devolution in books viii-ix I think is a reasonable accurate discription of
what's been going on in Western society since its flowering in the High
Middle Ages.
From jk Tue Jan 5 12:09:34 1999
Subject: Re: Li'l Bill ?
To: g
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1999 12:09:34 -0500 (EST)
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> What happens if the DNA matches, and the kid is undeniably his? What
> happens to BC's black support base? What will they say -- Bill has a
> black son and he's too ashamed to: 1) acknowledge him; 2) support
> him; and 3) invite him to the White House.
Not to worry. It'll be another opportunity for emotional redemption
and reconciliation.
Some predictions: Anyone who has a problem with the whole situation
will be a white racist, and blacks will rally behind the First Black
President who now has gotten actual blacks into the First Family. BC
will blame fears his own fear of white American racism as his reason
for not acknowledging the situation sooner. Anyone who says anything
will be attacking the kid and his mother.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From jk Sat Feb 13 20:24:58 1999
Subject: Re: Distributions
To: c
Date: Sat, 13 Feb 1999 20:24:58 -0500 (EST)
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> Have you read any of E. Michael Jones' recent work?
Only small bits and pieces here and there. Certainly a corrupted
populace is easier to manage, more "tolerant," makes fewer demands that
can't be dealt with by payoffs, threats and manipulation, and therefore
better from the current point of view. Disordered personal lives make
men more dependent on the government and therefore more public minded
as that's now understood.
> Jones has some passages somewhere (sheesh!) either on his web page,
> or in his last years' worth of magazine production, which analyzes
> some of DeSade's musings on this...
Sade is unfortunately worth reading from the standpoint of
understanding modern times. I'm not sure I'd recommend him to anyone
though -- knowledge of the joy of evil isn't the best knowledge.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From jk Fri Feb 19 04:34:53 1999
Subject: Re: Question
To: cd
Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 04:34:53 -0500 (EST)
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I do find what I have seen on responses to Hitchen's affidavit
disturbing. It's a mixture of self-involvement, arrogance, moral
confusion, cliquish partisanship, and ideological bigotry that's
totally unselfconscious because it's apparently never occurred to
people like Gitlin that the moral and social world is bigger than their
little club. How can such people be the public intellectuals?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Tue Feb 23 16:19:46 EST 1999
Article: 13565 of alt.revolution.counter
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Subject: Re: The metaphysics of impeachment
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In <919802547snz@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> raf391@bloxwich.demon.co.uk (rafael cardenas) writes:
>Where I differ from Mr . Kalb is not on the issue of whether the
>aquarium has been boiled, but whether the deoxygenation of the tank is
>solely attributable to the dregs at the bottom or also to the scum at
>the top.
I don't see that as the difference. The question as to laissez faire
is which kinds of government actions intended to promote a better
future are only further boiling. I've proposed that direct government
responsibility for the welfare of individuals decomposes centers of
independent life and therefore is part of the boiling, mashing and
blending. I've also suggested that at least some barriers to
international trade and movement are like artificial reefs of auto
tires that create nooks and crannies for life to develop.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From owner-confucius@lists.gnacademy.org Tue Feb 23 21:52:22 1999
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Status: RO
Robert Rosenstein writes:
> my interest is not in feminism but in women as simply people. What
> that means is persons who have precisely and exactly the same
> opportunities and considerations as men.
> Abolish gender - Heaven help us, Heaven help us: NO! No., we want to
> abolish inequality of opportunity.
The intention seems to be for men and women to be viewed and treated
exactly the same in everything of substantial public importance, for
example politics, education, and economic life. In what's left over
distinctions are to be accepted.
I don't see an important disagreement with my claim that feminism is
"the view that gender should be abolished as a principle of social
order, so that everything becomes unisex." Gender might still exist,
but not as a principle of social order. I will change the last part of
my claim to "so that everything that anyone cares about seriously and
affects any substantial number of people becomes unisex."
It seems to me a Confucian objection is that there would be very little
left of gender. The "women as simply people" comment suggests that the
public side of things -- the side governed by the rule of precise and
exact equality of opportunities and consideration -- is by far what is
most important in human life. Gender would be an ornament or
diversion, in principle excluded from relevance to anything serious.
For serious guidance we would look to equality and apparently a
conception of the person as essentially a bureaucrat, an egalitarian
idealist, or a self-interested market participant -- in any case, an
abstract actor in an formal public system -- rather than basing social
order on cultivation and refinement of immediate natural tendencies
that have ordered human life in all times and places.
Again, the modern conception may be right and it may lead to the most
stable and satisfying way of life for most people. For my own part I
think it leads to insuperable problems, which is why I'm interested in
Confucius -- he has a radically different view of good social order and
its sources. So I don't like the idea of starting off the discussion
by making Confucius conform to modern orthodoxy. And even if the
modern view is probably right, isn't there some benefit to keeping
possible alternatives in play in little theoretical discussions here
and there?
> A better question would be what would Confucius's response be if he
> became aware of single-parent families, especially where the parent
> was male?
I imagine he would view such things as a symptom of disorder.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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From paleo-return-9-jk=panix.com@returns.egroups.com Wed Feb 24 01:43:40 1999
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In-Reply-To: <36D29D81.F6D01738@freedixie.net> from "Jim Langcuster" at Feb 23, 99 06:22:25 am
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Jim Langcuster says:
> After all, where is the guarantee that in an increasingly corrupt,
> barbaric world the elites would even allow the existence of large
> numbers of dissidents -- much less an alternative society operating
> in the bosom of the dominant regime?
I'm not sure national borders are going to help all that much, given
the regime of international law now under construction.
It seems to me the real hope is corruption and consequent inefficiency.
The principle of modern thought is identification of what's good with
what's wanted. I would expect that principle to lead even more quickly
and completely than usual to a dissolution of ideology in self-seeking.
The Clinton administration is only the beginning. If you don't cause
trouble and make the necessary pay-offs you'll likely get through,
although of course you may not.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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Subject: Re: From_telos-forum: Details
To: telos-forum@www.ithaca.edu
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1999 08:38:20 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <5599894d.36cdc404@aol.com> from "Telospress@aol.com" at Feb 19, 99 03:05:24 pm
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>From Jim Kalb
Paul Piccone writes:
> a reconfigured liturgy may have a positive role to play in radical
> projects of community reconstitution.
> those rituals can totalize community life only within a particular
> historical context where its iconography and symbolism is part and
> parcel of the community's everyday life ... the liturgical dimension
> must itself be so structured as be able to become part of the
> "immediately obvious."
> a collective preconceptual horizon allowing even the most illiterate
> and least vocal members full participation through liturgical
> practices.
> Practically all the available accounts (written by the bureaucrats
> rather than the revolutionary "mendicants") are full of "love of
> God," "repentance," "holiness," etc., which effectively occlude what
> the Franciscan movement was all about
Isn't there a difficulty with a "radical project of community
reconstitution," apparently a conscious one, which is supposed to be
based on something "immediately obvious" and "preconceptual"? It seems
to suggest social technologists with unlimited powers who have honed
their skills to become technologists of everyday ontology, the sacred,
what have you.
It seems to me community reconstitution is more likely to take place
through those who are part of the world that is being reconstituted and
therefore do not view the preconceptual as something to use for
purposes they have chosen. Such people I suppose would likely think of
their efforts as having to do with "love of God," "repentance,"
"holiness," etc.
The foregoing may be old hat, but it's something of a stumbling block
for a new reader of _Telos_.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Wed Feb 24 12:12:44 EST 1999
Article: 13567 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
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Subject: Re: the metaphysics of impeachment
Date: 24 Feb 1999 10:28:14 -0500
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cjahnes@msmisp.com (Carl Jahnes) writes:
> So we have the aquarium. No one is "outside" the aquarium, except
> God. Anyone who thinks he is 'outside' the aquarium, and thus can
> know whether it is boiling, or has been boiled, or is lukewarm, or
> frozen in a solid cake of soup, is kidding himself.
You seem to be saying that we can't characterize the world we live in
at all. That point is made by those who want to cut off reference to
anything that transcends the world. All we can speak of, they say, has
to do with distinctions within experience. Experience as a whole, its
possible nature, source, meaning and implications, are meaningless
issues that it doesn't pay to discuss. That seems wrong to me.
One possible position is that left to himself man is sunk in his own
experience to the point that he could not begin to conceive of anything
beyond it, but for revelation. That also seems wrong to me. The
heavens after all declare the glory of God. And all men by nature
desire to know, especially the highest things.
> How are we aware of existence such that we can tinker with it and
> engineer it like a simple machine?
We can't tinker and engineer it. We can discern something about it and
cooperate with it. We can try to understand what is destructive and
sometimes do something to reduce the destruction. Otherwise conscious
action of any sort would be useless. If absence of boundaries and
abolition of tradition visibly makes human community impossible, and
man is by nature a social animal, then opposing the principle of
destroying all traditional boundaries makes sense, at least to me.
That isn't social technology any more than providing a marketplace and
suppressing robbery is price-fixing.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From jk@panix.com Mon Feb 22 08:15:44 1999
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Subject: Votes for felons
Status: O
"Many moderates in both parties are also reluctant to reject the idea
for fear of appearing racist, given the felony voting laws'
disproportionate effect on minorities."
A very important thing about politics in America right now is that
race-baiting really is trumps. Does someone object to Clinton? He's a
racist. Do you like the 2nd amendment? You're a racist too. Does
Hitchens decline to lie when asked about the President's use of the
powers of his office to smear a young woman he had used and thrown
away? He must be an antisemite. It's always effective, at least
somewhat, and there are never any consequences to the accuser no
matter how reckless or even unfounded and utterly cynical the
accusation. Nice ploy if you can make use of it.
It's not just America, either. Our British cousins are catching up.
For a good account of one incident, see Sean Gabb's piece on what
happened to a writer on cricket. His Free Life Commentary is really
excellent, by the way -- I think there's a link from the piece.
From: JimKalb (jk@panix.com) *
02/22/99 05:19:49 PST Reply
_________________________________________________________________
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Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 20:37:23 -0500 (EST)
From: Jim Kalb
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To: jk@panix.com
Subject: Hitchens
Status: RO
It's obviously not loyalty to personal friends the Left is concerned
with. That's a sentimental cover for their rejection of ordinary
standards of decency and honor. The loyalty is to the Left itself, and
the essence of the Left is the identification of what is good with
what I want.
From: JimKalb (jk@panix.com) *
02/22/99 05:28:37 PST Reply
From paleo-return-11-jk=panix.com@returns.egroups.com Wed Feb 24 13:38:27 1999
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From: Jim Kalb
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In-Reply-To: from "XianAnarch@aol.com" at Feb 23, 99 06:18:28 pm
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Status: RO
> Are the anti-immigration folks confessing an unwillingness to meet
> immigrants at the borders with an army of missionary societies of
> charity and discipleship? Can the ideals of a Godly culture be
> immunized from barbarism only by armed forces monitoring fortified
> borders?
Yes and yes, I suppose. To exist any society must have boundaries and
exclusions. Jesus and St. Paul both applied that principle to the
society of Christians. It applies all the more to the peoples and
nations of this world, who after all have a role to play in the scheme
of things. I don't think we can get along without them because man is
a social animal and imperfect limited man can't get by without
imperfect concrete societies. And practically speaking social life
can't be carried on without ability to appeal to an _ultima ratio_
understandable and persuasive to those likely to disorder it.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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From christ-and-culture-return-724-jk=PANIX.COM@returns.egroups.com Thu Feb 25 20:51:56 1999
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From: Jim Kalb
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Date: Thu, 25 Feb 1999 20:51:57 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <004b01be6120$2fd79d60$bbf463ce@sethwill> from "Seth Williamson" at Feb 25, 99 07:37:23 pm
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> Before him were a dozen congressional aides, a think-tank policy
> wonk, and a cadre of Democratic interest groups, all coordinating
> sympathetic op-eds, studies, and demonstrations in an effort to push
> through a housing bill. Suddenly Weyrich understood not only his
> enemy but his life calling: to replace the liberal establishment with
> a conservative one that would guide the movement, at last, out of the
> wilderness."
>
> You can't do it that way.
Can you do nothing that way?
To the extent we don't all drop out we're going to be affected by
whatever the correlation of forces is affecting what is laughingly
called the public mind. The centralization of social life and
domination of ideology means that is manipulated. I'm not sure what
the practical alternative is to countermanipulation, barring
withdrawal. We can resolve to be so strong in our souls and so
inspirational in our lives that our social environment won't affect us
but rather we will transform it with our presence. Somehow that seems
imprudent though.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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From owner-confucius@lists.gnacademy.org Thu Feb 25 21:44:11 1999
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To: confucius@lists.gnacademy.org
From: Jim Kalb
Subject: Re: Confucius: A Man for all Seasons
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Status: RO
Robert Rosenstein writes:
> You say there would be very little left of gender; also, " Gender
> would be an ornament or diversion, in principle excluded from
> relevance to anything serious." I wonder if there isn't a confusion
> here. It sounds as if you are saying that women's objective is to
> become as much like the male species as possible
I don't understand where you disagree with the language you quote.
What serious function do you think gender should have?
> "unisex" refers primarily to public life. There is no doubt though
> that it also refers, to a certain extent, to private life.
Your point seems to be that gender could thrive in private while
remaining irrelevant to public life, as the equal opportunity principle
requires.
I don't understand that. Life isn't so compartmentalized, and "public
life" -- the sphere in which equal opportunity principles are
applicable -- covers too much to leave much room for radically opposed
principles. Man is a social animal. Public life includes everything
of any importance that requires general cooperation. It now includes
employment, education, organized care of the sick and aged, daycare,
most entertainment and amusement (TV and pro sports are part of public
life), politics, organized religion, organized charity, community
activities, etc., etc., etc. Most of our time and most of our effort
and attention is focused on public life, and the major aim of education
and childrearing generally is to make children ready for successful
participation in public life.
I don't see how the strict rule that gender is irrelevant is going to
vanish during whatever time people spend doing things unrelated to the
foregoing. Gender after all exists as a social institution, which
already has public implications.
> Could you describe the Confucian social order and the place of women
> in it.
I think of a Confucian social order as one developing in accordance
with a certain process and general understanding rather than one
created by following a blueprint. So speculating in America in 1999
about what the exact place of women would be in a modern Confucian
society is a bit like speculating in a Chinese people's commune in 1965
what the market price of tractors would be if there were a free market
in tractors.
I do think the understandings basic to Confucius' thought are at odds
with equality as a fixed and comprehensive goal. Nor are they
individualistic (they're not really collectivistic either -- the group
is not the standard, and individual integrity and judgment is
important). Rather they are based on acceptance of immediate natural
relations like those of the family, and loyalty, good faith and
reciprocity within those relations. They favor cultivation of the
immediate and natural through culture but not radical reconstruction
based on an abstract philosophical view. There's a notion of what is
right overall that limits what we owe to loyalty and so on, but the
latter remain central nonetheless.
If such understandings were accepted my guess is that we would have
publicly accepted sex roles broadly consistent with those that
apparently have been traditional at all times and places, with women
tending more to home and children and men to public affairs. The exact
form sex roles would take and just what modifications, inconsistencies
and so on they would have only the process of development would show.
Of course, my view depends on the view that there are natural
complementary differences between men and women in average behavioral
tendencies. If the latter view is false, as you may believe, then it's
all up in the air.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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From jk@panix.com Fri Feb 26 06:48:48 1999
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From: Jim Kalb
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To: jk@panix.com
Subject: No enemies to left
Status: O
"Was this willful blindness or mere stupidity?"
That's the way the Left deals with the crimes of the Left, by
invincible disbelief.
My brother, who used to be first mate on an oil tanker, told me just
yesterday how cruising up the west coast of the US in the '80s they'd
listen to the Russian antimissile radar. They called it the "Russian
woodpecker" by its sound. Then he'd listen to Joe Biden saying it
didn't exist. Only after the fall of the Soviet government did Biden
became able to recognize its existence. I suppose Clinton's crimes are
another example.
It makes sense. After all, the whole idea of the Left is that how
people naturally tend to live and understand life is just wrong, and
everything has to be changed in accordance with some new principle
that trumps everything represented by a movement that is the absolute
embodiment of all that is good and hopeful, as it must be since there
is nothing transcendent that outranks it.
From: JimKalb (jk@panix.com) *
02/25/99 18:19:33 PST Reply
From paleo-return-29-jk=panix.com@returns.egroups.com Sun Feb 28 07:03:54 1999
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> is the paleo project essentially to stand up holding a burning match
> of cultural critique in a vast darkness, watching as the flame burns
> down to our fingers?
There's no guarantee of success or even any very clear stategy for
success. On the other hand part of the basis of the critique is that
technology -- the human capacity to devise strategies that reliably
achieve chosen goals -- has limited scope and doesn't apply to basic
things.
The question I think is whether the New Order is going to work, because
it adequately reflects human nature and historical contingencies, or
whether the understanding of things required for it to work is an
illusion plausible only because the New Class dominates the apparatus
of discussion.
I think the latter. The world is not reason's peanut, and as the New
Order fails other ordering principles are going to be needed that have
more of a grip on men and their concrete ways of life. Religion,
gender and historically developed culture (and therefore ethnic
loyalties) come to mind.
Talk of "hatred" comes from the fear that those things will reassert
themselves in a mindless form. I agree that's a concern, that
thoughtful racism, sexism, homophobia, religious intolerance etc. are
much better than the contrary. So all -- even progressives -- should
agree that paleo thought is an essential part of the bridge to the 21st
century and those that follow.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
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From news2.panix.com!news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Mon Mar 1 15:45:41 EST 1999
Article: 13569 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: The long march of PC into criminal law
Date: 25 Feb 1999 10:37:44 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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Any comments from people in the UK on how the Macpherson Report is
playing there? (It's the official report just published on a murder in
England that has somewhat the status of the Jasper and Shepard
murders.)
I looked at it briefly. It defines "racism" and "racist incident" very
broadly:
"Racism in general terms consists of conduct or words or practices
which disadvantage or advantage people because of their colour,
culture, or ethnic origin."
So if some cultural groups (French businessmen) don't like to pay taxes
then laws against tax evasion are racist.
"the definition should be: 'A racist incident is any incident which is
perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.' ... the term
'racist incident' must be understood to include crimes and non-crimes
in policing terms. Both must be reported, recorded and investigated
with equal commitment."
So every time anyone says anything conceivably offensive in public, on
TV or the radio say, there'll be a police investigation. If the
audience is big enough and has just one member who wants the speaker to
shut up official action becomes almost certain. If someone wants to
take offence on behalf of the honor of French taxpayers then we've just
had a racial incident on a.r.c. I wonder if I'll get a call from the
British Consulate since I just exported a racism to the UK?
The report then proposes:
"consideration should be given to amendment of the law to allow
prosecution of ofences involving racist language ... where such conduct
can be proved to have taken place otherwise than in a public place."
So it seems private speech which someone -- anyone at all -- thinks
racist is not only to be reported and officially investigated and
publicized but at least in some cases it is to be made criminal. The
Report also wants to establish a presumption in favor of prosecution
when racism is involved, by the way.
It's been clear for some time that PC and in fact antiracist ideology
generally require thought control and therefore a comprehensive system
of supervision and compulsory regulation of what people think and say.
It's good of Sir William to provide official confirmation.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Mon Mar 1 15:45:42 EST 1999
Article: 13571 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The long march of PC into criminal law
Date: 28 Feb 1999 21:34:00 -0500
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In <920237410snz@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> raf391@hormel.bloxwich.demon.co.uk (rafael cardenas) writes:
>this is merely the latest of a long succession of incidents in which
>the authorities are negligent or abuse power, and after which there is
>an enquiry which makes various proposals and recommendations
>(elaborate or intrusive). Meanwhile the individual police, judges,
>prison warders, utility staff, bureaucrats, company directors, or
>whoever was most obviously responsible for the original negligence or
>abuse of power get away unpunished.
Good point. Saying there is a pervasive problem and the whole world
needs to be changed can be a way of identifying the specific problem.
>Is it on the web? You picked up a copy remarkably quickly.
The NY Times reported the major proposals, so I looked and found the
report at
http://www.official-documents.co.uk/document/cm42/4262/sli-00.htm
Through the BBC website.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine)
Do let me know if you have comments of any kind.
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