Besides race, what did Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, Bayard Rustin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King have in common? Hugh Murray on the relationship between civil rights activists and Communists.

New Orleans Woolworth’s sit-in, September 9, 1960: Jerome Smith, Ruth Despenza, Joyce Taylor, Hugh Murray, Archie Allen, William Harrell

My friend Hugh Murray (b. 1938), a native New Orleanian, is a veteran of the African American civil rights movement (CRM), a critic of its betrayal by “affirmative action” (its latest incarnation being “diversity, equity, and inclusion”), and scholar of the 1931 trial of the Scottsboro Boys, the first international American civil rights cause célèbre. Our paths first crossed over a half-century ago in the reading room of the American Institute for Marxist Studies (AIMS) on East 30th Street in Manhattan. Its director, Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), hired us (and others) as research assistants for the massive project of preparing for publication the correspondence, bibliography, and published writings of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963). For the past few years, Hugh and I have been preparing an anthology of Hugh’s writings for publication later this year, Deo volente.

On his blog, Murray recently explored the tension between the noble, justice-seeking motives of the CRM and the ignoble motives of the Communist movement to which some CRM activists were attracted to one degree or another. (For the CRM one could substitute the labor movement.) It’s a tension I’d rather ignore. It’s easier to concentrate on the horrors of Communism uncomplicated by the fact that many Communists were drawn to it to fight the horrors of lynching and other violence. It was easy for me to call them dupes (among whom I was once numbered) and leave it at that.

Continue reading “Besides race, what did Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, Bayard Rustin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King have in common? Hugh Murray on the relationship between civil rights activists and Communists.”

Do atheists have an excuse?

An edited version of this post, first published here five years ago today, forms the first half of Chapter 5 of Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after HimThe post linked in the first paragraph appeared on Bill Vallicella’s blog in 2018 (therefore, more than “a few months ago”).—A.G.F.

In a short post few months ago, Bill Vallicella argued that “If God exists, and one is an atheist, then one is ignorant of God, but it does not follow that one is culpably ignorant.” (Italics added.)

Bill takes his definition of “culpable ignorance” from a Catholic dictionary: ignorance is blameworthy if the ignorant one could have “cleared up” his ignorance, but chose not to. “One is said to be simply (but culpably) ignorant,” the dictionary says, “if one fails to make enough effort to learn what should be known.”

Bill applies this to the atheist this way:

I hold that there is vincible ignorance on various matters. But I deny that atheists are vincibly ignorant. Some might be, but not qua atheists. Whether or not God exists, one is not morally culpable for denying the existence of God. Nor do I think one is morally culpable if one doubts the existence of God.

Bill acknowledges that his exculpation of the professing atheist “puts me at odds with St. Paul, at least on one interpretation of what he is saying at Romans 1: 18-20.”

I’ll say! As Bill wrote in the post he linked to: “There are sincere and decent atheists, and they have plenty of excuse for their unbelief. The best of them, if wrong in the end, are excusably wrong.”

That position reveals a great deal about Bill’s idea of God. It’s not the idea one gets from the Bible, arguably the source of what Bill calls “the Judeo-Christian tradition.” I bring this up because Bill stipulates (in the post under discussion) that for “present purposes, it suffices to say that ‘God’ refers to the supreme being of the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

For Bill’s argument to work, that interpretation of Romans 1:18-20—God infallibly communicates His existence, power, and divinity to all people and they are all responsible for having received that communication—would have to fall outside that “tradition.”

God’s Word is the light that enlightens everyone who comes into the world (John 1:9). There are no exceptions for professing atheists.

Continue reading “Do atheists have an excuse?”

Michael Volpe’s thoughts occasioned by “Philosophy after Christ”

Michael Volpe had intended to append the following as a comment to the last post, but it merits standing alone as a post. I appreciate the effort he put into it; in due time, I’ll address his criticisms in a comment of my own.—A.G.F.

In his book Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him, Anthony Flood opts for a transcendental argument for the existence of God. It can be summarized as the impossibility of the contrary because Christianity as a worldview alone gives the conditions that makes predication possible. Since Anthony clearly states his indebtedness to Cornelius Van Til, one must ask what difference, if any, there is between their understanding of the same argument.

The Calvinistic Van Til built his form of the transcendental argument to justify the contradiction that God desires the salvation of those whom He does not choose. And though He elects, this free offer of Christ for all supposedly relieves God of the charge of being evil for not choosing everyone when He could have done so. Especially since it is man and not God who is the ultimate cause of sin deserving of hell. Thus, Van Til needs to combat not only the belief in free will and free thought, but rationalism. The former two lead to chance as being ultimate and the latter requires omniscience. Either way, if any of these are true, they would destroy the belief that his hyper-infralapsarian Calvinism (grounds the free offer in Christ’s limited atonement) is the transcendental truth or worldview alone which establishes predication but without its constituent truths logically entailing each other for a sound and consistent deductive system. Continue reading “Michael Volpe’s thoughts occasioned by “Philosophy after Christ””

Philosophy before Christ: the case of an Athenian fence-sitter

In Colossians 2:8, Paul warns Christians not to be seduced by philosophy after (κατὰ, kata) “the elementary principles of the cosmos” (τὰ στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου, ta stoicheia tou kosmou, i.e., demonic spirit-beings[1]) and not after Christ. This suggests the possibility of “philosophy after Christ,” a suggestion I pursued in a book with that title.[2]

“After” here doesn’t mean chronologically subsequent, but rather “in the manner or style of,” as one might paint after Rembrandt or after Picasso. When we philosophize, that is, pursue wisdom to help us lead rightly ordered lives, we ought to do so as Christ the Wisdom of God (σοφίᾳ τοῦ Θεοῦ, sophia tou Theou; 1 Corinthians 1:21) counsels. All philosophy that’s not “after Christ” (not only, say, Hermeticism) assumes a “neutral” posture toward God’s self-revelation in Scripture.[3]

Interestingly, twenty verses earlier, Paul taught not only that all things (τὰ άντα, ta panta) cohere (συνίστημι, sunistēmi) in Christ, but also that He is “before all things (πρὸ πάντων, pro ta pantōn)” (Colossians 1:17). That is, He ranks above them because He created them: “. . . without Him nothing was made that was made” (John 1:3b). He decrees what is true about anything other than Himself: “All (כֹּ֤ל, kol) whatever (אֲשֶׁר, asher) pleases (חָפֵ֥ץ, hapes) the Lord (יְהוָ֗ה, Yahweh) does (עָ֫שָׂ֥ה asah)” (Psalm 135:6a). That includes the states of affairs we call “facts.”

Christ is not only “temporally” antecedent to (from “eternity past”[4]) His creation, but also pre-eminent over it. The set of “all things” includes His image-bearers: nothing has priority over Him—not even a philosopher’s mind. The thinker who gives epistemic authority to every Word that proceeds from the mouth of God (by which we are to live: Matthew 4:4) is different from the one who awards that status to something else. By “philosophy after Christ” I mean the pursuit of wisdom by practicing what Jesus preached, that is, answering Satan’s lies with Scripture; that is, putting Christ before that pursuit, not the other way around. Continue reading “Philosophy before Christ: the case of an Athenian fence-sitter”

Du Bois Day

Title page of “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the United States of America: 1638–1871,” Du Bois’s Harvard dissertation, awarded in 1895.

Phil Sinitiere, a scholar specializing in W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) and Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), recently brought to my attention that today, Du Bois’s 156th birthday, is commemorated as the Third Annual W. E. B. Du Bois Day at Fisk University. Fisk was Du Bois’s alma mater (1885-1888) before he became the first African American to be awarded a Ph.D. from Harvard College in 1895. The birthday occasioned today’s brief post.

I’m linked to Du Bois through my modest involvement a half-century ago in Aptheker’s preparation of Du Bois’s correspondence and bibliography for publication, which I discussed briefly here. In another post I elaborated upon certain grim facts that no admirer of his efforts to secure civil rights for African Americans should forget.

Willie Du Bois with his mother, Mary Silvina Burghardt. (Public domain.)

After graduating from Fisk, Du Bois studied philosophy at the feet of several members of Harvard’s Minervan pantheon, including Josiah Royce, George Herbert Palmer, George Santayana, and William James. James’s mentoring of Du Bois was a major factor in his pioneering of American sociology.[1]

By temperament and education, Du Bois was the furthest thing from “woke”; he had earned a Harvard doctorate when that institution was transmissive rather than subversive of Western Civilization. In the six decades since his passing, unfortunately, the writings of this card-carrying Communist have inspired many of that civilization’s enemies. In the last two decades of his life, his disgust with the West moved him to eulogize Stalin effusively and admire Mao cordially. Should we judge such things less harshly than the inanities of “woke” ideology (which rationalize genocide)? My posts suggest a negative answer.

Herbert Aptheker signs the contract authorizing the sale  of W.E.B. Du Bois’s papers to the University of Massachusetts, May 27, 1973

Note

[1] “I became a devoted follower of James,” Du Bois wrote, “at the time he was developing his pragmatic philosophy”; James “guided me out of the sterilities of scholastic philosophy to realist pragmatism.” He recalled being “repeatedly . . . a guest in the home of William James . . . .” Cited in James Campbell, “Du Bois and James,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 28:3, Summer 1992, 569-570. Campbell contrasts the younger man’s star-struck recollection with James’s more sober description: “although James was no doubt concerned with Du Bois’s future and respectful and supportive of Du Bois’s work,” Campbell writes, “it is not clear that James offered him any real help to advance any of his projects” (570).

Happy Birthday, Wé Ani, My Musical Tonic and Oasis

Wé Ani

Wé Ani turns 25 today. Last spring when she auditioned for American Idol her protean voice began drilling a hole in my soul.

Due more to what was going on in my life than her talent, her equally powerful performances on The Voice in 2016 didn’t have that lasting effect.

Her career is a story of strong family support, raw talent (dancing, acting, classical voice training), and diligence (wé ani in Swahili).

I’ll let my notes from 2023’s last post introduce the rest of this one:

. . . Harlem-born performer Wé Ani (b. 1999) [is] the most versatile, and powerful, pop singer I’ve ever heard, whose voice salves my charred soul and never fails to plaster a smile on my face. My wife and I had first seen her in 2016 on The Voice (when she went by “Wé McDonald”).

A physically different (almost unrecognizably so) Wé competed in last season’s (2023) American Idol . . . She can belt like nobody’s business, folk her way through any ballad (guitar and all), or rock it out, or out-Broadway any veteran of The Great White Wé, I mean, Way.

There seem to be at least a half dozen Wé Anis: after watching any two videos, I sincerely wonder, “Is that the same singer?” . . .

And then there’s the uncanny sonic chasm between her childlike speaking pitch and her robust, gritty singing voice: she says she wants to be taken seriously, but “it’s not easy sounding like a 12-year-old at 23.” The simile that comes to my mind is fiction’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (minus the creepy associations): she makes a fool of anyone who prejudges her talent on that basis. . . .

She’s also a modest and charming interviewee (sans tatoos, nose ring, acrylic claws and other accoutrements of female celebrityhood): consider one from 2018 and another from September.

Varleton McDonald (Wé’s father and manager), Wé Ani McDonald, and Michael Amorgianos (Lawrence Middle School psychologist), January 2023

Wé’s voice and musical choices take me back to the day, about sixty years, when pop music entered my life, washing away life’s dirt as images of war, assassinations, and race riots washed across the TV screen.

Her voice is more than pleasant: it’s a delivery system for aesthetic endorphins, an oasis and tonic for my soul.

But the above text is so much blather. Why not taste and see for yourself?

Continue reading “Happy Birthday, Wé Ani, My Musical Tonic and Oasis”

Evidence I wasn’t always a “Van Tillian”

Listening this morning to an old (well, 2022) podcast[1] by the great Calvinist apologist James R. White, I was startled by his reference to Thom Notaro’s 1980 Van Til and the Use of Evidence. (White says he paid $3.75 for his copy back in the day, but a used copy on Amazon will set you back forty-five bucks.) Startled, I say, because over forty years ago, the Roman Catholic periodical New Oxford Review published, in its November 1981 issue, pages 29-30, my cluelessly negative review of Notaro’s book.

Consistent with my habit of airing my political and philosophical dirty laundry (which exercise works against one’s intellectual pride), I hereunder post that review’s text (and its prefatory note), which I took the liberty of posting in 2013 on my old site (whose anniversary I noted the other day).

* * *

On a “cringe-ometer” scale from 1 to 10, with 10 inducing a coma from embarrassment, this rates a 9. I pontificated about Van Til’s thought, about which I knew little first-hand, instead of actually reviewing a book about the role of evidence in an apologetic often mischaracterized as anti-evidence (even “fideistic”). In less than 600 words, I managed to beg every apologetical question, rendering myself a poster boy for the epistemological un-self-consciousness that, Van Til argued, renders every anti-Christian theistic worldview impotent. 

In slight mitigation of my offense, I recall that as a New Yorker, who was not long before writing this a student in a doctoral program in philosophy, could not interact regularly with Van Til’s protégé, California-based Gregory L. Bahnsen, a Ph. D. in philosophy (USC, 1978). Had I been able to, my confusions would have been exposed and rectified much sooner. As it happened, I had to wait for the day I could carry around dozens of mp3s of his recorded lecture series and read many articles that are now freely available online. Even the very best of Bahnsen, his Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings & Analysiswas not available until after his passing. 

I am posting this only to memorialize the flawed inception of my investigation into Van Til’s thought.  I also observe that I did not give up.

Anthony Flood

January 16, 2013 (Slightly amended January 21, 2019) Continue reading “Evidence I wasn’t always a “Van Tillian””

AnthonyFlood.com: An Emerald Anniversary Retrospective

December 2004, Executive Assistant to William J. Ledger, M.D., Chairman Emeritus, Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology, Weill Cornell Medical College. Note the Three Musketeers bar in the shirt pocket.

Twenty years ago today I launched this site’s ancestor: AnthonyFlood.com. (No middle initial.) Building it with Microsoft’s (no-longer-supported) FrontPage, made to order for this low-tech bookworm, I had swiped the look and feel of a color specialist’s site (how could I go wrong?), chose a font that conveys text to the brain with the least eyestrain (Verdana 10-pt Bold), slapped an image of the Owl of Athena in the upper left corner, and experimented with log lines. (An early mouthful was “Where Panentheism, Revisionism,  and Anarchocapitalism Coalesce,” developed here; later, the terser “Philosophy against Misosophy.”)

A lifetime ago, I had it “all figured out”: Whitehead in philosophy, political economy via Rothbard, historical revisionism (e.g., Acton, Barnes). I scanned, in some cases typed from scratch, articles from my paper archives and formatted them for the site. Many global visitors (sometimes descendants of the authors) sent encouraging notes of appreciation for bringing the text of not easily accessible essays to their attention. The articles are worthless for citation purposes, of course, but readers hungry for their contents can consume them.

The site’s live, but dormant; I can no longer update it; it’s all I can do to maintain this one. Take a gander at the index. Behold its holdings for Blanshard, Langer, Lonergan, Hartshorne, Rothbard,  Whitehead. My dear friend (and fellow Aptheker research assistant) Hugh Murray (an anthology of whose historical essays I’m editing) has his portal.

And, last but not least, this writer, roadkill in the fight to publish or perish outside of academia, at least had a platform for stuff he wrote that others might consider as he eked out a living in the “corporate world.”

Maverick Philosopher William F. Vallicella, Ph.D., in the hills of Gold Canyon, AZ

One of those others is Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, an analyst’s analyst and early (and continuing) source of encouragement and criticism. (An earlier version of his site is approaching its 2oth.) He thought enough of an essay of John Deck’s (posted because, I say, it “broke Thomism’s hold on me”—I was well on my way to that waste of time called panentheism) to critique my appreciation of Deck. This sparked a decades-long correspondence and a friendship that transcends our differences.

Continue reading “AnthonyFlood.com: An Emerald Anniversary Retrospective”

On “color-blindness” and artistic merit: the power of The Righteous Brothers

The Righteous Brothers, Bill Medley (b. 1940) and Bobby Hatfield (1940-2003)

Lately, I’ve stumbled upon an unexpected joy—watching “reaction videos” on YouTube where young podcasters experience great musical artists for the first time. My focus has been on their reactions to The Righteous Brothers, Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield. I recall seeing their grainy masterpieces, You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’, and Unchained Melody, when they were broadcast on TV in ’64-’65. Their sonic power is undiminished to this day.

Reaction quality varies wildly; many are shallow. It never occurs to these tech-savvy kids to research answers to their simple questions, like, “Are they really brothers?” (when viewing Unchained Melody, Hatfield’s solo effort) “Where’s the other brother?” Almost all of them remember hearing the latter in a movie (Ghost, 1990), but none can name it.

Righteous Brothers: The Definitive CollectionIn any case, I find myself enjoying their reaction to the money-making notes that I see coming (having seen the videos hundreds of times). The females, black and white, American, European, and Asian, invariably melt, even shed tears. Sometimes their accents make their English unintelligible to me, but the emotion is undeniable. Some male viewers, rendered speechless, are content in that silence; others, metaphysically shocked. “I thought they were black,” some mutter, followed by “Soul got no color!” or the equivalent.

There are similar reactions to Tom Jones and other exemplars of “blue-eyed soul.” I will not litter this post with links. Interested readers can find them easily enough. Anyone in need of suggestions may ask for them in the comment box.

What these viewers would likely reject is the notion that by enjoying and sharing these performances, they are complicit in the “cultural appropriation” allegedly committed by The Righteous Brothers, Elvis Presley, Tom Jones, and others.

It’s as good a day as any to appreciate that we judge singers not by the color of their skin but by the profound emotions their vocal cords convey. Globally, there are millions of young people with whom I might have very little else in common, yet they and I delight in the same vibrations; in that commonality, however qualified, I take some comfort.

Two Cheers for Lord Acton

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902)

Instead of posting links to my essays on Lord Acton, as I’ve done in the past on his birthday (e.g., see here and here, which sport links of their own), I will sound a critical note on this master of historical sources.

Like his fellow Victorian, John Henry Newman, he knew better (an understatement) than to take at face value just-so stories about about what Christians have allegedly always believed, even in the first century, despite there not being a shred of evidence to that effect. The Vatican sets the boundaries of what its scholars can find and, more importantly, what they cannot contradict. The First Vatican Council (1869-1870) tested Newman and Acton’s integrity, especially with respect to defining the dogma of papal infallibility, formally binding on members of the Roman Catholic communion.

John Henry Newman (1801-1890)

“To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant,” Newman aphorized, and his reasons for breaking with the Church of England are of biographical interest. To affirm, however, that the Bishop of Rome as the “Vicar of Christ” is protected from propounding doctrinal error (under certain conditions) was the constant and ancient belief of Christians is to abandon history for pious historical fictions and the attendant pleasures of belonging. Same for the earlier dogma of Immaculate Conception (1854) and that of the Bodily Assumption of Mary (1950).

Newman and Acton caved. Newman, a brilliant intellect who, in the end, came to know his place and kept it, smothered his historically grounded “reservations.” Acton sought and got the protection of his diocesan bishop from the grasp of his nemesis, Cardinal Manning. He had an escape hatch as exquisitely lawyerly in its expression as is the dogma.[1]

So, one cheer for his love of liberty, another for his productivity (which, however, never resulted in a book). For his “yielding obedience,” not to sola scriptura, of course, but sola ecclesia, a Bronx cheer.

Note

[1] “. . . Acton protested [to his bishop] ‘that I have given you no foundation for your doubt. . . . I have yielded obedience to the Apostolic Commission which embodied those decrees, and I have not transgressed . . . obligations imposed under the supreme sanction of the Church.’ That satisfied Acton’s ordinary, and that was that.” Anthony Flood, Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic, 2019, 310.