Month: December 2020

What are we doing when we’re reading? Bernard Lonergan and Gordon Clark on “black marks on white paper”

Gordon H. Clark (1902-1985)

While reading The Presbyterian Philosopher, Doug Douma’s authorized biography of Gordon Haddon Clark, I was struck by this 1962 lecture snippet:

. . . ink marks on a paper, or sounds in the air, the noise I’m  making, never teach anybody anything. This is good Augustinianism. And Protestantism is supposed to be Augustinian, at least it was in its initiation. And it was the most unfortunate event that Thomas Aquinas came in and replaced Augustinianism with Aristotelianism and empiricism which has been an affliction ever since. But the point is that ink marks on a paper, and the sound of a voice, never generates any idea at all. And Augustine’s solution of it is that the Magister is Christ. Christ is the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. This not a matter of regeneration. This is a matter of knowledge. And Christ enlightens the unregenerate in this sense just as well as the regenerate. If an unregenerate man learns anything at all, he learns it from Jesus Christ and not from ink marks on paper.[1]

Bernard J. F. Lonergan, SJ (1904-1984)

Now, whom did these remarks put me in mind of? Why, Bernard Lonergan, S.J., the great transcendental Thomist, steeped in the Aristotelian tradition:

“Reading categories into” is a particular application of the great principle that you know by taking a look at what’s out there. Either it is out there or it is not; and the man who sees what is out there is right and the other fellow reads his own mind into what is out there. That is a fundamental error on what the exegete or interpreter does. What’s out there are black marks on white paper in a certain order. And if the exegete or interpreter gives you anything distinct, in any way different from those black marks on white paper in the same order, then it is due to his personal experience, his personal intelligence, and his personal judgment, or it is due to his belief in what someone else told him.[2]

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Murray Rothbard’s libertarian reflections on “The Negro Revolution” (1963)

“All-Negro Comics” (1947), the first such book “to be drawn by Negro artists and peopled entirely by Negro characters” (Time Magazine).

Election integrity, or rather the lack thereof, is the topic of the day. Some Americans are now reflecting on how we might avoid social conflagration, even secession.

Fifty-seven years ago my late friend Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995), the great economist, political philosopher, and author of Conceived in Liberty (a five-volume history of the American republic’s founding) pursued the logic of revolutionary resistance to oppression in the essay appended below.

Its relevance to our time should be clear. There is no better example of Rothbard’s historical insight, politically incorrect frankness (which would get him “canceled” today), adherence to principle, and polemical adroitness. It should go without saying that this anticommunist’s citations of communists implies no endorsement of their illiberal program (but I can’t take any chances these days).

Some readers may need to be reminded, or told for the first time, that those who identify as “African Americans” are descendants of those who once preferred “Black,” “Afro-American,” “Negro,” and “Colored.” (See this post’s initial illustration above.)

“The Negro Revolution” appeared in the Summer 1963 issue of The New Individualist Review, a classical liberal-libertarian scholarly journal edited by John P. McCarthy (another friend), Robert Schuettinger, and John Weicher;  its book review editor was Ronald Hamowy.  Besides Rothbard, NIR’s distinguished contributors included Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, Russell Kirk, Ludwig von Mises, Richard Weaver,  and Henry Hazlitt (a far from exhaustive list).

On the 28th of August in the summer of ’63, millions of Americans heard and saw Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver his memorable “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. I’m happy to promote Rothbard’s essay on the eve of another march in that city, one that portends another revolution.

—Anthony Flood

The Negro Revolution

Murray N. Rothbard

In his thirties; he wrote this article when he was 37.

DESPITE INCREASING USE of the term, it is doubtful that most Americans have come to recognize the Negro crisis as a revolution, possessed of all the typical characteristics and stigmata of a revolutionary movement and a revolutionary situation. Undoubtedly, Americans, when they think of “revolution,” only visualize some single dramatic act, as if they would wake up one day to find an armed mob storming the Capitol. Yet this is rarely the way revolutions occur. Revolution does not mean that some sinister little group sit around plotting “overthrow of the government by force and violence,” and then one day take up their machine guns and make the attempt. This kind of romantic adventurism has little to do with genuine revolution.

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