On arguing for one’s “sense of life”: Vallicella, Alain, Rand, and Bahnsen

In “Alain on Monasticism,” a stimulating Substack offering, my friend and philosopher extraordinaire Bill Vallicella (“Maverick Philosopher”) asked about the fruitfulness of arguing for or against a sense of life. The occasion was his recent re-reading of On Happiness by Émile-Auguste Chartier (1868-1951), whose nom de plume was Alain. My interest is not in Alain’s antipathy toward monkish existence but rather in Bill’s (apparent) ambivalence toward mere attitudes that imply (or entail) philosophical claims. Since I’ve probably misunderstood the problem Bill was cornering, I’m hoping that what I’ve written below will move him to set me straight. He writes:

Alain . . . frankly expresses his sense of life or sense of reality. I don’t share it, but can I argue against it? Does it even make sense to try to argue against it? Probably not. In a matter such as this, argument comes too late. Alain feels it in his guts and with his “whole being” that the religion of the mournful monks, the religion Alain himself was raised in, is world-flight and a life-denying sickness.

For a worldling such as Alain, the transient things of this world are as real as it gets, and all else is unreal. The impermanence of things and the brevity of life do not impress or shock him as they do someone with a religious sensibility.

In a Schlitz ad from yesteryear Bill finds this mood summed up:

. . . in the words of a 1970 beer commercial:

You only go around once in life
So you have to grab for all the gusto you can.

He continues:

The worldling’s attitude is a matter of sensibility and it is difficult and probably impossible to argue with anyone’s sensibility. I cannot argue you out of your sense of reality. Arguments come too late for that. In fact, arguments are often little more than articulations on the logical plane of a sensibility deep in the soul that was already in place before one attained explicit logical skills. Continue reading “On arguing for one’s “sense of life”: Vallicella, Alain, Rand, and Bahnsen”

Rothbard’s anti-statist theory of revolution, 60 years on

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

I republish this December 11, 2020 post not only for its intrinsic historical and theoretical interest (not to mention its subject matter’s timeliness), but also its bearing on my current project of understanding the attraction of revolutionary Marxism. (Note his concise exposure of two common non sequiturs, one “racist,” the other “anti-racist.”) Marxists have avoided grappling with Rothbard’s praxeological and natural law approach to history and economics (to their detriment, in my opinion). Unlike Rothbard, it is they who are today’s conservatives: they champion oppressive statist social orders as well as or better than hired “prizefighters for the bourgeoisie” whom their rhetoric holds up to ridicule. Those who, like the present writer, lived through the 1960s, will recognize antecedents of today’s newsmakers.—A.G.F.

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. [That would be January 6, 2021, which (as I wrote about at the time) predictably provoked a counterrevolutionary reaction that reverberates to this day.—A.G.F.]

—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 sits 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.

Revolution, in the first place, is not a single, isolated event, to be looked at as a static phenomenon. It is a dynamic, open-ended process. One of its chief characteristics, indeed, is the rapidity and acceleration of social change. Ordinarily, the tempo of social and political change is slow, meandering, inconsequential: in short, the typical orderly America of the political science textbooks. But, in a revolution, the tempo of change suddenly speeds up enormously; and this means change in all relevant variables: in the ideas governing the revolutionary movement, in its growth and in the character of its leadership, and in its impact on the rest of society.

Another crucial aspect of Revolution is its sudden stress on mass action. In America, social and political action has taken place for a long while in smoke-filled rooms of political parties, in quiet behind-the-scenes talks of lobbyists, Congressmen, and executive officials, and in the sober, drawn-out processes of the courts. Outside of football games, the very concept of mass action has been virtually unknown in the United States. But all this has been changed with the onset, this year, of the Negro Revolution. Continue reading “Rothbard’s anti-statist theory of revolution, 60 years on”

To “Remake the World”: The Perennial Dream of the Left, Old, New, and Woke

On the 84th anniversary of the German invasion of Poland I find myself embarking on a study that will be roughly equal parts philosophical, historical, theological, and personal. It will immerse me in the writings of 20th century American Marxists who, despite the path they took, have fascinated me. They thought, wrote, and fought in a world that headed inexorably toward the Second World War, was embroiled in it, and then emerged from it, knocked for a loop. It seemed that, directly or indirectly, these writers were always trying to make sense of the conflagration and its aftermath.

This project will involve me in the risky business of imputing motives to people who claimed to know how the world worked, how it ought to go, and where history was heading. I want to be fair to people I deem mistaken, for I was once mistaken (if that’s not a euphemism) in just the way they were. Some American revolutionaries will admit the failures of their revolutions, but never reevaluate the conceit that human beings can “remake the world.” The day I gave up that conceit is the day I ceased to be a revolutionary.

Professor Alexander Riley, Bucknell University

I distinguish the merely mistaken from those who compound their mistakes with crimes enabled by the power (governmental, academic, and cultural) they wield. Such social outlaws are to be defeated, not refuted. I’m therefore concerned that what’s called “Wokeism” marks, not a break with Marxism, but an organic outgrowth thereof. What would allay my apprehension is a Marxist condemnation of Wokeism. Until I find one, I must take comfort in the writings of Bucknell University sociology professor Alexander Riley, especially his illuminating “Why Wokeism is Not Marxist” and his scorched-earth discrediting of Mark Levin’s American Marxism, “Marxism Misunderstood.” (Please also consider taking a look at my “Marksism Levinism,” an earlier review that complements Riley’s.)

A Marxist critique of the so-called “1619 Project,” which Riley adduces as evidence for his antithesis, is only implicitly against Wokeism. I’ve been amazed to find attacks on the weaponization of the Department of Justice against Donald Trump on the front page, not of The Wall Street Journal, but of The Militant, organ of the Castroist Socialist Workers Party. (Here’s the latest; friends will attest that it’s not the first such article I’ve forwarded to them.) My mental jury’s still deliberating.

Exhibit A in my study is Marxist educator George Novack (1905-1992) under whose influence by God’s grace I did not fall. Alan Wald, whom I mentioned the other day, befriended Novack and began corresponding with him in the late 1960s and would visit him in New York City—my city—and in the end eulogize him warmly and at length, facts I learned only yesterday. (This originally appeared in the magazine In Defense of Marxism in 1992 and anthologized in 2016 here.) I now know exactly where he lived in his last years and how easy it would have been for me to look him up.

Poster announcing symposium for Alan M. Wald on the occasion of his retirement from UMichigan in 2013. https://events.umich.edu/event/12956

The life of Marxist revolutionaries, especially intellectuals, has a negative theological or atheological dimension. They are almost never unsocialized “village atheists,” but unbelief is ever in the background, or under the floorboards, of everything they think, even it only implicit or taken for granted. (It’s impolite, even beneath their dignity, to argue against religion.) In the case of the Novack, the philosophical writer, however, it had to surface sooner or later. I will foreground the fundamental question of worldview, which foregrounding will have a Christian-apologetical purpose.

Worldview is a topic to which Wald adverts every so often, but so far I haven’t caught him exploring it philosophically. That’s not his patch. He suggests that what marks off people he admires from the rest is commitment to remaking the world. Not to improving what they can, but to overhaul the whole.

But that God’s patch (Revelation 21:1).