Anthony Flood

Stalin: Apostate, terrorist, tyrant . . . philosopher

Mugshot, 1901 (age 23) © David King Collection, London

Realizing that there’s more sand at the bottom of my life’s hourglass than at the top, I’ve been reflecting on that life’s inflection points. One was my conversion to Marxism.

I’ve been thinking about Josef Stalin (1878-1953) for over fifty years, that is, for about as long as I’ve studied philosophy, by which I mean the pursuit of answers to questions of the greatest generality (being, knowledge, goodness), whether or not my philia of sophia (or, as has too often been the case, moria) has ordered that pursuit.

I had rebelled against my Christian inheritance to embrace Stalinist Marxism while attending a Catholic military high school—just as Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili—whom the world knew as Joseph Stalin—had given himself over to Marxism at Tbilisi Seminary in Sakartvelo (Georgia to Westerners, Gruzia to Russians). He had succumbed to Lenin’s malign influence; I, to that of Herbert Aptheker, who came of age in the decade following Stalin’s consolidation of power at the end of 1929. Continue reading “Stalin: Apostate, terrorist, tyrant . . . philosopher”

Two anniversaries of Pat and me

September 9, 1972, was the first time I spoke to Pat Martino on Folk City’s stage while he packing up after his last set. (I had seen him there many times that summer, one perk of having FC’s Mike Porco as a friend of the family).

Exactly 23 years later, a fellow fan took a picture of him, Gloria, and me in Blue Note’s second-floor dressing room. This was directly across the street (that is, West Third Street) from where Folk City once was. (These music venues were never contemporaries.)

I’ve published this picture before, but not the copy Pat signed almost 14 years later on March 15, 2009 at the Rubin Museum of Art (150 West 17th Street). The occasion was the premiere of Unstrung!, a documentary about Pat’s recovery from brain surgery and amnesia. (Free download of medical journal article on Pat’s case.) Gloria couldn’t make the event, but Mom, who’s the reason I got into jazz, did. A few months earlier, her friend had played Pat’s Strings! album on his turntable, thereby altering the course of my musical life.

My diary for September 9, 1972 shows that I was equally excited about meeting another fan of Pat’s:

Was I knocked out when Mom came over to me [at my Folk City table in the main music room] and told me that George Benson was there diggin’ on the music! I went over to his lovely wife to ask if that was truly him and then introduced myself and asked him a few questions. He’s coming out with a book by which student of various levels can progress and “get more serious.” What a surprise that was! Pat M. came over and and rapped about guitar makes (George has an 1898 Gibson) and other things. Ornette Coleman was sitting at the bar. . . . I talked to Pat about little things. He’s really at peace with himself. He went for a walk after his set. Mom was sitting at the bar and stopped him to talk. He’s so gracious. Mom and I hung around to be driven home [in the Bronx] by Mike [whom, in my diary, I cluelessly surnamed “Gerde”!].

As 1994 was the last year I kept a diary, I have only that photo to stir my memory of that 1995 meeting (of whose significance as the anniversary of our first chat I was not then cognizant). The following summer (June 30, 1973, to be exact) I’d see both Pat and George (and a half-dozen other jazz guitar greats) in the Wollman Amphitheater in Central Park at the Newport Jazz Festival. The concert was aptly named “Guitar Explosion.”

Happy to share with those who care and remember that September.

George Benson and Pat, Wollman Amphitheater in Central Park at the Newport Jazz Festival, June 30, 1973.

80 years ago today

Pat Azzara at about six months. He adopted the surname “Martino” when he went on the road. His father, an amateur guitar strummer, was known as “Micky Martino.”

Allied forces liberated Paris. Composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein turned 26 and would soon bask in the Broadway success of On the Town. There was, however, another birthday that day (literally, the day of his birth). It was of another great musician whom it was my privilege to know, the guitarist Pat Martino (1944-2021).

It is almost impossible for me to grasp that he would have turned 80 today. In fact, he’s been gone almost three years. To me, he’s still the “guitar god” I met at Folk City on West Third Street in Greenwich Village, when I was 19 and he an old man (in my eyes) of 28. I distinctly remember chatting with him on the northeast corner of West Third and Sixth Avenue (yes, just outside the basketball court informally known as “The Cage”) about how I was picking up the jazz tradition on our common instrument. A few months later, he’d offer to teach me if I’d be willing to travel to his hometown of Philly.

My first initial impression of his playing, like that of many young listeners discovering their favorite musicians, was of his speed of execution. (“Look how fast he plays!) I slowly but surely realized that “fast” does not capture the beauty of his streams of eighth notes. The excitement I so poorly conveyed derived from his melodic inventiveness and “pulse.” He didn’t sound like anyone else, but you knew if someone else was playing his lines Continue reading “80 years ago today”

Christianity and intelligibility, Part VI: Something about Mary

This continues a series of posts in which I engage Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella over my idea of philosophizing before and after Christ. (See Parts I, II, III, IV, V.)

Bill Vallicella asks me if Mariology (the doctrine of Mary, the mother of Jesus) is a part of the presuppositionalist “package deal,” that is, an essential element of the worldview that (I argue) uniquely makes intelligible predication possible.[1]

My answer is, yes, “some version of Mariology,” as Bill puts it, is derivable from an exegesis of Scripture, but not the Roman Catholic version that Bill tacitly presupposes.

That version was unknown to the writers of Scripture and the early Church Fathers. History knows of no writing alleging Mary’s “immaculate conception” (freedom from contracting Adam’s sin, “original sin”) until over a thousand years since Christ’s Ascension had passed. That’s when theologians could consider, and then reject, the musings of Eadmer, a 12^th-century monk who studied under Anselm (who denied Mary’s immaculate conception).[2]

Bernard of Clairvaux rejected the idea as a novum. He was joined in rejecting it (as inconsistent with the need for universal redemption in Christ) by Peter Lombard, Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, Albert the Great, and Aquinas. The distinctive dogma that the Roman Catholic magisterium has since 1854 taught de fide (that is, as binding on all Catholics) forms no part of the Biblical worldview. Continue reading “Christianity and intelligibility, Part VI: Something about Mary”

Christianity and intelligibility, Part V: Worldview and the “eye of faith”

This continues the series in which I discuss Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella‘s critique of my idea of philosophizing before and after Christ. (See Parts I, II, III, IV.)

In Philosophy after Christ, I wrote:

The relationship of evidence of one thing to another depends on there being minds fitted with reliable cognition that can surmise and test that connection. What must the world include for evidentiary relationships to be possible?

We may not be certain whether A is evidence of B, but that things are in evidentiary relationships to each other is something about which we not only have no doubt but wouldn’t know how to doubt. Is that merely a brute psychological fact without further ground? For doubting expresses intellectual exigency, critical “demandingness,” a healthy fear of being duped; exercising that virtue makes no sense except in a world that is completely intelligible (formally, efficiently, materially, and finally).[1]

And that brings us, as every philosophical question must, to worldview.

Continue reading “Christianity and intelligibility, Part V: Worldview and the “eye of faith””

Truths the Republican Party no longer affirms or denies

Trump, with blood on his face, raises his fist triumphantly during a rally. I will vote for Donald J. Trump this November. When I did so in 2016 and again in 2020, I was (and am) an anarchocapitalist libertarian. That’s my utterly fallible but defensible political opinion for the Dispensation of Grace. I wish Ron Paul, who had a framed portrait of Murray Rothbard hanging in his congressional office, were running, but he’s not.

In 2015-2016, during the rise of anti-police mania in New York, I’d share this metaphor with anyone who’d listen: when I’m discussing, say, Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) with a friend in Starbucks, I want a big guy with a bat standing guard outside to protect the conversation. I’m now beginning to identify the possible spiritual costs of employing him. Continue reading “Truths the Republican Party no longer affirms or denies”

A letter from Herbert Aptheker

Yesterday a letter, dated October 1, 1992 (see a jpg and annotated transcription below), fell out of my diary for that year. In it, Herbert Aptheker, my former comrade and “boss,” said he “was delighted to hear” from me—17 years after I left the Communist Party, nine years after I had become a decidedly anti-Communist Rothbardian libertarian—and “should be delighted” to do so again. I hope my diaries will dissolve the “mystery” of my apparent “outreach.” He thought the Committees of Correspondence “will interest” me. He cites three of his books, underscoring their titles. This perfectly composed hand-written note is from a 77-year-old recovering from a stroke he had suffered exactly six months earlier.

Continue reading “A letter from Herbert Aptheker”

Christianity and intelligibility, Part IV: the atheist doesn’t have it made, even if he can fake sincerity

This post continues a series on Christianity and intelligibility (Parts I, II, and III) which focuses on Bill Vallicella’s criticisms of presuppositionalism, the position I share with (albeit at a great distance from) Greg L. Bahnsen and his teacher, Cornelius Van Til, whose distinctive approach to Christian apologetics Bill has been studying.[1]

As I’ve been arguing here (and in Philosophy after Christ), unless one presupposes the Bible’s worldview, one’s thinking—including the thinking informing the post under review and the counterexamples Bill adduces in it—reduces to absurdity. Why? Because non-Christian thinking is groundless—it floats in a void—and if it displays any cogency, it’s because it surreptitiously borrows from the biblical worldview. Continue reading “Christianity and intelligibility, Part IV: the atheist doesn’t have it made, even if he can fake sincerity”

Civilizational decline via institutional capture

In 1997 Gary North 2022 (1942-2022) produced a thousand-page study of one instance of such capture: Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church.[1] Its funding from humanists and other people we’d now call “globalists,” the coordination of subversive agents outside and inside the targeted institution, their ideological self-consciousness and discipline, are familiar to anyone aware of the accelerating corrosion of Western institutions.

North identified Modernism as the root ideological and spiritual perversion of our world. It was a nice ecumenical touch for the Calvinist (anti-Romanist) scholar to begin his book’s foreword by quoting the popular 20th champion of the Roman Catholic worldview, G. K. Chesterton:

Almost every contemporary proposal to bring freedom into the church is simply a proposal to bring tyranny into the world. For freeing the church now does not mean freeing it in all directions. It means freeing that peculiar set of dogmas called scientific, dogmas of monism, of pantheism, or of Arianism, or of necessity. And every one of these . . . can be shown to be the natural ally of oppression.[2]

Chesterton’s Orthodoxy was published in 1924, the year he joined the institution that had formally condemned Modernism as a heresy.[3] Continue reading “Civilizational decline via institutional capture”

Wé Ani: a protean multiplex of vocal performance

“I mean, there’s a lot of layers.” Wé Ani (before her American Idol performance of “Ain’t No Way” @0.38)

Imagine a ten-screen movie multiplex, each showing an Anthony Hopkins film. In one, he’s Nixon; in another, Hannibal Lecter; in a third, Zorro; fourth, Odin; fifth, C. S. Lewis; sixth, Pablo Picasso; seventh, John Quincy Adams; eighth, Alfred Hitchcock; ninth, Pope Benedict XVI; and on the tenth screen, Richard the Lionheart. Hopkins is their only commonality; each can make one forget the others (at least for a few hours). He’s all of these characters . . . and none of them.

Wé Ani is her performances’ only common thread: each “theater” in her audiovisual multiplex shows off a distinctive vocal texture into which no other intrudes and which often sets up an expectation that is (pleasantly) disappointed. Each performance also displays a unique dramatic persona.

Perhaps the better metaphor (although it’s by now a cliché) is: a palette of many colors.

If you compare several bars from each of, say, seven (randomly chosen) tracks, then unless you already know who’s singing, you may reasonably doubt that the singer on the first track is the one on the second (or any other). And that’s because of the vocal color she chooses for any song she interprets.

Every great singer has variability in range and textural quality but Frank Sinatra always sounds like Frank; Ella Fitzgerald, Ella; Stevie Wonder, Stevie. That’s what their fans expect. Not so with Wé, however: you may expect Aretha but get Nina; Etta but hear Whitney; and so forth. Continue reading “Wé Ani: a protean multiplex of vocal performance”