Anthony Flood

This blog’s direction

I appreciate the feedback some readers gave when I asked what they’d like to see more of/less of on this blog. The received wisdom in the blogosphere is that the blogger must be obsessively reader-centric; this means making readers hungry for one’s next post.

Can I do that? I don’t know.

My interests intersect with yours, or they don’t. Mine do not include financial, health, or romantic advice. I don’t create fiction series. I have no recipes for red velvet cupcakes or tips on saving money on getaways.

This blog’s subtitle is “the dialectical residue of fifty years”: I’m sharing conclusions I’ve reached in fields that most people avoid but I find exciting. If we’ve labored in the same vineyards over part of that time, something I write might resonate with you. If you’re a kindred spirit, I won’t have to coax you to check in from time to time. You will have become (what Jeff Goins calls) a member of my “tribe.”

(Tribalism’s not my thing, but all Goins is emphasizing is the notion of following someone for what he or she is writing about. I’ve happily acquired the status of tribesman to others.)

But it’s been too long since my last post. (Some of you might mutter, “Not long enough.”) “At least once weekly” was my now-broken rule. As a company of one, I can either produce content or market content, but not both at the same time; there are only so many hours in the day. The work week flashes by like a day, with Monday feeling like breakfast, Wednesday lunch, and Friday dinner; weekend chores beckon, and suddenly it’s Monday.

Turning 88 posts from my 2011-2012 anarcho-catholic blog (now deleted) into a book of 42 chapters, to which a libertarian Catholic philosopher has graciously provided a foreword, exacted a price on this blog. I can spare time for this post because the manuscript for Christ, Capital and Liberty is out for formatting. The paperback should be available next week on Amazon; the Kindle version, next month. I’ll keep you posted.

Going forward, I face the same dilemma. For most of this year I’ve been researching the life and thought of Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), a productive autodidactic Bible teacher I knew forty years ago. I had initially accepted his interpretation, then rejected it, but then re-embraced in 2015. (I refer to him on my About Me page and featured his contrarian interpretation of Romans 13:1-7 a few months ago on what would have been his 118th birthday.)

This project will take me into areas of history, hermeneutics, and theology, all necessary if I am to contextualize Sellers’ maverick interpretation of Biblical prophecy.

I intend to solve the productivity dilemma by blogging about the Sellers project. Not exclusively, but mostly. Cannibalizing my notes, I’ll write about aspects of his life and thought in no particular order, hoping this apparent randomness will ward off the paralysis that threatens whenever I face a big, blank canvas.

Sellers’s theology has not enjoyed exposure to an audience beyond his tribe of a few thousand students who, over seven decades, attended his classes and conferences, absorbed his messages, and read his literature. My dual challenge is to expound the thought and write the life of person who is not (yet) notable. I will meet it through acts of regular, focused writing that will intersect with topics that drew you to this blog in the first place.

To say that I will be interested in your take on this project would be an understatement.

Murray Rothbard: Notes on His Philosophical Starting Point

Complementing last week’s post is another unfinished essay from my Rothbard biography project, aborted two decades ago.

“All of my work has revolved around the central question of human liberty.”¹

Reason may be man’s most distinctive attribute, but his liberty, his essential freedom (as distinct from his effective freedom) is his noblest. For it is by his exercise of liberty that man decides either to be faithful to his rational nature or to evade its demands. Man is by nature a knower, but how he expresses that nature depends on how he exercises his liberty.

Murray Newton Rothbard denied that liberty was man’s highest end and that it may excuse license. He did believe, however, that man must protect liberty above all else in his political life, the realm of legitimate interpersonal violence. There is of course much more to life than politics. There is, for instance, religion, philosophy, and art, not to mention the love of family and friends. To enjoy them, however, requires liberty. It is therefore incoherent to constrict liberty in the name of art, religion, philosophy, or love. An attack on liberty is an attack on the great goods that presuppose it. Continue reading “Murray Rothbard: Notes on His Philosophical Starting Point”

Murray Newton Rothbard: Notes toward a Biography

I may be fairly described as (among other things) road-kill along the way to the definitive biography of Murray Rothbard (1926-1995). In 1997 I sought and gained the cooperation of his widow, Joann, and Lew Rockwell, then president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, to begin that project.

All I managed to do, however, was fulfill the prediction that this effort would overwhelm me. My enthusiasm for the idea of telling Murray’s story and expounding his ideas blinded me to the fact, obvious to everyone but me (and perhaps my mother), that I was not up to the task. The life of Rothbard, an intellectual giant, awaits its Hülsmann. And if the interval between the death of Ludwig von Mises and the production of Guido Hülsmann’s Mises: Last Knight of Liberalism is any guide, the wait is far from over.

On display below is barely refined ore mined from not only from secondary sources but, more importantly, from interviews conducted with people who knew Murray: in the first place JoAnn Rothbard, but also Leonard Liggio, Ralph Raico, George Resch, John McCarthy, and James Sadowsky. Readers who have profited from Justin Raimondo’s An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement as well as Murray’s own monograph, The Betrayal of the American Right will discover a fact or two not related in those works, which I highly recommend.

I was pleasantly surprised when, in 2010, Gerard N. Casey, Professor (Emeritus), School of Philosophy, University College, Dublin, and Associate Scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute cited my unfinished essay (first published on my old site in 2008) in his fine monograph Murray Rothbard, a sure milestone on the road to the “definitive biography” project.¹

Murray Newton Rothbard was born in the Bronx on March 2, 1926. His father, David Rothbard, a shoemaker’s son, was raised in Vishigorod, Ukraine, 40 miles north of Warsaw on the Vistula. David, who had attended Hebrew school as a child, abandoned Judaism because its scriptures told of a God who had instigated the violent behavior of the Israelites, and that horrified him. Continue reading “Murray Newton Rothbard: Notes toward a Biography”

Sadik Hakim, 1919-1983: Chance Encounter? A Jazz Digression.

It may be, as the Buddhist proverb has it, that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. When Sadik Hakim briefly appeared in my life, however, I wasn’t ready, and wouldn’t be for more than a third of a century, that is, until it was too late. So, maybe he wasn’t supposed to be “the teacher,” right? He was certainly, however, “present at the creation” of arguably the world’s greatest music (well, that’s how I’d argue); if I had known then what I learned later, I could have benefited from our chance encounter even more than I did.

He was christened Argonne Thornton a century ago on July 15th in Duluth, Minnesota. On November 26, 1945, this denizen of 52nd Street in its glorious Bebop period had alternated with Dizzy Gillespie on piano on Charlie Parker’s immortal “Ko-Ko” date. (Britt Aamodt tells the story here.)

According to his Wikipedia entry, “Hakim is credited with co-writing Thelonious Monk’s standard ‘Eronel’ and is rumored to have written a few famous bop tunes credited to other composers. He adopted his Muslim name in 1947.”

The most common, and most apt, adjective associated with Sadik Hakim is “unsung.” Although the average jazz fan cannot recognize his name, I have run into it repeatedly, and unexpectedly, in many jazz biographies. For example, I’ll pick up From Swing to Bop only to read Shelly Manne’s memory of a night at the Onyx on 52nd Street in the early ’40s when big Ben Webster knocked over nearly every table to dissuade some rowdy solider on leave from further pestering his pianist. Or just today, when I consulted Feather and Gitler’s The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazzfor information on a former music teacher of mine, saxist Paul Jeffrey (with whom I took a single, but valuable, lesson in 1974), I learned that Professor Jeffrey had played with Hakim in 1961.

Some of Sadik’s memories of befriending as well as working with Bird are recorded in Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker, edited by Robert Reisner. Because I had read this book sometime before November 19, 1976, that I was able to appreciate the good fortune of his striking up a conversation with me, a stranger, that night at Bradley’s (70 University Place, 1969-1996).

I was there to see legendary bop-era guitarist Jimmy Raney, who did not disappoint. (He played Bird’s “Billie’s Bounce” at my request, and his son, Doug, sat in for one or two numbers.) During the second set I was, according to my diary, “joined at my table by Sadik (I think that’s it) who knew all the greats. It was great talking to him. After the second set I walked him over to Sweet Basil’s [88 Seventh Avenue South] where George Coleman was blowing an alto [sax] apart. On the way, I recall [to him] somebody from a book on Charlie Parker who had a Moslem name and who knew Bird well. It turns out it was he!! He doesn’t drink or smoke; he lives his religion. I was very impressed with him. He’s going on tour now with somebody.”

He accomplished much more than I can summarize usefully in a post, but a quick search will bring you to the most salient facts. He passed away in June of 1983, about a year after playing “Round Midnight” at the funeral of Thelonious Monk. (Read Hakim’s “Reflections of an Era: My Experiences with Bird and Prez” on my old philosophy site, where one can also read scans of old clippings.)

In 1976 I could not have imagined paying tribute to him this way. Thank you, Sadik, for going out of your way to touch my life, however fleetingly, not in cyberspace, but at Bradley’s. I wish I had gone out of my way to keep in touch, but my self-esteem, or lack of it, wasn’t up to the task. I had foolishly undervalued the evidence of your accessibility and ruled myself out.

Perhaps I’m learning from you after all, Teacher. Requiescas in pace.

(This post is a slightly modified version of one that appeared on Tony Flood’s House of Hard Bop” on July 15, 2010; you might also check out my other post on Hakim, “Forgotten Duluthian” from May 8, 2012.)

Did the Apostle Paul argue for God’s existence?

Theistic philosopher Bill Vallicella recently posted again on Apostle Paul’s Letter to the Romans (1:18-20). Here are the concluding sentences:

It ought to be obvious that one cannot straightaway infer from the intelligibility, order, beauty, and existence of nature that ‘behind’ nature there is a supernatural personal being that is supremely intelligent, the source of all beauty, and the first cause of all existing things apart from itself. One cannot ‘read off’ the being instantiated of the divine attributes from contemplation of nature.

Suppose I see a woman. I am certain that if she is a wife, then there is a person who is her husband. Can I correctly infer from those two propositions that the woman I see is a wife? Can I ‘read off’ from my perception of the woman that she is a wife?”

No, we can’t read off “wife” (a relationship) from her body, but the prior question should be: can we can “read off” her being a woman from . . . what exactly? From nothing: we don’t infer “woman” (female person) from a congeries of sensory phenomena, but rather intuit “woman” immediately.

And we’re responsible for treating her with the respect due every person, and not treat her as though she were an insentient android (on the off chance that the “inference” to personhood is an inductive leap to a falsehood).

We don’t infer God from the world’s existence, organization and beauty, but that’s irrelevant to Paul’s claim. That is, Bill’s report of what’s obvious to him is not germane to Paul’s claim to have revealed something about our epistemological situation.

What is known (gnoston) of God (Roman 1:19) is understood (noumena) by the things that are made (Romans 1:20). It is not that the latter provide materials for an inference to God, but rather that they occasion the occurrence of insight (as Augustus Strong put it).

Continue reading “Did the Apostle Paul argue for God’s existence?”

“Life from non-life”? Without a prayer.

Abiogenesis, a Greek mouthful for “the origin of life,” is according to Wikipedia, “the natural process by which life has arisen from non-living matter.”

The lack of critical qualification at the outset is startling: non-living matter’s alleged once-upon-a-time issuance in life is asserted as a fact, not a hypothesis. That is, the bald assertion comes first, followed by the admission of the hypothetical nature of the whole business:

While the details of this process are still unknown, the prevailing scientific hypothesis is that the transition from non-living to living entities was not a single event, but a gradual process of increasing complexity that involved molecular self-replication, self-assembly, autocatalysis, and the emergence of cell membranes. Although the occurrence of abiogenesis is uncontroversial among scientists, there is no single, generally accepted model for the origin of life, and this article presents several principles and hypotheses for how abiogenesis could have occurred.

So the devilish details are unknown and there’s no single, generally accepted model for abiogenesis, yet some version of it must be true. That’s the “prevailing hypothesis.” Belief in its having occurred is “uncontroversial among scientists.”

That is to say, abiogenesis is a dogma, not an empirically verified fact. It is a sad commentary on the state of science that a theory with nothing going for it except the culturally regnant naturalistic prejudice is “uncontroversial.”

And by nothing, I mean . . . nothing. For an entertaining retailing of the dues the dogmatists pay for their dogmatism, I cannot recommend too enthusiastically Rice University Professor of Chemistry James Tour‘s lively video presentation (sponsored by The Discovery Institute) available on EvolutionNews.

Professor Tour’s massive case against “life from non-life” gives one an idea of the “integrated chemical complexity” that led the late philosopher (and long-time atheist) Antony Flew (not to be confused with Anthony Flood) to drop his profession of atheism for deism.

“Show me the chemistry!,” Tour demands. So did Flew, but he went away empty-handed.

It doesn’t exist.

The evidence for the existence of God—the God of the Bible, not Flew’s deistic deus—lies in (among many other aspects of creation) scientific inquiry itself, the fit of intelligibility and intelligence. It’s inexplicable apart from the worldview expressed in the Bible. The demonstrated folly of research programs for testing the abiogenesis “hypothesis”—or the dogma masquerading as one—is, at best, a suasive consideration for Christian theism.

So, again, set aside a couple of minutes for the beginning of James Tour’s pedagogical tour de force (sorry!). I defy you not to stay for the whole hour.

Book Launch: “Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness”

My first book went live on Amazon today. Its introduction and first chapter were originally blog posts, but the rest the book consists of essays published over the past five years. If you can help spread the word, please do. I’ll prepare a paperback version. I now append the book description.—Anthony Flood

Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), a pioneering researcher in African-American slave revolts, was also an American Communist theoretician. Anthony Flood, who attended Aptheker’s lectures a half-century ago, became his research assistant, friend and comrade. Decades after Flood repudiated the comradeship, it dawned on him that Aptheker’s politics had blocked his research in his area of specialization: he failed to recognize The Black Jacobins, the work of C. L. R. James (1901-1989) that chronicled the only successful slave revolt in modern times. The failure was ideological.

In the course of investigating this silence, Flood discovered scholars who admired both writers, but never at the same time. Doing so would have forced them to address the uncomfortable truth that one of their heroes ignored the other. That is, the white radical scholar ignored the black radical scholar who was 14 years his senior. The only explanation, Flood contends, is that Aptheker, the Stalinist, could not bring himself to acknowledge the work of James, the Trotskyist.

There are other problems with Aptheker’s legacy, of course, such as his uncovering the truth about slavery in the Americas while covering it up in the Soviet Union and its satellites. The “dissing” of James, however, undermines his “anti-racism” reputation as well as his argument that “partisanship with the oppressed” makes objectivity in history writing possible. He was a partisan of too many oppressors. He eventually admitted his own “willful blindness” (his words), yet that didn’t stop him from defending, as late as 2000, The Truth about Hungary, his book-length apologia for the Soviet Union’s crushing of the 1956 Hungarian revolution.

Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness includes not only Flood’s essay on Aptheker and James, but also vignettes of his coming into Aptheker’s life as a high school student and that of Sidney Hook (Aptheker’s nemesis and Flood’s philosophy professor). Also included are a review of the first biography of Aptheker and an inquiry into Aptheker’s status as an historian. Appendices include Aptheker’s first essay (in The American Hebrew) and Flood’s first letter on Aptheker (in The Journal of American History).

Herbert Aptheker expressed the ethos of the American Communist Party in its heyday, an atmosphere that pervades “progressive” American politics today. If you want to look at his role in that “progression,” this monograph is a good place to start.

Once more on Romans 13: James Redford’s “Jesus Is an Anarchist”

As I have an interest in dislodging the sediment of encrusted theological opinion, today I post an excerpt from James Redford’s 2001 essay “Jesus Is an Anarchist,” the text of which is here: anti-state.com and revised and expanded in 2011. It complements Otis Q. Sellers’s situating of Romans 13:1-7 in the Acts dispensation, posted recently.—Anthony Flood

It is often claimed that Christians are required to submit to government, as this is supposedly what Paul commanded that we are supposed to do in Romans 13. Thus:

Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. Do you want to be unafraid of the authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same. For he is God’s minister to you for good. But if you do evil, be afraid; for he does not bear the sword in vain; for he is God’s minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil. Therefore you must be subject, not only because of wrath but also for conscience’ sake. For because of this you also pay taxes, for they are God’s ministers attending continually to this very thing. Render therefore to all their due: taxes to whom taxes are due, customs to whom customs, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor. Romans 13:1-7

But in actual fact Paul never does tell us in above excerpt from Romans 13 to submit to government!—at least certainly not as they have existed on Earth and are operated by men.

In fact, Paul would be an outright, boldfaced hypocrite were he to command anyone to do such a thing: for Paul himself did not submit to government, and if he had then he would not even have been alive to be able to write Romans 13.

Continue reading “Once more on Romans 13: James Redford’s “Jesus Is an Anarchist””

Two Passovers? What a difference a calendar makes.

When Jesus was brought before Pilate, “it was the day of the Preparation of the Passover” (John 19:14; emphasis added). Passover lay in the near future. And yet Jesus told his disciples, “With desire I have desired to eat this the Passover with you before I suffer” (Luke 22:15; emphasis added). What is commonly called “The Last Supper” was the Passover.

If, however, the arguments of Colin J. Humphreys’s The Mystery of the The Last Supper hold up, there is no discrepancy. We may believe Jesus did celebrate the Passover on Nisan 14, not according to the calendar devised during the Babylonian Exile, however, but according to the pre-exilic calendar of ancient Israel. Those calendars were as different from each other as, say, the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar differs from the equally serviceable calendar of the Eastern Orthodox.

The pre-exilic calendar, being 364 days in length, is evenly divisible by 7. In such a calendar, therefore, any given date falls on the same day every year. Therefore, that calendar’s Nisan 14 has always fallen on a Wednesday since the first Passover. Humphreys’s hypothesis, to which I cannot do justice here, dissolves apparent discrepancies that have challenged faithful readers of the Gospels. Image result for The Mystery of the Last Supper: Reconstructing the Final Days of Jesus

For example, even though Jesus was arrested after eating His Passover, John’s Gospel has servants of the high priest Caiaphas conducting Jesus to Pilate’s hall of judgment before the “official” Passover: “and they themselves went not in the judgment hall, lest they should be defiled; but that they might eat the passover” (John 18:28b).

Continue reading “Two Passovers? What a difference a calendar makes.”

Romans 13: another contrarian interpretation

Last week I posted Eric Voegelin’s “Theoretical Inquiry into Romans 13,” which exposes the weaponization of the Apostle Paul’s words in the service of the state, even Hitler’s, making every scoundrel with executive authority an ordained minister. After reading it, libertarian scholar Gerard N. Casey brought to my attention other alternative interpretations of Romans 13:1-7, readings that regard the “powers that be” to be, not “civil,” but rather ecclesial or spiritual. Those views pass in review in Casey’s magisterial Freedom’s Progress?: A History of Political Thought, which I unreservedly recommend to my visitors, especially (for its relevance to our topic) pages 198-209.

Today I share with you yet another view, one I discovered forty years ago, but only now am willing to own. It’s from the pen of the late Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), whose life I’m researching for a biography. Today happens to be his birthday.—Anthony G. Flood

The Powers That Be

“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.” This is Paul’s positive declaration recorded in Romans 13:1, and there is no verse in Scripture that has been misapplied more than this one. In all church theology “the higher powers” are made to be the civil authorities, whoever they may be in any country and at any time. And it needs to be said that of all the absurd interpretations ever made by theologians, this one takes first prize. It is unworkable and unbelievable, and it cannot be followed out through the additional statements that follow this declaration.

Continue reading “Romans 13: another contrarian interpretation”