Western Civilization – Page 3

Brand Blanshard: rationalism’s “working hypothesis” and the Van Tilian verdict

In the discourse we call philosophy, noncognitive interests are in play, interests that compete with, threaten to interfere with if not overwhelm the interest in knowing the truth. Brand Blanshard—the one member of my pantheon of former philosophical heroes whom I could have met, but now regret never having exerted myself to do so—acknowledged their efficacy:

What our intelligence wants is, of course, the truth. What the rest of our nature asks from our intelligence is not what is true but what will satisfy. By that we mean what will appease our impulsive and emotional nature, our longing to be liked, our desire to see our future secure, our character respected, our faith vindicated, our party shown to be the party of sober sense, or nation triumphant. When one considers how hidden and barricaded the truth commonly is, how definite it is, allowing no alternative, how feeble is our passion for it, and how overwhelming the tendencies in us to look for it through distorting prisms, the wonder is not that most of us are irrational but that some of us are as rational as we are.[1]

He denied, however, that non-cognitive interests smothered the interest in truth. He thought it worthwhile to cultivate the latter to see (almost experimentally, ironically enough) how far one could go if one gave reason its head.

Unlike Blanshard’s empiricist and pragmatist critics, however, I affirm an irreducibly distinct love of truth. But that’s because I presuppose that the One who is Truth (John 14:6) created the context within which human truth-seeking takes place and makes sense. Continue reading “Brand Blanshard: rationalism’s “working hypothesis” and the Van Tilian verdict”

Happy Birthday, Lord Acton!

John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton (1834-1902), Catholic historian in Victorian England and thorn in Pio Nono‘s side (to whom he nevertheless dutifully submitted when he could do no other) was born 185 years ago today. Image result for lord acton israelites

As the Enlightenment’s embers flicker out I continue to engage his writings for their style as well as substance. Below are quotes (including the aphorism “everyone knows”) culled from Roland Hill, Lord Acton, Yale University Press, 2000.

Here are links to my review of Lazarski’s Power Tends to Corrupt and my essay on the limitations of Acton’s liberalism from a dozen years ago.

On Liberty

By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities. The State is competent to assign duties and draw the line between good and evil only in its immediate sphere. . . . In ancient times the State absorbed authorities not it own, and intruded on the domain of personal freedom. In the Middle Ages it possessed too little authority, and suffered others to intrude. Modern States fall habitually into both excesses. The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities. Liberty, by this definition, is the essential condition and guardian of religion; and it is in the history of the Chosen People, accordingly, that the first illustrations of my subject are obtained. The government of the Israelites was a Federation, held together by no political authority, but by the unity of race and faith, and founded, not on physical force, but on a voluntary covenant. (278) Continue reading “Happy Birthday, Lord Acton!”

What kind of Muslim is Wajahat Ali?

Every year around Christmas illiberal “liberals” (aka Progressives) lecture Christians, mostly those of the white conservative persuasion, about the “true meaning” of Jesus and how they obscure it. This year is no different.

Rep. Luis GutiÃ©rrez. D-Ill., questions Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen as she testifies before the House Judiciary Committee Dec. 20, 2018. The congressman could have benefitted from getting manners for Christmas. Photo: SARAH SILBIGER /NYT / NYTNS Retiring Representative Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) recently shouted at Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. “Shame on everybody that separates children and allows them to stay at the other side of the border fearing death, fearing hunger, fearing sickness,” he fulminated. “Shame on us for wearing our badge of Christianity during Christmas and allow the secretary to come here and lie!”

He bolted from the hearing room before she could respond to his slander.

Gutierrez’s rhetoric was on par with his manners: the Roman Empire had impressive walls, but none prevented migration from Judea to Egypt, i.e., from one Roman province to another.

A few days after Gutierrez’s theatrics, the day after Christmas, Gustavo Perez Arriaga—gang-banger, DUI violator, and illegal immigrant—murdered Newman California Police Corporal Ronil Singh, thereby separating his child and wife from him. Permanently. Image result for ronil singh

Arriaga had snuck into the U.S. through Arizona. How many others like him are in the caravan passing through (if you can believe it) Arriaga, Mexico? Is it un-Christian to ask how likely any of them are to make orphans out of American children?

Or are we morally allowed to fixate solely on the tragedy of children whose migrant parents expose them to harm, sometimes fatally?

Wajahat Ali is a Muslim, perhaps the way Gutierrez is a Christian. He’s a Progressive who focuses on combating “hate,” especially “Islamophobia.” Cafeteria-style, he picks out what he likes about Islam and ignores the embarrassing remainder as if they were accidental features of Islam.

Image result for Wajahat Ali That is, Ali provides what William Kirkpatrick calls the “smiley-faced version of Islam which emphasizes the commonalities with Catholicism and leaves out the scary parts.” (“Pope Francis, Indifferentism, and Islamization,” Crisis Magazine, December 31, 2018)

Continue reading “What kind of Muslim is Wajahat Ali?”

My philosophical “credo”: all right (mostly) after all these years

“Elements of a Credo” was probably the first piece I wrote for my antique (i.e., not mobile-friendly) philosophy site in 2004. (Compare the edited version below with the original.) I wrestle with its applicability to my current thinking. That is, I’m unhappy with its pretension to theological “neutrality.” But reading it as though it were written by someone else, I think it good enough to share in the hope that it might provoke conversation.—AGF

“He who tells me only what I already know, what I already believe, and what I like to hear, may please me, but he does not contribute to my grasp of the subject. Whereas, he who compels me to face aspects of the matter which I would like to avoid really does something for me.”

George Andrew Lundberg ¹

I am a philosopher. That is, I seek to “frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted.” (Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality).

I am also a commentator on the passing scene. Apart from any degree of success I may enjoy as a philosopher, I feel compelled to venture provisional, qualified judgments in advance of the completion of my speculative philosophy.

As philosopher and commentator, I seek the truth. To do that, I need the cooperation of some and, more importantly, the noninterference of all.

Some may not refrain from interfering. They would even coerce my cooperators into shunning me. For the unfettered seeking of truth invariably leads to the expression of particular truths, or just the exposure of falsehood, which threatens to harm the (at least short-term) interests of the coercers.

That has ever been the nature of the truth-seeking business. It has never been merely about straightening out someone else’s muddled thinking within the ambit of a journal article and then repairing to one’s study for a cigar and a glass of sherry. Socrates made that clear. Nothing has changed since his day. Continue reading “My philosophical “credo”: all right (mostly) after all these years”

Adolf Hitler: Socialist Activist

Going over articles by my friend Hugh Murray, a veteran of the civil rights movement Image result for hugh t. murray, jr (third from the right; New Orleans lunch counter sit-in, September 9, 1960), I noticed in one of them his elaboration upon an inconvenient (for some) fact of Adolf Hitler’s political trajectory.

Rejected by several journals in the late ’90s, Hugh’s “Affirmative Action and the Nazis: Or: Why Liberals Cannot Understand a Holocaust” at last found a home in 2004. Here’s the salient passage (lightly edited; my commentary follows):

Turmoil erupted inside Germany. On New Years 1918-19, the radical Spartacists attempted a coup, but were foiled by soldiers returning from the fronts [of the Great War] who formed into new groups, the Freikorps (free corps). They killed the two Spartacist leaders, Karl Liebknecht and the Jewish Rosa Luxemburg. Elsewhere events went in the opposite direction. In the large southern German province of Bavaria a republic was also proclaimed, led by the Jewish journalist Kurt Eisner, then by the Jewish playwright Ernst Toller, and finally by the Jewish Communist Eugen Leviné . Apparently, one of the supporters of this radical Left regime was a young corporal, recently released, who had been gassed in the trenches toward war’s end, Adolf Hitler (far right, seated, with his Bavarian Reserve Infantry comrades).

The television program The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler: [Part] I, The Private Man contains some revealing sequences. [It’s available on YouTube.] I quote from the narration:

With the defeat [of Germany in 1918], revolution broke out across Germany. In Bavaria a revolutionary government was set up. The socialist president Kurt Eisner was shot on the street in [25] February 1919. The people turned out to say farewell. Hitler had returned to his Munich regiment, his only foothold, his only home. He was threatened with demobilization and a return to the hostel. A fellow soldier later remembered that Hitler seemed like a stray dog, searching for a new master. In the funeral procession for the Jewish Socialist Eisner was a detachment from Hitler’s regiment wearing both red armbands and black armbands. The film clip shows a lance corporal marching with the officers—Adolf Hitler. Continue reading “Adolf Hitler: Socialist Activist”

Hans-Herman Hoppe’s 2017 Property and Freedom Society talk repays study and debate

When it comes to the fate of Western civilization, I often wonder whether “it’s all over but the shouting,” whether the odds favor our enemies.

(Secularly speaking. The Kingdom of God will interrupt the current evil flow. If you think the secular is all there is, we need to have another conversation.)

The sheer volume of material one has to grapple with to come to a responsible answer overwhelms me. And then there’s what one might call the secondary literature, the thousands of worthwhile blogs and other platforms on which pro-Westerners can hash things out and find their way through the maze. One cannot responsibly dismiss it with a wave of the hand or pretend to have mastered it.

Only today I stumbled upon the text of the talk that Hans-Hermann Hoppe‘s gave to the Property and Freedom Society last year. (Once upon a time I was au courant on all things libertarian. Better late than never.) Hoppe’s frank discussion of our parlous estate is one of the best things I’ve read in a long time (but you may discount the appraisal of one who’s just admitted to being late to the party).

It’s long. You’ll probably skip it. After all, life is short. I understand.

It ends with a list of imperatives I agree must be carried out. But how? I’m left with skepticism, if not despair, about what those who agree with Hoppe’s diagnosis can reasonably hope to do. It seems there is much more sand in the bottom of the hour glass than the top.

I invite debate not only about Hoppe’s remedies but also about the prospects for their ever being applied in time. Ludwig von Mises‘s aphorism* doesn’t allay my pessimism. (Yes, Mises believed this while escaping the grip of the Nazis, and the Institute that bears his name promotes his ideas, and yet . . . here we are.)

Let’s affiliate, help each other find the truth of the matter, support each other’s efforts, build each other up, encourage each other.

Our enemies need to be more than ridiculed, exposed, and refuted. They need to be defeated.

Here’s the link: The Alt-Right and AntiFa—A Libertarian Strategy for Social Change

* Tu ne cede malis [Virgil wrote] sed contra audentior ito. That is, “do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against them.” (Part of it is the motto of The Bronx.) Is giving up tantamount to giving in?

Blanshard, Langer and Voegelin on Cassirer

Over the years I’ve collected short essays by and about the morphologist of the human spirit, Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945)* by diverse thinkers I also admire and posted them on my other site.

In his 1944 review of Cassirer’s An Essay on Man, Brand Blanshard sounded a note of disappointment:

It is hard not to think, as one reads a book so wealthy as this in historic and scientific erudition, but at the same time so oddly inconclusive, that Cassirer was rather a distinguished reflective scholar than a great speculative philosopher. The learning is not mobilized in the interest of any theory; the book is not so much an ‘essay on man’ as a series of essays, all suggestive and enlightening, which converge on—what? It is hard to say. Perhaps there is no end, or harmony of ends, toward which all these activities are moving. But then, on Cassirer’s own showing, no philosophy of man would seem to be practicable; there would only be a theory of art, a theory of religion, and so on. This is in fact what he gives us. And an admirable gift it is, for which I, at least, am thankful. Only it is not what he sets out to give, nor all that the reader hoped to gain.

William Schultz commented on Blanshard’s assessment:

Here is the assumption of a continental philosopher that a system must ‘converge’ on something or lead to an overall unity of experience, an ideal unity. To some extent, the criticism is correct, for the main arguments are not in An Essay on Man, yet Cassirer’s claims about the need for unity should have alerted Blanshard that they were in his previous books, as Cassirer himself said in the Preface to that work written almost twenty years after the three-volume masterpiece [The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms]. Ironically, both Blanshard and Cassirer share some of the same assumptions about what philosophy should do, but Blanshard did not study Cassirer’s work enough to recognize the revolutionary way in which Cassirer satisfies traditional expectations about what a philosophy is and does. (Cassirer and Langer on Myth, Routledge, 2000, 51)

The other subject of Schultz’s study was Susanne Langer, whose thought was shaped largely by her absorption of Cassirer’s writings in the original German as they were published. She contributed an essay on his theory of language and myth to the Library of Living Philosophers volume dedicated to him.

. . . myth and language appeared as genuine twin creatures, born of the same phase of human mentality, exhibiting analogous formal traits, despite their obvious diversities of content. Language, on the one hand, seems to have articulated and established mythological concepts, whereas, on the other hand, its own meanings are essentially images functioning mythically. The two modes of thought have grown up together, as conception and expression, respectively, of the primitive human world. . . .

The first dichotomy in the emotive or mythic phase of mentality is not, as for discursive reason, the opposition of ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ of ‘a’ and ‘non-a,’ or truth and falsity; the basic dichotomy here is between the sacred and the profane. Human beings actually apprehend values and expressions of values before they formulate and entertain facts.

Continue reading “Blanshard, Langer and Voegelin on Cassirer”

When Acton met Whitehead?

Knowing that the paths of two intellectual heroes, Lord Acton and Alfred North Whitehead, crossed at Cambridge, I’ve sometimes imagined Whitehead, whose mathematics fellowship (1888-1910) overlapped Acton’s Regius Professorship of Modern History (1895-98), attending his lectures.

We know that while at Cambridge Whitehead showed interest in history and theology. But did they meet? The truth may be lost to history.

Lowe’s life of Whitehead documents that he admired Acton, was aware of his “troubles with Rome,” proposed a Cambridge memorial to him, and dropped “in on some of his lectures after Acton was appointed” to the Regius chair. (p. 186) “But I know of no discussions between them,” Lowe wrote. Image result for Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and his Work

Like Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon before him, Acton had rooms in Nevile’s Court. In his Lord Acton Roland Hill states that the designation of his room was “staircase 2, A1, on the first floor. (His library would later occupy the apartment next door.) When Whitehead married [in 1891], he changed the rooms given him by Trinity College, moving from a large, high-ceilinged room (C2) in Nevile’s Court to a modest one there” until 1902, the year of Acton’s death.

During the years of the lectures, therefore, Acton and Whitehead were “next-door neighbors.” Someone with access to Nevile’s Court’s floor plans could judge the proximity of their rooms to each other.

Lowe mentioned that in the mid-1890’s the philosopher J. M. E. McTaggart formed Eranos, a discussion group and that Whitehead was a member, but he did not think much of it. James C. Holland, in his introduction to Owen Chadwick’s study of Acton, noted that “it was at Cambridge that he gave it [i.e., “his commitment to moral judgment in history”] definitive and final expression, in May, 1897, in the privacy of his Trinity rooms in Nevile’s Court, where he [Acton] addressed a select society, the Eranus [sic], which never numbered more than twelve members.”

Continue reading “When Acton met Whitehead?”

Lord Acton: ambiguous democrat, libertarian modernist

Christopher Lazarski’s Power Tends to Corrupt: Lord Acton’s Study of Liberty (Northern Illinois University Press, 2012) is, or at least ought to be, a reputation-making book. Image result for Power Tends to Corrupt: Lord Acton's Study of Liberty

It is the best discussion of the ideas of John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton in sixty-five years, that is, since Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s ground-breaking study.

Image result for Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics The author achieves this in about the same number of pages (at least, sans apparatus) but, more importantly, he does so with equal readability, all the more remarkable since English is not his mother tongue.

After having immersed himself in the events of early 20th-century Russia, the fruit of which being his 2008 The Lost Opportunity: Attempts at Unification of the Anti-Bolsheviks: 1917-1919, Lazarski shifted his scholarly interest to the political thought of a 19th-century European who, while not predicting the Bolshevik Revolution, identified the spiritual fault lines that help explain such an anti-libertarian rupture with the past.

Currently Associate Dean in Warsaw’s School of International Relations at Lazarski University (founded by a distant relative), our author draws upon Roland Hill’s magisterial life of Acton for frame and meat, but does not minutely track that monumental biography. Image result for roland hill acton

What he does track are the contours of Acton’s prodigious learning. He divides his terrain into four parts, three devoted to Acton’s areas of interest—the ancient world (Jerusalem and Athens), the modern alternative (especially the Anglo-American tradition), and the revolutionary crisis to which that alternative succumbed (the French Revolution). A fourth part expounds and interprets Acton’s view of “the best regime,” a question rarely absent from Lazarski’s neat encapsulations of the master’s texts.

Continue reading “Lord Acton: ambiguous democrat, libertarian modernist”

Antony Sutton’s Inconvenient Research

I’m not an expert on the works of Antony C. Sutton (1925-2002), but I hope to be one day, and this post will explain why.

Deep within the second volume of his magnum opus, Sutton posed the following alternative:

To subsidize and support a system that is the object of massive military expenditures is both illogical and irrational. . . . it calls into question not only the ability and the wisdom but indeed the basic common sense of the policymakers. The choice is therefore clear: either the West should abandon massive armaments expenditures because the Soviet Union is not an enemy of the West, or it should abandon the technical transfers that make it possible for the Soviet Union to pose the threat to the Free World which is the raison d’être for such a large share of Western expenditures. Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, 1945-1965, Stanford, Hoover Institution, 1968, p. 400.

Image result for western technology and soviet economic development When I chanced upon Sutton’s trilogy at a public library in the early ’70s, I was still viewing the world through Herbert Aptheker’s red-tinted spectacles. The massive amount of evidence of technology transfer that Sutton had discovered, organized, and published—under the imprint of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution—cohered with neither the Communist worldview I then held nor my anti-Communist one a few years later.

For Sutton proved that for at least fifty years capitalists had sold their supposed mortal enemies helming the Soviet Union much more than the proverbial rope with which to hang them (thereby fulfilling a prediction apocryphally attributed to Lenin).

Continue reading “Antony Sutton’s Inconvenient Research”