Days go by and still I think of you.

Most Bible quotes are KJV or ESV.

 
Philosophical Health

I just took the philosophical health check (via Zorak, the Mantis who's married to Old Oligarch, which claims:

The PHC is designed to identify tensions or contradictions (a Tension Quotient) between various beliefs that you have. The PHC does not aim to identify which of your beliefs are true or false, but where the set of beliefs you hold may not be compatible with each other.

The PHC report below lists pairs of beliefs which are identified as being 'in tension'. What this means is either that: (1) There is a contradiction between the two beliefs or (2) Some sophisticated reasoning is required to enable both beliefs to be held consistently. In terms of action, this means in each case you should either (1) Give up one of the two beliefs or (2) Find some rationally coherent way of reconciling them.

My "tension quotient" was 27%.

Here are my "tensions", with my answers:

Questions 10 and 23: Is there an all-good, all-powerful God?

9482 of the 27658 people who have completed this activity have this tension in their beliefs.

You agreed that:
There exists an all-powerful, loving and good God
And also that:
To allow an innocent child to suffer needlessly when one could easily prevent it is morally reprehensible

These two beliefs together generate what is known as 'The Problem of Evil'. The problem is simple: if God is all-powerful, loving and good, that means he can do what he wants and will do what is morally right. But surely this means that he would not allow an innocent child to suffer needlessly, as he could easily prevent it. Yet he does. Much infant suffering is the result of human action, but much is also due to natural causes, such as disease, flood or famine. In both cases, God could stop it, yet he does not.

Attempts to explain this apparent contradiction are known as 'theodicies' and many have been produced. Most conclude that God allows suffering to help us grow spiritually and/or to allow the greater good of human freedom. Whether these theodicies are adequate is the subject of continuing debate.

What God owes us (which is nothing) and what we owe each other are two different things. (Even though I say "owe", I don't necessarily think a person who needlessly let an innocent child suffer should be legally liable -- that depends on the circumstances.) I know that's hardly a complete theodicy, but most theodicy is in the wrong direction anyway, since it presumes the Fall was less bad than it was and that humans, or some humans, deserve better than they get. This is of course wrong. The only real question for theodicy is why God let the Fall happen in the first place.

Questions 19 and 7: Is the unnatural wrong?

3635 of the 27658 people who have completed this activity have this tension in their beliefs.

You agreed that:
Proper sanitation and medicines are generally good for a society
And also that:
Homosexuality is wrong because it is unnatural

You believe that something is wrong if it is unnatural. Yet you believe that sanitation and medicine are good. But aren't these also unnatural? What is natural about sophisticated modern sewage systems and the domestic supply of clean water? What is natural about chemotherapy or other sophisticated medical treatments? So the first problem here is that it is simply not true that most people think all things unnatural are bad. So that means being unnatural is no reason for homosexuality to be considered wrong. (There is also the question of in what sense homosexuality is supposed to be unnatural). The second problem is a logical one. Because something 'is' the case, it doesn't follow that it 'ought' to be the case. 'Cancer kills' is true, but that doesn't mean 'cancer should (in the moral sense of the word) kill'. So there is a problem in trying to derive matters of moral value directly from matters of pure fact.

This whole thing directly contradicts their claim, "The PHC does not aim to identify which of your beliefs are true or false, but where the set of beliefs you hold may not be compatible with each other." This exists to tell people people who think homosexuality is wrong that it isn't, in pretty much so many words. It has, needless to say, an impoverished notion of what's natural.

Now consider: Is it natural or unnatural to try to avoid illness and death? Natural, of course. Is it natural or unnatural to invent and use technology? Natural, because every culture has tools, which is already technology. Therefore using technology to stay healthy is natural. This isn't sophisticated, it's obvious.

So why is homosexuality unnatural? Because it's contrary to man's telos. Man's purpose is to "glorify God and enjoy Him forever", and homosexuality is incompatible with that. But doesn't that mean that homosexuality is unnatural because it's wrong, rather than wrong because it's unnatural? Yes, but there's a deeper level: wrongness is wrong because it's unnatural. The Hebrew word for sin literally means "missing that mark", the mark being what sort of beings we were intended to be. Because of the Fall, we now have, as it were, an unnatural nature, a perverted nature.

Something needs to be singled out:

So the first problem here is that it is simply not true that most people think all things unnatural are bad. So that means being unnatural is no reason for homosexuality to be considered wrong.

I suppose Socrates pestered the Athenians with the wrong kind of questions. Instead of asking after the justifications of their beliefs, he should have simply asked all of them what their beliefs were. But if what "most people think" settles such matters, why even dig to the level of asking if they think the unnatural is wrong? Ask if they think homosexuality is wrong. I'd wager that the vast majority of the world's people think it is.

Questions 8 and 18: What is faith?

7045 of the 27658 people who have completed this activity have this tension in their beliefs.

You disagreed that:
It is quite reasonable to believe in the existence of a thing without even the possibility of evidence for its existence
But agreed that:
Atheism is a faith just like any other, because it is not possible to prove the non-existence of God

In disagreeing with the first statement, you are acting consistently with the general principle which states that in the absence of good grounds for believing something, it is not rational to believe it. For example, it is not possible to disprove the possibility that there are invisible pink fairies at this moment circling the planet Pluto, but we don’t countenance it as a real possibility because there is no evidence for their planetary activities. This is not to be thought of as a matter of faith, but of sound reasoning. But asserting that atheism is a faith just like any other, because it is not possible to prove the non-existence of God contradicts this principle. It replaces the principle 'in the absence of good grounds for believing something, it is not rational to believe it' with the principle, 'in the absence of good grounds for believing something, it requires faith not to believe it'. For this reason, atheism is not a matter of faith in the same way as belief in God. In short, belief without evidence (a form of faith) is not the same as non-belief due to lack of evidence (rational refusal to assent).

When I agreed that "it is not possible to prove the non-existence of God", I meant something stronger than they seem to have assumed I would mean. I don't mean that such things are beyond proof or even just not proven yet. I mean that you can't prove the non-existence of God because He exists, quite obviously so, and that it is irrational and contrary to the evidence (evidence we see every day) to deny that He exists. The whole of creation declares His glory. It takes a perverse and fallen being to deny it.

It also gets the nature of faith wrong. Faith does not mean belief without evidence, still less irrational belief. It means placing your trust in a person or being. Otherwise, the Apostles, who saw and in one case touched the Risen Christ, could not have had faith. Christians have faith in Jesus. Atheists have faith in man. This faith leads them astray, of course: man's intellect is as fallen as the rest of him.

Questions 14 and 25: How do we judge art?

13150 of the 27658 people who have completed this activity have this tension in their beliefs.

You agreed that:
Judgements about works of art are purely matters of taste
And also that:
Michaelangelo is one of history's finest artists

The tension here is the result of the fact that you probably don't believe the status of Michaelangelo is seriously in doubt. One can disagree about who is the best artist of all time, but surely Michaelangelo is on the short list. Yet if this is true, how can judgements about works of art be purely matters of taste? If someone unskilled were to claim that they were as good an artist as Michaelangelo, you would probably think that they were wrong, and not just because your tastes differ. You would probably think Michaelangelo's superiority to be not just a matter of personal opinion. The tension here is between a belief that works of art can be judged, in certain respects, by some reasonably objective standards and the belief that, nonetheless, the final arbiter of taste is something subjective. This is not a contradiction, but a tension nonetheless.

Taste is partly innate and common to all humans. I say partly because individuals and whole cultures differ widely. But people can and do enjoy and admire works of art from other cultures. I suspect this has to do with the imago Dei, but I haven't thought very deeply about aesthetics.
posted by Aaron at 5:27 PM

 
Miscellany

(1) Everybody has Thanksgiving leftovers. At my house, the best kind is turkey stew, made by yours truely. After I carve off the meat, I boil the remainder of the turkey (together with the basting juice) for several hours to make the broth, adding water as necessary. I strain it, and there's always more meat to be found, which is where most of the stew's meat comes from. I put the meat in, and rice, and potatoes, and carrots. Variations as I deem tasty. Turkey stew's very rich.

(2) Bacardi 151 is not your friend.

(3) There's an article from Razormouth in support of pedocommunion. For myself, I don't see why, if you'd accept pedobaptism, you wouldn't go the rest of the way and accept pedocommunion. This particular argument, I think, is a little strange. He cites Galatians 4:26 to say that the Church is our mother. He admits this sounds a bit Catholic, but how it sounds isn't particularly relevant to whether it's true, so we'll pass over that and accept it for the sake of argument. He argues that mothers feed their chirldren, and that by analogy, the Church should feed children. Sound enough so far. Then he notices that giving children communion is literally feeding them, so therefore pedocommunion ought to be adopted. But why shouldn't it be the same sort of feeding as the Church's motherhood, i.e., spiritual? That is, shouldn't we feed them with teaching? This is a consistent New Testament usage. Consider 1 Corinthians 3:1-2 and Hebrews 5:12-14, where those who ought to be ready for a diet of meat are criticized for still needing milk. Or consider where Jesus said, "Feed My sheep." We aren't literally sheep and Christian life doesn't consist of redoing the miracle of loaves and fishes. The meaning is spiritual.

(4) It's almost embarrassing how good some of the blogs I link to are. Makes me look bad.

(5) Toledo, Ohio has a dance music station, and Chicago does not.

(6) The Kennedy Center in Washington looks better on the inside than the outside.
posted by Aaron at 2:13 PM

 
More on Reason's Odd View of Marriage

First, one from Jacob Sullum.

The problems start early. The subtitle: "Is allowing gay marriage the same as endorsing it?"

Uh, no. Endorsing it (which is what he argues for while denying that that he argues for it) is the same as endorsing it. I would allow gays to have big ceremonies and sign contracts and claim to be married, and I hardly endorse it. What he means by "allowing" it is issuing state licenses for it, which is another matter altogether.

He then talks about some conservative's support for civil unions instead, which is a foolish idea.

Even if we accept marriage licenses as a convenient way to make various legal and contractual arrangements simultaneously, it does not follow that granting them amounts to a moral judgment.

A marriage license declares two people married. The only way that isn't a moral judgement is if you already presuppose that marriage is morally neutral, a profoundly radical position. A few things wrong with it:

1) Scripture says it's not true.

2) Proponents of gay "marriage" don't think it's true. It's precisely because they know marriage is a higher estate than singleness (consider that every husband is a type of Christ and every wife a type of the Church) that they want in.

3) The opponents of gay "marriage" don't think it's true.

4) Just about nobody throughout history has ever thought it to be true.

5) In short, it isn't true.

Marriage licenses do not distinguish between people who marry for love and people who marry for money, or between couples who plan to have children and couples who don't. By Miller's logic, that means the government is discounting the importance of love and procreation.

The law cannot know the thoughts or emotions of anyone except inasmuch as they choose to express them, nor should it really try. This is really a distraction.

But in any event, yes, marriage licenses for people who are open about marrying for money (which is really prostitution, not marriage) is an insult to real marriage, as would be marriage licenses to people who are open about being swingers or intending a "trial marriage" (these are really cohabitation). Reproduction is neither here nor there.

But once you get beyond the basic rules that are necessary for peaceful coexistence, Americans do not share a single understanding of divine law. And as history amply testifies, using the state to impose one view of God's will is a recipe for perpetual discord.

Since when is giving marriage licenses to homosexuals a basic rule necessary for peaceful coexistence? For that matter, since when are state marriage licenses at all a basic rule for peaceful coexistence?

If he was interested in not imposing one view of God's will (or one view of fairness or whatever his substitute is), he'd be for abolishing state marriage licenses.

Another post on Hit & Run tries to claim Hayek for gay "marriage". Unfortunately, both the main post and the commenters have an odd notion of how the state should relate to intermediate institutions. No, the state is not around to endorse, sanction, and give force to whatever a small minority of intermediate institutions they happen to like are doing. It's supposed to get out of the way!

What I want is simply to let people enter into contracts, within a very few reasonable limits (i.e., nothing too close to slavery), with the law neither knowing nor caring if it's a marriage, a business partnership, or deep-stained sin. If you're mainly concerned with letting civil society evolve (or simply be) free of government meddling (or for that matter, if you're mainly concerned with being libertarian) this is what you'd be for. But they're not. They're for government approval, not toleration but official approval, of sodomy.
posted by Aaron at 1:42 PM

 
Why Gay "Marriage" Takes the Libertine Side

From Hit & Run:

A commenter in an earlier post mentioned this piece at TechCentralStation, by James Miller, arguing that libertarians can't appeal to a "hands-off" principle of neutrality to decide the gay marriage question, and so are forced to "take sides" in the culture war.

First, this is a bad argument. Just as failure to restrict an activity does not constitute endorsement of that activity, neither does equal access to government benefits imply endoresement of those who accept the benefit.

Merely describing marriage as simply a "government benefit" is already to take a side, a radical, unhistorical, pro-statist, secularist side. Marriage pre-dates the state. Marriage in no way depends on the state; it is established by God, by nature, and by the experience of every civilization.

Furthermore, he ignores reality. Of course gay "marriage" endorses a pretend equality between habitual sodomy and Biblical marriage. Andrew Sullivan calls it "equal marriage rights". That gay "marriage" implies the government officially regards gay relationships as equal to Biblical marriage is precisely why they're for it, and precisely why I'm against.

On Miller's premises, the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws "endorsed" interracial marriage

Of course it did, and properly so. The fact that the government had ever banned them is another example of how fundamentally unfit the state is to administer marriage. Numbers 12.

Second, this is an issue only if you buy Miller's earlier argument that marriage shouldn't be an entirely private affair— that argument is actually significantly less compelling, and indeed, confused in enough delightfully different ways that I'm not even going to try to deal with it here.

In the first place, marriage isn't an entirely private affair, regardless of whether the state issues marriage licenses, but this isn't a sufficient reason for the state to be involved.

In the second place, the confusions of his argument for keeping the state involved are pretty simple: 1) Regardless of how badly the state mismanages marriage, there will always be a market for marriage as long as America has people who believe in the Bible in it. 2) The state has already done vast amounts of damage to marriage's "brand name" by instituting no-fault divorce. They have no business being entrusted with it.

In the third place, I don't buy his argument, and I still think it's an issue. In fact, I don't buy his argument precisely because I think it's an issue. The notion that real marriage is no better than two homosexuals buggering each other is an insult to real marriage (so is the notion that real marriage is no better than two heterosexuals who claim marriage yet reserve the "right" to jump ship whenever they fall out of love), and this in turn is an insult to Jesus Christ, for He is Himself a groom.

While I'm at it, I'll comment on two fallacies pushed in the comments section.

First is the old "but words change, and marriage now means something different". The reason "marriage" cannot rightly refer to a homosexual relationship is because it would mean that such relationships are equal to the union of men and women found in all traditional cultures and in Scripture, and that would be a lie. The concatenation of sounds used in English to signify that union isn't important; if we all woke up using it the way gay advocates suggest, we'd just have to invent a new word for the Biblical union. For now, the word is marriage, and I refuse to let the sodomites have it without a fight. But whatever the word, it's wrong (by which I mean immoral, not incorrect) to call the two things by the same name. Of course, if we did invent a new name, they'd try to hijack that too. They intend to rob us of any way of conveniently naming the union of one man and one woman, which is why a commenter's mention of Orwell is exactly right.

Second, is a new one:

Also of note, the Church suddenly got interested in marriage sometime about the 17th century. Prior to that, marriage was secular matter. So, reframing marriage as a civil and legal matter is just a reversion to the way things were for a long time. If we're having to change the meaning of marriage, it is only because certain religious leaders got us into the mess.

I'm guessing this fellow is an atheist. It's that tone of professorial knowledgeability while tossing out nonsense.

The 17th century was 1600 to 1699 (yes, I know some people say 1601 to 1700, but it doesn't matter for our puposes).

Now, dear reader, you've heard of Anglicanism, right? (The quick ones know where I'm going with this.) Why did the Church of England get started? Right, so Henry VIII could divorce his wife, which he wanted to do to get a male heir. He went to the extreme length of starting his own church because the Pope wouldn't let him get divorced -- evidence of involvement in marriage, I would think. Henry VIII reigned from 1509 to 1547.

But maybe he meant 16th century. Still wrong. There was a major Byzantine controversy over Leo VI's four marriages, as each of the first three wives died (naturally, unlike Henry VIII's wives). Yes, the church was deeply involved. But... that was the east, what about the west? (Not that I expect "avicenna" knows enough to tell the difference.) And, and, maybe rules were different at the top. Wrong yet again: Paul included rules for marriage in his letters -- that's the New Testament, as far back as you can go. The only difference at the top was that they could get around the rules easier.
posted by Aaron at 2:28 PM

 
Is This Guy on Something?

From Slate:

After all, the fiscal recklessness of the past few years means I'm highly unlikely to get the Social Security benefits to which I'm theoretically entitled.

No, the fact that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme and has been since it got started means you're highly unlikely to get any.

You don't get to pin it on Bush, as much as you'd dearly love to. Everybody with sense knew, years before Bush was elected president, that Social Security would collapse. If you'd like to blame a president, blame FDR for inventing this mess in the first place.
posted by Aaron at 8:34 PM

 
Some Searches

a discussion about why should the legal voting age be lifted to 21

It shouldn't. A few years one way or the other really don't matter, so unless they start drafting 17-year-olds (they shouldn't draft anyone), there's no point in changing it. Plus making it higher would require a Constitutional amendment.

calvinist parody

This is the second time someone reached my site with this search. I now rank #1, because I mentioned it the first time. In the interim, no one parodized Calvinists. I kinda feel sorry for the guy. There's a sort of parody here, and my reply is here.

the neo-cons hymn

Uh...

descrimination against gays in the public housing policy

There shouldn't be any such thing as public housing. Neither should there be any such thing as gays, but that's another matter. (No, I'm not saying I want them dead. I'm saying homosexuality wouldn't exist if it weren't for the Fall.)

libertarians and god

Depends on which libertarians you have in mind.

THIS JUST IN: While I was writting the above, someone came in on the following search.

spurgeon sodomy

"He was against it."
posted by Aaron at 12:38 PM

 
Another Onion Link

This is why I don't mention that I smoke crack and trip every day on magic mushrooms.
posted by Aaron at 5:51 PM

 
Capitalism and the Bourgeois Virtues

I have in the other window a long attack on David frum's book Dead Right by John Holbo. The link is, surprisingly enough, from Hit & Run. I say surprisingly because Holbo is an enemy of economic -- and social, but I don't think he's thought it through that far -- freedom.

Now, I haven't read Frum's book, although like Franklin reading the book against Deism, I find the texts quoted for refutation more convincing than the refutations (and I'm pretty sure the free market is better for my soul than Deism).

It's tempting to agree with agree with the Hit & Run commenter who called it "some fun with a willful misreading of Frum's book" because the interpretations of just the quoted bits are painfully wrong, and wrong so painfully obviously, and tell the first commenter on Holbo's site that prolix length does not equal serious engagement. But, maybe perversely, I'm going to take Holbo seriously.

"The great, overwhelming fact of a capitalist economy is risk. Everyone is at constant risk of the loss of his job, or of the destruction of his business by a competitor, or of the crash of his investment portfolio. Risk makes people circumspect. It disciplines them and teaches them self-control. Without a safety net, people won’t try to vault across the big top. Social security, student loans, and other government programs make it far less catastrophic than it used to be for middle-class people to dissolve their families. Without welfare and food stamps, poor people would cling harder to working-class respectability than they do not."

The thing that makes capitalism good, apparently, is not that it generates wealth more efficiently than other known economic engines. No, the thing that makes capitalism good is that, by forcing people to live precarious lives, it causes them to live in fear of losing everything and therefore to adopt – as fearful people will – a cowed and subservient posture: in a word, they behave ‘conservatively’.

Now, is Holbo producing a deliberately untrue caricature, with faults added rather than exaggerated, or does he really believe this? I think he really believes it. He goes on: he talks about dark Satanic mills, he refers to J.S. Mill and mentions Virginia Postrel, two advocates of capitalism who, he says, hold the opposite position, in favor of "pagan self-assertion". If I have time we'll meet some self-assertive pagans later. He says:

Of course, many thinkers have argued that the kind of ‘negative liberty’ characteristic of the operations laissez faire capitalism precisely does not produce ‘pagan self-assertion’. To the contrary, it produces – if not mass misery – then at least withered, pinched, hidebound dwarf personalities. The thing to note about Frum’s position is that it is, as it were, a lower synthesis of the standard defenses and criticisms of capitalism. It assumes the worst-case scenario predications about capitalism's tendency to destroy individual spirit, and advocates capitalism on that basis. (As a great conservative once toasted: "Gentlemen! To Evil!")

He goes on to assert that Frum, to be consistent has to favor making people experience Donner-party like conditions or Stalinist oppression to toughen them up. Missing, I might add, the whole point of the quoted praise by Bill Bennett for the style in which the Donner party members wrote their accounts. If such were written today, they'd be so emotionally incontinent, self-indulgent, woozy, and even sentimental that you'd want to track down a surviver and beat him on the head with a brick.

Finally, he said on the Hit & Run thread:

Frum really does say that the good thing about risk is that it makes people behave in a conformist way. That's sort of an odd thing to say, and I don't think Frum quite means it. You are quite right to point out that Frum is not really in favor of cringing conformism. He wants rugged individualism. In the post I say he wants the former - this is a logical inference from some things he says about risk and fear - but then I make the correct response on Frum's behalf. The post proceeds by experimentally attributing a lot of stuff and then retracting, concluding there is really very little left except for a lot of idiosyncratic private social and cultural preferences which Frum really has no business dressing up as philosophically justified or justificatory. His philosophical position is absent, not noxious. I could probably have been clearer, but that's what I tried to say.

So, then, Holbo meant this interperetation seriously, even if he didn't think Frum meant it. It's a little like the point I made here about Dahlia Lithwick's comment about the "public square". The difference is that Frum said nothing of the sort.

Here's the score: Frum says capitalism involves risk, which "makes people circumspect" and "disciplines them and teaches them self-control". Holbo takes this to mean (he seems unaware that this is even an interpretation) that Frum wants people to live in "a cowed and subservient posture" and wants "only ‘withered’ capacities, ‘pinched and hidebound’, ‘cramped and dwarfed’ human beings" (from a quote from Isaiah Berlin).

Holbo wants to free us from self-discipline. He thinks it a terrible thing that laissez faire capitalism would induce people to be disciplined and self-controlled, that they would delay gratification, and that they would generally act like ants rather than grasshoppers.

If capitalism is as bad as the Left says it is, advocating it because it promotes the bourgeois virtues would be like advocating war because it promotes courage. But it's another thing to oppose war because it promotes courage.

We are at this point very near the heart of what Frum styles his ‘conservative philosophy’. But at the heart of it is a sort of proto-cognitive itch; a sensibility, or feeling, or subconscious reflex. Orwell talks about this in chapter 12 of The Road to Wigan Pier, incidentally: the naturalness of hostility to the softening that results from modern machine civilization. That’s the feeling, he explains. But, of course, next comes the thought.

"So long as the machine is there, one is under an obligation to use it. No one draws water from the well when he can turn on the tap … Deliberately to revert to primitive methods, to use archaic tools, to put silly difficulties in your own way, would be a piece of dilettantism, of pretty-pretty arty and craftiness. It would be like solemnly sitting down to eat your dinner with stone implements. Revert to handwork in a machine age, and you are back in Ye Old Tea Shoppe or the Tudor villa with the sham beams tacked to the wall."

That’s Frum in a nutshell. Had the feeling. Stalled out before he got the thought, right in front of ‘Ye Old Conferfative Philofophie & Non-Load-Bearing Architectonic Façade’. (Indeed, this seems to me an appropriate shingle to hang outside the offices of the National Review. And the next time someone over there has the temerity to quote Orwell piously. Take it down: whack!)

Exactly how is this Frum? You don’t drive west through the snowy mountains in covered wagons, gee-yawing a hundred head of cattle. You rent a U-Haul and follow the interstate highway system (thank you, federal government!) Likewise, the welfare state is a machine. It exists. If it were abolished, it would still exist in potentia. It can be built.

This little bit of text is so ornately confused it's hard to know where to start.

1) The notion of the welfare state as modern machine. Apparently he never heard the phrase "bread and circuses". The Romans had a welfare state. The welfare state is not some technical contrivance which we must use or else be like someone who uses covered wagons instead of cars. It's a political arrangement, and not a recently invented one at that.

2) The sensibility at the heart of conservatism has nothing to do with an attitude toward softening. It's, as I mentioned one post down, a bias for continuation instead of cessation. I have this bias myself, but I'm also a libertarian.

But – write this on a 3 x 5 card and consult as necessary – it is absurd to advocate that the government intentionally impose hardship on the people, against their will, for the sake of toughening them up.

How, pray tell, is not giving away free bread (if not circuses) an "imposition"? I would think the ones imposed on are people paying for the panem.

"If I am bearded, and I notice that my boss and the last four men in my section to win promotion are clean-shaven, I will find myself slowly nudged toward the barbershop. If the owner of the gas station across the road from mine smiles a lot, and I don’t, I will find myself forcing a cheerful manner myself, no matter how snarly I may inwardly feel. People who do not have to work for a living, however, can indulge themselves in a hundred little peculiarities of behavior – one reason that the English upper class is so famously odd. Millions of Americans now live as free from the pressure to conform as any English lord, thanks either to the direct receipt of welfare or to civil service employment where promotion is by seniority and firing is unheard of. The fact, as much as any fashion change, explains the sudden flaunting of ethnic difference in manner and dress that so distresses Patrick Buchanan in his native city. Relatively few vice presidents at Proctor & Gamble would dare wear a kente cloth or keffiyeh; nobody who intends to earn very much of a living in the polymer business can hope to get away with not learning English; but city hall employees and welfare mothers can do both.

So the cultural conservatives are simply deluding themselves when they hope for escape from the unpleasant task of resisting every enlargement of the ambit of government action and trying, when opportunity presents itself, to reduce that ambit." (p. 196)

This is supposed to sound sober and sensible. If cultural conditions are functions of economics, you can’t change the culture without altering the economics. So conservatives must keep up the titanic, colossal, epic, probably cosmically doomed and tragic economic struggle to keep government small … so people will not dress funny or wear their hair in hairy ways? Sort of wimpy, as ragnaroks go. Notable disproportion here between means and the wished-for end. Even if you are the sort of person who feels deeply offended by funny, ethnic clothes (we're off the deep end) – even if you think it is anything like your business to dictate fashion sense to everyone around you (we're so off the deep end) – how could you possibly think it was so important as all that? And yet immediately we are off and running about after the bourgeois virtues, all dying out: thrift, diligence, prudence, sobriety, fidelity, and orderliness. I won’t bother to quote. Why can I not exhibit all these virtues beneath and/or behind a beard, kente cloth and/or keffiyeh? Frum seems to find it too obvious to bear arguing that the trick is impossible.

Never mind that if a bearded kente cloth wearer practiced the bourgeois virtues he would be a cramped, hidebound, warped human being, or so Holbo seems to think. Go back to why Frum says they can afford to indulge little idiosyncrasies. Public support by way of welfare or bureaucratic sinecures. The ideal of human freedom: the ability to do whatever you want because someone else is paying.

Pagan self-expression.

Do such people lead lives of bourgeois virtue? Of course not. Frum pointed to minor effects following from the same cause. Warm weather causes both ice cream consumption and drowning. Cold weather causes sledding, and hypothermia.

If you want to know how they do live, you should read articles by Theodore Dalrymple, especially What Is Poverty?, Lost in the Ghetto, and The Starving Criminal.

I almost described Holbo's freedom as being able to make whatever choice you want because it doesn't matter what you choose. But it does matter, more than it would if others weren't paying for it. That's why all this must destroy personal freedom as well as economic. That's what seat belt laws, helmet laws, the crusade against smoking, the stirrings about taxing "fatty" food, ect, are all about. They haven't got the guts yet to go after the real burden on the public treasury, sexual libertinism. Maybe they'll eventually impose mandatory birth control like they do in China.

That's it for now.
posted by Aaron at 9:12 PM

 
More From Forested Foolery

A Fool in the Forest wonders if there's a Calvinist conspiracy afoot after noticing my comment on the "blog" matter, since he was inspired to join by this, by posted by a neocalvinist. (Gimme a K! Gimme a U! Gimme a Y! Gimme a P! Gimme an E! Gimme an R!)

Now, for some reason my browser didn't take me to the post itself, but to the top of the page, and lazy and short attentention spanned as I am, I gave up trying to find it a few clicks down, which is why it wasn't on the list of links. But it's an interesting site. He's not a conservative but he wishes he was (you may or may not have to scroll down), because American conservatism has too much libertarianism in it for his taste. It hasn't got enough for mine. A lot of what attracts him to conservatism attracts me too. I also like Leo Strauss (he linked Straussian.net, and my favorite professor, who I still hope to study under again eventually, is on their list of Straussian teachers), I am a kind of evangelical, and I'm also temperamentally conservative, instictively favoring continuation over cessation and long cultivation over tearing things up root and branch, and I also see civilization as basically fragile. I don't even see where the need for radical change in places like Africa is unconservative, since conservatism as I conceive it isn't like an old man who says, "I've seen a lot of changes in my life, an I was agin every one of 'em." (I got that from the professor I mentioned.) It's about the cultivation of civilization, which is the work of generations -- and if ours happens to be the first of those generations, as it would have to be in Africa or even, say, a colony on Mars, then taking the already existing culture in another place and growing off it in a new way is still conservative. Going back to the agricultural metaphor from which we get the word "culture", it's borrowing another's seed for your first planting.

I wonder how much of libertarianism itself, the policy positions, he objects to, because he mostly complained about libertinism and "South Park Republicans". The irony is, if you asked the libertines whether they'd like to abolish public schools, eliminate the Food and Drug Administration, let corner convenience stores sell crack, ect, most wouldn't turn out to be so libertarian after all.

But anyway, to answer Wallace's question: why yes, there is a Calvinist conspiracy. You won't be able to figure out what we're up to unless you're predestined to.

(Update: The Fat Guy also replies, and I comment, after a fashion.)
posted by Aaron at 1:34 PM

 
Abortion is Not Drugs

David Frum, at NRO (link via Samizdata), said:

I can’t defend Roe v. Wade as a legal decision, and I would be very glad to see abortion become much more rare than it now, but if the law attempts to suppress abortion entirely, it is the law that will fail, rather than abortion that will disappear.

This sounds like a particular anti- War on Drugs argument, but there's an emperical difference. We've had two experiences with banning a substance, Prohibition and the War on Drugs, and one was and one is a complete failure, which not only didn't do much to stop alcohol or drugs, respectively, but funded crime outfits and corrupted law enforcement. Abortion used to be illegal too, with none of the same results. And don't mention anything having to do with back alleys or coathangers: I don't care. Even if I did care, it's not within an order of magnitude of Prohibition and the War on Drugs.

Now, he says the failure will happen if the law tries to "entirely suppress" abortion. This is silly. The law would fail if it tried to entirely suppress murder. The law isn't there to create social perfection, it's there to settle cases and punish crimes proven beyond a reasonable doubt. If you drop all the laws that can't be fully enforced or won't be followed, there'd be no laws at all. Drugs -- but not abortion -- is manifestly different from robbery or whatever purely as a matter of experience.

Not to mention the tiny matter of abortion killing someone.
posted by Aaron at 10:14 PM

 
Nothing to do with Theology or Politics

There's a little controversy over the word "blog". It seems it offends some sensibilities. There are various arguments, some about "blog" being technical somehow, but it really comes down to the fact that they want it to sound refined, but "blog" sounds like a caveman word for poop.

Posts here, here, here, here, here, here, and it all started here.

From the first one:

It's the pervasive use of jargon, acronyms, buzzwords and insider references by the blogger community that keeps the vast majority of Americans (or voters, or even online computer users) from learning about or caring about web log sites, much less becoming frequent visitors.

Considering how new blogs are, and how rapidly it's growing, what more does he want?

"Web journal" isn't as precise as "blog", which, although it doesn't mean anything unless someone explains it to you, means only one thing, while "web journal" can mean anything that gets updated. Blog is productive of new terms like "blogging" "blogger" "blogroll", which can only be equivalated clumsily without "blog". The only real argument is aesthetic. I wonder how many words we have now (actually, "blog" is already a word we have now) would pass. "Gorgeous", which means especially beautiful, sounds like a slightly dysphemic word having to do with overeating --"Ralph became gorgeous once he got to the buffet."
posted by Aaron at 11:56 PM

 
Go Read This

Americans Demand Increased Governmental Protection From Selves

"It's obscene that the government allows those companies to allow me to do this to myself."
posted by Aaron at 3:04 PM