Continued from Part 1.

Syme sprang to his feet, shaking from head to foot.

“I see everything,” he cried, “everything that there is. Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? Why does a dandelion have to fight the whole universe? For the same reason that I had to be alone in the dreadful Council of the Days. So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter. So that the real lie of Satan may be flung back in the face of this blasphemer, so that by tears and torture we may earn the right to say to this man, ‘You lie!’ No agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this accuser, ‘We also have suffered.’

“It is not true that we have never been broken. We have been broken upon the wheel. It is not true that we have never descended from these thrones. We have descended into hell. We were complaining of unforgettable miseries even at the very moment when this man entered insolently to accuse us of happiness. I repel the slander; we have not been happy. I can answer for every one of the great guards of Law whom he has accused. At least—”

He had turned his eyes so as to see suddenly the great face of Sunday, which wore a strange smile.

“Have you,” he cried in a dreadful voice, “have you ever suffered?”

As he gazed, the great face grew to an awful size, grew larger than the colossal mask of Memnon, which had made him scream as a child. It grew larger and larger, filling the whole sky; then everything went black. Only in the blackness before it entirely destroyed his brain he seemed to hear a distant voice saying a commonplace text that he had heard somewhere, “Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?”

(source: The Man Who Was Thursday, by G. K. Chesterton)

You Become What You Assent To

Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy.

(source: Nihilism [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy])

Of course, I had to cut my letter about the planned sacrilege at the Oklahoma City Civic Center to the bone to get it under the Letters to the Editor word count (any shorter and you’d have to chirp, er, whistle, er, tweet it). The original version, still only about 400 words, had a slightly clearer explanation of my objection to civic facilitation of this particular class of sacrilegious acts. In addition to the obvious spiritual consequences, there were important civic considerations that should concern even those who are not yet persuaded of the religious facts in the matter:

We understand, as all civic-minded people should, that public life involves a give-and-take of constructive and corrective expressions. This act, however, is an act of sheer nihilism, at best, and demonism, at worst.

Whether you believe it or deny it, there really are powers of good and evil that go far beyond human imagination and will. Even those who do not accept this reality, however, live in a world whose understanding of good and evil is wholly conditioned on this understanding. Civil society can profit by lively debate among different ways of accounting for these basic understandings; as an English professor, this lively exchange is precisely what I promote in the classroom daily. Civil society cannot, however, thrive in an environment where mere destruction of meaningful distinctions and cultural institutions becomes mainstream.

Nihilistic outbursts and sacrilegious demonstrations are not part of civic discussion; they are an assault on the very possibility of civil society. They intend to exclude the faithful from public life without offering any social benefit in return.

If this event takes place, it will mar this wonderful city; and it will damage the souls of all who facilitate it.

To understand the difference between the “sheer nihilism” which is, in the best case, what civic officials are facilitating here and the general give-and-take of culture-making social behavior and discourse, we will first need to understand nihilism a bit better.

Continue reading →

A friend asked my opinion of this preposterous article by Stephen F. Cohen.  What follows is the sort of thing that happens when I read a bad article on a good day and have an excuse to jot down my reactions as I read:

Hmmmm.

1) This retired prof must think it’s nice to have a chance drag out his old Cold-War “Americans are jingoistic bullies” pro-Soviet rhetoric, again, after so many years.  He sounds just like he probably sounded in the 1980s.

2) “the unlawful change of government in Kiev.”  Hmmmm.  Interesting choice of words in the 2nd sentence of the essay.  One might also refer to “the change of unlawful governments in Kiev,” I suppose.  Or possibly, “the predictable result of kleptocratic oligarchy in Kiev.” Hmmm….

3) “potentially more dangerous than its US-Soviet predecessor the world barely survived” — incoherent attempt to have it both ways.  IF this is more dangerous, it is because actual hot conflicts are more likely BECAUSE less costly.  IF the world “barely survived” the Cold War, it wasn’t because of the (surprisingly few) hot conflicts, but because the (never actually suffered) worst-case scenario was so very costly (global thermonuclear war).

4) his points about the risk of tactical nukes are worth noting.  Also worth noting:  the U.S. wargaming in the early 1980s that assumed tactical nuke use in a total war scenario between NATO and Warsaw Pact was very likely, ICBM use much less likely.  Nothing new here, but certainly a thing to think about.

5) “surreal demonization of Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin” — oh, HONESTLY.  I don’t know precisely how much one needs to do to “demonize” a grandiose totalitarian leader with aggressive regionalist ambitions.  Another friend has been sending me far-out Pravda snippets for years, now, that sound quite a bit like the Bad Old Days to me.   Continue reading →

[Greg, who is an expert on Locke and literally wrote the book on the man, thinks I am including him too readily in a general critique of Enlightenment thought. He suggested we make this a whole-blog discussion, rather than keep it in a corner. Here, then, one of my several protestations that Locke–who was my hero for the twenty years it took me to really find Thomas Aquinas–is really deserving of accolades, but lacking in just exactly those resources that we most need at this cultural moment.  In making the case for the prosecution, I think it is quite urgent that readers heed my learned friend, the counsel for the defense, whose arguments are meritorious indeed.]

[pick up the comment thread here, if you like, after perhaps glancing over this post.]

I think Locke can’t protect us from such a lapse without supplementation.

I do not think Locke necessarily tends toward that lapse, or that we can get there without abandoning some of his key views.

But I do think he is vulnerable to such a lapse, even in some of the best parts of the Essay:

1) on Degrees of Knowledge:

These two, viz. intuition and demonstration, are the degrees of our knowledge; whatever comes short of one of these, with what assurance soever embraced, is but faith or opinion, but not knowledge, at least in all general truths. There is, indeed, another perception of the mind, employed about the particular existence of finite beings without us, which, going beyond bare probability, and yet not reaching perfectly to either of the foregoing degrees of certainty, passes under the name of knowledge.

[ http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/locke/locke1/Book4a.html#Chapter%20II ]

2) IV.xiv on Judgment is brilliant, but note the troubling preference for perception over assent, here; the clarity and distinctness of perception is to the voluntary and relational act of judgment as light is to twilight.   Continue reading →

I am quite glad to see that libertarian law professor and uber-blogger Eugene Volokh has weighed in on the discussion surrounding the scheduled Black Mass in Oklahoma City.

I am glad Volokh weighed in because I know his history of carefully considering the legal principles surrounding First Amendment issues–and because I think, at least up until The Volokh Conspiracy moved to the Washington Post website and became harder to follow, I had read pretty much every post he’d written on any related subject since about 2003. I am also pleased because I think that, as regards only the specific point of legal understanding he comments on, he is probably correct.  That correction will help us all to clarify the situation considerably.

In fact, when I wrote my letter, I imagined Volokh and his confreres in order to test my words–not because I expected Volokh to be wholly sympathetic to Archbishop Coakley’s objections, but because I was confident that Volokh’s response would be accurate, to-the-point, and respectful.  Here is his post, shortening his extract from the Archbishop’s remarks:

“I’m disappointed by their response,” Archbishop Paul Coakley of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City told FoxNews.com Friday. “If someone had come to them to rent the Civic Center to stage a burning of the Koran or to hold an event that was blatantly and clearly anti-Semitic, I think they might find a way to prevent it.

“Not all speech is protected if there is hate speech and it is intended to ridicule another religion,” he said. “I don’t believe it is a free speech matter.”

No, speech intended to ridicule or insult another religion is entirely constitutionally protected, as the Court has held since 1940. Under the First Amendment, people are free to criticize, ridicule, parody, and insult religious belief systems, no less than other belief systems — whether they are Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, Satanism, atheism, capitalism, Communism, feminism, or fascism.

And this remains true even as to government-owned auditoriums that have been generally open for public rental. The government may not exclude speech from such places, whether they are called “designated public fora” or “limited public fora,” on the grounds that it’s blasphemous or “hateful” or “intended to ridicule another religion.” (It’s an open question whether the government may sometimes exclude all religious worship services from particular kinds of government property, but I’m unaware of any such across-the-board exclusion as to the Civic Center Music Hall, and indeed at least one church apparently regularly conducts services there.)

(source: The Volokh Conspiracy) Continue reading →

From Lord Peter’s diary:

(source: The Wimsey Papers)