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)

Robert Royal recently referenced a line from Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution that delighted me, especially as I warm up for another semester teaching Rhetoric to my freshmen. Royal’s point is as follows:

The radical Enlightenment–the part that Edmund Burke discerned in the French Revolution as operating “with the metaphysics of an undergraduate and the mathematics and arithmetic of an exciseman”–is with us still and often provides the background music to our lives. We see it in public figures who seem to believe that there are known remedies for all social ills, which have been “blocked” because of the ill will of the privileged or the ignorance of the underprivileged, both of whom it’s okay to ignore and perhaps even to eliminate from the conversation.

I think Royal is not only right, but is pointing us in the right direction, when he refers to this passage from Burke. “The metaphysics of an undergraduate” is an important jibe; it signifies far beyond mere detraction. I think something very similar is at work in passages Greg has posted recently in two different articles:

Across both these broken relationships (with God and with family) the appeal of pornography is the illusion of power. It is not primarily the physical senses that pornography stimulates, but the imagination. Pornography helps the user enter and remain within an illusion of his own creation. Within that illusory world, he is all-powerful. Everything bends to his will; even the most outrageously implausible scenarios become easy.

(source: Pornography and Power | Greg Forster | First Things)
and

Few people improve their behavior much strictly on their own initiative, through self-awareness and self-discipline. Our moral development comes much more from our response to other people’s prompting, encouraging and restraining us. While the basic principle here is ancient wisdom, Haidt backs it up with an impressive collection of empirical data, and shows that to some degree this social basis of morality is hard-wired in human physiology.

(source: They Know Not What They Do | TGC | The Gospel Coalition)

What all of these seem to be suggesting is that humans today have a reality problem. Describing that problem philosophically pretty surely won’t solve it, but it may well help us devise correctives that are more useful. To that end, I urge you to read the entire passage from Burke (below), but to note especially the argument he makes about bad metaphysics, here.   Continue reading →