can [we] prove that the primary act of recognition of any reality is real? The answer is that St. Thomas recognized instantly, what so many modern sceptics have begun to suspect rather laboriously; that a man must either answer that question in the affirmative, or else never answer any question, never ask any question, never even exist intellectually, to answer or to ask. I suppose it is true in a sense that a man can be a fundamental sceptic, but he cannot be anything else; certainly not even a defender of fundamental scepticism. If a man feels that all the movements of his won mind are meaningless, then his mind is meaningless, and he is meaningless; and it does not mean anything to attempts to discover his meaning. Most fundamental sceptics appear to survive, bcause they are not consistently sceptical and not at all fundamental. They will first deny everything and then admit something, if for the sake of argument-or often rather of attack without argument. I saw an almost startling example of this essential frivolity in the professor of final scepticism, in a paper the other day. A man wrote to say that he accepted nothing but Solipsism, and added that he had often wondered it was not a more common philosophy. Now Solipsism simply means that a man believes in his own existence, but not in anybody or anything else. And it never struck this simple sophist, that if his philosophy was true, there obviously were no other philosophers to profess it.

To the question "Is there anything?" St. Thomas begins by answering "Yes"; if he began by answering "No," it would not be the beginning, but the end.

"The FDIC has been in existence for 75 years, and no one has ever lost a penny on an insured deposit, and this will not change." But the penny itself has lost 94% of its value in those 75 years precisely because of institutions such as the FDIC and the Fed. Does he really think we are that foolish?

Hooray financial bailout defeat. Hopefully this defeat is more than a temporary setback to Washington's socialist planners. Boo Sonny Perdue for attacking businessmen with threats and fines for price gouging and causing a minor, temporary oil gas supply problem to become a gas shortage. Didn't he learn anything from Jimmy Carter?

This is a long article, but I liked it. By the by, I highly recommend Chronicles. They have an online site, www.chroniclesmagazine.org, but it only has a fraction of the articles from the magazine.

Jonathan

What Is Wrong With Ideology? : The Great Inversion
by Donald W. Livingston (from Chronicles)

Ideology is an intellectual pathology that has gripped the West for about three centuries. At times, we have been told that ideology is at an end. This was said after the close of World War II, when the most ideological age yet, the Cold War, was just beginning. After its collapse, some 50 years later, we were again said to be entering an age without ideology. If anything, the disease has metastasized and is stronger than ever.

Ideologies come in wildly different forms: liberalism, Marxism, socialism, fascism, conservatism, neoconservatism, feminism; but as isms, they are all corruptions of reason. And because they mimic reason, the corruption lies hidden.

At bottom, the error of ideology is that it values one kind of knowledge too strongly over another. Knowledge can be divided into what Aristotle called practical wisdom and theoretical wisdom, or what we might call knowing how and knowing that. In the former, an action follows the how. I know how to raise a question in nuclear physics, how to speak French, etc. In the latter, a proposition or a theory follows the that. I know that all bodies attract as the inverse square of the distance, and that it is immoral to treat persons as things. All human knowledge contains both kinds of knowledge, but they have different characteristics. In knowing that, we have a clear self-conscious apprehension of the object. In knowing how, nearly all the knowledge we enjoy is hidden from self-conscious apprehension. It exists as a potentiality, as something we know how to do even if we never do it.

Of the two kinds of knowledge, knowing how is primordial and is the more important. To see this, imagine an anthropologist who discovers a tribe in the Amazon basin that has never encountered modern people. By living with them, he learns their language and codifies its phonetics, syntax, semantics; its descriptive and performative uses; and its grammar. He then teaches the natives how to read and write their language. The natives now possess a large set of rules about their syntax, semantics, and grammar. But this knowledge, which has raised the self-consciousness of the tribal people, does not constitute the language, and it cannot guide the natives in speaking the language correctly for they knew how to speak it correctly without any apprehension of the rules. Indeed, the anthropologist had to check his hypotheses about the rules against what the natives revealed to be correct usage.

The same is true of all the practices that make up a civilization. Science, morality, law, political conduct, architecture, medicine, theology, etc. are all practices in which knowing how is primordial (and largely unselfconscious) and knowing that is derivative and dependent. How do we gain this knowledge? Not by being taught propositions and applying them to experience, but by undergoing a long process of apprenticeship with master craftsmen in the practice. The process begins in childhood with parents, then moves on to apprenticeship with greater masters. In the end, one might become a master craftsman oneself - for instance, a physicist who knows how to raise a theoretically fruitful question in nuclear physics and can see immediately, without reflection, that a question raised by an amateur such as myself is silly, misplaced, or otherwise uninteresting.

Knowing that can be important in the mastery of a practice. Like a library system, it helps order knowledge into categories for convenience; distinguishes some aspects of a practice judged to particularly important; and endows the practitioner with self-knowledge. These may aid in raising new questions and establishing new lines of research, but the aid is useless unless we know how to raise such questions and how to recognize the most fruitful path. Shakespeare could push the English language in new directions only because of a long period of apprenticeship and practice carried out largely prereflectively.

The error in the soul of ideology, then, is to think that knowing that is more important than knowing how - and, in the most extreme case, to deny that the latter is a form of knowledge at all. The extreme case is exemplified in Descartes, who is rightly said to be the father of modern philosophy. Descartes observed that, since tradition is not available to conscious apprehension, it is conceivable that the entire tradition is built on old wives' tales and superstitions. To guarantee against this possibility, he argued, we must transcend the whole of tradition (that is, the whole of knowing how) to discover those universal principles that are absolutely certain and which alone can guide rational inquiry. Freed from the particularities of tradition, these principles would be the objects of knowing that.

Why would Descartes and his modern followers elevate knowing that over tradition to the point even of denying the legitimacy of tradition? One reason is that self-consciously apprehended principles give the thinker a sense of control. If, in addition, the principles are universal and certain, they seem to provide an infallible guide to a line of inquiry that will yield power. Descartes thought that, since he had discovered the absolutely correct beginning point for inquiry, the cure for death could be discovered in his lifetime. Bacon, following a similar path, famously held that knowledge is power. Because the knowledge locked in traditions is, for the most part, not available to self-conscious apprehension, it is not something we can control, and so it seems blind. Inquiry conducted in blindness, then, can only disorient thought. Another reason is that Descartes inversion was fetching to the new ethic of individualism that had been sweeping Europe since the Renaissance. To this newly created individual, who was determined to live life according to his own dictates, the thought that reason itself demanded emancipation from tradition was welcomed as something he had always known to be true.

Descartes realized that this degradation of tradition would be disastrous if applied to morals, politics, and religion. So he insisted that it be quarantined to the fields of natural science, mathematics, and metaphysics. But the opposite happened. Philosophers of science, not scientists, championed the ideologies of rationalism, empiricism, positivism, pragmatism, structuralism, and the like.

The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) was the first to perceive the devastating consequences from a style of education that would privilege knowing that over knowing how. He called the inversion "the barbarism of reflection" and countered the Cartesian revolution with a humanistic and tradition-laden conception of rationality. By the mid-18th century, a virulent ideological style of thought had entered politics and was beginning to move men and armies. David Hume observed that "no party, in the present age, can well support itself, without a philosophical or speculative system of principles annexed to its political or practical one." Hume was the first to work out a systematic critique of ideology in politics - a critique that even today is unsurpassed. He showed that an ideology, far from being a rational source and guide for political conduct, is irrational, arbitrary, and no guide at all.

"Equal pay for equal work" seems to be a principle that is certain, universal, necessarily true, and capable of serving as a measuring rod for evaluating the justice of all wage settlements. Now consider this example: Two people are doing exactly the same work, stitching twenty pairs of shoes in an eight-hour day. One is paid ten dollars per hour and lives in Chicago; the other receives two dollars per hour and lives in Costa Rica. This settlement clearly violates the principle, although one might object that the principle cannot be applied across countries. Now suppose both live in the same country, but one worker belongs to a trade union and receives ten dollars per hour, while the other does not and receives eight. Again, it could be said that one must make allowance for trade unions. Now suppose that the same workers belong to the same trade union and live in the same country, but one factory is in Mississippi, the other in Chicago, and the latter's wages are higher for the same work. Again, the principle is clearly violated, but one could plausibly reply that the cost of living in Chicago is higher. Or suppose the two workers in Mississippi are doing the same work for different employers but receiving unequal wages. A response could be that this would not be a violation because the wage settlements were freely entered into by the workers; we must allow for freedom of contract. Or suppose a male worker and a female worker are doing the same work for the same employer but at different wages. Should the state prosecute? No, not if the male is the head of a family. This was the teaching of the "family wage" policy, which favored married men over women in order to ensure that a male head of household would have an income sufficient to allow his wife to remain at home to rear their children. To demand the equality of wages would put men and women in a competition that would be to the disadvantage of stay-at-home mothers and, hence, to the family as the foundation of society.

In every case mentioned above, we cannot admit that the principle "equal pay for equal work" has been violated without ruling out a valuable social practice. So it is not the abstract universal principle that is critically guiding and correcting our practices; it is our practices that are critically guiding and correcting our interpretation of the principle. The principle, in itself, is indeterminate and cannot guide or correct anything. It must be interpreted to be "applied," and the source of interpretation cannot be another abstract and indeterminate principle. Absent the authority of tradition, anything might appear to satisfy and abstract principle. It is for this reason that Hume called the new ideological critics "anti-Reformers"; knowing that cannot correct and reform society's practices.

How, then, is rational criticism of society's practices to proceed if not through an ideological critique? The way it has always proceeded when it has not been distracted by ideology: by loyal and skillful participants in the practices. Practices overlap and are in constant tension and conflict. The task of politics properly conceived is to understand these practices, their tensions and conflicts, and to render them as coherent as possible. An ideology such as egalitarianism is an abstraction of just one aspect of a society's moral practices: equality. But there are other aspects that are valuable: liberty, consent, authority, circumstances, excellence, family, fraternity. All of these, considered as abstract ideals purged of custom and tradition, are incompatible with equality.

So one cannot think rationally about the justice of wage settlements without a connoisseur's knowledge of the overlapping and conflicting social practices that constitutes society. In this correct form of critique, equality will be seen not as an absolute measuring rod but as one aspect that must be harmonized with conflicting aspects. Such criticism, however, presupposes a certain kind of education, one that forms people who naturally think that their conduct flows from inherited traditions and not from abstract ideals, and who have a connoisseur's understanding of the historical details of their practices, without which rational criticism is impossible in any practice, including science. This is not the kind of education in morals and politics that has dominated modern society.

We are educated to think that a political ideology is both a source and guide of political society. History, of course, will be taught, but only insofar as it conforms to the ideology. And, as we have seen, the standard for "conforming" is arbitrarily set by the ideology's devotees. The rest of the tradition and its institutions will either be ignored or will be denounced as an impediment to the realization of the abstract principles. As the moral substance of tradition is slowly hollowed out by various forms of "critical theory" (what Vico called "reflective malice"), people gradually lose the knowledge of how to behave. And society becomes a battlefield of warring abstract principles: liberty versus equality; justice versus charity; authority versus consent; the right to life versus the right to choose. These conflicts must be settled by force or, as in the United States, by a regime of legalism. Those receiving an ideological kind of education and enjoying the benefits of tradition will feel guilty about their failure to "realize" the ideological principles; others will feel resentment. Persistent guilt, bad faith, and resentment are the public sentiments of an ideological style of politics and have their source in arbitrary power, not in sound moral judgment. And in such a regime, politics, viewed as the harmonization of the distinct interests embedded in an order of inherited practices, will gradually be pushed to the margin.

Hume was an astonished witness to this preposterous intrusion of ideology into politics. He distinguished between three kinds of political parties: those of affection (loyalty to ruling families), interest (loyalty to the practices and institutions that make a valuable way of life possible), and metaphysical principle. The first two have always existed and are legitimate, but the third is a pathology: "Parties from principle especially abstract speculative principle, are known only to modern times, and are, perhaps, the most extraordinary and unaccountable phenomenon, that has yet appeared in human affairs." Hume contemptuously described his age as the first "philosophic age," a time in which warring philosophical abstractions would dominate public speech and conduct. Legitimate parties of interest would continue to exist, but they would be stained, distracted, and distorted by an arbitrary and destructive ideological mode of politics.

This style of politics was resisted by Americans after it already held sway in Europe, but the temptation was here from the beginning. The watershed occurred when Abraham Lincoln presented the War Between the States not as a battle between concrete historic interests but as an ideological conflict between those who subscribe to certain abstract propositions about liberty and equality and those who do not. Before Lincoln began to employ such rhetoric, political parties openly pursued what Hume called "interests" (i.e., whole ways of life binding generations) and would debate whether the states or the federal government had authority to enact the preferred policy. Afterward, politics would be progressively trained to conceive of interests through the intoxicating and distracting fumes of an ideology. In time, only the abstract principles and slogans would remain, and people would eagerly embrace ideological political parties whose practice were positively against their culture and way of life.

Rather than recognize this style of politics as a moral catastrophe (Hume saw it as the most "extraordinary and unaccountable" happening in human affairs), American would celebrate it as a "progressive" achievement rooted in "American exceptionalism." America is the first "proposition nation," the first "universal nation," the first "credal nations, " and because of her ideological credentials, she is uniquely endowed, as President George W. Bush has said to lead a "global democratic revolution."

Garrulous gentlemen on a verandah,
Bibbers or non-bibbers of illicit potations,
Rehearsing the acta and the agenda
Of Republican or Democratic administrations - John Crowe Ransom

Karl Marx once said that religion is the opiate of the masses. He was profoundly wrong. Religion is profoundly revolutionary. Rather, at least in (nominally) democratic societies, voting is the opiate of the masses.

Nothing better illustrates this than the current Presidential election. With three "major" candidates, McCain, Clinton, and Obama, left in the race, there is little choice in political ideology. Sure, there are major personality differences, but all three of these candidates are some strain of pro-war socialist.

Perhaps this is too harsh on Obama, as he at least has consistently spoken out against the War in Iraq. However, I think it is that war that Obama is against, but I dont think he opposes nation building, humanitarian intervention, or other such leftist platitudes that lead to war. I merely think he’d lead us to war under a new (old) banner - making war is Peace Making. Perhaps I give him too little credit here. He is clearly the least odious of the three "major" candidates left in the race, but even if he is truly anti-war, only supporting defensive wars truly for defense of American interests, I could never vote for of him because of his socialist leanings.

"There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democrat and Republican Parties."--George Wallace

Come November, I will no doubt continue my streak of voting third party. I’d like to say that my streak is perfect, but it’s not. In 1992 I let myself be duped into voting for George H.W. Bush. He didnt win, and Im glad of that (not that Im a lover of Clinton, but he proved to be better than H.W., even if only because of the opposition he had after ’94). Then again, maybe Im not sure to continue my streak. Im starting more and more to believe the old libertarian line - dont vote, it only encourages them. If there were only a 5% voter turnout, politicians would have a much harder time claiming any legitimacy and maybe the opiate of the vote would lose its sedating power.

Four and three and two and one....

Having long ago moved away from a political blog for myself and moving away from mass reposting, I think Ill start posting more personal blog/writing/philosophizing (but not today though).   So, if youre interested in that mess, check in from time to time.

Jonathan

A friend of mine needs to rent/borrow a replica of the General Lee for one day. Any of yall know where I can get one?

Jonathan

Early voting starts in Georgia this week.  Go vote for Dr. Paul.  That way you'll be free to campaign and what not on Tuesday.

I stole this from Paul Gottfried because I think he shows a good job of describing the diversity (and the unity) or Ron Paul supporters. Oh, yeah, join the revolution.

Jonathan

A Revealing Rally
Posted by Paul Gottfried on November 19, 2007

A Revealing Rally

On Saturday November 10, on a visit to my wife's friends in South Philadelphia (near the turf immortalized by Rocky), I attended a Ron Paul rally at Independence Mall. By the time the hurried candidate arrived at the scene, at 1:45 PM, the mulling crowds already numbered in the thousands (perhaps tens of thousands); and those who showed up were jumping up and down with Ron Paul signs while chanting the candidate's name. The attendees were indeed a motley lot. Within about half a square mile I ran into such varied types as a visiting German priest who assured me that we were living in the end times, scads of self-described veterans who expressed anger at the Iraqi war of choice, working class blacks sporting Ron Paul paraphernalia, and immaculately dressed professionals who identified themselves as "paleos." I had never before encountered such a hodge-podge of humanity packed into so small a space in order to shout their support for a presidential candidate. Despite the media efforts to depict Dr. Paul as a rightwing kook or as an aging anarchist going nowhere, it dawned on me as I was standing there that this candidate is gaining momentum in all sorts of unexpected quarters. In any case he has far more traction than his high-placed adversaries may wish to believe.

In his utterly unpretentious manner and appearance, Ron Paul calls to mind the perpetually disheveled Ralph Nader. Despite their diametrically opposed views about public administration and the role of government, both figures have attracted devoted followers, who seem willing to listen and cheer, while their leaders go on about complicated issues. Neither of these offbeat presidential candidates has shown much PR pizzazz, and in public debates they often sound crotchety and certainly unwilling to suffer journalistic fools gladly. But this has been part of the appeal of these two figures, who come across as honest, public-minded intellectuals. They are the very opposite of Hillary Clinton, who is both scripted and disastrously inept when trying to sound sincere.
Dr. Paul's followers did not appear disappointed when he spent fifteen laborious minutes noting the structural defects of the Federal Reserve System, an interest that only a minority of those assembled probably cared deeply about. But what really brought them to the tips of their toes were the candidate's sneering references to the neoconservative instigators of the war in Iraq. Dr. Paul first stated his general principle that "we should neither bomb nor subsidize other countries," and then added this qualification. "It is not the American people but the neocons who should pay for the war damages." At that point the crowds went wild, taking up their by now ritualized cheer "Ron Paul, Ron Paul." Unless I'm mistaken, there was no one in the crowd who did not hate the war but loathed the neoconservatives even more.

This caused me to reflect that whether the next president would be Hillary or the neoconservatives' favorite Giuliani, neither victor would avoid massive, deep opposition. One is reminded here of the newly elected Abraham Lincoln, who in 1860 had not won a single vote in any of the Southern states on his way to the presidency. The crowd in which I was mingling at Independence Mall had undoubtedly the same hostile feelings toward Giuliani and more generally toward the Republican Party, which they believed had "betrayed its ideals." Although I am more skeptical than Ron Paul and his followers that the Republicans, outside of a few noble souls, ever held to such "ideals," I was struck by the widespread sentiment I encountered that day that the Republicans had abandoned their high principles.

On the way back to Center City, where I was to meet my wife after the rally, I ran into a black Ron Paul couple wearing multiple buttons on their clothes. When I asked them where they had located these treasures, they looked at me with surprise and then explained: "They're available online but you need a computer if you want to order them." That confirmed my impression that Ron Paul's campaign belongs to the computer age. His followers, whatever their race or social origin, reside online. Fortunately the couple was nice enough to sell me two buttons at cost, one of which I wore the next day when I visited a used bookstore on Bainbridge Street, on the South end of Philly. The store owner looked like a decayed hippy still struggling to get home from Woodstock; and he probably had gone through life smoking myriads of joints. When he caught sight of my button, however, he simply slurred the words "he's a good man."

That utterance took me aback because it would have been inconceivable that the same person would have supported Ronald Reagan, or even less plausibly Barry Goldwater. But Ron Paul, the morally outraged antiwar constitutionalist, and an obstetrician who had delivered babies in rural Texas, often free of charge, does not strike anyone as a big-business Republican. He is an anti-establishmentarian, a fact that became apparent when my wife's friend Denise, who would never in a million years consider herself any kind of "conservative," commented on how much more principled Ron Paul seems in comparison to Hillary and Rudy. That is undoubtedly an integral part of the candidate's appeal, and it might be why he is becoming a factor in the presidential election. Although I would place my money on the candidates of the national media, the Council on Foreign Relations, public administration and the apartments located on both sides of Central Park to hold on to their government, Ron may soon be giving the power elite cause for concern.

This Monday, 10 September 7,  at 7 p.m., Ron Paul supporters will meet at Western Sizzlin in Rome to meet each other and organize a local campaign on behalf of Congressman Paul.  Come one, come all, bring your ideas and lets get to work.

excerpted form the Mansion

In fact, by 1919 even the five-year-old Jeffersonians like I was then were even a little blase' about war heroes, not only unscratched ones but wounded too getting off trains from Memphis Junction or New Orleans.  Not that I mean that even the unscratched ones actually called themselves heroes or thought they were or in fact thought one way or the other about it until they got home and found the epithet being dinned at them from all directions until finally some of them, a few of them, began to believe that perhaps they were.  I mean, dinned at them by the ones who organised and correlated the dinning-the ones who hadn't gone to that war and so were already on hand in advance to organise the big debarkation-port parades and the smalller ones that hadn't gone to that one and didn't intend to go to the next one nor the one after that either, as long as all they had to do to stay out was buy the tax-free bonds and organise the hero-dinning parades so that the next crop of eight- and nine- and ten-year-old males could see the divisional shoulder patches and the wound- and service-stripes and the medal ribbons.

Until some of them anyway would begin to believe that that many voices dinning it at them must be right, and they were heroes.  Because, according to Uncle Gavin, who had been a soldier too in his fashion (in the American Field Service with the French army in '16 and '17 until we got into it, then still in France as a Y.M.C.A. secretary or whatever they were called), they had nothing else left:  young men or even boys most of whom had only the vaguest or completely erroneous idea of where and what Europe was, and none at all about armies, let alone about war, snatched up by lot overnight and regimented into an expeditionary force, to survive (if they could) before they were twenty-five years old what they would not even recognise at the time to be the biggest experience of their lives.  Then to be spewed, again willy-nilly and again overnight, back into what they believed would be the familiar world they had been told they were enduring disruption and risking injury and death so that it would still be there when they came back, only to find that it wasn't there any more.  So that the bands and the parades and the barbecues and all the rest of the hero-dinning not only would happen only that once and was already fading even before they could get adjusted to it, it was already on the way out before the belated last of them even got back home, already saying to them above the cold congealing meat and the flat beer while the last impatient brazen chord died away:  "All right, little boys; eat your beef and potato salad and drink your beer and get out of our way, who are already up to our necks in this new world whose single and principal industry is not just solvent but dizzily remunerative peace"

So, according to Gavin, they had to believe they were heroes though they couldn't remember now exactly at what point or by what action they had reached, entered for a moment or a second, that heroic state.  Because otherwise they had nothing left:  with only a third of life over, to know now that they had already experienced their greatest experience, and now to find that the world for which they had so endured and risked was in their absence so altereed out of recognition by the ones who had stayed safe at home as to have no place for them in it any more.