Requiescat in Pace "Gus" Duvall

An actor with many memorable roles, Robert Duvall described "Gus" McCrae as his favorite and most meaningful. There are many memorable scenes with that character, some of which are referenced here pretty regularly. 

The one I think about most, though, is this one. The first time I saw it, it seemed almost cruelly flippant; but the longer I live, the more I agree with his companion's conclusion. "He's right, boys. The best thing you can do with Death is ride off from it."

Now we ride off from his. Dust to dust. 

Public School for Slow Learners

AVI is reflecting on Sunday School.

I was thinking of something by CS Lewis in relation to this - something about the world as a hotel vs. a prison vs. a school - and tracked it down today.

Christ said it was difficult for “the rich” to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, referring, no doubt, to “riches” in the ordinary sense. But I think it really covers riches in every sense—good fortune, health, popularity and all the things one wants to have. All these things tend—just as money tends—to make you feel independent of God, because if you have them you are happy already and contented in this life. You don’t want to turn away to anything more, and so you try to rest in a shadowy happiness as if it could last for ever. But God wants to give you a real and eternal happiness. Consequently He may have to take all these “riches” away from you: if He doesn’t, you will go on relying on them. It sounds cruel, doesn’t it? But I am beginning to find out that what people call the cruel doctrines are really the kindest ones in the long run. I used to think it was a “cruel” doctrine to say that troubles and sorrows were “punishments.” But I find in practice that when you are in trouble, the moment you regard it as a “punishment,” it becomes easier to bear. If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it’s not so bad.

Imagine a set of people all living in the same building. Half of them think it is a hotel, the other half think it is a prison. Those who think it a hotel might regard it as quite intolerable, and those who thought it was a prison might decide that it was really surprisingly comfortable.

At the sheriff's debate this weekend, the sitting sheriff was discussing a program he's introduced into his jail to allow prisoners access to GED qualified courses, with an eventual possibility of proctored exams to gain a GED. In that sense the prison is become a school. You can't leave, the discipline is authoritarian, and the food's not that good, but you do have a chance to learn and improve if you choose to do so.

Yet if you go to our public schools these days, you'll find they are surrounded by fences, with single points of entry, with metal detectors and armed deputies guarding them and inspecting your bags for contraband. You can't leave during school hours, the discipline is authoritarian, and the food's not that good, but there is a chance to learn and improve if you choose to do so. 

You might get a degree that's the rough equivalent of a GED, maybe; I would wager that the average GED holder knows more than the average high school graduate, because they cared enough as an adult to study when nobody was forcing them.

The school buses are yellow instead of white, there's more color on the walls, you have a little more choice of what clothing to wear and you do get to go home and night and on weekends. Still, the similarities are striking. Prison is just public school for slow learners, I suppose. 

A Feast in Iraq

I came across this picture this morning while looking for something else, but since I was just talking about some of those meetings and conversations with the tribes it seemed relevant. This was taken from a meeting at a tribal compound near Mahmudiyah in February 2009. The feast followed a meeting between ourselves and their sheiks, one of whom was a US-educated engineer. It was a majestic feast, featuring boiled sheep, rice, vegetables, and those delicious sheets of bread you can see draped over everything to soften from the steam. 

I imagine they had watched Lawrence of Arabia, and were trying to live up to expectations to some degree. Exactly as pictured in the movie, we never saw any women there -- though you can see one of ours in the photo. Everyone was armed, but we felt enough trust with them at that time to remove helmets. In 2007 we were getting attacked daily, but in 2008 there was very significant improvement. I stayed for the first half of 2009, and I think that year only once did a patrol I was with get fired upon. It seemed like we had won. 

Cf.

In academic or legal publications, one occasionally sees the abbreviation "cf.," which means "confer." It usually follows a claim or a case law finding, with the intent being that you consider it against an alternative claim or finding that the cf. cites. 

So here is a good example: 

The New York Times: Gabbard’s 2020 Election Claims Put Her Back in Favor With Trump. "Ms. Gabbard appeared at a warehouse in Fulton County, Ga., where ballots from the 2020 vote were stored. As the F.B.I. conducted a raid, she observed and oversaw their work. After the operation, Ms. Gabbard met with the F.B.I. agents and put Mr. Trump on speaker phone to address them... with the renewed investigation into baseless claims about fraud during the 2020 election, she is back in the spotlight, and Mr. Trump’s good graces." [Emphasis added.]

cf. Not The Bee: FBI says they have found major irregularities in the 2020 election in Georgia. "Yes, they are officially investigating whether Fulton County conspired to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump. The irregularities, including illegally certified ballots and thousands of double-scanned ballots, led the FBI to establish that there is probable cause to raid the election office and look for motive. Here are the five major irregularities cited...." 

I wonder how much longer the 'baseless/no evidence/unfounded' language game can continue? There's lots and lots of evidence now. Proof is still being established, but evidence has been clearly demonstrated for years. 

Follow-Up On The Sheriff’s Debate

I went to the event. Nobody was checking voter registration cards or IDs. There was no obvious security or LEOs with pepper spray either. That was all talk.

Mostly the debate was exactly what you would expect. The only very interesting thing was the question about ICE. Sheriff Farmer described the process by which ICE might issue a detainer for someone the deputies had arrested, and that it was up to ICE whether or not to drive out and pick that person up. He said he would cooperate with Federal agents if they did, but didn’t go any farther than that.

His opponent said that he would “aggressively” cooperate with ICE, and used most of his time on that question to rhetorically paint illegal immigrants as inherently bad people, and then to tie them to murder, rape, human trafficking, and child abuse. That was the biggest difference between the candidates apparent in the debate.

I thought the sitting sheriff displayed an appropriate amount of realism as to what can be accomplished with the resources and budget of this rural North Carolina county. His opponent promised to do more, but of course he did. 

A good question from the audience touched on the common peace issues raised in the last post. Both candidates gave proper answers grounded in being employees of the people and bound to provide security for public debates without taking sides, regardless of their personal ideology. I don’t know if they both meant it, but they did at least know that this was the right thing to affirm. 

The Common Peace

Not long ago... ok, it was nearly twenty years ago... I was in Iraq working with the tribes as we were trying to bring peace to a long-troubled land. One time I had a conversation in my bad French and a tribesman's bad English (but very good French) about Thomas Jefferson. We talked about different ways of approaching democracy, of trying to achieve fairness in outcomes, of trying to get past Sunni/Shia or Arab/Kurd/Persian divisions, as well of course as resolving the old unsettled tribal feuds that were behind a lot of the trouble. 

I think about that a lot these days. 

Tomorrow the Republican party here locally is holding a candidate debate and meet-and-greet for the candidates for sheriff. They have decided, the GOP, to rent a private room so they can close the event except to registered Republicans, who are supposed to present their voter registration card at the door. A local GOP party official has been posting on Facebook about having Democrats who show up arrested for trespassing, and has alluded to the possibility of pepper spray being employed against them.

Now I should mention that, although this is a primary election, there are only the two Republican candidates; whoever wins the Republican primary will be the sheriff. That is partly a failure by Democrats to field a candidate, but it does have the effect of eliminating both Democrats and unaffiliated voters from the chance to see the candidates debate for the quite important public office. The decision to privatize a public good is coherent with a lot of Republican ideas -- some of which I agree with, such as privatizing public education given the collapse of the effectiveness of the public education system in much of the country -- but here many citizens will be excluded from even listening to the discussion. 

It seems to me that upholding the common peace, which allows us to debate and discuss our problems together even when we disagree, is a matter very much germane to the question of who would make a better sheriff. It's certainly something we should be thinking about; that common peace seems somewhat frayed of late. 

The Man Who Fell to Earth

I can't recommend highly enough a biography of John von Neumann, "The Man from the Future," by Ananyo Bhattacharya. The author's appealing style, choice of anecdotes, and mastery of a wide variety of scientific fields make him a skilled and entertaining biographer.

Von Neumann, born in 1903 to a wealthy, titled Jewish family in Budapest, was one of an unparalleled outbreak of geniuses from that doomed demographic cluster, including Leo Szilard and Edward Teller. As Bhattacharya notes, even in such august company, if Teller and Szilard seemed like men from Mars, von Neumann hailed from another galaxy. Later, at the IAS in Princeton, where he regularly rubbed shoulders with Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel, von Neumann struck contemporaries as the sharpest of the three.

Bhattacharya calls him the Man from the Future because he played the part of Johhny Appleseed in so many new fields. Few mathematicians affected so many areas, from quantum mechanics to the Manhattan Project and the nascent computer business, including some of the first stirrings of interest in the possibility of artificial intelligence. Along the way he planted some of the earliest seeds of political and economic game theory as well as nanotechnology.

Edward Teller was among the many colleagues who marvelled at von Neumann's ability to speak to that crowd's often precocious children. Teller said that von Neumann managed to speak to Teller's 3-year-old son as an equal, and he always rather wondered if von Neumann wasn't communicating with his colleagues by the same technique. He was never unapproachable or condescending, however, but unusually sociable and well-liked.

Von Neumann's father, who saw the writing on the wall even before World War I, insisted that his sons study something remunerative and learn the many languages that would ensure their ability to earn a living in whatever new country they might be forced to adopt. His mother, an accomplished musician, insisted on piano lessons. To please his father, von Neumann enrolled in the University of Göttingen. On the train there, other students, knowing a little of his already promising published career, assumed he would be studying Maths. No, he said, I already know Maths. I'll be studying Chemical Engineering. He excelled by giving it a minor fraction of his attention while he continued to pursue his real interests, including overhauling troubled fields in mathematics. To please his mother, von Neumann took piano lessons. His family wondered why he seemed to do little but play scales, before they discovered he was making appropriate noise while he read a book on the piano stand.

He lived to be only 53, dying the year after I was born.

Icicles on a Balmy Day

 

It was a good day. 

The Scales Fall Away

The 2nd was always about being able to resist. 

Poke Salad

This song turns up in a Ray Wylie Hubbard tune. 

Against Chivalry

Here is a woman actively working against the goods that the virtue of chivalry embraces. 

Don't do this, not that any of you are dumb enough to do such things. Many men have been exposed to a great deal more violence than women, and are prepared to deal with it at a higher level. No one should want that sort of equality to be achieved. 

Embracing the Inner Knight

Sly sent this article from the American Thinker on a topic well familiar to readers of the Hall. 

Parts of it are better than other parts even though it is on a topic near and dear to my heart. For example, of course the CIA doesn't swear an oath to "eschew deceit" as a knight might have done; keeping such an oath would rather eliminate the value of such an agency. Nevertheless the CIA officers who in my youth taught me very much were often the most patriotic of men and women, highly honorable and upright, and loyal to a fault to the American project. That was what allowed such good and honorable people to engage in shadowy projects without losing their core. 

And then there's this section: 

Are we better, as a society, without virtue?  Are we happier, as a people, since the philosophers declared that God is dead?  Do men behave more or less honorably than they did in the past?  Have pornography and the indulgence of strange sexual appetites taught people to respect each other and behave nobly?  Are there fewer rapes and murders now that several generations of men have been disarmed of their masculinity?  Do we kill fewer people during war because we have chosen science over moral conviction?  Are our streets safer because we have decided that decrying sin is too “judgmental” for our modern tastes?  Do we have more selfless heroes, brave knights, and noble leaders in this age?

These are rhetorical questions, but in fact it's hard to say what the truth is about some of them. It seems likely, for example, that there actually are fewer rapes: the crime rate has been falling since 1992, and even though rape reporting is higher among women than in previous generations, there seem to be fewer rapes. The statistics are also muddy because FBI changed its definition in 2013 in order to capture more things as "rape," which gave the appearance of a huge sudden spike but was really an artifact of this definitional change. Even given increased reporting and also a definition change to expand the category, however, we do seem to be down from the 1992 high. I don't of course suppose that men being "disarmed of their masculinity" is the cause of this even if there is a correlation; but the rhetorical question's answer isn't as obvious as the author supposes. 

Likewise, the conclusion: 

But we are not a happy people.  We are not a brave people.  We are not an honorable people willing to fight each day for what is right.  

Speak for yourself, sir. I know some very brave and honorable people, and even a few happy ones.

Dialectical Liberalism

Dad29 sends an article built around the concept that Liberalism failed by succeeding. 

If Patrick Deneen’s 2018 Why Liberalism Failed didn’t make us uncomfortable enough with the Lockean ideas underlying the American founding, his Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future, published five years later, made us really squirm. “Liberalism has failed,” Deneen writes, “not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself.” In other words, liberalism “has failed because it has succeeded."...

To put it simply, it’s not entirely correct to say that the role of truth is to “limit” freedom, as if the main consequence of a moral imperative against killing, for example, is that it narrows the range of permissible actions towards other human beings; or that the immorality of sexual acts outside of marriage simply restricts what we can do with our bodies and what we can do with the bodies of others....

Pope Leo argues that if we concentrate on seeing the truth more clearly, we will be less prone to “short circuit” human rights by proliferating falsehoods that promise freedom but don’t deliver:

The right to freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, religious freedom, and even the right to life are being restricted in the name of other so-called new rights, with the result that the very framework of human rights is losing its vitality and creating space for force and oppression. This occurs when each right becomes self-referential, and especially when it becomes disconnected from reality, nature, and truth.

This 250th anniversary of our nation is an opportune time to reexamine any qualms we might have with political liberalism. For if we suspect that liberalism has “failed” because it has allowed us to be too free, we should consider the possibility that it is we who have failed because we have lost sight of the crucial truths that our Founders considered self-evident. 

There are a lot more specific examples in the article which I won't cite here; you can read them if you like. You can also read reviews of both books widely; here's one from the LA Review of Books which, as you can imagine from the home of Hollywood, isn't a fan. The reviewer cautions that "the book appeared a few months ago, during a time in which a dark and authoritarian anti-liberalism has risen to prominence" -- the date of the review is 2023, the height of the Biden Administration. The shadow of Dark Authoritarianism is always rising in LA. 

These authors all seem to think that the choice is between the Old Way and the New Way. What strikes me immediately is that the conflict fits neatly into the dialectic. In the dialectic, a thesis is rejected and an opposing antithesis appears; but eventually people figure out that neither is quite right, and work out the good things that each side had. This is called the synthesis. 

Dialectical political theories have a bad history: both Hegel and Marx were champions of them. The error, though, lies in thinking that the logic of the dialectic is a pure logic that can therefore be worked out in advance. Marxists have been writing for more than a century (almost two!) on the inevitable workings of the logic of economic history, only to find their predictions always falsified.

As we very often discuss here, the physical world isn't logical but analogical. All analogies always break; part of the work is figuring out where the break is going to happen. This is the I.3 point that I kept returning us to during the reading of the EN: it's a category error to attempt to apply strict logic to ethics or politics, as if you could provide proofs for them.

Still, the core idea that we are working towards a synthesis of the Old Way and the New Way is very likely true. We should be looking back at the Old Way to see what was good about it, as we also look at the New Way to identify what were genuine improvements we'd like to protect in the synthesis. On such terms, the task isn't "reactionary" but progress -- just progress in an orthogonal direction from the way in which "progress" has been defined by the New Way for so long.