Cases up, deaths down
From Issues and Insights:
It's getting rare to find reporting that focuses on hospitalizations and deaths instead of whatever they mean these days by "case counts," but it's out there if you hunt hard enough. Bloomberg started carrying daily updated charts many months ago. I check them often to compare the 7-day-average "case" trends against the "death" trends: big uptick in cases, small impact in deaths.
On the other hand, in just the last couple of months I've learned of two friends-of-friends in their 60s or 70s who died of COVID: both were unvaccinated, and neither pursued monoclonal antibody treatments. I don't get it. Texas Governor Abbott just announced this week that he was opening a number of outpatient antibody infusion clinics, but no one I talk to seems to have heard of the treatment at all, though it's FDA-approved and seems to work brilliantly. There's a nearly complete press blackout on the subject. It has to be administered fairly early; you can't wait until you're in dire straits and hospitalized.
West's Founding IX: Moral Laws
We are reaching the heart of what interested me about this book: the refutation of many scholars, whose work has influenced my own understanding, who held that the Founders had not meant for the government to morally shape individuals as a matter of respect for individual liberty. West is going after some big players here, including Gordon Wood, Alan Gibson, Harvey Mansfield, and Peter Onuf; he is also partly rejecting Thomas Pangle, Jean Yarbrough, and even Leo Strauss (to whom he is obviously philosophically aligned to some degree, but whose arguments he finds flaws with on several occasions).
West is doing it right, too: not offering a different interpretation, but offering new textual evidence that seems clear-cut on the point. It is possible that he is leaving things out; for example, at one point he offers an argument that the Founders often aimed at a generalized Christianity, but he doesn't mention Jefferson's well-known kind words about Islam. Now, those words were more foreign policy and diplomacy than anything else, and there is more to the story. Still, the fact that it goes unmentioned makes me wonder what else he has omitted that might not fit his vision.
The silence proves nothing, however; his actual inclusions are very impressive.
One of them has limits he is up-front about. He quotes John Locke on the 'four kinds of moral law,' and notes that there is no evidence he knows of that the Founders used this concept (though some of them read the book in which it is mentioned). (188-9) Rather, West says, he is bringing it up to give us a framework for considering how the Founders' actions can be interpreted. Locke is himself following Aquinas' tradition for the most part, which West doesn't mention at all.
Locke's four laws are:
1) Divine Revelation ("Eternal Law" for Aquinas)
2) Natural Law ("Natural Law" for Aquinas)
3) Civil Law ("Human Law" for Aquinas)
4) "The law of fashion and private censure" (This is not a kind of law for Aquinas, but rather the domain of honor and shame)
For the first, he has citations even from Jefferson that a foundation on the divine is the only firm foundation for the defense of liberty. (190-1). Divine law is known to us only by revelation, and reason cannot access it directly.
Natural law is derived by reason from what is observed about Creation; to know God's works is to learn something about God and God's intentions. What reason can derive about the moral structure of the world is of the second water, but it is still higher than man-made civil law. Human-made laws that violate natural law are and ought to be void; as we have seen throughout, the Founders thought a system of civil law that violated natural rights ought to be overthrown.
Civil law is the least interesting category. It should serve the natural law by spelling out consequences for violating the natural rights of others, and by offering non-violent ways of settling disputes ('torts,' for example). Here too is public education, which is supposed to shape and train the virtues in the hope of raising up citizens fit for a free society, its offices, and its duties.
The fourth category is one that I wouldn't normally think of as being a sort of law, but West makes a good case that the Founders might have done. As he points out, the Founders used this a lot to try to shape moral society through praise, condemnation, celebratory speeches, funerary speeches, honors, shames, and so and and so forth.
West is also good on the limits of Enlightenment thought in the view of the Founders. A lot of scholars view the Founding as an Enlightenment project. West shows that the Founders, though aware of the Enlightenment and interested in it, were also skeptical of how far pure reason could take you. He has good citations to Jefferson, Adams, Madison, and Washington's Farewell Address. (198-200)
So, if the ultimate metaphysical ground for natural law is the divine law, ought government to promote religion? West argues that the Founders were strongly in favor of this almost across the board; he gives an argument that Washington thought the government should promote religion even if it were thought to be a false religion rather than to leave the common people without a divine warrant to encourage their practicing of good habits. (Confer with Aristotle's arguments, well known to readers of this page, that virtue is a kind of habituation of one's character through practice until excellence becomes habitual.)
West concludes that the Founders were open to government promoting religion, and less open to government supporting a particular religion. They defended free exercise, but did not defend the idea that all religions were equally deserving of support from the government. As Tom noted in the comments below, states did in fact have state religions at and after the Founding. West argues that, at the Federal level, there were three basic approaches to what ought to be done:
1) A specific Protestant denomination;
2) "[W]hat Adams called 'the general principles of Christianity'"
3) "[T]he God of Liberty who endows all men with inalienable rights, who is identified neither as biblical nor anti-biblical." (212)
Perhaps other approaches are possible, but that is what he thinks the Founders did.
The chapter closes with some other clear-cut encouragements by the Founders in the direction of actively using government to develop citizen virtue. The strongest one is militia service, which is meant to inculcate courage but also the sense that the defense of the free state is a personal duty of every citizen. Jefferson thought we should all carry guns, and use them regularly:
"A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind... Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks." (216) Jefferson means here taking walks in the country, and shooting small game and birds-a-wing over land. There are too many people for that today, and too many cities, but it was common practice even among proto-environmentalists like Aldo Leopold in his A Sand County Almanac.
That also brings to my mind my favorite quote from Francis Parkman, one of America's great early naturists and educators. "For the student there is, in its season, no better place than the saddle, and no better companion than the rifle or the oar."
I am convinced, with only the reservation mentioned above, that the Founders were hugely interested in shaping American moral character in salutatory directions. They could adopt this without much fear because they had an idea of the good to which 'salutatory' pointed that was rooted in natural law. The great hazard of a similar movement today -- that 'health' would become aligned with the interests of the state and its powerful corporate bedmates -- was not present because of a robust, rooted philosophical tradition.
Rogues in the House
The title of one of REH's Conan stories, and also this song by a band called Ironsword.
Aristotle On Shame
As regards a weekend discussion at AVI's, shame actually functions similarly to justice-as-lawfulness in Aristotle's ethics. Yet he is much less willing to assert that shame's encouragement of virtuous behavior is a kind of virtue than that justice-as-lawfulness is at least sort-of like virtue.
Shame should not be described as a virtue; for it is more like a feeling than a state of character. It is defined, at any rate, as a kind of fear of dishonour, and produces an effect similar to that produced by fear of danger; for people who feel disgraced blush, and those who fear death turn pale. Both, therefore, seem to be in a sense bodily conditions, which is thought to be characteristic of feeling rather than of a state of character.The feeling is not becoming to every age, but only to youth. For we think young people should be prone to the feeling of shame because they live by feeling and therefore commit many errors, but are restrained by shame; and we praise young people who are prone to this feeling, but an older person no one would praise for being prone to the sense of disgrace, since we think he should not do anything that need cause this sense. For the sense of disgrace is not even characteristic of a good man, since it is consequent on bad actions (for such actions should not be done; and if some actions are disgraceful in very truth and others only according to common opinion, this makes no difference; for neither class of actions should be done, so that no disgrace should be felt); and it is a mark of a bad man even to be such as to do any disgraceful action. To be so constituted as to feel disgraced if one does such an action, and for this reason to think oneself good, is absurd; for it is for voluntary actions that shame is felt, and the good man will never voluntarily do bad actions. But shame may be said to be conditionally a good thing; if a good man does such actions, he will feel disgraced; but the virtues are not subject to such a qualification. And if shamelessness-not to be ashamed of doing base actions-is bad, that does not make it good to be ashamed of doing such actions. Continence too is not virtue, but a mixed sort of state; this will be shown later. Now, however, let us discuss justice.
In a way this is a strange conclusion, because justice-as-lawfulness is going to end up turning on either fear or shame: the coward is pushed to the front by law, but only because he fears being put to death for disobeying the law, or because he fears being shamed as a coward by his community. The law's requirement is a rational principle, though, whereas shame is merely an emotion -- one that might be rightly or wrongly felt.
Even so, it is 'conditionally a good thing,' shame -- the condition being that it produces right action. Virtue is not good only conditionally, because it produces right action essentially.
Georgia Update
Ballots rejected by the machines were returned to election poll workers, who were allowed to alter them and then have them count. "In all, more than 5,000 of the 148,000 absentee ballots cast — or about 3% — in Georgia's largest county required some form of human intervention, according to logs obtained from Fulton County[,]"
The article notes that isn't enough to swing Georgia, which had a final margin of almost 13,000; but that's just one county, and it's just one mode of changing votes. (Recall, too, the Time Magazine 'Secret History of the 2020 Election' in which one of the things the self-described conspirators claimed to have done was to have recruited an "army" of poll workers on their side.)
West's Founding VIII: That the Founders Intended to Develop Public Morality
So we begin Part II of West's book, "The Moral Conditions of Freedom." This first chapter is devoted to simply proving, against a host of leading scholars, that the Founders took it to be part of the purpose of government to inculcate virtue among the citizens. West accomplishes this by quotations from founding documents and charters.
He begins with three documents that focus on the education of the citizenry, including the 1785 charter for the University of Georgia (quoted here). "As it is the distinguishing happiness of free governments that civil order should be the result of choice and not necessity, and that the common wishes of the people become the laws of the land, their public prosperity and even existence very much depends upon suitably forming the minds and morals of their citizens. When the minds of people in general are viciously disposed and unprincipled and their conduct disorderly, a free government will be attended with greater confusions and with evils more horrid than the wild, uncultivated state of nature." (165-6)
Scholars have wrongly thought that 'liberty' and 'republicanism' -- or 'liberty' and 'virtue' -- were opposed to one another. The concept, as West reconstructs it through quotations to these scholars, is that liberty is about doing what you want; virtue is about doing what you ought (and republicanism, requiring virtue, ends up being a kind of freedom-that-binds-you, a paradox of sorts). Some go as far as suggesting that the Founders rejected, through their embrace of freedom of conscience, any notion that the government should try to train its citizenry towards virtue.
Returning to the state constitutions and other foundational documents, West shows many clear examples that this conception is wrong. In addition to The Federalist, he gives the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights: "no free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles." (175) He finds similar language in Pennsylvania, Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire; and similar language to the opening quote from Georgia in North Carolina and Massachusetts.
Likewise above the state level, he has quotations from the 1776 resolution of the Continental Congress that the powers they were claiming were "for the preservation of internal peace, virtue, and good order, as well as for the defense of their lives, liberties, and properties[.]" (176) That puts the defense of natural rights -- life, liberty, property -- in the last and perhaps fundamental place, but raises the preservation of 'virtue' as well as 'peace and good order' to near parity.
This should be no surprise, West suggests, given that the Founders equated moral law with the very natural law they were intending to enshrine. Jefferson is quoted on his foreign policy, which he describes as "the moral law of our nature" which is "the moral law to which man has been subjected by his creator," adding, "The moral duties which exist between individual and individual in a state of nature accompany him into a state of society[.]" (177) Hamilton also: "the established rules of morality and justice are applicable to nations as well as to individuals; that the former as well as the latter are bound to keep their promises, to fulfill their engagements, to respect the rights of property..." is natural law, and also the moral law. (178)
Private virtue is not enough, given that not all are equally capable of virtue nor inclined to it; and so, moral institutions are required. (181-3). In this, West says, they are in agreement with "philosophers both ancient and modern." (184) He quotes a scholar who mentions Aristotle by name, but cites a different section than the one that occurs to me, to whit, Aristotle on the function of law with respect to justice:
Since the lawless man was seen to be unjust and the law-abiding man just, evidently all lawful acts are in a sense just acts; for the acts laid down by the legislative art are lawful, and each of these, we say, is just. Now the laws in their enactments on all subjects aim at the common advantage either of all or of the best or of those who hold power, or something of the sort; so that in one sense we call those acts just that tend to produce and preserve happiness and its components for the political society. And the law bids us do both the acts of a brave man (e.g. not to desert our post nor take to flight nor throw away our arms), and those of a temperate man (e.g. not to commit adultery nor to gratify one's lust), and those of a good-tempered man (e.g. not to strike another nor to speak evil), and similarly with regard to the other virtues and forms of wickedness, commanding some acts and forbidding others; and the rightly-framed law does this rightly, and the hastily conceived one less well. This form of justice, then, is complete virtue, but not absolutely, but in relation to our neighbour.... What the difference is between virtue and justice in this sense is plain from what we have said; they are the same but their essence is not the same[.]
What Aristotle means here is that the law should compel everyone to act as if they were virtuous. Thus, the coward will be enjoined to act as if he were brave, and punished if he does otherwise; the temperate and the intemperate will be required to act temperately, etc. This means that justice (i.e. lawfulness) and virtue are the same in terms of the conduct they produce, but not the same in essence: the virtuous man does it because he is virtuous, without compulsion, and thus is better than the lawful.
West notes an important difference in that the Founders separated public virtue from private virtue, leaving a great deal more leeway in private life. Not complete leeway, as he points out: even religious liberty is not unlimited in these charters, which say that it cannot excuse 'licentiousness.' (175-6, 180) Yet I believe he has successfully shown that the Founders thought of encouraging the virtues necessary for citizenship as a task that government and especially its educational systems both should and must undertake.
UPDATE: West doesn’t mention him, but the want/ought discussion of liberty and virtue is also present in fellow Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant. For Kant, what proves that a rational being is free and not driven like an animal by base desire is his ability to choose what he ought instead of what he wants. Even metaphysically freedom is proven by doing the virtuous thing instead of the desirable thing.
Farewell, Afghanistan
U.S. State Department advises all remaining Americans to leave Afghanistan "immediately," but also that they're on their own about doing it because the American government can't help them anymore.
The Most Serious of People
Coincident to the former President's titanic birthday bash (to which climate envoy John Kerry took his private jet), the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally is taking fire from the New York Times for the second year in a row. Iowahawk reports.
Olympic Nonsense
The gold medal karate match was won by the guy who got knocked out in it, because the actual winner was disqualified for having kicked too hard.
That's not how fighting works, guys. Even in We Are The World happy globalism land, if you got knocked out you're not the one who won the fight.
DOJ to Investigate Phoenix Police
Police in Phoenix had better be very circumspect in how they deal with any protests for a while.
In a news release, the department announced the “investigation will assess all types of use of force by PhxPD officers, including deadly force.
“The investigation will also seek to determine whether PhxPD engages in retaliatory activity against people for conduct protected by the First Amendment[.]"
Just a coincidence.
Intrigue in Saudi Arabia Threatens CIA Network
Here is an interesting story that has made the Swiss papers. (If you're curious about the URL, ".ch" is the country code for Switzerland, or "Confœderatio Helvetica" as they are properly known.)
The upshot is that the relatively recent shift in the Saudi royal family displaced a number of formerly powerful guys, some of whom had CIA ties as well as ties to Saudi intelligence. Now they're abroad, the Kingdom would like them back, and they're trying to avoid being sent home by filing lawsuits. These lawsuits entail revealing a lot they know about how the Agency has been operating in the Middle East -- much to the consternation of the United States government.
You probably won't read this story in the US press, which is slavishly devoted to the intelligence community. Nevertheless I have confirmed the details with Saudi contacts, who view the guy as a fugitive and are rather incensed that our government is meddling in his hoped-for extradition.
REH Was Right: Babylonian Edition
Ancient Babylon had an advanced form of mathematics we had thought was invented by Pythagoras.
The Eviction Moratorium as a Practical Test of West
West's book, which we have been examining, laid out three tests for justified revolution.
1) The ends of government are perverted, and,
2) Public liberty manifestly endangered, and,
3) All other means of redress are ineffectual.
Now the end of government is the defense of natural rights, and property is a natural right of the first water according to the Founders. The eviction moratorium not only forbids landlords from exercising their private property rights, it creates felony Federal crimes -- without legislation -- should they dare to do so. This is clearly perverse: the natural right is being not just refused, the natural right is being criminalized.
Public liberty is manifestly endangered by this. For one thing landlords are being bankrupted, causing them to lose the property that it was their natural right to possess and use. They are threatened with prison, a very pragmatic loss of liberty.
So what about condition three? The prior CDC moratorium was challenged in court, and ruled unconstitutional by the Sixth Circuit. Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh affirmed this judgment in his dicta. (UPDATE: see Elise in the comments of the previous post for an alternative reading of what Kavanaugh did.) The Biden administration issued another CDC moratorium anyway, in spite of the courts, and admitting that the courts will probably reject this one too.
On Tuesday, President Biden said he's conferred with constitutional scholars, and the "bulk" of them say the most recent CDC order is "not likely to pass constitutional muster.""But," he added, "there are several key scholars who think that it may and it’s worth the effort."So Biden asked the CDC "to go back and consider other options that may be available to them.”“Whether that option will pass constitutional muster...I can’t tell you,” Biden said. “ I don’t know. There are a few scholars who say it will and others who say it’s not likely to.“But, at a minimum, by the time it gets litigated, it will probably give some additional time while we’re getting that $45 billion out to people who are, in fact, behind in the rent and don’t have the money.”
So what happens when we see that the other means of redress are in fact ineffectual? West quotes the Essex Result (of 1778):
"the equivalent every man receives, as a consideration for the rights he has surrendered [in leaving the state of nature to form a social compact]... consists principally in the security of his person and property... [F]or if the equivalent is taken back, those natural rights which were parted with to purchase it return to the original proprietor." (137)
Note the specific requirement to defend person and property. Both are being taken by force: their property is effectively seized, their rights over it at least temporarily void, and their persons threatened with felony prison terms if they disobey this lawless order. They went to the courts, obtained relief, and were denied it by executive usurpation.
Prudence may caution landlords to try the courts again, in the hope that the second time around the government might agree to restore their rights and perhaps compensate them for damages. If this is a transient harm, as the Declaration suggests, it might be borne in patience.
Nevertheless please note that it is exactly the kind of offense that dissolves the social contract under our founding theory, restores the right to resume the state of nature, throw off the government, and constitute a new one. The powers that be do not seem to understand that they are playing with fire.
West's Founding VII: Natural Rights and Public Policy
This will be the last section on Part I of West's book, which is a description of the political theory of the Founders as he understands it. Part II, "The Moral Considerations of Freedom," follows after.
Both foreign and domestic policy can be derived in a few short strokes once the principle is accepted that government's sole purpose is to secure the natural rights of the citizenry. In West's formulation, the Declaration lays out foreign policy succinctly when it speaks of "one people [dissolving] the political bands which have connected them with another, and [assuming] among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them[.]" A people have a right to do that; but because it is only a 'free and equal' station to which they are entitled, their new government has no right to interfere with any other except in cases of self-defense. (141)
West does not like the term "isolationism," which he describes as pejorative. Nevertheless he approves both of Hamilton's and Jefferson's refusal to join the French Revolution's attempt to export its ideology, and their criticisms of France for shifting into an ideology-exporting mode. (145) Washington's discussion of 'entangling alliances' (especially referring to France) was repeated by Jefferson in his own day, in spite of his pro-French leanings. (ibid) West's basic idea is that the natural rights theory requires America to mind its own business, leaving other nations to do whatever they do -- be they tyrannies or principalities -- so long as they do not threaten the citizens of the United States and their natural rights.
On domestic policy, West points out that the modern conception of law enforcement that focuses on police is a great departure from the Founding approach. In early America, there were no police departments. Law enforcement was a whole of government approach, but much more limited in what exactly it tried to regulate. The legislature passed laws, the executive brought indictments, the judiciary tried the case and if guilt was proved assigned back to the executive the execution of sentences. Yet only a very few things were taken to be matters of law requiring government action (and this mostly at the state level). Murder, robbery, and the like required the government to step in and protect the natural rights of citizens to be free of such things. In more minor cases, the legislature passed laws giving citizens access to the courts to sue each other for damages related to natural rights like property or reputation. Most of life did not involve the government. (150-1)
Nevertheless, West adds, "limited government did not mean weak government. Instead, government was to be strong in its proper sphere and not involved at all anywhere else." (153)
West is sharply critical of the contemporary approach to using laws to regulate every aspect of life, to try to prevent injury in advance (as e.g. via building codes). This ends up being destructive to the natural right of liberty by constraining people's every action in the course of their employment, and requiring them to submit proofs of their obedience to the government just from day to day. The Founders rejected this approach, he says, and only allowed harms that have already occurred to be treated at law. This served as an important limit on government power. (154)
The most important aspect of the rule of law, and the one we are seeing lost today, is equality of the enforcement of the law. Just yesterday we were treated to the spectacle of a Democratic governor in the state of New York being found by the Attorney General to have violated numerous laws yet being charged with violating none of them. This is a double failure: on the one hand he is entitled to a presumption of innocence which she denied him in her press conference declaring his guilt; on the other, he will not face the hazard to liberty and property before the courts that his (alleged) violation of his victims rights entitled them to see him run. Likewise we see people who have attacked Federal buildings in Portland released without charges, night after night, while people involved in the Capitol incursion on 6 January held without bail for many months, while Congressional hearings declaring their guilt are held and new powers are granted to police to pursue such people. Likewise, too, we have seen how the DOJ handles cases against Clintons and their allies versus Trumps and theirs.
What is to confine the government here? West points out that the idea of separation of powers and federalism were meant to be functional. Natural law theory does not actually require either one, but having the powers separated was supposed to make violations of equality before the law less likely. Federalism was supposed to restrain both states and more importantly the Federal power by decreasing its sphere. Concentration of power makes abuse of power more likely. (160-1)
How about the Bill of Rights? Madison mocked what he called 'parchment protections,' and Hamilton according to West agreed. (161) However, West says, these guarantees were 'not totally ineffectual' for as long as the political theory of the Founders prevailed. (162) Only once it was lost among the elite as a guiding light did these statements of immunities and rights become things that the courts would not enforce, and that other officials would ignore at their pleasure.
Just yesterday, Joe Biden announced he was extending a program limiting the property rights of landlords in spite of the fact that the Supreme Court had said that was unconstitutional without further action from Congress; they are doing it anyway, because who cares what the Supreme Court says about the constitutional rights of people like landlords? The Court may come back and say it again, but until they get around to it power to limit the natural right to property is unconstrained; and it may just be violated again after a second ruling as easily as after a first. This shows both that the Founding political theory has been rejected by the government, but also that Madison and Hamilton were right that these 'parchment protections' do not by themselves secure any of our rights. They must be enforced by living men.
West's Founding VI: Right of Revolution
This is a section of fundamental importance that he treats very briefly. He shows through citations to the Declaration of Independence, New Hampshire's constitution and the preamble to New Jersey's 1776 constitution that the right to revolution is firmly established in the founding documents. (127-8) I'm going to quote the latter two because they are not as immediately familiar.
NH: "whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought, to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power and oppression is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind." (128)
NJ: "allegiance and protection are, in the nature of things, reciprocal ties, each equally depending upon the other, and liable to be dissolved by the others being refused or withdrawn." (ibid)
West points out that this is not license for any minority to reject a government because it disapproves of the laws or loses a legitimate election (even a hotly contested and strange one like the election of 1860). The election of an opposing party does not justify revolution; but if that new government should violate its duty to protect and secure the natural rights of the people, it can.
The New Hampshire constitutional language is very nice. It establishes three conditions that all have to apply before the revolution can be justified.
1) The ends of government are perverted, and,
2) Public liberty manifestly endangered, and,
3) All other means of redress are ineffectual.
Our current case satisfies the first two of these, but we are still trying 'other means of redress,' as we ought to do. The ends of government are obviously perverted in the present case, where a government feels that public health might require mandatory vaccinations and lockdowns but also is allowing vast numbers of people with the very disease they fear to enter the United States illegally, and then is shipping them around the nation. The ends are perverted when we see (as mentioned yesterday) rioters who burn our cities let free by prosecutors, but those who tried to defend home and community persecuted and ruined under color of law. The ends are perverted when the national security state is turned into a partisan weapon, as the National Strategy to Counter Domestic Terrorism explicitly does (and in the absence of actual terrorism). The ends are perverted, too, when the executive and judicial branches collude to usurp the authority of state legislatures to determine election laws, and thus (demonstrably, and quite outside of any need to establish fraud in the election) decide elections outside of the legal and constitutional framework. The reader can easily add others.
The public liberty has been under increasing threat -- restrictions on religious free exercise; freedom of speech under constant attack by the unconstitutional union of corporate and government power to suppress rights the government is forbidden to suppress; a President who speaks of banning all semi-automatic weapons in direct violation of the Heller decision and therefore of the 2nd Amendment; a similar government/corporate conspiracy to vacate 4th Amendment privacy protections; etc. Again, the reader can easily add to this list.
We are saved from revolution in the moment by the third criterion, the pursuit of other means of redress. Audits to establish the facts about weaknesses in our election systems, state legislatures' reassertion of their right to make laws to protect both voting rights and election security, and court cases to challenge unconstitutional acts by the Federal and state governments are such means. These are peaceful and lawful, and it is right and proper to pursue them.
Note, however, that the New Hampshire language follows the Declaration in asserting that -- should all these conditions be satisfied -- revolution is not merely a right but a duty. "The people may, and of right ought," they said in New Hampshire; the Declaration, just after the discussion of prudential reasons to suffer ills as long as they may prove transient, adds that if the ills are not transient and sufferable the people have both the right and the duty.
West points out the Declaration's language on the need for caution and patience. "Prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes. And accordingly all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." (129) Prudence, the Aristotelian virtue, is the guide here; and West says that "[o]nly prudence can judge how far 'evils are sufferable' in the unique circumstances of a particular time and place.” (ibid)
Let us hope that Prudence guides us wisely; and that those in power find at least a shadow or reflection of that virtue, and have the wisdom not to prevent the success of our efforts to seek redress through peaceful means.
Painless
A fourth police officer who responded to the Capitol riot on 6 January has committed suicide. That's statistically unlikely, points out PJ Media.
The MPD has 3,800 officers, meaning that the force has had a suicide rate of just over 4 per 1,000 in just the last few months.
In 2019, the national suicide rate was about 0.14 per 1,000.
Even with 2020’s higher suicide rate (we couldn’t find final figures in time for today’s column), an MPD officer is about 25 times more likely to die by their own hand than a typical American.
The ratio skews even more towards the extreme when you consider that not nearly every one of the MPD’s 3,800 officers responded to the riot.
But who’s going to investigate? The same MPD that’s taken such poor care of its own officers? The FBI that may have enticed and entrapped protestors into becoming rioters?
It's easy to imagine the mafia agreeing to eliminate Jeffrey Epstein at the behest of powerful people who could provide useful favors, and also political protection from any investigation (the official finding was, of course, suicide). The cascade failure of prison security systems meant to prevent suicides also made it look much more like murder than like a suicide.
It's pretty hard to believe in a similar conspiracy to murder police officers to keep them from talking about what they saw on 6 January.
That leaves actual suicide as probable; but what then explains this extraordinary rate? Not PTSD, surely, given that there wasn't actually severe violence -- no machinegunning of the crowd, no massive death toll of any kind. It's just bad luck, I suppose; statistics only appear in broad enough segments, and for whatever set of reasons it just so happened that a statistically unlikely band of suicides occurred.
Definitely it is the sort of thing that gives additional heat to our national discourse, though. Yet we are not the main matter: we should pray for their souls and families.
The Foggy Dew Performed by Daoirí Farrell
Yesterday's "Parting Glass" introduce me to RTE - Raidió Teilifís Éireann, or Radio Television Ireland, which seems like their version of NPR. Here's another from them:
On Gaslighting
It’s probably unhelpful to frame this, as he does, as the backstory on vaccine hesitancy. It surely does play into that, but that is a small part of what he shows to be a much bigger story: Brexit, 2016’s election, “Russiagate,” Mueller, two impeachment’s, claims of mass racism...
Why doesn’t anyone have any trust anymore?
A Submarine Analogy
Wretchard on, among other things, lockdowns by analogy to movies about submarine hunting.
Arguments by analogy always break; the point is to decide if the breaking point of the analogy is before or after the useful lesson. This one seems like a stretch, traversing both the distance between infectious disease and warfare on the one hand, and the fiction/true-life distinction on the other. Wretchard is one of the smartest people out there, though, so I'm going to give him leeway to make his argument.
West's Founding V: Consent of the Governed
Moving along to chapter six of the first part, West reminds us that the Founding idea was that government was created by the consent of the governed, and is sustained only by the continuing consent of the governed. There are at least three kinds of consent:
1) The initial formation of the social contract;
2) Period elections of representatives, which provide the citizenry with the chance to alter the government's membership according to their will;
3) The right to withdraw consent, i.e., the right of revolution should the government fail to abide by the contract of (1) or the fair elections of (2). (Today we will only treat (1) and (2).) In the absence of a declared withdrawal of consent, consent is supposed to be sufficient.
In his discussion of (2), West approaches one of the criticisms leveled against the Declaration: that it is not a democratic document per se, but would allow for any form of government that would secure natural rights. West argues that this view is wrong, as the Declaration's complaints against the king include specific complaints that he refused to honor their democratically elected legislatures. He ignored their decrees, and he taxed without their consent, and this anti-democratic character of his rule is part and parcel of the violation of natural rights.
Why should this be so? When people move out of the state of nature by creating a government, they might consent to many potential forms. Locke -- West does not mention -- cites the story of Jeptha from the Book of Judges to give an early account of how this might work. (This is in Locke's First Treatise on Government, which almost no one reads; everyone reads the Second). As long as everyone consents to the bargain, and the new authority secures their rights, isn't the bargain fair?
West thinks that the Founders did not think so. He says that the idea of representation is so central to their concept of what just government looks like that it constitutes an entire second criterion to what the Founders thought just governance was about.
This is not a view I've held myself, but I can see where he is going with it. I have tended to say, "The sole legitimate function of government, according to the Declaration of Independence, is to secure the natural rights of the people." West's argument is that a just government actually has to do two things, according to the Declaration: it has to secure natural rights effectively and not subvert them, but it also has to ensure the people are able to fairly elect representatives who will provide the ongoing consent that the nation requires.
If so, this is definitely an outgrowth of the British tradition of which the Founders were part. The kings of England and the United Kingdom slowly lost their ability to rule without the consent of Parliament, especially in matters of taxation. The presence of representatives fairly elected, without whose consent the king could not act, is a feature the British kings unsuccessfully resisted. It is plausible that to a British national of the eighteenth century this concept of being due representation was as fundamental as the concept of natural rights. Without representatives, there is no guarantee that initial consent will continue; if stripped of honest representation, the people have every right to withdraw from the contract.
Note that this representation is legislative in character. The executive need not be elected; he might even be a king, or he might be elected indirectly as in our Constitutional order. The legislature is where our right to representation firmly resides, as it was the legislature that was supposed to be the first and most powerful branch. The First Amendment begins "Congress shall make no law..." because if Congress cannot make the law, the executive cannot enforce the law, and the courts cannot try cases regarding that law.
Our whole system has slipped out of gear on that issue. Since the New Deal's establishment of a vast Federal bureaucracy, the production of laws has become more a matter of executive rule-making than formal legislation. Courts have set themselves up to create interpretations of laws that are in effect new laws, thus legislating from the bench. The actual legislatures have far less power than designed, and the demon of being subject to legislation without representation has escaped.
Who Burned the Bonnehomme Richard?
The Navy has charged a sailor, but won’t release his name or apparent motive.
West's Founding IV
The next section includes a lot of inside baseball, where West is working out disputes with other scholars (especially but not only Harvey Mansfield). There are three 'clarifications' West wants to lay out before he proceeds with positive arguments from the Founders on natural rights.
1) "Self Evident Truths." West makes the plausible claim that what is meant in the Declaration by "self-evident" is really "we all agree about this." The claims about human equality are not, in fact, self-evident. In fact, the evidence of your eyes will tend to argue against the notion that we are all equal. We have games like the ongoing Olympics to sort out questions about inequalities even among the very most unequally talented. People are smarter, stronger, wiser, and also weaker, slower, more foolish. It's the most obvious thing in the world.
This is a topic I've written quite a bit about, and my sense is that 'equality' among humans is generally only possible given a third party. Let's say that I'm a father, to illustrate, who has three sons. These sons are not equal: one is the oldest and another is the youngest, one is the strongest and another is the weakest, etc. But they are all equals in that they are all equally blessed, by me, in bestowing upon them an equality of inheritance. In that sense they are in fact exactly equal.
It happens that this is the kind of equality the Declaration posits, i.e., 'they are endowed by their Creator' with equal natural rights. But this isn't "self-evident" -- I had to give an argument for it.
West points out that scholars have sometimes treated the arguments for natural rights given by the Founders as dispensable because of this claim that the natural rights are "self-evident." They aren't, in fact, except perhaps in the sense he means. You do have to prove that they exist.
2) "Why should nature be a standard for right?" This is a crucial question. I'm not sure from reading West's account if he understands the depth of the opposition. Hume raised an objection to the whole idea that 'ought' can be derived from 'is.' Why should it be true, as Aristotle says, that an eye 'should' see because it ordinarily can see? Why isn't a blind eye just as good, in its own way, or perhaps even better in that it can enable different approaches to understanding and grappling with reality?
West gives this about two pages, which isn't enough. It's one of the most fundamental questions in philosophy. My own answer, summarized, is that you can only ever get an ought from an is. If it is possible to get an ought at all -- another fundamental and difficult question -- it has to be from the things that exist. Whether you get them from natural organs and functions ('an eye should see because that's what eyes evolved to do') or reason as Kant does (reason exists, after all), from virtue (what makes a virtue is that it excels, i.e., it has practically valid results), all these things reason from what is. There is no access to a discussion of 'ought' outside of reality; and thus, reasoning from nature, i.e. what is, is not only a reasonable thing to do it is the only thing to do.
But that is also too brief, much too brief. West quotes Hamilton: "The sacred rights of mankind are... written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal powers. (81) Would that it were so!
3) "The God of Nature." West rejects the idea that Deism was very important among the Founders, imputing to them a more ordinary form of Christianity. However, he does allow them the Enlightenment conceit that human access to reason is sufficient to deduce laws in (and of, which is not quite the same thing) Nature.
Here he claims to be interested in refuting those scholars who want to say that the Founding is hopelessly religious, rather than rational, and rooted in divine revelation. His (again very brief) discussion of natural religion is weak and limited to my ear, but I am accustomed to the Medievals who were very interested in this question and pursued it with great discipline. The point is that if you want to know about God, you can know him through his works; and nature, writ large, is one of his works. There are significant limits to this approach, which Aquinas and Avicenna explore in ways that West does not.
He is not that interested in the question, however, which may explain his brevity and inattention. He is interested in clearing the Founders of having relied upon revelation in the ordinary sense of 'God told me.' That's fair; they mean that they deduced ideas about God's will from God's work, not from the whisperings of angelic messengers audible only to themselves. (Muhammed is thereby supposed to have learned the divine law about what to do if a mouse fell into the butter you had churned this morning: to whit, God says to cut out the contaminated part and keep the rest.)
I'm leaving out all the internecine feuds with the other scholars. These are the key ideas from this section.
Licklog Gap
I know a high meadow still used that way. They’ve got a handsome crop of calves coming up. This view is from a little over five thousand feet, where it was seventy degrees and sunny today. Songbirds were singing, a veritable paradise even in August.
Bringing Back the Great Depression
Descendants of the FDR administration are uniting to try to get the Biden crew to adopt the same disastrous policies.
I knew one of these people decades ago; she was a professor at Armstrong (now part of Georgia Southern). Even then she’d built her career as a historian around apologist efforts for her grandfather’s work in Roosevelt’s cabinet.
Our government is so ossified in its bureaucracy now that it probably can’t learn any new tricks anyway. It won’t help to bring in people literally trying to restore failed policies that haven’t been new ideas for a century.
Never-, sometimes-, always-Trump?
Salena Zito thinks about Ohio:
Paul Sracic, a Youngstown State University political science professor, ... adds that it would be a big mistake to think that Ohio's sudden reddening was just about former President Donald Trump. “These voters clearly liked the former president, but they are not a cult," he says. "They were just waiting for someone like him to come along, and when he did, they were overjoyed. They’ll still turn out in droves to hear Trump because he still says the things they want to hear and in the way they want to hear them."
* * *
“Jacksonians were attracted to law and order Republicans such as Nixon, or the patriotic anti-communist, Ronald Reagan,” Sracic said. "But they usually considered themselves Democrats since they tended to be working class and associated the Republican Party with the wealthy. Trump converted the Republican Party into the Jacksonian Party; this change is likely permanent, and future Republican candidates will adopt this message.”
The wisdom of strangers
From a PowerLine comment: Programs are voluntary until people figure out they're rubbish, then they become mandatory.
Songs of Doom
Two country pieces, both of them odes to lost times as well as sorrowful worries that the world to come will not be one we will like.
Waylon Jennings played off the last one during a cameo he made on Married With Children. He said, “Men like us are dinosaurs. Real, live, dead dinosaurs.... The only thing wrong with being a dinosaur is there’s no future in it. But there is one hell of a past. Be like the mighty Tyrannosaur, and while you can, leave deep prints so everyone remembers we were here. Leave deep prints.”
No More Masks
I passed through Asheville today, expecting to find a total resurgence of the mask mania that characterized it last year. In fact very few people responded to the CDC by returning to their masks.
One young lady at a raucous bar explained: “I did the right thing, but I’m not going to let a bunch of Republicans screw up my summer.” I assume she meant ‘by not getting vaccinated,’ since Republicans hold no power at the Federal level and even at the state level only control a legislature whose power has been largely usurped by the governor and the courts.
The non-Karen voters
Instapundit reports both an encouraging outbreak of sanity among voters and an opportunity for Republicans to makes inroads into Democrat strongholds:
Overall, a majority of voters — 55 percent — agree that “despite good intentions, shutting down businesses and locking down society did more harm than good.” Only 38 percent disagree, with the rest unsure.
But the really interesting part is the racial breakdown: White Democrats reject the idea that lockdowns did more harm than good by a 30-plus-point margin. Nonwhite Democrats, on the other hand, are evenly divided.
The divide widens on the question of whether government officials will hold on to too much power in the future: 62 percent of voters say yes. Nearly two-thirds of white Democrats disagree. But note well: By a whopping 64-27 margin, black Democrats fear that officials will abuse their vast new powers.
West's Founding, III: Against Criticisms
West is aware of the need for someone writing today to defend the Founding against claims that it extended its allegedly universal claims only to white men, and only in defense of their power. He attempts this in Part I, Chapter 3.
First, he distinguishes between rights and power. "The language of the founding documents did not exclude either blacks or women from equal natural rights," he says, then quoting Congress' 1774 declaration, a 1776 address to foreigners fighting for the British that appealed to their notion of natural rights, Georgia's revolutionary 1776 constitution, and another 1777 affirmation by Congress. (62-3) If West is right about what was meant by equality -- that all are rightly born free of masters -- then the fact that political power was not distributed equally was not what the Founders intended by 'equality.' They had hoped (as per the last section) to enshrine political power among the especially virtuous, not all people equally. The rights of all to be free of slavery, though, were recognized as universal.
Of course that leaves the actual fact of slavery. West cites the 1780 Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery (Pennsylvania), which states that there is a "duty" to "release them from thralldom" because though "the inhabitants of the several parts of the earth were distinguished by a difference in feature or complexion.... it is sufficient to know that all are the work of the Almighty hand." (63) He also cites in the same place the abolition law in Rhode Island, and the fact that the Revolution was in fact accompanied by an intense period of manumission: "By 1810, more than a hundred thousand slaves had been freed." (ibid.)
As for those who kept slaves in spite of the Revolution, West has several citations from them in which they acknowledge the injustice of it. (65) Jefferson, he suggests, regarded it as both an intolerable injustice and yet a necessity because there was no practical way to release slaves without tempting a mass murder similar to the one that occurred in Haiti. (41) The fact that a hundred thousand slaves were indeed released without a mass slaughter is evidence against Jefferson's position, but the fact of Haiti's 1791 revolution and massacre gives evidence that Jefferson was not completely out to sea on this possibility. Jefferson knew and admitted that he knew that what he was doing was a violation of natural law and therefore a monumental injustice. The Founding was tainted by bad practices, but it was not unable to see the injustices being committed among its members.
Furthering this discussion, West cites pro-slavery Senator John C. Calhoun in a few places where Calhoun is condemning the Founders for being too devoted to this whole equality notion. Rather than the Founding principles being easily transferrable to the Confederacy, as is sometimes suggested, the Confederacy and its predecessors needed to reject the Founding explicitly. (64, 75)
On women and Native Americans, West has different arguments but claims that both were considered equals in the "natural law" sense he is framing as fundamental. Women are equals in that sense, he writes, but considered themselves to have a different role in society than the exercise of political power (a complimentarian view still defended by some communities, e.g., the Amish and some Orthodox Jews). He quotes Abigail Adams, certainly no shrinking violet, on this score, and a number of her contemporaries. (66-7)
Native Americans were not considered racially different at the time of the Founding, West says, only culturally so. He cites in support Patrick Griffin, who "argues that white settlers 'did not vie Indians as an alien race and did not refer to Indians by their physical features." (71) This may have some weight, because in the Colonial and Revolutionary period intermarriage was quite commonplace on the frontier. It is clear that a racism that embraced Native Americans arose later, of course, just as it is clear that the 1915 era KKK disliked Jews as well as Blacks even though Jews seem to have been regarded as equals in Antebellum Savannah (where they fought in duels against Christian gentlemen, the fullest proof that they were regarded as equals who must be answered even at risk of one's life).
What the Founders looked down upon about the Native Americans was their way of life, which they regarded as "savage." We know this because they say so, for example in the Declaration of Independence. In fairness, West says, just as the Declaration says the Native Americans did "often fight by means of indiscriminate and merciless killing of all ages, sexes, and conditions," and the British really did use them as irregulars on the frontier. (71) That did not remove their equality under natural law, but it did mean that they were criticized as barbarous and dangerous.
Maybe that's true. Certainly the record of interactions there involves a mixture of ruthless war and negotiated peace (the latter of which infamously often ends up being betrayed and treaties broken). There is intermarriage, there is cohabitation, there are frequently people of mixed heritage who seemed to be accepted without prejudice in the early era. I don't know that it's right, but it isn't completely out of order with what I know of the time and place.
West buys some trouble for himself in trying to rope in a discussion about relative intelligence for different peoples, citing Charles Murray et al. His claim is that the Founders would not have accepted that a difference in relative intelligence justified a reduction in rights, or an inequality in the natural law sense he has been defending. He might have been wiser to have avoided bringing what is really a historical debate about what the Founders thought into a contentious present day debate about whether race is in any sense 'real.'
That said, West has good citations in support of this position to Jefferson ("whatever may be the degree of talent [of blacks] it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others") Benjamin Franklin (who remarked after a visit to a school for black children, "Their apprehension seems as quick, their memory as strong, and their docility in every respect equal to that of white children"), and Alexander Hamilton ("their natural faculties are probably as good as ours... The contempt we have been taught to entertain for the blacks, makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason nor experience"). (69)
Likewise, he has Declaration signatory Benjamin Rush condemning the principle that intelligence ought to give power over others. "But supposing our author had proved the Africans to be inferior...: will his cause derive any strength from it? Would it avail a man to plead in a court of justice that he defrauded his neighbor, because he was inferior to him in genius or knowledge?" (70) That implies that Rush was not convinced of the proof, but also that he thought the proof was irrelevant to the question of rights.
West is trying to put a lot in this short section, which has to carry the weight of defending the Founding against a set of vicious attacks as well as a large number of misunderstandings (if West is right) by major historians and scholars. It is clear that he has found and marshalled at least a lawyerly defense, which should give us reasonable doubt about the condemnations to which the Founders are often subject. Whether it proves his case requires longer reflection and further study.
West's Founding, II
West has a bedrock notion that he wants to convey. That notion is that equality and liberty, as the Founders understood them, were the same thing: specifically, both terms mean that no one is born a natural slave. We are all born free, and therefore we all are in that strict sense equals.
That puts him at odds with most of the scholarship, which have treated equality and liberty as being different notions -- even opposing or incoherent ideas. If we are really free, then inequality will surely result as natural talents, differential fortunes, and other things create unequal results. (As West points out, the scholars are led astray here by de Tocqueville, whose use of the term 'equality' is the French and not the American notion, and really is a commentary on 'equality of condition.')
It also creates a conceptual problem because the Founders definitely do believe that some people are natural aristocrats. By this they meant roughly what Aristotle meant, i.e., that some men are more capable of excellence, i.e., "virtuous" than others. Jefferson says this explicitly in his letters, but he is not alone. James Wilson wrote, "When we say that all men are created equal, we mean not to apply this equality to their virtues," which may vary widely. (73; all page numbers in this series will be to West unless otherwise noted.) The Founders, like the Greeks, take it as a matter of first importance to identify those who are exceptionally virtuous for government service and refer to this mission over and over in their state constitutions and similar statements (ibid).
Nevertheless, this capacity for excellence does not create a natural class of masters: the idea is that free and equal men shall choose their leaders from among themselves. The power of legitimate governing arises from this election, without which no superiority in intelligence or virtue (which are not equivalent terms) justifies the exercise of power of one over another.
West's project ends up treating a number of terms as being actual equivalents: "In these documents," he writes, "'created,' 'born,' an 'by nature' are equivalent terms. 'By nature' means as they really are, independent of customs and traditions. What human beings really are -- with respect to freedom -- is individuals who are neither the masters nor the slaves of other people." (25) This gives rise to the concept that human beings have a natural right to be treated in accordance with that equality, which in nature (i.e. pre-politically) is absolute. Social compacts may create a class of governing men with legitimate power, but in nature there is not one.
Likewise, even social compacts end up being limited because there are some parts of this equality that cannot morally be given away. These are the 'inalienable' rights, which include "life, liberty, and property" or "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," but also several variants West finds regularly included in the many lists composed by the Founders in various documents. "Other rights sometimes mentioned include reputation, keeping and bearing arms, freedom of speech and press, and assembly." (27-8) All of those except 'reputation' have survived to us at least as ideals; that one, I notice, is a right to defend one's honor. Our society has tried to dispose of honor as a value, though it is in fact impossible to do that; instead we end up fighting over whether George Washington or George Floyd should be honored with statues and street names. The Founders' earlier model, which entailed a right to defend honor with violence, was defensive: it was not a right to initiate violence, but to demand that no one be allowed to sully your honor without being subject to answering to you for it.
The consequence of this idea of natural right is that everyone is "rightfully free of the violence of others," an idea we usually today hear mostly from libertarians. (28) This also imposes natural duties of others not to impose upon us their violence, within only the limits of ensuring the public peace (e.g., religious liberty is not coherent with endorsing the sacrifice of even one's own children). (33)
This collection of natural rights and corresponding natural duties is, together, what West believes the Founders meant by "natural law." This set of laws must be respected by any decent government, and a government that comes to violate these things is -- as the Declaration will tell us -- rightfully set aside. It is out of order not only with human nature but nature in general, and thus the will of the author of Nature, however you conceive of that. Jefferson wrote that it applies to all societies and to foreign policy, i.e., the interaction of societies. "[T]he moral law to which man has been subjected by his creator... The moral duties which exist between individual and individual in a state of nature, accompany them into a state of society." (39)
West points out that this idea does not imply a lack of conflicts, even violent ones. "In the founders' theory, it is possible for one person to have a natural right to violate the natural rights of another," he says, pointing to an example from Jefferson about two ships that meet at sea, one starving and the other well-supplied. The right to life being the first natural right, Jefferson said, the starving ship would have the right to extract food by force should the other ship refuse to sell them food. The right to property, although also a natural right, is derivative of the right to life: you are entitled to collect and use property as a way of sustaining your own life. (40-1) It is surprising to find a right to piracy, you might think, but in fact pirates and the American colonies had an interesting historical relationship and a lot of American ideas were tried out by buccaneers first.
Nevertheless West is clear that this "does not create a rightful claim against others to provide [those with unequal resources] with resources -- except in extreme circumstances[.]" (49) "Modern liberal rights are not natural because no one possesses food, transportation, respect, and access to medical care by nature." (ibid.) I note that he is using the term "respect" here as a non-natural right, whereas "reputation" was a natural right -- one rather difficult to disentangle from 'respect' in ordinary language. He has in mind Rawls' usage, which is that those who are not respected by society have a claim on having respect somehow 'transferred' to them, which is unworkable.
This argument exposes West to a large number of criticisms from scholars; he exposes himself to more, as I will explore in later sections. The most obvious current criticism is that the Founding was either hypocritical or racist, sexist, etc., in denying equality and liberty. He has quite a bit to say about that, so I will treat that next.
A Philosophy of Pornography
We were talking at some length here and at AVI's place about the way in which the virtual, and especially pornography, alters the sense of self in the young. Arts & Letters Daily linked to a philosopher who is working on this, and she says some of the nicest things about conservative thought I've ever heard from someone on the left.
I put it to Srinivasan that her critique shares some of its spirit with conservative objections to porn: the worry that porn’s logic of commodification corrupts the value of sex, manifest perhaps in the creeping feeling—all too easily evoked whenever one finds oneself choosing from a menu with pictures—that one is engaged in something debasing. “I totally agree,” Srinivasan says—“the conservative way of putting it is that we have this kind of sacred thing that’s being degraded by being placed on this screen. I more specifically want to say the thing we’re losing is a certain kind of creative capacity which then gets dulled by its over-reliance on the screen.”Such arguments, she adds, are another reason to read conservative philosophers—“to understand that part of us, which is very much drawn to and recognises the truth in conservatism, because it’s a very false radical politics that thinks that progress does not come with loss.”
That's a very keen insight as well as a kind word. You may or may not find that you agree with her thoughts on pornography, but that much we can surely appreciate.
Socratic Humility
A fun exploration of Socrates and his method.
Socrates: What is courage?You: Courage is being willing to take big risks without knowing how it’s going to work out.Socrates: Such as risking your life?You: Yes.Socrates: Is courage good?You: Yes.Socrates: Do you want it for yourself and your children?You: Yes.Socrates: Do you want your children to go around risking their lives?You: No. Maybe I should’ve said that courage is taking prudent risks, where you know what you are doing.Socrates: Like an expert investor who knows how to risk money to make lots more?You: No, that isn’t courageous. . . .
When I first encountered Socrates, it was through the Laches, and so the question of what courage was happened to be the first question I found him considering. I thought, as a teenager, that I would answer thus: "Courage is the quality of doing the right thing even though it is dangerous."
On the reflection of many years, I still think that's not a terrible definition. It avoids the riposte sketched in the article: "Do you want your children to go around risking their lives?" Not for no good end, but you do want your children to do what is right. Sometimes this might entail risking life or limb, but you want them to have the quality they need to do what is right even if someone or something is threatening them.
What Socrates would probably say to that is, I think, to press me on whether that means that the virtue is a form of knowledge, and therefore could be taught; and if so, why it was not always possible to teach it, why some men turned out to be cowards in spite of careful instruction.. That was one of his favorite lines of inquiry. As you know from reading much from me on the subject, I think Aristotle gets this one right: it's not so much a form of knowledge, as it is a state of character that is attained by practice and habituation. You can only change yourself so much, and some people thus turn out to have more potential for courage than others just as some have more potential for swimming than others.
[For all of Socrates'] influence, many of our ways are becoming far from Socratic. More and more our politics are marked by unilateral persuasion instead of collaborative inquiry. If, like Socrates, you view knowledge as an essentially collaborative project, you don’t go into a conversation expecting to persuade any more than you expect to be persuaded. By contrast, if you do assume you know, you embrace the role of persuader in advance, and stand ready to argue people into agreement. If argument fails, you might tolerate a state of disagreement—but if the matter is serious enough, you’ll resort to enforcing your view through incentives or punishments. Socrates’s method eschewed the pressure to persuade. At the same time, he did not tolerate tolerance. His politics of humility involved genuinely opening up the question under dispute, in such a way that neither party would be permitted to close it, to settle on an answer, unless the other answered the same. By contrast, our politics—of persuasion, tolerance, incentives, and punishment—is deeply uninquisitive.
Sometimes it is necessary to be intolerant to preserve a spirit of honest debate and deeper inquiry. It is not ideal, it is not desirable, but it proves to be necessary at times. Yet more often we see people closing off debate not to preserve an honest and reasonable discussion on terms of mutual respect, but to enforce what is merely the preference of the rich and powerful. That seems to be the fate of the current moment, at least. Perhaps we can do better if we can find a way to throw it off.
On The Subject
The Olympics are considering dropping weightlifting.
Olympic weightlifting has never been an interest of mine, and in fact it strikes me as extremely weird. None of the lifts that I think of as the core, major lifts are actually in the competition. For example, all three of the Powerlifting lifts from the previous article are omitted. The overhead press is simulated to some degree by the clean and press, and since the legs are stronger you can probably clean the weight if you can press it. Still, for a sport called "weightlifting" it seems to be more about explosive, dynamic movements than the simple ability to lift weight.
The reason they are thinking about cutting the sport is because of doping. Now there they might take a page from Strongman and Powerlifting, and simply stop worrying about it. You want to see how strong a human being can be? Well, let them do whatever they want to prepare for the competition. This has the nice side effect of eliminating any trans*-competition concerns because, if you're going to let them juice with whatever they want, there's no reason to worry about natural hormones.
(I am myself a purely natural guy; no performance-enhancing drugs of any kind have I ever used. From my perspective, though, the reason to be strong isn't to win the Olympics -- it's to maintain robust good health and physical capacity for as long as I am able. Taking dangerous supplements would be counterproductive if that is the end.)
You Need To Work Harder
While I have doubts that this young man and I would agree on the definition of 'a Nazi,' in principle it's reasonable to want to be strong in order to defend yourself and others from aggression. This is not going to get it done, though:
"At his best, he could squat 335 pounds, bench 200 and deadlift 280."
I don't even warm up at those weights, and he is on the order of half my age.
H/t: Dave Reaboi.
West's Founding, I
I have read at this point the introduction and the conclusion of West's Founding, as well as the first three chapters. Reading the introduction and the conclusion first, by the way, is the right way to read any historical monograph. It's not appropriate for most works, but with historical monographs like this one it will greatly ease the process. The introduction tells you what the author intends to say; the conclusion tells you what the author thinks he or she has said. That gives you a clean map of the argument, and so everything in the middle falls into focus quickly and easily.
West is taking up a position in a dispute between academics, one that is (as he says) in basic agreement with a number of other scholars: he names Thomas Pangle, Paul Rahe, William Galston, and Michael Zucker. He is opposed by the great figures of the Establishment, including Supreme Court justices like William Brennan, scholars like Ralph Lerner, and even great names like Gordon Wood and Dwight Eisenhower (who says, in one of his surviving documents, that he found it very difficult to defend the American philosophy against charges of selfishness and immorality brought by a Soviet general he met during the war).
That the weight of names is against him West attributes to a failure of American education. Much of this he locates from the 1960s onward, when he believes the meaning of words like "equality" and "rights" changed so substantially in the minds of scholars that they were no longer able to hear what the Founders were saying in their own writings. There was already a substantial loss of meaning by the mid-20th century, though, when the New Deal's approach to welfare had altered American ideas about justice to such a degree as to account for Eisenhower's inability to defend America against Communist attacks on its principles. (West gives an account of early American approaches to welfare in the conclusion, which he says were present from the beginning of the nation -- though at the state level rather than the Federal level, as the Founders thought appropriate for almost all powers.)
What he wants to argue is that the Founding principles were:
A) Coherent philosophically, deriving from their understanding of Natural Rights;
B) Moral and decent on their own terms, and definitely in contrast to the ones offered by communism and socialism;
C) At least possibly true, and certainly useful.
The third claim is metaphysical and substantial. First of all, it relies on a notion that a claim about something like natural rights could be true, as opposed to what our contemporaries like to call "a social construct." Something about reality must exist that can sustain truths across generations, regardless of what people think about those things. This is an idea that is as unpopular as it is easy to be in the current environment, although it was popular as recently as the gay marriage debate: people asserted that sexuality was true in this way, being in-born and not a matter of thought or choice, and thus that no government could transgress this truth. (That position has since been abandoned in favor of the idea that identification, which is a decision of the mind, is what really matters.)
That there is a human nature that sustains this truth West defends but ultimately decides not to rely upon. Whether or not the claim is true, he says, the claim is useful. Such a claim is perhaps the only thing that can tie down a government to some idea of justice that it itself does not have the power to edit. Thus it is useful because it restrains the powers of the world, and keeps at least some things out of their hands.
He defends the utility of the claim against both the early Modern model -- that power structures are of divine warrant -- and the Marxist one that inexorable dialectics produce evolutions in power structures. People are free and equal, just as the Founders claim, and thus able to make choices about self-government. These choices, per West, are better than submission to the claims about what God or History would impose upon us, which claims end up being merely the will of the powerful. We are free only if we believe we are, and capable of self-government only when we reject the impositions of the powerful: those who "belong to a class anointed by God, by History, by moral credentials earned by serving the disadvantaged, or by Harvard and Yale."
That is the basic plan of the work. I shall get into the arguments in the next post.
New Philosophy Reading: The Political Theory of the American Founding
For my next longer work, I'll be reading The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom by Thomas G. West. It is available in several formats including Kindle from Amazon if you want to read along.
West takes an unusual view of the Founding among scholars, although I think it is ordinary among ordinary Americans. Specifically, he believes that the Founders had a pretty uniform view of what made their program right and just, as opposed to being driven by variant ideas of republicanism and liberalism that were in tension with each other. This coherent view is the view of natural rights, which is to say the rights all people have prior to the formation of a government or a social compact.
These natural rights, he argues, also create moral duties: if you have a right to be free from being murdered, everyone else has a duty not to murder you. Many of these duties must be respected even after a social compact is formed, and cannot morally be surrendered as part of any such compact or formation of government. These rights are the ones the Declaration of Independence calls inalienable.
West's view is thus that the American Founding has a lot more moral content than most scholars believe today; but he is also (he claims; I haven't gotten there) to argue that the Founders had a larger moral vision for the inculcation of virtue in the citizen.
One thing we will be exploring as I post about this book is the debate Joel and I were having about whether the Declaration ought to inform the Constitution. Initially what I find him to be saying about that is that the constitutions and the Declaration inform each other: that is, the state constitutions that pre-date the Declaration often give fuller explanations of what terms like "equality" mean, and how they arise, than the Declaration itself bothers to do. However, later constitutions (like New York's of 1777) specifically refer back to the Declaration's language and project. Thus, the two kinds of documents end up being in dialogue with each other even though they serve different purposes.
If any of you care to read along, I'll be doing a series of posts about it similar to what I did with Weber's lecture and the recent books of Plato that we've read through.
A Question Arises
Because sometimes I have more time than good sense.
There is growing chatter that President Joe Biden (D) will be out as President by November, whether by resignation or by 25th Amendment action. Say that occurs, at some time in the next year or two.
Who would a President Kamala Harris (D) get for her Vice President?
There would no longer be a way to break a tie in the vote to confirm, so at least one Republican would have to agree with the Progressive-Democrats on any nominee, or at least one Progressive-Democrat would have to agree with the Republicans.
Who could make it through that gauntlet that Harris would be likely to nominate?
Or would she finish out the term without a Vice President? In which case no other tie vote could be broken for the duration of that term.
That last would seem a fine motive for the Republicans en masse to Just Say No to any Harris nomination (running the political risks thereof), thereby blocking all further Progressive-Democrat moves until at least 2025 (for the potential political rewards).
Eric Hines
Lord Dunsany
Not the deservedly famous one, but the current one. He is engaged in a “rewilding” project on the estate. It’s worth reading about.
Blues Weekend: Stevie Ray Vaughn
In his autobiography, BB King praised the musical talents of Eric Clapton and Bonnie Raitt, but he said the only white musician he knew who had the soul of the blues was Stevie Ray Vaughn.
I think Tex can sympathize with "Texas Flood" these days.
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