The Season's Upon Us
Happy Christmas Eve, everyone. I hope you had a worthy Advent and are ready for the holiday.
Virginia's Constitutional Right to Bear Arms
In addition to the Second Amendment at the Federal level, Virginia itself has a constitutional right to bear arms. It is even clearer and more explicit than the Federal Constitution's.
That is not to say that no restrictions on arms were ever considered even in the old days. Before the Civil War, Virginia did prohibit the carrying of concealed weapons -- but also the keeping or carrying of any sort of weapons by slaves. Even after the Civil War, blacks in Virginia could only carry arms with a license from the state, just because they were considered too dangerous to be allowed unfettered access to the right. Cf. George Mason's comments that to disarm a man was the best way to make it easy to enslave him; so too the actual slaveowners, and those who had but late been slaveowners, did their best to keep their slaves and former slaves disarmed.
It will be interesting to observe how much attention is paid to the constitutional limits by the legislature in the next session, or by the governor thereafter. Should the government violate its constitution, I would argue that there is a fundamental duty on the citizenry to disobey such laws, and to refuse to enforce them when called as jurors.
Article I. Bill of RightsThere is quite a bit of scholarship on this particular clause. Even before the adoption of the Virginia constitution, colonial-era laws had mandated that each home keep arms and a stock of ammunition at all times. At the time of the adoption of the Federal constitution, the exact meaning of the term 'militia' was described by George Mason and Federalist 46. Patrick Henry said that "the great object is that every man be armed."
Section 13. Militia; standing armies; military subordinate to civil power
That a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state, therefore, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.
That is not to say that no restrictions on arms were ever considered even in the old days. Before the Civil War, Virginia did prohibit the carrying of concealed weapons -- but also the keeping or carrying of any sort of weapons by slaves. Even after the Civil War, blacks in Virginia could only carry arms with a license from the state, just because they were considered too dangerous to be allowed unfettered access to the right. Cf. George Mason's comments that to disarm a man was the best way to make it easy to enslave him; so too the actual slaveowners, and those who had but late been slaveowners, did their best to keep their slaves and former slaves disarmed.
It will be interesting to observe how much attention is paid to the constitutional limits by the legislature in the next session, or by the governor thereafter. Should the government violate its constitution, I would argue that there is a fundamental duty on the citizenry to disobey such laws, and to refuse to enforce them when called as jurors.
The marriage of love and reason
From a Gutenberg work I'm formatting this morning:
ADVICE TO MARRIED COUPLES
To Pollianus and Eurydice with Plutarch's best wishes.
. . . When people in olden times assigned a seat with Aphrodite to Hermes, it was because the pleasure of marriage stands in special need of reason; when to Persuasion and the Graces, it was in order that the married pair might obtain their wishes from each other by means of persuasion, and not by contention and strife.
Do Not Be Fishers of Men
I am beginning to suspect that, in spite of his personal courage, the Pope may be innovative beyond what scripture can support.
The Wind
The wind is moaning in the chimney tonight. It reminds me of one of Tolkien’s less-quoted poems. In the story it happens in Beorn’s hall, a source of much inspiration for my own life.
Living in Truth
Vaclav Havel's greengrocer:
Havel, who died in 2011, preached what he called “antipolitical politics,” the essence of which he described as “living in truth.” His most famous and thorough statement of this was a long 1978 essay titled “The Power of the Powerless,” which electrified the Eastern European resistance movements when it first appeared. It is a remarkable document, one that bears careful study and reflection by orthodox Christians in the West today.
Consider, says Havel, the greengrocer living under Communism, who puts a sign in his shop window saying, “Workers of the World, Unite!” He does it not because he believes it, necessarily. He simply doesn’t want trouble. And if he doesn’t really believe it, he hides the humiliation of his coercion by telling himself, “What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?” Fear allows the official ideology to retain power—and eventually changes the greengrocer’s beliefs. Those who “live within a lie,” says Havel, collaborate with the system and compromise their full humanity.
Every act that contradicts the official ideology is a denial of the system. What if the greengrocer stops putting the sign up in his window? What if he refuses to go along to get along? “His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth”— and it’s going to cost him plenty.
He will lose his job and his position in society. His kids may not be allowed to go to the college they want to, or to any college at all. People will bully him or ostracize him. But by bearing witness to the truth, he has accomplished something potentially powerful:
He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth.
Because they are public, the greengrocer’s deeds are inescapably political. He bears witness to the truth of his convictions by being willing to suffer for them. He becomes a threat to the system—but he has preserved his humanity.
Government Surveillance
Sharyl Attkisson at The Hill writes that there are at least six red flags around the Federal government's misuse of surveillance.
United in Death
Thesis: Nietzsche's 'death of God' and the death of the Humanities are the same death.
It happened first in relation to religion, and second, more recently, in relation to culture and the humanities. We all understand what religious secularization has been — the process by which religion, and especially Christianity, has been marginalized, so that today in the West, as Charles Taylor has famously put it, religion has become just one option among a smorgasbord of faith/no-faith choices available to individuals.What's strange about this analysis is that the author locates the source of damage in "globalization intertwined with both feminism and decoloniality," which are all hard-left projects (at least for the sort of feminism under discussion, i.e. the sort that undermines the canon precisely because mostly men wrote it), but the author then goes on to conclude that defending the Humanities is itself to be done for hard-left reasons.
A similar process is underway in the humanities. Faith has been lost across two different zones: first, religion; then, high culture. The process that we associate with thinkers like Friedrich Schiller, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold, in which culture was consecrated in religion’s place, and that in more modest forms survived until quite recently, has finally been undone.
They are to be preserved because they are compelled to push back on the capitalist apparatuses that are dismantling them. In that pushback, what remains of them is aligned with green and radically left anti-capitalist movements.Sounds like someone has a religion after all! The king is dead; long live the king.
Good question
The presiding FISA judge, Rosemary Collyer, recently started putting a little belated pressure on the FBI to explain what it was up to in pursuing and renewing the Crossfire Hurricane surveillance. She then abruptly announced that she was stepping down nine weeks early for "health reasons," but the questions she posed remain interesting, and I'm glad to see that IG Horowitz also is pursuing one aspect of particular interest to me. Given the poisonous behavior of this particular hand-picked FISA team, what lies under the rock of the many FISA warrants pursued routinely every year? As the New York Post editorial board puts it:
Were they playing fast and loose because they were investigating a presidential candidate and then the sitting president? Or was rule breaking so routine that they didn’t even think about it?That's the real choice underlying the determination of "bias" or "no bias."
When worlds collide
An asteroid will make a nearish miss with Earth on Boxing Day this year. It's not all that close, about 4.5 million miles, and it's not all that big, either, less than 2,000 feet in diameter. For comparison, the Tunguska strike in Siberia in 1908 was less than a tenth that big, while the dinosaur-killing object 65 million years ago probably was in the 7- to 50-mile diameter range. The one in "Armageddon," of course, was "the size of Texas, Mr. President." The thing that knocked loose the Moon 4.5 billion years ago is estimated to have been the size of Mars. Things in the solar system have really quieted down since then.
Darn Russians again
The magnetic North Pole has been drifting from Ellesmere Island towards Russia, and will soon be captured by that crafty Putin. Magnetic forces may have been behind the mysterious disappearance and/or death of Joseph Mifsud almost two years ago.
Kidding aside, I've been reading about the possibility of another pole-reversal just about all my life. They do happen every few hundred thousand years. We don't know what it's like when they do. It's interesting to read this "Mother Nature Network" account, though, and compare the relatively measured "let's not panic yet" tone to a story about which they've been given their marching orders by the climate authorities. I'm waiting for the theory that links magnetic poles to CO2 concentrations.
Kidding aside, I've been reading about the possibility of another pole-reversal just about all my life. They do happen every few hundred thousand years. We don't know what it's like when they do. It's interesting to read this "Mother Nature Network" account, though, and compare the relatively measured "let's not panic yet" tone to a story about which they've been given their marching orders by the climate authorities. I'm waiting for the theory that links magnetic poles to CO2 concentrations.
Scandinavian Food in Minnesota
A review of old and new options. I have only gotten up there once and won’t likely again, but some of you might.
Happy Holidays
At first I thought this comic was doing Denis Leary, but about 2/3rds in he suddenly takes on a serious tone Leary never quite attempted. Hey, you know, people are dying in China over this. It’s not a joke. Welcome to my stand up comedy act, which isn’t funny because this stuff isn’t funny.
Speech Does or Does Not Constitute Speech?
J. K. Rowling, whose work I've never read but who was apparently extremely popular with children and young adults, has transgressed. Rowling's offense was to defend someone else who had transgressed, a woman who holds views that the British courts this week declared to be "not worthy of respect in a democratic society."
Well. I don't know what she said, but I don't have to know to know that the courts are wrong here. Human dignity is not opposed to freedom of speech, but rather, freedom of speech is essential to human dignity.
Well. I don't know what she said, but I don't have to know to know that the courts are wrong here. Human dignity is not opposed to freedom of speech, but rather, freedom of speech is essential to human dignity.
Why are human beings due a basic dignity at all? ... [One answer according to] Immanuel Kant, is that human beings have dignity because they are free. Kant did not mean politically free. He meant that, unlike a stick or a stone, you can reason for yourself and decide how you will behave. Your ability to think for yourself and come to your own decisions thus sets you above sticks, or stones, or most other objects in the universe. It is why you have dignity.Likewise, the right to defend your beliefs in public is an essential feature of democratic society.
What does it mean to have dignity? It means that you are due a certain respect that is not due to sticks or stones. For example, a person is due the respect of not being harmed without good reason. Not everything has that dignity. Anyone can pick a stick up off the ground and break it without it being thought to violate the stick’s dignity. No one may similarly grab another person and break their arm without having committed an affront.
If your dignity arises from your capability of thinking for yourself, respecting your dignity requires respecting your thoughts. “Respecting your thoughts” does not mean “agreeing with your thoughts,” for requiring agreement would itself be disrespectful of everyone else’s ability to have their own thoughts. It does, however, mean respecting your right to think things through for yourself. Your free thoughts cannot be prohibited without violating your dignity as a human being – indeed, if Kant is right, such a prohibition is a violation of the most basic source of your dignity as a human being.
If I may not prohibit your thoughts, though, might I prohibit your words? Speech is only thinking out loud.
To tell someone that they cannot speak in public about what they take their interests to be is to tell them that they cannot organize politically in defense of those interests. This is another basic affront to the dignity of an individual. It is incompatible with any form of government by the people.The court cannot be right, no matter what she said or what she believes. This holds for the worst ideas anyone has or could in principle have.
Yet you might think that some ideas are so bad that anyone who adopts them is themselves a bad person. In that case, it might seem as if preventing them from political organizing is a desirable end. After all, if bad people can organize politically they are likely to gain political power. As political philosophers since Plato have argued, it is dangerous for political power to fall into the hands of people who lack the proper virtues. For people who have instead adopted a wicked character, it is surely even worse. Thus it might seem as if speech prohibitions were a good thing.
The most pragmatic counter-argument against this practice is that allowing those in power to impose speech controls during times when good people are in office will also allow bad people to impose speech controls should they gain office. Sometimes surprising situations can cause even disorganized campaigns to win a victory. Any power that one would not trust to one’s opponents is not wisely invested in a government that the opponents will sometimes control.
But it is also the case that self-government is itself a way of building virtue. To whatever degree people are excluded from self-government, they will not develop the qualities they need to do it well. This is because virtue is a matter of practice, as Aristotle argues. The way you gain the virtue of courage is to do things that are dangerous and frightening. Soldiers in training practice climbing across ropes stretched high over water. Then they may rappel from tall towers. Some may then go on to learn to jump from airplanes. Even if their military service never needs them to do any of these things in combat, the practice of learning to do things in spite of being scared makes them brave. In time, when they need to take actions in the face of fear, they are able to do so.
All virtues work this way. John Stuart Mill argued that the whole reason for representative government was that it encouraged people to become virtuous. Just as Aristotle spoke of the best life as the one that most completely develops the capacity to act virtuously,[1] and Kant derived a universal (if imperfect) duty to develop one’s capacities,[2] Mill also has an argument that attaining one’s capacities roots the human good. This is found in his Considerations on Representative Government, in which he offers an account of why he believes republican government is the best possible form. An early argument he fields is against what he calls a common opinion – it dates at least to Aristotle’s Politics – that a benign despot is the best possible form of government. “What sort of human beings can be formed under such a regimen?” he asks. “What developments can either their thinking or their active faculties attain under it?… Wherever the sphere of action of human beings is artificially circumscribed, their sentiments are narrowed and dwarfed in the same proportion.”[3]
The concern that people are not good enough for self-government is not then a reason to deny them the ability to speak their minds. If they are to become better people, they need to be allowed to speak their minds.
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