Hope the women had the foresight to buy burqas.
Ten Thousand Journeys
The approximately ten thousand American civilians left in Kabul have been told to head to the airport, but they’re on their own getting there.
West's Founding, X: Sex and Marriage
West points out that there is little in the Founding core documents on these topics because they were quite uncontroversial matters in the Founding era. Nevertheless they are so important to our own time that he decided they merited a chapter. He had to dig deeper to come up with material, looking at state and local laws, legislative statements and debates, court cases and rulings, even personal correspondence between John and Abigail Adams.
The findings are not very surprising. The Founders endorsed a rational, reasoned account of traditional Judeo-Christian moral views on sex and marriage. They rejected Islam's approach by name (235), not because of prejudice but because they felt it degraded women's natural right to equality and reduced them to near-slavish status. They approved of monogamous marriage, barred polygamy, sodomy, and bestiality; they banned prostitution and pornography as being contrary to the success of marriage, which they viewed as a fundamental institution of a natural society -- as well as a natural right of men and women, provided they took only one spouse of the opposite sex and with due reflection.
West finds that the laws on sex were very strict, but barely enforced. In principle sodomy was a capital crime in many places; Jefferson proposed to reduce the penalty to castration for men and nose-piercing for women. Massachusetts' adultery law prescribed public display on the gallows followed by whipping of up to 39 stripes, plus imprisonment and/or fines. In fact, though, there is no evidence that these corporal penalties were carried out, and there are only two recorded capital cases West could find. One of these was in a case of sodomy against an unwilling youth, and as a result the death penalty might have been as much for the rape as for the homosexuality. The other might have been a bestiality case, but it is not clear. (230-1)
This was how Georgia handled sodomy cases even in my own lifetime. In principle it was a felony, whether the sodomy was oral or anal, homosexual or otherwise. In practice almost no one was ever prosecuted for such a thing; the only case I know of was of a guy who admitted to it on the stand in the course of his divorce case. He ended up going to prison for what he'd confessed to under oath, but his wife (an equal partner in theory) was not prosecuted because she had not confessed.
West says, "For the most part, this de facto 'don't ask, don't tell' policy on sexual misconduct continued from the founding until... the 'surge of interest in victimless crime, in vice, in sexual behavior, at the end of the nineteenth century," i.e., the rise of the Progressive age. West documents that it was the Progressives who banned birth control, and pushed for aggressive enforcement of sexual morality laws. He quotes one of the Progressives on the subject, who wrote that the "purpose of the state... [is] the perfection of humanity;... the perfect development of the human reason, and its attainment to universal command over individualism[,]" (234) The 1910 encyclopedia article on crime praises the apparently rising crime rate because "it is almost in every case due to the enactment of new laws, police regulations, etc., with the stricter enforcement of social and hygienic regulations -- an indication, therefore, of social progress rather than the reverse." (ibid)
The common law inherited from Britain that continued at the Founding did place a significant limit on women's equality if and only if they became wives: their legal personhood was collapsed with their husband's ('one flesh' and all that), and he was therefore in charge of any money and property they held in common. Single women and widows had the same civil rights as regarded owning property or businesses (witness Betsy Ross), but this was not true for married women whether or not they had children. (237).
These laws were not immediately changed at the Founding, because the status of the family was uncontroversial in the society of that time, but they did begin to change in ways that asserted women's natural rights after 1776. Courts as early as 1816 held that, though a wife could not make a legally binding contract under the common law, husbands were bound to obey any contract their wife made provided that it was reasonable. (238) Courts also departed from the English common law that permitted husbands to "moderately chastise" (i.e. beat) their wives, holding that "the right of chastising a wife is not... recognized by our law." (ibid) The continual evolution of the laws after the Founding was in that direction, until we arrived where we are today.
Another thing that changed after 1776 was that American women no longer were expected to abide by their parent's wishes on whom they should marry, but were free to choose their husband. (241) West claims that "After 1776, the American family was increasingly based on a new view of wives as equal partners with their husbands, although men and women were still expected to occupy partially separate spheres in life." (ibid) He cites a number of publications from the period that praised women as the moral center of the family as evidence that women were increasingly entrusted by society with the right to make decisions about what morality required of their families as well as themselves. "Historian Linda Kerber has called this new idea of women's role 'republican motherhood," West notes, citing her work Women of the Republic. (ibid)
Once again West cites Locke mostly to point out that he has seen little evidence that the Founders read him on the subject; once again he does not cite Kant, whose work is quite close to the approach West attributes to the Founders. Kant, just as West says the Founders did, essentially endorsed the Judeo-Christian traditions on sex and marriage but put a coat of 'practical reason' paint on them rather than citing the tradition or the Bible. Kant also reasoned that marriage was a natural right of individuals, so much so that any individual had a right to insist that a society that had somehow not made legislation permitting marriage must do so on demand. Kant likewise reasoned to the conclusion that sex was only permissible in marriage, in a 'natural' way (i.e. one capable of producing children), and that marriage was a natural law institution consisting of exactly two parties of the opposite sex from one another. The Kantian project and the Founding project are quite different, but they are both expressions of the Enlightenment in this way (although, as you will recall from earlier sections of this review, West thinks the Founders were fairly suspicious of the Enlightenment's claim to rely on reason alone as a guide).
In any case, this chapter is unsurprising but was worth putting together. This is true even though I imagine it was a lot of work, compared with other chapters, because it required a lot more digging. Still, it is helpful to have it all spelled out.
Harmless enemy, treacherous friend
Mark Steyn.
The world-record brokey-brokey-brokeness manifested by the current spending bills is only possible because the US dollar is the global currency. When that ends, we're Weimar with smartphones. Clearly, Chairman Xi and his allies occasionally muse on the best moment to yank the dollar out from under. If you were in Beijing watching telly today, would you perhaps be considering advancing those plans?
The President's New Statement on Afghanistan
The President's speech today was (a) preposterous and (b) discouraging. It was preposterous to claim that we will now focus on the counter-terrorism mission in Afghanistan, which we have just lost all capacity to perform at all. It was preposterous in the extreme to claim that "We planned for every contingency!" in the wake of the obvious failure of military planning for this retreat.
It was discouraging because the President chose not only to accept no responsibility for himself ("The buck stops here!" he said, before walking away without taking a single question). He also chose not to ask anyone on his team to accept responsibility. Every officer involved in the planning of this withdrawal should be cashiered, and some might reasonably be prosecuted. Instead, it sounds as if the President intends to push the blame as far away from his team as he can, so that no one will actually be held accountable for this massive failure.
He was strident on the non-issue: almost everyone agrees that it was long past time to leave Afghanistan. He had nothing at all to say about the actual issue, which is a titanic failure of military order. This mismanaged retreat is an issue in and of itself. We had a perfectly good airfield at Bagram we could have used to handle the withdrawal, which is highly defensible and without a large civilian population around it. Instead we've got 6,000 Marines and Paratroopers trapped on a single runway, overrun with civilians who are trying to climb on the plane, endangering all of our forces and also all of the civilians. It's a complete military failure; again, every officer involved in the planning should be cashiered.
Retreat is one of the most basic military maneuvers, so central to the reality of military life that it had a bugle call that everyone was once supposed to know how to fall in on when it was sounded. A strategic withdrawal is different from a tactical withdrawal in scale, but not in substance. The line of retreat is established, rear guard forces form up to defend the retreat, falling back when a new rear guard is ready to protect them as they fall back. (A sort of reverse of the bounding overwatch maneuver used to advance under fire.) We should have fallen back in stages onto Bagram, evacuating as we went until everyone was gone. The embassy could have been abandoned long ago, before the military withdrawal began. Any civilians we wanted to take out could have been taken out before we pulled support for the Afghan forces, and before we pulled out our own people.
What I heard President Biden say today was that he was right about everything, brave to take on this difficult decision, and steadfast in the face of all criticism. What that means is that he has learned nothing, is determined to learn nothing, and insists on no one else learning anything either.
The Girl I Left Behind Me
They were mostly males, this time. There's a lot of sadness among those who were in Afghanistan for the ones they got to know, whom they cannot save.
I remember an Afghan kid who worked in the DFAC (cafeteria) who we called Cowboy. He always wore this cowboy hat and an “I’m with stupid” t-shirt someone had given him, always with a big smile, high school age.Cowboy was a good student. His family, who all worked on base, was incredibly proud of him. He wanted to go to college in America. But there weren’t colleges that took Afghans, the education system was too shit. No program to help kids like him. I looked.I wonder if he’s dead now, for serving us food and dreaming of something different.But if Cowboy is dead then he died a long time ago, and if Cowboy is dead it’s our fault for going there in the first place, giving his family the option of trusting us when we are the least trustworthy people on the planet.We use people up and throw them away like it’s nothing.And now, finally, we are leaving and the predictable thing is happening....You can’t keep lying to yourself about what you sent us into. No more blown up soldiers. No more Bollywood videos on phones whose owners are getting shipped god knows where. No more hypocrisy.No more pretending it meant anything. It didn’t.It didn’t mean a goddamn thing.
It's not just veterans. Here's a staff writer at The Atlantic, the kind of person who has contacts he can call on at the Open Society. They have almost infinite resources. They could have helped, if only they'd had time. Why didn't they have time?
In recent days Bard and Open Society have appealed to universities in the region to host Afghan evacuees, and to foundations and board members to pay as much as $400,000 to charter flights out of Afghanistan. “In many cases we have institutions to host them. Colleges, universities, and funders are stepping up,” Becker said. “That is not a problem. The challenge is the time to get people out and get them visas into those countries.”...
At the travel agency Khan heard that there were no seats left on any flights before August 27. By then his wife would be unable to fly, the government of President Ashraf Ghani would have fled, the Americans would be in full evacuation mode, and Kabul would lie open to the Taliban. But on Saturday morning in the U.S., Julie Kornfeld, the pro bono lawyer who has been advising Khan, found three seats on a Turkish Airlines flight and an organization called Miles4Migrants to pay the cost. Khan and his family were scheduled to leave Afghanistan on Tuesday and arrive in Houston on Thursday. With the U.S. visas and tickets in hand, Khan told me that Saturday, August 14, 2021, was the happiest day of his life. He sent me a video of his 3-year-old son in their rented room, dancing an Afghan dance of celebration.
Today, Sunday, the Taliban are in Kabul. President Ashraf Ghani has reportedly fled to Tajikistan. American officials are burning sensitive documents and evacuating the embassy for the airport. All the Western diplomatic missions are being abandoned. The neighborhood where Khan was renting a room has become dangerous, and he and his family have fled, walking six miles to another hiding place. He needs to find a facility that will administer the COVID-19 tests required by the airlines. He needs to get his family to the airport. He needs two more days.
Saturday was already too late. Let's have one more, from Bari Weiss' contacts.
We met in 2011, when we were both working for an Afghan news organization. He was 19 then and had never known a country at peace. He was also very cute, and the other American girl and I would anticipate prayer times because he would roll up his sleeves to do his ablutions. We surreptitiously called those moments “muscle o’clock.”Why didn't they have more time? Because of yet another cascade failure of our systems, a story that is becoming very commonplace. Planning a retreat is a basic military function. It's not magic. At one time any student of West Point could have done it, would have known when and how to do it.Once, when we thought there was a Taliban threat to our office, he told me not to worry. “I will protect you,” he said then. “And Allah gave me the heart of a lion.”
The Taliban didn’t hurt us that day, but on Sunday they took over his city. “I cried so much,” he told me.
He was trying to get a visa to leave — everyone in his neighborhood knew he’d worked for the Americans, it was only a matter of time before the Taliban learned it, “and then you know what will happen to me.” He needed one more document: a letter from a supervisor who had stopped returning his emails. On Saturday, I got help from some D.C. friends to track the supervisor down. The supervisor responded immediately, saying the young man had “worked tirelessly to help the U.S. mission in Afghanistan,” and had “regularly placed himself in harm’s way without any objection.”
I was relieved he’d gotten this ticket out. But by Sunday it was clear it was too late; the Taliban weren’t letting anyone leave.
Now apparently whole bureaucracies of West Point students can't manage it, not with all the resources in the world. Not with four years of time to plan under the previous Commander in Chief, whose intent to withdraw they resisted so thoroughly as not to make a plan; not with seven months under the current one, whose intent proved ultimately the same.
They failed us, and they failed those some of us came to care about. They placed themselves above the elected leadership, assumed their own superiority, and consequently left thousands at the mercy of the merciless.
The President's Statement on Afghanistan
The situation in Afghanistan is currently complete collapse, but we are about to insert five thousand Marines and Paratroopers to try to restore control over the airport. At that point we will be facing a situation worse than Saigon in 1975, and potentially as bad as Xenophon's Anabasis (should there not be enough jet fuel at the Kabul airport to manage the evacuation, and resupply proves unrealistic, and the brigade or so of American forces thus have to evacuate overland) or Teutoburg Forest (should the Taliban manage to overrun and destroy our forces, which is unlikely given that these are regular forces with air support -- but also not impossible).
This is an inexcusable disaster brought on by a complete failure of military leadership and the intelligence community, but also by the civilian leadership's failure to take it seriously or to hold their bureaucracies' feet to the fire on honest information.
Indeed, the President issued a statement yesterday that has already been completely passed over by reality.
First, based on the recommendations of our diplomatic, military, and intelligence teams, I have authorized the deployment of approximately 5,000 U.S. troops to make sure we can have an orderly and safe drawdown of U.S. personnel and other allied personnel, and an orderly and safe evacuation of Afghans who helped our troops during our mission and those at special risk from the Taliban advance.
It is too late to help anyone at risk from the Taliban advance. They've taken the presidential palace and the US embassy in Kabul.
Second, I have ordered our Armed Forces and our Intelligence Community to ensure that we will maintain the capability and the vigilance to address future terrorist threats from Afghanistan.
Too late. We will have no foothold in Afghanistan, or near Afghanistan, from which to maintain the vigilance that might underwrite any capacity to act against terrorist threats there.
Third, I have directed the Secretary of State to support President Ghani and other Afghan leaders as they seek to prevent further bloodshed and pursue a political settlement. Secretary Blinken will also engage with key regional stakeholders.
Ghani fled the country this morning.
Fourth, we have conveyed to the Taliban representatives in Doha, via our Combatant Commander, that any action on their part on the ground in Afghanistan, that puts U.S. personnel or our mission at risk there, will be met with a swift and strong U.S. military response.
They appear completely unconcerned about that, having taken Kabul in spite of these threats.
Fifth, I have placed Ambassador Tracey Jacobson in charge of a whole-of-government effort to process, transport, and relocate Afghan Special Immigrant Visa applicants and other Afghan allies. Our hearts go out to the brave Afghan men and women who are now at risk. We are working to evacuate thousands of those who helped our cause and their families.
You'll be lucky to evacuate your embassy employees and the Marines and Paratroopers you're deploying. If you fail at that, there will be female State Department employees turned into Taliban wives and we will lose thousands of the best men remaining in American life.
That is what we are going to do. Now let me be clear about how we got here.
You can read that if you want, but it's not worth the candle. He isn't clear; and he thinks it's everyone else's fault.
UPDATE: The top American diplomatic official, the Charge d'Affaires, has been evacuated. We did not have an ambassador because the Biden administration never bothered to nominate one.
Saturday Music
Had a good ride today, abbreviated by the rising storms of afternoon. By early evening the storms on the mountain were epic. It reminded me of the stories of wizards or martial arts masters who lived high on storm-shrouded mountains.
Dragging pegs through the mountains on a fast motorcycle is as good as it gets short of war. It’s better yet if your woman is with you, as my wife was today
The Alternative to Police
Regarding an Atlanta shooting last year...
Today a Fulton County grand jury indicted two men involved in the shooting. According to prosecutors, both men were members of the Bloods gang and were manning the roadblock where Turner was shot because Rayshard Brooks, who was killed by a police officer in the nearby Wendy’s parking lot, was also a member of the Bloods gang....
“There are many more who will never be criminally indicted but should be indicted for their allowing a situation like this to happen in the city of Atlanta,” attorney Mawuli Davis said Friday. “We’re clearer now than we’ve ever been that this was absolutely preventable and did not have to happen but for the city surrendering a block, a neighborhood, to what has now been described as a gang.”
It could have been a well-regulated militia of responsible citizens, but the government seems hostile to that idea and tries to prevent volunteer civil defense organizations from operating. Or it could have been professional police, but I hear the idea is to defund those and eliminate them from these neighborhoods.
The world is what it is. Somebody is going to be keeping order with guns. If you don't like the cops, you can have the community. If you don't trust the community and you don't trust the cops, you suppress both; but you're going to end up with gangsters instead. Maybe you like your local gang, and you think they're a better option. Maybe they are.
Better be sure.
Collapse
The Taliban are staging a very rapid reconquista of Afghanistan, apparently taking our intelligence and military experts by complete surprise in spite of 20 years of investments in knowing what is going on in that country. They're capturing major amounts of war materiel we have apparently left behind for them (probably they can't long maintain the Blackhawks and MRAPs, even if they can operate them; hopefully they'll find good use for the small arms supporting the righteous cause of their brother Muslim Uighurs).
It's bad enough that we spent 20 years training an Afghan army that fell apart at the first touch. It's worse that we had absolutely no idea of how strong the Taliban was even at the last. There was no successful infiltration by these intelligence agencies with the infinite black budgets, no visibility on what they were capable of doing.
The real lesson is that our institutions have failed. The military never lost a gunfight above the squad level, but they never came close to attaining the conditions for winning the war -- or even understanding what was possible in a place like Afghanistan. The intelligence services are complete failures. The brass should be cashiered, almost across the board; the intelligence community disbanded and replaced.
But so too so many of our institutions, which are ossified and immobile, helpless and beyond reform. This includes the institutions that would be tasked with reform, such as Congress.
The Soviet Union did not long survive its adventure in Afghanistan; it may well be that the US Federal Government will not either. Afghanistan itself was too far away to wound us, though it bled us of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. Yet the rot it reveals in our institutions looms like a sudden terminal diagnosis in the life of a man.
Strange swings in confidence
I've seen this chart before, but not showing differences between Americans and Brits. It's odd enough that the confidence levels should be so consistently different between the two populations, but what's even weirder is--there are people who think they could survive a fight to the death with a grizzly bear, etc., unarmed? And there are people who think they couldn't beat a cat or a rat unarmed?
Don't we all feel like we live in a Dilbert cartoon?
A good interview with Elon Musk, including an anecdote about optimizing processes that really should have been eliminated in the first place:
"[T]here were these fiberglass mats atop the [Tesla] Model 3 battery pack that were in between the floor pan and the battery. And it was the one point choking the battery pack production line. . . .
“I tried to fix the automation, like, make the robot better, make it move faster, shorter path, increase the torque, delete the reverse 720 degrees on the bolt cause that’s unnecessary. Go forward fast, not at a 20% rate but at a 100% rate. And instead of spackling glue on the entire battery pack, just put little dabs of glue because the fiberglass mats are sandwiched between the battery pack and the floor pan anyways so all you need is something to hold it in place until you bolt the battery pack into the car.”
And after doing all of this work on automation and acceleration and simplifying Musk finally wondered what the purpose of the mats was in the first place.
“I asked the battery safety team . . . . I said ‘Are they for fire protection?’ And they said ‘No, these are for noise and vibration.’ . . . Then I asked the . . . noise vibration harshness team ‘What’s it for?’ and they said fire safety.”
“So, literally, it was like being in a Dilbert cartoon, okay,” Musk said. He added, “Actually, I feel like I’m in a Dilbert cartoon quite frequently.”
. . . [T]hey put microphones in two cars, one with the mat and one without and found no one could tell the difference. So after all of that, they deleted the mats “and just bypassed this $2 million robot cell that was a complete pile of nonsense.”
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.)
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