Taliban: There Will Be No Extensions of the US Military Presence at the Airport

August 31st is the drop-dead date for American forces to withdraw from the small sliver of Afghanistan where they are stationed. 

I'd like to give you an estimate of how many Americans per day we'd need to evacuate to meet that deadline, but the government says it has no idea how many there are to evacuate. Currently they say they've evacuated 37,000 people, but mostly not Americans. American citizens are currently advised not to come to the airport because it's too dangerous -- as they have been for two days now.

Speaking of things I'd like, I'd like to believe the administration is just pretending to go along with this while getting forces in place to do what will really be necessary to rescue our fellow citizens. 

However, Jen Psaki just said that no Americans are stranded in Afghanistan at all. This is because, she claims, the Biden administration intends to bring them home. They're just experiencing flight delays, I suppose, plus an unusually challenging gauntlet of airport security. 

I also like the way Psaki says, "Americans who want to come home," as if there might be plenty of them who are just planning to set up house under Taliban rule. "I've always considered converting to radical Islam, maybe taking a second or third wife, burning an amusement park. This might be the perfect opportunity!"

West's Founding XII: Which Virtues Should America Teach?

West's book has a pretty good structure. For the most part, with only small deviations, I've divided my review of it as he divided his own argument. Thus, today I'm on the twelfth part of my review, which is of his twelfth and thirteenth chapters. This is also the end of his Part II, leaving only the last (and shortest) part of his work. 

In today's section West gives a list of the particular virtues the Founders sought to encourage, and then examines other virtues they definitely did encourage but didn't add to their lists. The listed virtues are what West calls 'social' virtues; he gives lists from five early state constitutions that all included justice, moderation, temperance, industry, and frugality. There are minor variations in the additional ones included by state, but those appear to be the big five that make the lists. West deduces this may be because of a famous (at the time) magazine article called "Social Virtue" that lists these five and gives definitions of them. (272-4) 

West points out that industry and frugality are not only social virtues, but republican virtues as well. By this he means that no government of the people can survive if most of the people aren't pretty industrious and frugal, because otherwise the people will vote themselves access to others' wealth rather than earning their own. As a result (and this is exactly Aristotle's conclusion about democracies in the Politics), a government by the people absent those virtues will become unstable and overthrown. (274)

Two virtues that only appear in Massachusetts and New Hampshire are "piety and religion." Yet we know that the states of the era generally had state churches; likely the government thought that those virtues were less a matter for government than for the churches themselves.

The same two states add "wisdom and knowledge." Georgia's state seal to this day declares for "Wisdom, Justice, and Moderation," thus combining one of these rarer virtues with two of the famous social ones. West adds that "responsibility" has to be added to the list even though, he admits, the Founders don't seem to have used the term. 

Now he begins to defend the list against various critics, beginning with Nietzsche. Nietzsche complained that the aforementioned list of virtues makes up a "herd animal morality," which leads to men being degraded into unobjectionable members of the herd -- but not great, powerful, or noble warriors. (This is parallel to the argument Chesterton is frequently at pains to defeat from Nietzsche, that Christianity leads men to be too peaceful; odd, Chesterton notes, given that Christianity is also said to have led to war that smokes to the moon. So too here.) "This concern is not unreasonable," West says. (279) 

However, he points out that other writings show that Nietzsche has a wider understanding of 'herd morality' that does embrace the martial (West often says 'manly,' and sometimes 'strong') virtues. He gives a long quote that I shall partly reproduce:

Liberal institutions... make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic... These same institutions produce quite different effects while they are still being fought for; then they really promote freedom in a powerful way.... the war for liberal institutions... educates for freedom. For what is freedom? ... That one becomes more indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself.... Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight in war and victory dominate.... Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit -- and forces us to be strong. (281)

West goes on to show numerous Founding era documents that argue for these strong, martial, manly virtues. These include Congress' 1775 Declaration on Taking up Arms (pre-declaring for independence, note), proclamations on the heroic spirit necessary for resistance, and especially Washington's General Orders of 1776: 

The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army -- Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us no choice but to resolve to conquer or die; Our own country's honor, all call upon us for a vigorous and manly exertion, and if we now shamefully fail, we shall become infamous to the whole world. (283)

The Founder's cry of 'Liberty or Death' was also echoed in their wartime usage of the Bedford flag, which translates as "Victory or Death." The rattlesnake flag was an emblem of vigilance and danger to one's foes. (285-6)

So why do these martial virtues not make the list? West says that the Founders believed -- as Plato and Aristotle did -- that not everyone is capable of them. The social virtues are things everyone must be asked to do, and can be expected to do; courage, prudence, and wisdom are not going to be things of which every man is capable (and certainly not equally capable). Like the ancient philosophers, the Founders wanted a society that was virtuous throughout insofar as all are capable of virtue; also like them, West argues, they attended to finding the very best for leadership positions out of a recognition that not all were worthy. (288, 294-6)

West defends this proposition also with quotations from Machiavelli and Hobbes, although he repeats that he does not think the Founders held Hobbes in much regard. (296)

He closes his Part II with a further examination of the difference between the Founders and Classical theorists on the role of society as regards virtue. "In Plato's Republic, virtue may be said to be the purpose of political life," he says (299, and correctly, as in the Laws). The ancients are not concerned with individual rights; whereas the natural rights of individuals -- rather than their virtues -- is the purpose of government for the Founders. 

Likewise a virtue for the Founders but not Plato is vigilance against their own government. It is part of the duty of the good citizen to keep an eye on the government, hold it within its limits, and abolish it when it grows destructive to the proper end of defending natural rights. (299-300) Plato hoped to put the wise so firmly in charge that the less-competent people would necessarily be helping themselves by being guided by the state; the Founders recognized that the powerful, however wise, can become corrupt. 

He also concludes that the Founders held "humanity" to be a virtue, in something like Kant's sense (though again he never mentions Kant), i.e., a general benevolence to mankind. This is more Christian than ancient, but West says that it is obvious in Plutarch and therefore not as strong a departure as some believe. (300)

West notes a matter I have mentioned here and elsewhere, which is that there is a kind of proto-pragmatism in Aristotle's approach to virtue. Virtue is good not merely for being noble, but for being useful. Courage is good because it is noble, but it is a virtue because it brings success in wars and therefore freedom from oppression. (302)

Finally West defends the Founders against those who think that their approach 'eclipses the higher virtues,' such as intellectual contemplation. He points out that Jefferson's founding of the University of Virginia (and there were parallel projects across the early nation, including the University of Georgia in 1785) suggests that this concern is greatly overstated. (303-4) He gives examples also from Washington, Adams, and James Wilson to show that the Founders also appreciated these 'higher' virtues in great measure. (304-6)

Nevertheless he agrees that they were not themselves philosopher kings of the sort Plato had hoped to find. 

They were statesmen and gentlemen, admiring from afar, just as Aristotle's gentleman looks up to the philosopher in the Ethics, and Plato's Glaucon learns to admire philosophy in the Republic. Political life cannot and should not attempt to produce philosophers or poets, but a well-governed polity can provide a place for the life of the mind[,] (306)

Philosophers in my experience are very keen on defending the idea that the vita contemplativa is higher than the vita activa of action, war, and political life. My own life having embraced both at turns, I am not sure that this is true; the eudaimonia of being fully engaged in all your vital powers in working the good is sometimes more evident at war than at peace, as are the deep and powerful friendships that are the subject of the end of Aristotle's Ethics. War, for one thing, does much to level the social inequality that Aristotle thinks will make friendship difficult; but under fire together, there is a true equality in that you and the man beside you are in equal danger of death. There is good to be had in both lives, and one may not in fact be higher than the other except for those whose contemplation truly allows them to approach the divine. 

But West is writing about what the Founders thought, and of the worth of their thought, and he has given a defensible account of both.

Maybe you can do it

Brit Hume dared me not to laugh out loud on reading this querulous PuffHo pearl-clutching (not to worry, the link is to RedState, with an excerpt):

As President Joe Biden ended his news conference on Friday afternoon about the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, a reporter called out an especially bellicose question.

“Why do you continue to trust the Taliban, Mr. President?” the reporter said.

[T]he reporter’s criticism-masquerading-as-query was the culmination of a week’s worth of dramatic finger-pointing and fretting from a Washington press corps that usually prides itself on neutrality.

Although the White House’s failure to foresee the rapid fall of the Afghan government and prepare accordingly has exacerbated the chaos of the U.S. withdrawal, Biden and his allies are furious with what they see as reporters’ and pundits’ unduly hawkish coverage of the exit.

“The media tends to bend over backwards to ‘both-sides’ all of their coverage, but they made an exception for this,” said Eric Schultz, a deputy press secretary under President Barack Obama. “They both-sides coverage over masks, and vaccines, and school openings and everything else. Somehow [the Afghanistan withdrawal] created a rush to judgment and a frenzy that we haven’t seen in a long time.”

If Americans and their allies were not being slaughtered right now, I'd feel more glee about the spectacle of these clowns' new outrage over journalists' "criticism-masquerading-as-query," loss of "neutrality," "rush to judgment," and "frenzy." Next the White House will be calling them political operatives with bylines. "Hey, guys, can I get another scoop of that neutrality?"

Back to the drawing board

For LR1

It is interesting that they call the various academic fields "disciplines," just as you say. Fencing, horseback riding, but also the more intense disciplines make a very fine companion to academic study. 

Hurricane Damage

Hurricane Fred rolled over us last week, dumping a massive amount of rain and wind on the mountains. I cleared a fallen tree with a chainsaw and worked a medical call, and the dirt roads are pretty badly washed out up here, but it was not too bad. However, in the middle of the storm we got an emergency alert that anyone along the Pigeon River should head to higher ground immediately -- even though it meant leaving shelter in the storm. I went through that valley today, and I can see why. 

I passed a barn that had floated off its foundation and that was deposited by the roadside some distance away. Cars were overturned by the flooding. Crops were destroyed. The water at Sunrise Falls in the mountains got so intense as to fill the whole culvert, overflow the bridge, and destroy the whole side of the mountain on the other side.

US 276, a Federal Highway, is closed at the intersection of NC 215 and 110. The local Sheriff's department is stopping every traveler to ask where they're going and to try to suggest a route that might still get them there eventually. Many of those alternative routes are closed as well, but most people out here have 4x4s and can handle a washed-out road. The cops are suggesting officially closed roads and ignoring people using them if they're able. Where bridges are out, it's a bigger deal.

Power is out, water is out, roads are out. It must have been an unimaginable amount of water that came down through there that day.

“The Black Face of White Supremacy”

Can you people not hear yourselves?

Against Cultural Imperialism

Jamaicans are upset with America's embassy for pushing gay pride on their country.

Trusting the Taliban

As the President of the United States abruptly ended and fled from his press conference on Afghanistan, a reporter yelled out the question: "Why do you continue to trust the Taliban, Mr. President?"

It's an excellent question. One of the problems with the Biden administration's "strategy" of trusting the Taliban is that the Taliban forces are irregulars. Even if a Taliban leader promises something, he has no mechanism to ensure the forces on the ground know about his promise -- let alone abide by it. Even if the leaders that the State Department are talking with are sincere, they aren't able to discipline their forces well enough to ensure compliance. 

The situation is bad enough that even ABC News and NPR are turning on the administration. CNN is allowing their in-country correspondent to point out that the evacuation ground to a halt overnight, Qatar is refusing to take any more refugees, and that there is simply no way that they will be able to evacuate the planned numbers in the allotted time.

Their tribal ties persist, but they are under intense strain because of the horror the administration's actions have provoked. You can tell that CNN Correspondent Clarissa Ward thinks of herself as part of the team: even in her hostile interview with John Kirby, she speaks as 'the one who has to look them [i.e. Afghans] in the eyes,' meaning that she feels she is in a way a spokesperson or a symbol of the American administration. Yet she is doing her best to tell the truth, and being genuinely brave in a situation that very suddenly became unstable. 

Meanwhile, a new report shows that the Biden administration promised allies we would leave a stabilizing force in Afghanistan as recently as June. Even the British were given no warning that we had changed our minds and were pulling the rug out. 

Also, the Pentagon is openly contradicting the President on the facts on the ground. The Pentagon is being honest: al Qaeda is definitely still there, contra what the President told the press, and Americans are definitely not getting to the airport without difficulty. They're admitting that Americans are being beaten by the Taliban's forces and driven back in some cases.

It's not clear if Biden has lost his mind or is simply lying, but even his own appointees and favorites among the press can no longer stand to lie for him. That suggests the end is near for his Presidency.

Luke 22:36 / Havamal 38

Elite Education

My own has not been elite, but public state school, except for two years. In the early 1990s I attended the Paideia School in Atlanta for my last two years of high school, and that is very much a feeder school for elite education (although my family could not afford to send me to such). The youth I encountered there were completely different from anyone I had ever known before; the education included exposure to the progenitors of Critical Race Theory, and Critical Theory in general, to alternative religions including Wicca (then a tiny minority, now bigger than Presbyterianism), and of course to intense forms of feminism. 

So I read this essay from Swarthmore with a kind of interest. He is arguing that elite education is, on its own terms, despicable and impermissible. 

Surely there is no credible theory of social justice, or at least no view that would attract Swarthmore professors, according to which it could count as just to spend so much more on educating our students than on the rest of their cohort. In a just world, a college like Swarthmore simply wouldn’t exist. The mere possibility would be regarded as obscene.

Well, indeed: this is what the Marxists (or Hegelians) would call an internal contradiction, the sort that will ultimately force you to evolve to a new plane of understanding. But all of reality is supposed to be like that, if you read Hegel.

He's read Marx, anyway.

On my first day of teaching at Swarthmore I was asked if I would serve as faculty adviser for the Conservative Society. This came as a surprise. I was just about to publish a book called Plato as Critical Theorist, my job talk had been about the ideal of socialism and I had recently voted for Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. Did the students know something I didn’t? The answer was yes. They knew that student societies can only exist if they have a faculty adviser, for one thing, but they also knew there was no one else they could ask. The fact that I had written an article called “Why Conservatives Should Read Marx” was sufficient to demonstrate my interest in engaging with conservative ideas and, given the political climate at Swarthmore, that was all they felt they could ask for. “You could give us a critical eye on our activities,” the society’s president wrote, “and help us come up with hard questions for our guest speakers and for ourselves.” I worried about my reputation on campus but decided I couldn’t let the students down.

Good for you. It's a start. 

It's a hard question, though. There really aren't any schools for ordinary people that are even capable of aspiring to the level of education you'd want in whomever you put in charge. There should be; Catholic schools should teach Aquinas and Aristotle, and even Avicenna and Maimonides. They should be able to train you in the modern and Enlightenment theories without committing to them, showing you where they are strong and where they might be weak. 

Ultimately the goal has to be training those few of the ordinary people's children who have both the interest and the aptitude, that they might be raised to the Guardians (as Plato put it -- and in no way endorsing Plato's totalitarian model). The governing system needs to be voluntary, so that no one makes money off of command of others. You have to make your money off of service to others. That's the only moral way, the only way to avoid the corruption that Weber points out is a necessary feature of constant government (see the archives on Weber). 

This is also Aristotle's insight, re: his decision that only the middle class can be trusted with political power because they'll want to politics to the bare minimum so they can get back to earning their living on their private economic activity.

Yet someone ultimately must exercise political power, even if as a volunteer; and they need to be virtuous, and they need to be educated. The elite generally are not virtuous because, for reasons of their class, they live in luxury and ease. Virtue requires practice, and practicing in circumstances of hardship. It cannot be cultivated to a great deal in luxury.

But education requires ease, as Plato and Aristotle note: you cannot sit and study if you must work all the time. The elite thus easily build a surplus of education, but a deficit of virtue as compared to ordinary people.

A strenuous education was Plato's response: put them to hard training, military training, so that they cannot avoid developing the difficult virtues. Yet they will also be subject to education, and provided just enough ease for that. Theodore Roosevelt argues for the strenuous life on similar terms, although he was himself too much an elite to understand how his beloved cowboys were unlikely to have the leisure to grasp Plato at length.

It is a very difficult matter. Some combination of hardship -- war, ideally, if Aristotle is right; training for war at least, if Plato is right -- and leisure has to be made available, and for everyone who shows the potential to understand. Yet the hard work also has to be done; firewood has to be cut, or pipelines run; water must be carried from the river or the well, or plumbing maintained.

We have not reached any kind of ideal. Rule by the educated is enervating because they lack virtue. It is what is killing our society right now. Rule by the virtuous is right and proper, but they also need not to be ignorant of the knowledge that the wise of endless generations have produced. That requires education, of some kind and to some degree.

Pause and reflect on this. 

Goodnight, Sonny Chiba

The martial arts film star has died at 82. Quentin Tarantino was impressed with him; not only was he featured in Kill Bill (Volume One), as noted, his Street Fighter films were introduced in the opening scene of True Romance (an underappreciated movie). Here are some of those scenes.

He might also have been influential in William Gibson's choice to set the opening of his breakthrough novel, Neuromancer, in Chiba City. 

West's Founding XI: Honor and Shame in Politics

This is an underappreciated area of philosophy, though it is where I have spent an awful lot of my time. West points out that political power is insufficient to actually govern, and as such that what the Founders called the "law of fashion" (see prior posts) ends up being the most important law of all. What people happen to honor, or are willing to shame, ends up governing a great deal more of human behavior than the positive law -- and can even alter whether or not the positive law can be enforced, or upon whom, as we saw in the non-prosecution of last year's BLM riots (versus the objectively similar behavior on display on 6 January, which are being aggressively prosecuted because of the comparatively unfashionable nature of the perpetrators).

West points out that politics not only ends up depending on these forms, it can influence them as well. Funeral orations, speeches in general, the granting of and celebration of military awards and decorations, and political symbolism are all ways of using honors to hold up ideals for aspiration. West has an extended discussion of the Great Seal of the United States that intends to show how the Founders held up the Roman model as a kind of ideal, and likened their project especially to Virgil's heroic treatment of the founding of Rome. 

To some degree this underlines a problem with this approach, which is that fashions change and therefore honors of prior generations wash out. The Founders may well have been just as careful in their construction of the symbolism of the Great Seal as he says; and perhaps it had their intended message, down to the untranslated Latin references to Virgil, in their own generation. No one except a few specialists now reads Virgil in Latin; almost no one reads Virgil at all. The symbolism is lost, the honors are not noticed, and the symbol now looks just like a weird pyramid with an all-seeing-eye atop it.

Similarly, the fashion of respect passed that caused the daughters and granddaughters of Civil War Veterans to erect so many monuments to their fathers and grandfathers at the close of those mens' lives -- the great period of Civil War monuments is 1900-1920, when a youth of 20 in 1860 would have been 60 to 80 years old. The Daughters of the Confederacy knew their fathers and grandfathers, as did the parallel Union organizations. They honored them as much for the men they had been later in life, acting as fathers and grandfathers, as for what they did in the great and terrible moments of their youth. But they also honored that, because they had grown up hearing the stories of sacrifice and suffering from their elders. 

None living today knew the men, nor heard their stories from them. And so, to us, the monuments -- which are honors -- are important only for our own purposes. Few of us care for them even for their historical interest; almost none care for honor itself so much as to revere the impulse to honor one's elders for its own sake. Therefore our present generation destroys such monuments for their own internal reasons, honoring themselves instead (and not apparently even caring whose monuments they are, or what they did, as witnessed by the destruction of monuments to Lincoln and Grant as well as Lee and Stonewall Jackson). 

These are titanic matters of the first importance to human society; few understand how powerful or how deep they are. West's chapter is a little dry, but at least its presence shows that he is cognizant that it is a topic that deserves discussion. 

Assabiya

Lee Smith and Rod Dreher are making an explosive charge about the CIA's operations in Afghanistan.

The reality is that America lost its war in Afghanistan more than a decade ago, roughly around the time when CIA officers began bribing aging warlords with Viagra. The Americans knew all about the young boys the tribal leaders kept in their camps; because the sex drug helped Afghan elders rape more boys more often, they were beholden to America’s clandestine service. Losing Afghanistan then is the least of it. When you choose to adopt a foreign cohort’s cultural habits, customs for which the elders of your own tribe would ostracize and perhaps kill you, you have lost your civilization.

This is part of an overarching analysis of why the American elite has comprehensively failed, and why the barbarians in Afghanistan found them easy to beat. 

Dreher warns that he thinks the likely outcome is a totalitarian system, such as the one that replaced the Russian Empire after the fall of the Tsars. I think that's wrong; the totalitarians are the ones in the elite now. What's likely here -- as R. E. Howard wrote -- is likewise the return of barbarism. Our barbarians are healthier, though: strong, honest, and with a love of liberty enforced with arms. 

The French, Too

Under the commander in chief, our military is less daring and capable than French police. C’est dommage. 

That Was Four Days Ago, Five

People are pointing out that it was only two days ago — Monday — when Afghans desperate to flee the Taliban were falling to their deaths from American planes. Fair; apparently the President has lost track of time. 

In two or three days, though, it will have been four or five days ago. Had he given the answer then, when it was accurate, it would have been a horrible thing to say. How can you trivialize this, least of all by suggesting that the passage of a few days should put us beyond it? On 9/11, twenty years ago, we saw people choosing such a death over the horror of their situation; and it remains deeply tragic after all this time. 

PRC Funded China Trips for Anti-Audit Dems

Surprise. 

Hey, why would Chinese Communists be aligned with those trying to suppress audits of the election? Coincidence?

State Dept. Bureau In Charge of Afghan Evacuation Defunded

Trump's State Department -- which chafed under his authority the whole four years -- never really wanted to establish the Contingency and Crisis Response Bureau, but Trump wanted it to prevent Benghazi-style embarrassments. Biden's team defunded it in June, so it wasn't there to help evacuate Americans in Afghanistan.

Communists Outed by Communist Purge

Current Affairs is a lefty magazine that extends even to outright Communism at times. For example, from their current edition here is an argument that you should be breaking things at work (to keep your capitalist bosses from replacing workers with machines); and here is an argument that gay marriage was secretly just a plot by the wealthy to obtain benefits for themselves (one that, along the way, celebrates the descent of American sexual culture into complete chaos). 

The magazine just fired almost all of its staff because they were trying to organize a worker's co-op.

Not a surprise for those who read the history of actual Communist states.

UK Forces Still Running Patrols into Kabul

Apparently hotly opposed by the US commander, the UK's 2Para are running patrols to pick up and transport citizens -- theirs, Irishmen, but also others who want to be moved safely -- to the airport. Read this exclusive thread on the topic.