A retired Marine officer has wise words that will, sadly, not be heeded.
Enchiridion XXXI
XXXI
Be assured that the essence of piety toward the gods lies in this—to form right opinions concerning them, as existing and as governing the universe justly and well. And fix yourself in this resolution, to obey them, and yield to them, and willingly follow them amidst all events, as being ruled by the most perfect wisdom. For thus you will never find fault with the gods, nor accuse them of neglecting you. And it is not possible for this to be affected in any other way than by withdrawing yourself from things which are not within our own power, and by making good or evil to consist only in those which are. For if you suppose any other things to be either good or evil, it is inevitable that, when you are disappointed of what you wish or incur what you would avoid, you should reproach and blame their authors. For every creature is naturally formed to flee and abhor things that appear hurtful and that which causes them; and to pursue and admire those which appear beneficial and that which causes them. It is impracticable, then, that one who supposes himself to be hurt should rejoice in the person who, as he thinks, hurts him, just as it is impossible to rejoice in the hurt itself. Hence, also, a father is reviled by his son when he does not impart the things which seem to be good; and this made Polynices and Eteocles mutually enemies—that empire seemed good to both. On this account the husbandman reviles the gods; [and so do] the sailor, the merchant, or those who have lost wife or child. For where our interest is, there, too, is piety directed. So that whoever is careful to regulate his desires and aversions as he ought is thus made careful of piety likewise. But it also becomes incumbent on everyone to offer libations and sacrifices and first fruits, according to the customs of his country, purely, and not heedlessly nor negligently; not avariciously, nor yet extravagantly.
I think the bolded word is more properly "effected." The Perseus Project translation agrees with me.
I have italicized what I think is the hinge of this chapter. Confer with Aristotle's dictum that 'The Good is what all things desire.' This becomes important, in a different way, for Aquinas. For Aristotle, it is obvious that all things desire to continue to exist, to perfect their existence, and to extend it (as through reproduction). The good of a thing, say a dog, is that which allows that thing to flourish: food, shelter, a relationship with a kind master, a chance to breed.
The good per se is thus, as Aquinas notes, existence; but not, he warns, the kind of existence that we things have. It is existence in the divine sense, which is everlasting and eternal and incapable of eradication: a kind of good to which our souls aspire, but which we cannot have without yielding up our own natural good. Yet in coming to know the divine, as much as we can, we realize that God is truly good in a way that no earthly thing is. The nature of his existence proves that his goodness is truer than ours: Good itself.
In Epictetus dictum is complicated by the possibility of error: beings desire (and thus pursue and admire) that which causes them to flourish, or appears to; and they "flee and abhor" those things that harm them, or that appear to do. Yet, he says, we can fall into error if we mistake good and evil: if we take it to be human existence, as he notes, the man who loses a wife or a child may come to flee and abhor the gods who are presumably in charge of fateful events such as that. The danger of falling into impiety, of hating the gods instead of loving them, lies in failing to see the philosophical truth about what is truly good and, therefore, evil.
Now re-read Enchiridion XXVII. Aquinas' view is not Epictetus', who is centuries too early. His view of what the true good for humans is, and is not, is laid out there. The gods built the good for us into the world, and we should never doubt it -- nor should we doubt them and their goodness, either, because they built us a world in which the human good is both available and attainable. Mistaking the random acts of fate for evil is an error; just as, for Aquinas, it will prove to be an error to mistake human survival for the true good, the latter being a kind of existence that we do not have naturally but might obtain through divine grace. For Aquinas too the good is available and attainable, and via a divine action that made it so: but it is a different conception of the good.
Hamburger Misogyny
See how long you can listen to this without laughter. I made it to “girls and women.” But don’t worry. If that doesn’t get you, there’s more!
The whole room breaks out in laughter at one point.
Boots Not Made for Walking
A top nuclear DOE official the Biden administration has hired has an interesting choice of footwear.
Sam has worn his stilettos to Congress to advise legislators about nuclear policy and to the White House where he advised President Obama and Michelle Obama on LGBT issues. He shows young men and women everywhere he goes that they can be who they are and gives them courage. Once, while he was walking around Disney World in 6 inch stilettos with his boyfriend, a young gay boy saw Sam with his boyfriend and started crying. He told his mother, ‘”t’s true, Mom. WE can be our own princess here.”
I shouldn't talk. I've worn both cowboy boots and combat boots to the White House campus, though in my case it was just the Old Executive Building / Eisenhower Building to meet with the NSC. Sometimes you just need to go with what feels most comfortable on your feet.
He has identified the contradiction
The title of this Intelligencer piece is "Pro-worker conservatives are just union-busters in disguise," though what the article itself is saying is closer to "Conservatives are appealing to workers more and more, even though we believe the workers are mistaken about their own best interests." A conservative worker might put it a different way and say "Pro-union progressives are just union-boss-lovers in disguise, and will drop the actual workers in the ditch without a second thought."
"The Republican Party," the author complains, "has an interest in spotlighting the political divides between culturally conservative workers and progressive union officials." As usual, the leftist spin is not that union officials are ignoring the preferences of the members whose dues buy their country houses, but that Republicans have pounced on a weakness and engaged in their usual divisive tactics, using a wedge issue to show union members that they have a good reason to resent the use of their dues to support a party whose platform they abhor.
The author complains further that "Republicans do not need to advance working-class interests in order to gain working-class vote share." Now, why might that be? Because workers have an idea what they want out of a political system, and the Democratic party platform ain't it? Are we really supposed to believe it's unfair that Republicans can get workers to vote for them because they have outperformed Democrats in identifying what the workers want?
Enchiridion XXX
XXX
Duties are universally measured by relations. Is a certain man your father? In this are implied taking care of him, submitting to him in all things, patiently receiving his reproaches, his correction. But he is a bad father. Is your natural tie, then, to a good father? No, but to a father. Is a brother unjust? Well, preserve your own just relation toward him. Consider not what he does, but what you are to do to keep your own will in a state conformable to nature, for another cannot hurt you unless you please. You will then be hurt when you consent to be hurt. In this manner, therefore, if you accustom yourself to contemplate the relations of neighbor, citizen, commander, you can deduce from each the corresponding duties.
That very first premise is widely challenged by contemporary philosophy, which wants to consider duties as universal in character. Rawls, famously, argued that we should imagine (because we cannot actually do it) devising the moral rules in a 'veil of ignorance,' behind which we should know nothing about our actual circumstances. Some who consider themselves Kantian thinkers argue that Kant's dictum that you can only act properly under a maxim that could be expressed as a universal moral law requires treating all people exactly equally -- but Kant, of course, would never have accepted that you ought not to pay special attention to your father. Kant's actual moral vision was highly conservative, once he got around to spelling it out in the Metaphysics of Morals. It's only people who stop with the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals -- which is far more popular, being both shorter and more theoretical -- who can imagine he would have endorsed any such thing.
Epictetus says something that would have been morally obvious to everyone in his age, and in every earlier age, and almost every subsequent age. That it has become controversial points to the weakness of our own.
This view of duty expands outwards in accordance with the relations we bear to each other. I owe duties to my family that I do not to others; to my neighbors that I do not to others; to my fellow citizens that I do not to others. (This too is now highly controversial among the Managers, who would have us bear duties to the entire world while washing citizenship of any meaning: disloyalty to the demos from those who describe themselves as democrats.) Doing your duty in each of your relations satisfies your duties to the semblances you encounter of the things outside.
In fact, though, you have only done your duty to yourself. You have behaved as one ought to do, given what you think you know your relations and duties to be. In that way you have lived with honor, and thus can rest in honor. The injustice the semblances may produce is their own concern: you know you have done right, and are satisfied.
A Legal Dispute
Julie Kelly hits upon an interesting fact: the Justice Department has been lying in its indictments about the whereabouts of two people, Mike Pence and Kamala Harris. I don't think she's right about the legal argument she's advancing, but it is interesting that the government apparently refuses to tell the court the truth here as elsewhere. If this conduct was so bad -- Cocaine Mitch himself called it an "insurrection" just this week -- surely just laying out the plain facts would do?
Woke Oppressors
REI is having a dispute about whether to unionize. The leadership decided to hold a podcast to talk about it.
Wilma Wallace:
Hi REI. My name is Wilma Wallace and I serve as your Chief Diversity and Social Impact Officer. I use she/her pronouns and am speaking to you today from the traditional lands of the Ohlone people.
So I'm here chatting with Eric Artz who serves the co-op and all of us as CEO....
So just to recap for the audience on Friday January 21st we were notified by the National Labor Relations Board that the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union filed a petition for an election at our SoHo store in New York. And since then I'm sure you've heard from lots of employees across the co-op. Maybe we can start by you sharing some of what you've heard.
Eric Artz:
Well thank you Wilma. Thanks for hosting and hello to everyone that is listening. For those of you who I have not had the chance to meet, I use he/him pronouns and I'm speaking to you today from the traditional lands of the Coast Salish peoples.
Spoiler: they are not in favor of allowing their workers to unionize.
The atmosphere did it
It was the atmosphere that prompted the shooting!--I didn't say the people who created the atmosphere "caused" the shooting, so I didn't commit libel. From John Sexton, one of the better contributors at HotAir:
If accusing Palin (or her PAC) of clear incitement to mass murder when in fact there is no such connection at all doesn’t constitute reckless disregard for the truth, what could possibly qualify? In a way, even Bennet’s own argument supports this. Saying he was too rushed to do a proper job of it is just a way of justifying his own reckless behavior, i.e. if he’d only had more time, he’d have looked into the truth of what he was writing. The jury may decide the law protects the Times even in this case but if so then it’s hard to see how why “reckless disregard” was included in the law at all.
Lowdown Freedom
Trucker convoy has "weaponized freedom" to "undermine democracy." The preservation of the freedom of ordinary common folk was the whole point of the latter as I had always understood it. Canada doesn't have our Declaration of Independence, with its philosophical justification for government; but what really is the point of democracy if it isn't to protect the rights of common people?
Common people will have common faults, and their common sense will just mean embracing the kinds of things that make sense to common folk. It's only those kinds of things any government can do whose legitimacy is broad-based, for the common people are by far the most of them. Democracy was never meant to be for the great and the good; that's aristocracy, which has its own faults. They are worse faults: the Arabs say, "The mistake of the wise man is equal to the mistakes of a thousand fools."
So they'll drink too much, and some of them will cheat on their spouse; they'll have some prejudice, sometimes, against the people who are different. But they won't leave thousands of American citizens stranded in Afghanistan, or sell the place and all its ancient liberties to a totalitarian China. They won't murder millions like Mao did to try to make some titanic change. I'm not one of them, but I'll ride with them. My loyalty is always to them: as decent as they can be, as free as they can be. May God keep them -- He must love them, having made so many -- and may God defend the right.
Enchiridion XXIX
XXIX
In every affair consider what precedes and what follows, and then undertake it. Otherwise you will begin with spirit, indeed, careless of the consequences, and when these are developed, you will shamefully desist. “I would conquer at the Olympic Games.” But consider what precedes and what follows, and then, if it be for your advantage, engage in the affair. You must conform to rules, submit to a diet, refrain from dainties; exercise your body, whether you choose it or not, at a stated hour, in heat and cold; you must drink no cold water, and sometimes no wine—in a word, you must give yourself up to your trainer as to a physician. Then, in the combat, you may be thrown into a ditch, dislocate your arm, turn your ankle, swallow an abundance of dust, receive stripes [for negligence], and, after all, lose the victory. When you have reckoned up all this, if your inclination still holds, set about the combat. Otherwise, take notice, you will behave like children who sometimes play wrestlers, sometimes gladiators, sometimes blow a trumpet, and sometimes act a tragedy, when they happen to have seen and admired these shows. Thus you too will be at one time a wrestler, and another a gladiator; now a philosopher, now an orator; but nothing in earnest. Like an ape you mimic all you see, and one thing after another is sure to please you, but is out of favor as soon as it becomes familiar. For you have never entered upon anything considerately; nor after having surveyed and tested the whole matter, but carelessly, and with a halfway zeal. Thus some, when they have seen a philosopher and heard a man speaking like Euphrates—though, indeed, who can speak like him?—have a mind to be philosophers, too. Consider first, man, what the matter is, and what your own nature is able to bear. If you would be a wrestler, consider your shoulders, your back, your thighs; for different persons are made for different things. Do you think that you can act as you do and be a philosopher, that you can eat, drink, be angry, be discontented, as you are now? You must watch, you must labor, you must get the better of certain appetites, must quit your acquaintances, be despised by your servant, be laughed at by those you meet; come off worse than others in everything—in offices, in honors, before tribunals. When you have fully considered all these things, approach, if you please—that is, if, by parting with them, you have a mind to purchase serenity, freedom, and tranquility. If not, do not come hither; do not, like children, be now a philosopher, then a publican, then an orator, and then one of Caesar’s officers. These things are not consistent. You must be one man, either good or bad. You must cultivate either your own reason or else externals; apply yourself either to things within or without you—that is, be either a philosopher or one of the mob.
I didn't say anything about the last chapter because I think it's self-explanatory. That doesn't mean I don't think it's important.
This chapter, as the note at the original mentions, is almost the same as a parallel part of the Discourses, where arguments and discussions are laid out in fuller form. Since it is in its fuller form, I will also leave it be save to answer questions you may have.
Enchiridion XXVIII
XXVIII
If a person had delivered up your body to some passer-by, you would certainly be angry. And do you feel no shame in delivering up your own mind to any reviler, to be disconcerted and confounded?
Enchiridion XXVII
XXVII
As a mark is not set up for the sake of missing the aim, so neither does the nature of evil exist in the world.
This mysterious line is of immense importance. A single sentence, this lays out the conclusion to an argument whose premises are unstated. The argument is a proof, whose consequence is a view of the problem of evil similar to that adopted by St. Augustine.*
As noted before, the Enchiridion records only the summary conclusions of the Stoic school that Epictetus founded, and not the underlying arguments. Lacking the unstated premises, the proof's force and its consequences may not be obvious.
So here is a reconstruction of how the unstated premises might be stated:
1) All things come to be because they order themselves by their own nature, or because they are put into a particular order by someone or something else. (Aristotle Physics 1)
1a) An example of the first is living beings, which grow into what they are because of internal processes like digestion that let them turn other parts of the world into material for their own order. A child grows into an adult because it is realizing its own internal natural principles of order.
1b) Examples of the second include artifacts, which are made by someone else; and accidental features of nature like weathered riverbeds or seashores. They become what they are because of an external activity.
2) Things like human beings that are internally ordered have a nature; the reason a dog grows into a dog and a man into a man is that their natures differ.
3) Determining the good for a things requires looking at its nature, then; dogs can profit from eating different things than men, for example.
4) Human nature differs from dogs, other lower animals, and plants in that it has an additional capacity for reason that allows it to obtain fuller goods than irrational natural drives.
5) Human nature's highest good is eudaimonia, a flourishing that comes from ordering all your activities in accord with the reason that is the highest part of your nature. (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1)
6) This ordering produces virtues (arete), which are excellences of capacity that allow you to pursue the highest good even more fully.
7) Euidaimonia is reached when you exercise your arete in accord with your reason: thus, you can become happy by living the most virtuous life that is possible for yourself, which reason can tell you how to do.
8) Since this is the highest good for your nature (5), and your nature determines the good for the kind of being you are (3), attaining eudaimonia is the proper mark to aim at in your life.
9) Because the reason that is part of human nature (4) gives you the ability to hit this mark (7), nature can be said to contain a mark that is intended for you to hit and not miss.
Therefore, a mark exists in nature that is happiness and the highest good;
Marks do not exist to be missed, but to serve as targets to be hit. The mark does exist. Therefore nature is such that evil is not its intended end. Good is -- the highest good, and happiness, that comes from learning to hit the mark.
This leads to the solution of the problem of evil, which is that it is not the case that the gods have made an evil world, or a world in which evil is a necessary part. The gods have made a world in which good is the intended mark of nature: by pursuing your rational nature and developing your natural virtues, good and not evil is what you will obtain. Evil comes from people ignoring their reason, or their virtues.
What about random accidents, such as a rock falling upon your child? Those are events of type (1b), things that do not arise from one's own nature (what Kant will later call autonomy) but from outside forces that may be random chance (which Kant called heteronomy). They are not evil, no more than the carving of the river or seashore was evil. They are just the random workings of things that have no will of their own.
Therefore, the existence of the mark proves that the nature of evil is not part of the world. It is a failure by some of us to live up to the good -- to hit the mark that nature has provided.
*(For St. Augustine, this is placed in the Christian context: God did not create a world with evil in it, nor that is evil by nature, nor in which evil is a necessary part. Gods will is perfectly good; but our free will allows us to fail to attain the goods that God made possible for us, or for others to harm us out of a failure of theirs to pursue the good that God would have wished them to pursue instead of what they chose. Evil is also then a human failing, or a collection of them, rather than a charge that can be laid at the feet of God -- as Job did not do, at least not at first.)
Just what it says on the tin
The Virginia legislature's Black Caucus contains a lie right in its name. It's the Black Leftist Caucus, and no black Republicans need apply. Virginia's new black state representative aired the sad state of affairs on the floor of the House, saying:
Maybe I need to start my own caucus, the Virginia Non-Leftist Black Caucus. Right now it’ll be a caucus of one but that’s okay. As Thoreau said "Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already."
Enchiridion XXVI
XXVI
The will of nature may be learned from things upon which we are all agreed. As when our neighbor’s boy has broken a cup, or the like, we are ready at once to say, “These are casualties that will happen”; be assured, then, that when your own cup is likewise broken, you ought to be affected just as when another’s cup was broken. Now apply this to greater things. Is the child or wife of another dead? There is no one who would not say, “This is an accident of mortality.” But if anyone’s own child happens to die, it is immediately, “Alas! how wretched am I!” It should be always remembered how we are affected on hearing the same thing concerning others.
Can anyone be so rational or detached about a beloved child? Ought one to be? Even Job tore his garments and shaved his head in mourning over his children, and was said to be blameless for 'he did not charge God with wrongdoing.' Epictetus wants us also not to charge the divine with wrongdoing, and simply to accept it as one of the random things that happens in this world. Which, of course, it is.
Enchiridion XXV
XXVIs anyone preferred before you at an entertainment, or in courtesies, or in confidential intercourse? If these things are good, you ought to rejoice that he has them; and if they are evil, do not be grieved that you have them not. And remember that you cannot be permitted to rival others in externals without using the same means to obtain them. For how can he who will not haunt the door of any man, will not attend him, will not praise him, have an equal share with him who does these things? You are unjust, then, and unreasonable if you are unwilling to pay the price for which these things are sold, and would have them for nothing. For how much are lettuces sold? An obulus, for instance. If another, then, paying an obulus, takes the lettuces, and you, not paying it, go without them, do not imagine that he has gained any advantage over you. For as he has the lettuces, so you have the obulus which you did not give. So, in the present case, you have not been invited to such a person’s entertainment because you have not paid him the price for which a supper is sold. It is sold for praise; it is sold for attendance. Give him, then, the value if it be for your advantage. But if you would at the same time not pay the one, and yet receive the other, you are unreasonable and foolish. Have you nothing, then, in place of the supper? Yes, indeed, you have—not to praise him whom you do not like to praise; not to bear the insolence of his lackeys.
The analogue here is Diogenes, whom Plato reportedly called “Socrates gone mad.”
“A philosopher named Aristippus, who had quite willingly sucked up to Dionysus and won himself a spot at his court, saw Diogenes cooking lentils for a meal. “If you would only learn to compliment Dionysus, you wouldn’t have to live on lentils.” Diogenes replied, “But if you would only learn to live on lentils, you wouldn’t have to flatter Dionysus.”
CDL Proximity Metric
A few years ago, reporters were incensed when they were asked whether they or someone they knew owned a pickup truck -- the Ford F-150 being the most popular line of vehicles in America for decades, and the next two most popular also being pickup trucks. None of the reporters knew anyone with a truck.
In the wake of the Convoy for Freedom, another metric has been proposed: "How far out in your immediate social circle do you need to go to find someone who can legally operate a dump truck?"
I myself own a Ford F-150, so I am zero steps removed in the first metric. I am not too much farther in the second one. I can myself drive a fire truck, which in North Carolina is legal for volunteers without a CDL provided they take an annual weekend certification course. Professional firefighters require a CDL. Since several of my friends are professional firefighters -- the county has a few slots for them, in addition to the volunteers -- the distance is one.
Back in Georgia my next-door neighbor was a big rig driver. He retired after being hijacked and shot, though he managed to wreck the truck to prevent it being stolen (and to allow the police to capture his hijacker). It's a hard job under the best of circumstances, and can be dangerous as well.
Brilliant Analysis
Nobody believes China's pandemic numbers are remotely accurate: they are clearly lying. As part of its coverage of the Olympics -- which we should be refusing to participate in, both because of the ongoing genocide and slave labor in China and also because we cannot protect our citizens who travel there, as even Nancy Pelosi admits -- the NYT decided to entertain those numbers.
Headline: "Good morning. China’s zero-Covid policy has kept deaths very low. Can it continue?"
Has it, though? Refer to the graph at the first link.
The NYT admits that there is widespread disbelief: "Even if China’s official numbers are artificially low, its true Covid death toll is almost certainly much lower than that of the U.S., Europe or many other countries. Consider how enormous the official gap is."
That is an astonishing bit of reasoning. "Even if they're lying, look how BIG the lie would have to be. They can't be lying THAT much."
I mean, they could be. Their lies over the Great Leap Forward leave us guessing, even today, as to whether only 30 million people died or as many as 60 million people did. They control the state media and have threatened the foreign media on the ground very effectively, while purchasing influence with their parent companies. There's no reason to believe their numbers are remotely accurate, especially since they are also implausible. They're claiming to be doing fifty times as well as Japan, for example, a nation of similar population density and social cohesion but higher technology and far better sanitation.
UPDATE: The PRC apparently chose to open the games with a synchronized display of smiling and waving Uyghurs, whose families are under threat at home to ensure their cooperation. It is raw, totalitarian propaganda.
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