Nicomachean Ethics, I.2

If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good. Will not the knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what is right? If so, we must try, in outline at least, to determine what it is, and of which of the sciences or capacities it is the object. It would seem to belong to the most authoritative art and that which is most truly the master art. And politics appears to be of this nature; for it is this that ordains which of the sciences should be studied in a state, and which each class of citizens should learn and up to what point they should learn them; and we see even the most highly esteemed of capacities to fall under this, e.g. strategy, economics, rhetoric; now, since politics uses the rest of the sciences, and since, again, it legislates as to what we are to do and what we are to abstain from, the end of this science must include those of the others, so that this end must be the good for man. For even if the end is the same for a single man and for a state, that of the state seems at all events something greater and more complete whether to attain or to preserve; though it is worth while to attain the end merely for one man, it is finer and more godlike to attain it for a nation or for city-states. These, then, are the ends at which our inquiry aims, since it is political science, in one sense of that term.

This section is a great example of why it's important to take the introduction slowly. There is a whole lot going on in this short piece of writing, which I have quoted in full.

Aristotle sets aside infinite regress as a possibility. This is more fully argued elsewhere, but it is of great importance -- it is indeed crucial for theology because it proves the existence of God, as Avicenna spells out in his metaphysics. Briefly, you exist obviously; where did you get existence? You got it from your parents, who already existed. Thus, we inherit existence from something that already exists. Avicenna has two arguments, which he inherited from the Greeks, about why this cannot work as an infinite regress. There has to be something that really exists to found the existence of everything else, something that exists necessarily rather than accidentally: and that, Avicenna says, is God. 

For us in this work, we aren't looking for God. We are, however, also needing to ground our desires. Maybe you desire a promotion at work; why? Perhaps because it comes with more money or greater respect, or both; why do you want those things? Perhaps because they could better allow you to attract a mate; why do you want that? Perhaps because.... if this goes on forever, Aristotle is saying, you won't ultimately really want anything at all. But you do want things. Thus, some things need to be desired for themselves. 

There's a lot more we won't get here about how we determine what those things are, and which ones are more valuable. In the Rhetoric, for example, we will learn that when incomparable things are being weighted against each other -- should I prefer this meal, or that victory at war? -- honor provides the common ground for valuation. This is an important concept to the EN (Nicomachean Ethics, for reasons pertaining to Latin, is shortened to EN) that isn't explicit in the EN. When good men sit together and talk about what is most worthy of honor, that is when they find they can in fact compare what seem to be incomparable things. Apples and oranges are comparable in terms of the price assigned to them, but all things are comparable in terms of what degree of honor they merit. The victory is obviously worth more than the meal, even if you are very hungry.

Also in this section we learn that politics is a kind of extension of ethics. This is not obvious, but it is central to Aristotle's approach. Ethics is about how to live well as a human being; politics is about how to structure a society that supports the best kind of life. The value of doing this becomes apparent as we consider the human condition. It is possible to live well in conditions of oppression or tyranny; perhaps some of the very highest things can only be achieved given the opportunity to resist tyranny. (Perhaps that is why very comfortable Americans tend to describe relatively tame matters as tyrannical: they are striving for the greatness that comes from bravely resisting tyranny.) To have a society that is structured to support the good life, though, makes everyone's life better and the best life easier to obtain for everyone. We should want that.

We still have a lot of problems, but the goal is shaping up. In ethics we are trying to shape a life that attains the best qualities that a good person ought to desire in himself or herself; and in politics, therefore, we should be aiming at a society that supports that goal for its citizens. That's what we do want, and it is what we ought to want. 

Arms & White Samite: A Podcast

The interview with me on the subject of my Arthurian book that I mentioned a few days ago is now posted. 

The book, Arms & White Samite, is available free as an etext from the Signum Collaboratory.

Therapy Culture and Childlessness

This article in the NYT gets at something I have long believed: therapy culture has significant costs, here to include childlessness.

[I]t still seems increasingly likely that millennials will have the highest rate of childlessness of any generational cohort in American history.

There are plenty of plausible explanations for the trend.... I suspect there’s some truth in all of these explanations. But I think there’s another reason, too, one that’s often been overlooked. Over the past few decades, Americans have redefined “harm,” “abuse,” “neglect” and “trauma,” expanding those categories to include emotional and relational struggles that were previously considered unavoidable parts of life. Adult children seem increasingly likely to publicly, even righteously, cut off contact with a parent, sometimes citing emotional, physical or sexual abuse they experienced in childhood and sometimes things like clashing values, parental toxicity or feeling misunderstood or unsupported.

This cultural shift has contributed to a new, nearly impossible standard for parenting.... So I want to suggest that there’s another reason my generation dreads parenthood: We’ve held our own parents to unreachable standards, standards that deep down, maybe, we know we ourselves would struggle to meet.

Emphasis added. 

I remember a few years ago hearing a woman I know describe her work as "healing trauma," knowing that her clients were well-to-do women in the suburbs. She and others like her were training them to think of their lives as traumatic, when in fact they were plausibly among the most comfortable lives anyone was living anywhere on Earth or at any time in history.

That can't be healthy.

Nichomachean Ethics, I.1

Tom has asked that we go through Aristotle's most famous work on ethics. This is well worth doing; indeed almost nothing is more worth doing. It will take quite a while, and we will move as slowly as necessary. The first book we will take especially slow.

We probably don't have anything Aristotle wrote. Most likely, what we have are summary notes by students. They are, therefore, dense and surprisingly difficult to understand because a lot is being summarized into each section. The opening sections are often worthy of tremendous deliberation. Physics 1, for example, is extraordinary; but it is apparently entirely set aside by the beginning of Physics 2. The exploration of the first chapter was nevertheless deeply worthwhile.

So we will take our time with it. 

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim. But a certain difference is found among ends; some are activities, others are products apart from the activities that produce them. Where there are ends apart from the actions, it is the nature of the products to be better than the activities. Now, as there are many actions, arts, and sciences, their ends also are many; the end of the medical art is health, that of shipbuilding a vessel, that of strategy victory, that of economics wealth. But where such arts fall under a single capacity- as bridle-making and the other arts concerned with the equipment of horses fall under the art of riding, and this and every military action under strategy, in the same way other arts fall under yet others- in all of these the ends of the master arts are to be preferred to all the subordinate ends; for it is for the sake of the former that the latter are pursued. It makes no difference whether the activities themselves are the ends of the actions, or something else apart from the activities, as in the case of the sciences just mentioned.

A very great deal is being said here. First principle: every thing that we do aims at some good. Seems simple enough: why would we bother doing something that wasn't meant to obtain something good? Rarely do we engage in some activity that doesn't at least bring a passing pleasure; we might eat fried potatoes knowing they are bad for us, but at least they'll make us happy for a little while. 

So, we are aiming at the good, not the bad things that are perhaps necessary consequences. That's important. Often we know bad things are coming too, but we still pursue the goods in spite of the bad. The point is that action is chained to the good that it pursues; the Greek word is telos, meaning the end or goal.

Not all of these ends are equal. Aristotle wants us to discern the more important, or better, from the worse or lesser. Right away he wants us thinking about this. The potatoes aren't that important (indeed no one in Europe in Aristotle's time had heard of potatoes). The first division is in activities versus products that activities can produce. We were just talking about this recently. Walking is an activity; it can produce health. Health is better than walking was. Or it can produce an opportunity to engage in philosophy, talking and thinking as you walk. Philosophy is better than walking alone was. The products to be achieved by the activities are better than the activities alone, at least for us -- a pure activity, like God, maybe is not like we are. That is for the Metaphysics; the Ethics is for us.

Next he has a simple heuristic for trying to judge which of the products is better than other products. It is straightforward: the master art rules. Does it? Say you are a great helicopter pilot, and the product of your art is success in your missions. You are assigned many military missions and you succeed in them. What Aristotle is saying is that the strategist's product -- the one who assigned you the missions to attain some greater goal -- is better than your own product in succeeding in these missions. 

We can see the logic of this. The strategist hasn't done anything as glorious as the man who risked his life in dangerous and successful missions. Yet if the strategist chose the missions wisely, and selected a strategy that would fold them into a greater overall victory, the strategist has attained a greater good. Even though he may never have been in any danger, and spent his life in contemplation rather than in glory, the strategist may ultimately be due greater honor. The pilot executed successful missions, but the strategist won the war. 

Tom says he has guests this weekend, so we will pause and reflect until next week. 

A Plague of Credentials

Our friend Mr. Foster has a post on the dangers of having too many people with credentials aspiring for power. There is a great deal there that I will not excerpt about the perils of a class of status-hungry, educated people. 

The case is actually somewhat worse than he or his sources contemplate. It is not merely the case that we have overproduced candidates for elite positions, far beyond the number of such positions to occupy. The fact is that we have separate classes of elites and would-be elites that are competing for power and control. The present administration is damaging the pipeline for one of these classes by shutting down entities like USAID, hampering Harvard and the Ivys, and so forth. The National Endowment for Democracy continues to survive, protected by Federal judges -- as Harvard hopes to be. Here too are the teachers and public sector unions, and indeed all the Federal agencies. They have been in power for decades, and the attempt to unseat them is uncertain to succeed. 

Over against these are a large number of educated men and women who would like to be in control at least of their own lives and businesses, but that runs into the teeth of the first class' power to regulate and control. These include, of course, Elon Musk and the young men who volunteered for DOGE. It includes the Heritage Foundation and its supporters who wrote Project 2025. They are intentionally and explicitly waging an insurgency against the cemented power of the first class, which is responding by trying to rally and crush them. 

The conflict doesn't really touch most of us except slightly and at the edges. A little more of your wealth may be extracted as taxes if one side wins; as student loan payments or tariff-inflation if the other side does. You will be a little freer either way because they are so busy fighting each other they haven't got time for us anymore: gone are the days when the cemented class could spend its time destroying small-town bakeries for thoughtcrime. Now it's fighting tooth-and-nail for its own survival, and hasn't time to think of us any more.

A Roman Catholic Atheist

This is a good survey of the work and life of Alasdair MacIntyre, who once described himself as a Roman Catholic atheist: "Only the Catholics worshiped a God worth denying."

That didn't last. 

In 1983, he became a Roman Catholic in faith and a Thomist in philosophy, a “result of being convinced of Thomism while attempting to disabuse his students of its authenticity.” What impressed him, in part, was “that Aquinas—to an extent not matched by either Plato or Ayer—does not commit himself to accepting any particular answer to whatever question it is that he is asking, until he has catalogued all the reasonable objections to that answer that he can identify and has found what he takes to be sufficient reason for rejecting each of them. Following his example seems an excellent way of ensuring that I become adequately suspicious of any philosophical theses which I am tempted to accept.” No longer Karl Barth, Alasdair’s favorite twentieth-century theologian became Joseph Ratzinger. 

He also broke up the Beatles, which is good. 

Another Round on the Marx Carousel

In the LA Review of Books, an argument that Marx is newly important to America. It begins with the argument that he has already been good for America, even great for it, by rooting opposition to slavery.

Slavery in the United States had a clarifying effect on Marx’s thought concerning where value comes from. Marx famously declared that “labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded,” because they are the same. Labor is labor, and this remains one of the most important philosophical observations of the last couple centuries....

He disagreed with all impositions on free labor, especially literal shackles. Marx’s abolitionist zeal was a moral position, consistent with his hatred of most forms of hierarchy.... [an] important fact about the early history of Marx in America is that he was known as a popular rabble-rouser among immigrants—the first wave of Marxism in the United States consisted of German “forty-eighter” revolutionaries, who wanted to tear down the European monarchies and dethrone the medieval archbishops but ended up exiled to the New World after the 1848 revolutions, arriving just in time to help decapitate the Slave Power.

It used to be that everyone knew that the core of the abolitionist movement in America was evangelical Christianity's Great Awakening, bolstering an extant Christian abolitionism that was rooted in Quakers like Betsy Ross. Marx may also have been opposed to slavery; good for him, for although more people have been enslaved in his name than freed by it, the actions of subsequent Communists are not his fault. Still, the effect of Marxism on American abolitionism was surely trivial by comparison to the effect of Christian principles.

The author isn't bothered by that, but instead looks forward to an exciting future of youthful Marxism. 

And yet, there is hope in the fourth boom. Hartman, a professor of history at Illinois State University, is one of the rare Gen X Marxists, pilled by the revolutionary politics of rock band Rage Against the Machine.... According to him, “Marx has remained relevant in the United States across more than 150 years because he suggested an alternative perspective on freedom. In a nation long obsessed with the concept, why were so many Americans relatively unfree?”

Young Americans are only being pushed harder by these entrenched historical pressures. Accelerationists argue that worsening material conditions will force people to confront these questions no matter what, and the Right has a clear and bloody answer: it’s also a hapless and stupid one that just so happens to protect power and wealth. The left has a better response, with a liberatory future to win, and it’s rooted in the work of a guy named Karl.

First of all, Rage Against the Machine are quite complete hypocrites, having ridden their vocal Marxism to tremendous capitalistic success and luxury. This seems to be fairly common among Marxists, a fact that ought to cause more thoughtful introspection among them. 

Second, it's remarkable to hear that "the Right has a clear and bloody answer" when the Marxist answer is literally violent revolution. C'mon. 

Finally, I do know some youthful Marxists. Their ideas seem to be inspired as much by Star Trek as by Das Capital. And I agree with them that far: if we can work out how to build the replicators, maybe we don't need money any more and everyone can just ask for what they want for free. Maybe; but show me a replicator first. Until then, it's just another Marxist fantasy: like Cuba was, like China was, like the once-glorious Soviet Union. 

A Duty to Die

Just yesterday, remarking on a French 'right to die' law, Glenn Reynolds quipped that the right to die somehow always turns into 'a duty to be killed.' 

Now comes no less an elite thinker than Francis Fukuyama of "End of History" fame to advocate for that duty explicitly. 

Among the cognitive debilities that occur over time is rigidity in one’s fundamental outlook and assumptions about life. One’s outlook is usually set relatively early in life; usually by early adulthood you are either a liberal or a conservative; a nationalist or an internationalist; a risk-taker or someone habitually fearful and cautious. There is a lot of happy talk among gerontologists about how people can remain open to new ideas and able to reinvent their lives late in life, and that certainly happens with some individuals. But the truth of the matter is that fundamental change in mental outlooks becomes much less likely with age.

The slowing of generational turnover is thus very likely to slow the rate of social evolution and adaptation, in line with the old joke that the field of economics advances one funeral at a time.

He does have some positive words for increasing immigration as an alternative source of social change. 

We talk about natural rights, but the right to die is the only one that nature itself will not merely defend but resolutely enforce. There's no reason to get in a rush about it: everyone will get his turn. 

Two American Stereotypes

As celebrated by two Americana acts. The first is a contemporary model.

The second is a classic.

Riding around the country these last few days, eating truck stop chow and enjoying the freedom of the highways has put me in the mood for this kind of  Americana. 

The greatest truck stop I know is at Steele's Tavern, Virginia, for those of you who like such things. That's clearly not what the town wants to be known for, I gather, because they don't even mention the place on their website. No accounting for taste. 

Very Careful Vetting

In the Pentagon parking lot, while waiting for the ride to begin, I ran into an old friend who had told me some months ago that he had been tapped to serve in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. I wasn't too surprised, as he had been a Presidential appointee in the first Trump administration too. I asked him how it was going.

"I'm not going in after all," he said. "They tell me I can't pass vetting."

Now, it's good to vet people. However, I have no idea what could possibly be behind this. This guy is a retired Army officer decorated with a Bronze Star for service in Iraq. To my certain knowledge he has possessed a TOP SECRET clearance with SCI designation and been read into extremely sensitive classified war plans. He worked on both Trump campaigns, has met the President many times and been invited to Mar a Largo, and as mentioned was personally appointed by President Trump to serve in a high role in the first administration. His finances are fine; he owns his own home and several nice cars and motorcycles. 

All I can figure is that they're running 'vetting' through Twitter influencers now, and they can't vouch for him because he doesn't have an "X" account. That's not ideal. 

Natural History

While down on the Mall after the ride, we also visited the Natural History Museum. I thought the dinosaur displays were fun, but my comrades inexplicably wanted to spend all their time in the fossils and gems section. Rocks are not nearly as exciting to me. 

I will note that both of these museums had what they were pleased to call a "full security screening," which entailed me having to be front-and-back wanded after emptying my pockets at both locations -- even though I had fully disarmed before entering the building. These practices serve no purpose, I think, except to accustom citizens to the idea that they have to accept being subject to being treated as a potential criminal according to the demands of authority even when they are suspected of no crime, no warrant is possessed against them, and so forth.

What did they think I was going to do? Rob them at gunpoint and walk out with the Space Shuttle or a Tyrannosaur on my back? If you're worried about me shoplifting the Hope Diamond, you need to search me on the way out, not the way in. 

You might say, "Well, they are worried about mass shootings," and perhaps they are; however, the data show that armed citizens are much more effective at stopping such shootings than police, with fewer wrong people getting shot to boot. There's no rational reason for the government to treat American citizens as a threat except to accustom citizens to the idea of subjugation. 

Udvar-Hazy Center

I have been to most of the Smithsonian museums over the years, but this time we went to one I hadn't: the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center just on the flight path to Dulles International Airport. It had a very impressive collection, far larger than could fit in the more famous Air & Space Museum downtown.

More impressive to me than the planes, rockets, gyrocopters and other flying machines was listening to my son talk about them. I had no idea he knew so much about, well, anything at all. But he would lecture freely about almost every plane we passed, and with such knowledge that at one point a listener asked him about the contents of the collection as if he were an employee. "Oh, look! That's Fw 190, one of the 20mm variants. They..." 

He went on for four hours like this. I've never seen him so excited. I was exhausted by the end but he seemed as fresh as when we first arrived. 

The Love that Moves the Stars

The President's Memorial Day address included a line that probably gathered little notice, but deserves some remark. 

President Trump’s Memorial Day address opened by reflecting on the power that drives sacrifice—not politics, but something far deeper.

“Great poets have written that it's love which moves the sun and the stars,” he said. 

“But here on the sacred soil, right where we are, we're reminded that it's love which moves the course of history and moves it always toward freedom. Always.”

Emphasis added. Great poets may have written that, but a great philosopher certainly did: the concept is from Aristotle's Metaphysics. 

We know that God cannot cause movement by moving (Metaphysics 1072a26). If God did cause movement in this way, God would be susceptible to change, possess potentiality, and would not be the pure the energeia that Aristotle believes God must be. [Also, following Aristotle, Aquinas etc. -Grim] This is why God must cause movement through desire (Metaphysics 1072a27). An object of desire has the power to move other beings without itself moving.... 

The notion of movement through desire is straightforward. Which one of us has not been excited to move here or there by our desire for this or that? We might even suppose that desire is the primary source of all movement. Such an idea is entertained by Aristotle in De Anima: “It is manifest, therefore, that what is called desire is the sort of faculty in the soul which initiates movement” (De Anima, 433a31-b1). 

Aristotle's basic account is that the soul that motivates the heavens has some capacity to perceive the eternal divine, and therefore loves it and longs to imitate it. The heavens cannot persist eternally in the same way, but they can move in a way that imitates eternity. This sort of motion is circular, because it begins and ends and begins again in the same place and continues in the same way. Thus, the way the stars and sun reel about forever in the heavens is motivated, he thought, by their longing to be like the divine they could perceive. 

The insight the President is citing here wasn't meant as a kind of beautiful metaphor. Aristotle meant it quite literally: it is love that moves the sun, that moves the stars. 

The Return Ride

I had meant to ride back today, but the weather coming in after this weekend was not promising. We made the ride yesterday instead, which was still not entirely easy. By morning we were riding through a 200 mile wide salient of air that had fallen to 50-52 degrees, which meant temperatures in the 30s at highway speed. Heavy drizzle turned to driving rain at points, soaking us in hypothermic temperatures. Even after we crossed the salient, air temperatures hovered just at 60-61 in which hypothermia would still have been possible for soaked bodies even without the windchill of the highway.  

It was 15 hours of this, or six hundred miles averaging forty miles an hour once you included stops to warm and eat. 

The whole thing reminded me of the episode where Saruman bends the cold down on the Fellowship as they are trying to pass the mountains at Red Horn, or Caradhras. Unlike the Fellowship, we were able to cross the High Wall at Sam's Gap into North Carolina. It was completely encased in cloud for hundreds of vertical feet, but thankfully not the snows that faced the Fellows. 

My son, who accompanied me on this his first thousand-mile-plus motorcycle adventure, is quite pleased with himself today. As well he might be, I suppose: success in spite of that hardship validates that he has become the kind of man he wanted to be. I am proud of him. 

In Memoriam

 

The Bellamy Brothers & The Isaacs

 

Rolling to Remember ‘25

The city government doesn’t care for the event, and at the end forces all riders onto I-395 into Virginia with no clear way back into town. We get back anyway. The people love it and come out in crowds to cheer us. They wave flags and salute and join in the honoring of the fallen.

Good turnout this year. 

UPDATE: AMVETS, one of the organizing groups for this event, sent this out: "To be clear, we had it in writing from the National Parks Service Permit Office that riders would be allowed the option at the end of the ride to continue on Independence Avenue and circle back behind the Lincoln Memorial to Henry Bacon Drive by the Vietnam War Veterans Memorial for a closing ceremony. We had crew on the ground at the intersection of Independence and 14th St. to ensure a roadblock was not erected before the run began. As our lead element in the run approached 14th, the escort police motor units turned wide and created a blockade, once again forcing everyone to turn left on 14th St.... We have requested, through the White House, a meeting with U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who is responsible for the NPS."

A dignified silence

The same Oxford memoir from which I drew the Chesterson quotations a few minutes ago mentioned Margot Asquith, second wife of Prime Minister Asquith (1908-1916). Asquith opposed women's suffrage on the ground that "women have no reason, very little humour, hardly any sense of honour... and no sense of proportion." Looking her up on the net, I found a quip that would contradict at least part of her judgment of her own sex, if it indeed happened. (I remember my father relating this story to me some decades ago, though I'd forgotten whom it was about.)

Asquith was known for her outspokenness and acerbic wit. A possibly apocryphal but typical story has her meeting the American film actress Jean Harlow and correcting Harlow's mispronunciation of her first name – "No, no; the 't' is silent, as in 'Harlow'."

Slavery and symbols

The incomparable G.K. Chesterton, from a debate and conversation at Oxford:

"Because I bow down to the sceptre, and because I take the words 'honour and obey' quite literally, you say that I am the slave of the symbol. But I bow down to the sceptre because I believe in the power that lies behind it. I keep to the smallest details of the marriage service because I believe in marriage. If you believe neither in the sceptre nor in the service, and yet bow down to them, then you are the slave of the symbol."

* * *

[As he was leaving the debate hall:] "A time will come--very soon--when you will find that you want this ideal of marriage. You will want it as something hard and solid to cling to in a fast dissolving society. You will want it even more than you seem to want divorce to-day. Divorce ..." and here, with a sort of groan, he thrust his second arm through his mackintosh--"the superstition of divorce."

A Candidate for Grim