John C. Wright's Blog, page 113
November 5, 2012
Vote As if Your Life Depends on It
To my conservative readers: please take pledge to vote and pass it to ten people.
To my leftist reader, who is here by unhappy mistake: sir, your candidate in whom you placed such hopes four years ago betrayed the principles for which you stand, did not end the War on Terror, did not close Gitmo, did not stop the rendition of prisoners of war to unsavory third world nations, and instead of savaging the Wall Street ‘Fat Cats’ on whom you blame our current economic woes, made sweet-hart deals with them, bailed them out with money that could have gone to the poor, protected them from retribution or market correction, and, in short, formed an even closer and more cozy relation with Wall Street than your hated enemy, Mr Bush. I will not insult your spirit by asking you to vote Republican, but I will ask you to sit this one out, and so keep your principles intact.
To the independent or undecided voters: no matter how noble your ideals for voting for the Green Party or the Libertarian Party or the Constitutionalist Party, the practical result of your vote in a race this narrow is a vote for Mr Obama. You will not offend your ideals by voting for a less than ideal candidate, or for a Party which has no doubt deeply offended you in times past, because a vote for Romney at this time and in this crux of events will allow the Republic to continue to exist, and he and his party may possibly listen to you and your grievances, and, perhaps reluctantly, perhaps under protest, may act to satisfy you. Mr Obama’s Administration, surrounded by a News Media fanatically devoted to protecting him at all costs and demonizing his opposition, will never listen to you, and if you dare open your mouth to them, expect to be treated like Joe the Plumber, and be subject to investigation, harassment by the press, harassment by the bureaucracy, and retaliation.
Even if Romney is as bad as you fear, a strong conservative showing in the House and Senate races, and the awakening from slumber of a press corps willing to criticize the government, will slow the rate of corruption.
It is not idealism to hand victory to an enemy set to ruin your nation and your life by denying your vote to a lukewarm ally who is less than ideal.
To all my readers of any party, I ask: What is at stake in this election?
This is not about two men, and so any discussion of the personal merits and demerits of the candidates is irrelevant. This is not even about two parties, and so any discussion of the merits and demerits of the parties and their past behavior is likewise irrelevant.
This election is about whether the American Revolution, and that things for which it stands, shall prevail in America, or whether the French Revolution, and the things for which it stands, shall prevail in America.
It is about whether the American Dream lives or dies. Is that worth asking ten people to vote?
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
November 2, 2012
Atlas Shrugged Part II – Either Or
I went to see the second installment in the projected ATLAS SHRUGGED movie trilogy, and my reaction was mixed. Let me divide my reactions into the good, the bad, and the indifferent. There are some minor spoilers in this review, so read on at your own peril.
For those of you not familiar with the story: the United States of the near future is suffering from an economic depression brought on by the greed and corruption of the allegedly altruistic and upright populist and socialist reformers in all walks of life. Those whose work allows the society to continue to function, from artists to jurists to philosophers to inventors to entrepreneurs, are mysteriously vanishing one by one. Dagny Taggart, the ambitious and ultra-competent Vice President in charge of operations of an transcontinental railway, sees her nation and her company disintegrating in the rising tide of irrationality, culminating in the imposition of Directive 10-289 which outlaws normal economic activity. She seeks to find the mysterious figure behind the disappearances, the man who vowed to stop the motor of the world. Who is he? Who is John Galt?
The first good is that this movie was ever made at all. It seems that all my favorite books of my childhood and youth are being made into movies that are faithful to the original work, and as trilogies or series. That would have been (as Vizzini would say) inconceivable even a decade or so ago.
I am embarrassed to admit to my Catholic friends that this is a favorite book of mine. Yes, I actually like Ayn Rand’s monomaniacal hammering of her points and her overblown vitriolic rhetoric, which veers into self parody. I like it for several reasons.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Brilliance by Geo Weigel
Over at National Review. Let me quote large segment of it, it is that good:
Catholic Reflections on the Endgame of 2012
By George Weigel
For several decades now, Catholic thinkers influenced by the late Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar have been arguing that beauty can be a window into the true and the good. Postmodernity affirms “your truth” and “my truth” but is profoundly nervous about “the truth.” Postmoderns break out in hives at the claim that the good is embedded in reality, not inside my head. Yet a profound encounter with the beautiful in art, architecture, music, or literature can make even the deepest skeptic and the most assiduous relativist consider the possibility that some things simply are, well, true and good. That Mozart’s Ave verum corpus and Fra Angelico’s Annunciation are beautiful, and that the chord these beautiful things touch in us is noble, isn’t a matter of my opinion or your opinion; it’s just true, just as the experience of true beauty is undeniably good.
This same dynamic works in reverse, for the ugly often illuminates what is base and ignoble. If a sane person didn’t know anything else about Communism and its effects on the lives of individuals and communities, a first encounter with the crudity, the sheer unloveliness, of socialist-realist architecture or painting would set off alarm bells: Something is seriously wrong here.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
October 27, 2012
My First Bit of Hate Mail
I just got my first honest-to-goodness piece of nutbag hatemail today. The hate was not directed against me in this case, but it was still unseemly:
Dear Mr Wright,
I have seen from your blog that you plan to vote for Mitt Romney this November. Do not be deceived, whether Romney wins or not, should you, Mr Wright, declare that you want a Mormon to rule over you, you will not escape the judgement of God.
“And all the people said unto Samuel, Pray for thy servants unto the LORD thy God, that we die not: for we have added unto all our sins this evil, to ask us a king.” (1 Samuel 12:19)
Voting for Romney will not save you from the coming judgment. Stop putting your hopes in mere men who cannot save. REPENT and submit to the King God has already chosen for you.
Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion. I will declare the decree: the LORD hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee. Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel. Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of the earth. Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in him. (Psalm 2: 6-12)
I have heard all my life about anti-religious bigotry, but never actually came across any that come from any other source than Leftist laiacists. Is this the kind of crap Mormon have to put up with? Don’t get me wrong, they are heretics with a particularly outre version of Christianity, and their baptism are not valid. But they are less looney than Moonies, Christian Scientists, Young-Earth Creationists, Witches and Unitarians, all of which I have among my friends and loved one.
Me personally, I have more of a problem being too Ecumenical and irenic rather than being too supremacist. I have to remind myself that there is no salvation outside the Church, but I am hoping the Ark includes everyone baptized in the name of the Trinity, and other virtuous pagans saved like Trajan.
I am not offended at the bigotry, nor at the lack of civility but I am offended at the lack of Civics. Namely, the president is simply not a king. There is no offense even in the strictest possible religious interpretation of Catholic doctrine against voting for a Mormon to be your servant.
In America, we citizens are king, I and every other enfranchised voter. We the people are the sovereign. The president is our butler, our seneschal, an administrator we appoint to enforce the laws made by our representatives, and a bouncer we employ to keep out of the wide part we call America anyone trying to sneak in without an invitation.
By the logic of the nutbag, all voting is illegal, since it sets up a king in opposition to God, and all forms of government were illegitimate after the administration of Samuel the Judge, including the reign of St Constantine and St Louis. The only legitimate form of government is Bronze Age Theocratic tribalism under the administration of Judges in the Holy Land in the years between the exodus and the reign of Saul.
In reality, of this period, the Good Book says, Judges 21:25, “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”
The manly yet poetic language of the Old Testament is open to misinterpretation, but this language is a description and condemnation of the anarchy of those times.
Only twice have I come across any Anti-Catholic bigotry, and I grateful for its rarity. The Church of Later Day Saints, while I condemn them for preaching a false and abominable doctrine, I salute and admire them for maintaining a voice of sanity and decency in an increasingly lunatic world, and each Mormon I have ever met personally has been a shining example of virtue and charity and neighborliness.
In this case, I embrace the Mormons and scorn any fellow Catholics whose mouths of full of hate.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
October 26, 2012
On the Incivility of Socialists
Forgive me if I fail to list by definition and axiom and minor premise and major all my reasons for the thoughts I express below. Those reasons have been given many times before, by me and by other men more learned and articulate than me.
It is instructive to notice that it greater part of the rudeness, the incivility, the madness in public discourse comes from the Left.
It does not matter whether they are Christian or agnostic or atheist, the socialists cannot hold a civilized conversation or debate.
This is because, ultimately, after one says “eat the rich!” one has nothing to say.
One may just call people names after that, bark at them like a foaming mad dog, sneer at one’s betters, scoff and snarl and heap disdain on people too decent to reply in kind.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
October 25, 2012
Just a Small Thing
In the third presidential debate, Mitt Romney pointed out that the current Navy was smaller than it had been since 1917. President Obama replied by saying that since the mission parameters had changed, and the military needs of the current world did not require a Navy of the type and structure as needed in the days of the Great War.
All well and good. Both sides, so far, have made telling rhetorical points and presented a reasonable case, each man for his side.
But then Barry the Community Organizer decided to adopt a condescending and lecturing tone, telling Governor Romney that the modern Navy has aircraft carriers from which planes can take off, and atomic submarines which are ships that go under the water.
I am the son of a lifelong Naval officer, so I spent my youth on post, and heard how the men and officers talk, so some of this is second nature to me. But I cannot be the only one who noticed this gaffe.
The only ship that goes under the sea is one that gets sunk. A submarine is a boat, not a ship. That is why the Germans called then U-Boats, not U-Ships.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
October 23, 2012
The Last Post on this Topic for a While
Darrell says:
Mr. Wright, if I recall rightly, refers to himself as a compatiblist (a determinist who believes in free will – a position that I thought Dr. A held as well, but I am now uncertain) and believes in an “underlying reality” for which BOTH physical and mental descriptions apply while neither is able to do so fully and sufficiently without the other. To provide an analogy, if one person only sees a car crash and another only hears a car crash then neither witness can fully describe the crash. Nor did hearing the crash did cause what the one witness saw anymore than seeing the crash cause what the other witness heard.
I suspect that Mr. Wright is quite possibly a monist, or at least someone that would argue that we are unable to observe what the underlying reality “really” is. If this is so, and I stand ready to be corrected, then the underlying disagreement is what is reality composed of? Do we have access to observing this underlying reality?
Well, well. It will sound snarky, but I have been waiting for two years to see if anyone would actually ask me what I thought on this topic. You are all too shy (or have too much good sense).
The question is exactly what is reality composed of. That is the basic question of ontology. It is a question I have now asked Dr Andreassen an even dozen times to address, and he has now given an answer, which as a curt refusal accompanied by an unconvincing face-saving justification. Enough of him.
The question of whether monism implies an unobservable buried reality, however, is fascinating. My answer would either be a qualified yes or a definite maybe.
Oddly enough, Amelia Windrose in my ORPHANS OF CHAOS trilogy is asked exactly this question, and replies that she believes in monads, but that she cannot explain how the physical dimension of the monad relates to the mental dimension of the monad. It cannot be a physical relationship, like a gravity field, because then a brick would have to have the concept ‘brick’ attracted by gravity and connected to it; it cannot be a symbolic or mental relationship because then the physical brick would have to have the concept ‘brick’ producing or manifesting it the way a mind produces an imagination or a god produces an avatar. So she said the concept was unanswerable.
At the time I made it up, I meant it for a clever bit of science fictional reasoning, but seeing how this conversation is trending, now I am not so sure.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Seeking Closure on the Closure Discussion
Bel Roise once again asks a question to attack the Foundation of my philosophy. Okay, not really, but I could not resist the pun.
Time permits me at the moment only to reply to one remark in his long and thoughtful response:
I was merely asking how can it be that qualia, which I know to be real and which we both agree are not reducible to physical facts, can move objects or -perhaps I should put it this way-, how can objects in the physical move in such accordance to qualia?
When you see a woman with whom you are in love, the loveliness of the beloved draws you, sets your soul in motion, and is the final cause, the purpose or goal, of the various acts of courtship and valor by which the brave deserve the fair. Agreed? This is motion, but it is not physical motion. It is a cause, but it is not a mechanical cause. The photons bouncing off the bouncy young girl are not pushing the suitor to go pick flowers and scribble bad poetry with means of and only by means of the mass-energy of the photon. Photons of a similar mass and energy coming from a flashlight have never produced a single ode.
Your question is ambiguous, in that you are actually asking about ’cause’ in the sense of ‘purpose’ or ‘goal’ or ‘inspiration’ or ‘aspiration’ but you are using the word ’cause’ in the sense of a mechanical lever applying external pressure to an inert and animate body.
Because these words are the same in English, and because all our metaphors and words for mental events are the same words we use for physical events, it is nearly impossible in our thoughts to make and maintain this distinction, even though the distinction clearly exists in reality.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Europe 4 All in the 4th Stage
Take a look:
Daniel Hannan writes:
Take a close look at this promotional poster. Notice anything? Alongside the symbols of Christianity, Judaism, Jainism and so on is one of the wickedest emblems humanity has conceived: the hammer and sickle.
For three generations, the badge of the Soviet revolution meant poverty, slavery, torture and death. It adorned the caps of the chekas who came in the night. It opened and closed the propaganda films which hid the famines. It advertised the people’s courts where victims of purges and show-trials were condemned. It fluttered over the re-education camps and the gulags. For hundreds of millions of Europeans, it was a symbol of foreign occupation. Hungary, Lithuania and Moldova have banned its use, and various former communist countries want it to be treated in the same way as Nazi insignia.
Yet here it sits on a poster in the European Commission
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
October 22, 2012
To the Purist Voter
While I honor and respect any man who withholds his vote from Governor Romney on that grounds that Mr Romney is so evil from stem to stern that a vote for him will tarnish one’s immortal soul and damn one to hell, I cannot respect those who withhold their vote on the grounds that the mild annoyance of an ideologically impure or insufficiently libertarian Romney Administration is indistinguishable from an Obama Second Term.
No political contest in my lifetime, no election since before the Civil War, has been fraught with such grave and lasting likely consequences.
At the risk of sounding alarmist, I believe this election will either destroy the nation, economically and spiritually if not physically; or else destroy the Democratic Party for a generation.
While I would not be willing to imperil my immortal soul for the sake of my nation — for what profits it a man to gain the world but lose his soul? — I would be willing to imperil my ideological purity by voting for a candidate who says he supports my causes but might not, or who claims not to support intrinsically morally evil practices, but might yet. Is my ideological purity worth risking the collapse of the last nation on Earth which even plays lip service to my ideals?
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
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