John C. Wright's Blog, page 120

Lex Naturalis and Postmodern Post-Sanity

In my experience man and boy, I know of no topic more likely to provoke incompetent and incoherent reply than the topic of Lex Naturalis, or Natural Law.

I have a theory, nay, a speculation merely, as to why this is.

Natural Law is a term of art used by philosophers and theologians to refer to that objective moral standards by which Positive Law, that is, laws men posit, manmade law, is to be judged as good or bad, fair or unfair.

In jurisprudence this same distinction is called by other names: an offense that is malum in se or wicked in and of itself is contradistinguished from an offense that is malum prohibitum or wicked only because it is prohibited.

Murder is malum in se: if the killing of a human being with malice aforethought takes place on the high sea or in some unclaimed wilderness where no human law has sway, a court of law can still justly punish the crime. Its criminality is innate to the act.

Driving on the unlawful side of the highway is malum prohibitum: which side of the road is forbidden is different in England versus New England.  No court of law could justly punish the act if a man drove on a private road on his own land, or if a scientist landed a wheeled vehicle on Mars and trundled it down some turnpike built by long vanished Barsoomians.  An act that is malum prohibitum is wrong only when and where prohibited by Positive Law.

If no Natural Law existed, all discussions of the goodness or fairness of Positive Law would be silenced.

A man might say he preferred one statute or court ruling to another, but this would be a mere psychological report of his arbitrary and subjective tastes, like saying he preferred pie to cake.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Who is Like unto Tolkien?

I find I am reduced to merely repeating articles from Bruce Charlton’s blog on days when I find that gentleman’s thoughts more interesting than my own. And this topic interested me immensely:

Is there anything *like* Tolkien?

This was a burning question for me aged c. 14 years once I had read and re-read Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit) to the point of wanting to read something else.

What did I find?

*

Having seen a reference to Spenser’s Fairie Queene on the LotR blurb, I picked this up to look-at in a second hand bookshop – I pretty quickly put it down again!  But I was never foolish enough to tackle Ariosto (to which C.S Lewis bizarrely compared LotR – what on earth did he think he was doing?!)

Then having done some background reading (for example, in Lin Carter’s A look behind the Lord of the Rings) I tried some older fantasy and also some more recent fantasy.

I read Lord Dunsany’s King of Elfland’s Daughter but it was hard work and made no impression – I failed to read E.R Eddison’s Worm Ourorboros. I actually enjoyed Evangeline Walton’s Island of the Mighty – which was a retelling of the ‘Mabinogion’ Welsh legends – but it was nothing like Tolkien.

*

In sum – I found only a couple of books (or a couple of pairs of books) which were post-Tolkien and resembled him enough to satisfy re-readings.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

The Pigpile of Subjectivism

Part of an ongoing discussion. A reader comments:

All subjectivists, in my experience, believe that subjectivism is true for all people at all times, and furthermore that it is all people’s duty to acknowledge this.

I remember a philosophy class that turned into a pigpile on me until the teacher intervened in the discussion because it got too fierce — and I meekly observed afterwards that it was very odd to be told that I was wrong for saying that points of view could be wrong. Fortunately, they were smart enough to be abashed. (One classmate, not one of the pile, chuckled.)

My comment: I suspect, from your description, that the pigpile was surprisingly fierce because you touched a nerve. By commenting that there was such a thing as right and wrong, you challenged the highest and most revered idol of modern idolatry, the nothingness at the core of all postmodern thought. If there is such a thing as right and wrong, then Political Correctness is not politeness and enlightenment, it is Orwellian deception and self-deception. If there is right and wrong, the main argument in favor of sexual license and sexual perversion (namely, ” ‘taint nobody’s business if I do” is no longer available). If there is such a thing as right and wrong, all cases of historical injustice have to be judged on their merits, not condemned because it forms the “narrative” of the stronger or weaker party; indeed, the whole process of investigating the motives and character of the person condemned rather than their argument shifts the intellectual past-time of the leisured intellectual away from gossip and back toward the merits of the argument.

When their central idol was challenged, all the modern halfwits were required by their sense of honor to defend what the truth of their creed, namely, that there is no such thing as honor and no such thing as truth.

It is to their credit that any of them perceived the irony or got the joke of the manifest self contradiction involved. Most moderns are as lacking in humor and self reflection as they are in reason.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Drake Equations and ‘It Ain’t Gunna Happen’ Science Fiction

A reader whom I will, for the sake of anonymity, refer to merely as ‘Curmudgeon’ (albeit his real name is Homer Snodgrass of 12 Manitowish Avenue, Mammoth Falls, Wisconsin, 54545, and his social security number is 1205-119-8577, and the PIN number of his bank card is 4560) holds the opinion that too many modern persons of the youthful persuasion (he refers to them as “kids!” or “punks!”) are devoted to science fictional ideas as a thinly disguised substitute for spiritual longings.

‘Curmudgeon’ reads and promotes what he calls the ‘It Ain’t Gunna Happen’ School of science fiction. This school is remarkably similar to the Mundane Movement of Really Boring Self-Righteous Left-Leaning Science Fiction, being mostly a list of things that ain’t gunna happen.

Here is a summary of his manifesto:

(1) There will be no colonization of space, either O’Neil or otherwise, for the same reason no one lives in a submarine at the bottom of a trench in the Arctic sea;

(2) we are never meeting any intelligent extraterrestrial life;

(3) or if we do, they will be incomprehensible, so much so that even the question of whether they are truly ‘intelligent’ or not will be debatable;

(4) there will be no faster than light travel – It is not just a good idea, it’s the Law;

(5) medicine may shift where the top of the bell curve falls, but human beings are not going to live much past 80 or 90;

(6) psionics is just magic wearing a lab coat;

(7) time travel is less possible and less realistic than fairy unicorn sparkly magic;

(8) The Soviets and the Red Chinese and Cubans all promised and vowed to bring about modern, scientifically-run secular humanist utopias very much along the lines of Gene Roddenberry’s ideas. (So… how is that workin’ out for ya’? What is the murder count now for the Utopians? Upwards of 110,000,000? Let’s give the idea one more try!)

Now, for some reason, my friend Curmudgeon thinks I am of his school of science fiction. I am not.

In fact, I am a founding member of the Space Princess school of science fiction writing, which, to date, includes me and a writer named Edward Willet: Albeit we two have retroactively included every big name Willet and I can think of into our movement against their will and over their strong objections, if they ever had any female royalty from outerspace in any story.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Atheist Rational and Otherwise

A reader asked me my definition of an atheist. Allow me to play Lineaus and identify the various subspecies.

An atheist is someone who disbelieves in any god. I would make a distinction between a rational atheist and a fashionable atheist, based on his motive for disbelieving.

A rational atheist is one who, if asked, can provide some warrant for his disbelief, give some argument or chain of reasoning to justify his disbelief. He does not believe in god for an impersonal reason.

A fashionable atheist is is who, if asked, reacts to the question with erratic hostility and antic displays of halfwittedness, jerking his knees and elbows at strange angles, lolling his tongue and crossing and uncrossing his eyes in protuberant and alarming eccentricity. This behavior is accompanied by accusations, ad hominem, insults, sneers, carping, capering, expressions of hate and scorn and contempt that anyone would dare raise such a question. This is also accompanied in a fashion risible were it not so pathetic, with what psychologists call projection, where the fashionable atheist accuses all and sundry in the immediate area of being filled with hatred and bigotry.

After he is done voiding his bowels and rolling sticky warmth, tearing his hair and shrieking his praise of himself as a paragon of cool intellectual ratiocination, bystanders, embarrassed, avert their eyes, pretending something that fascinates them is in the grass underfoot or the sky overhead.  Or, if the reaction of the fashionable atheist to a request for his reasoning is in word-noises, the glossolalia he eructutates approaches this same level of dignity and reasonableness. And he says religion is a “meme”

The causes of fashionable disbelief are emotional, personal, and usually quite frivolous. He is scornful of religion, ignorant of history, and proud of his ignorance. He is indifferent to morality and decency if not (through an odd inversion of psychology) actively proud of his immorality, a righteous defender of perversion and unrighteousness.

He is not just shallow, he is shallow in all aspects of his philosophy. If I may be permitted the oxymoron, the fashionable atheist is profoundly shallow.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Wright’s Writing Corner: The Three Levels of Character.

After a long break the beautiful and talented Mrs Wright takes a brief look at 1, 2, and 3-D characters

http://arhyalon.livejournal.com/26128...

An excerpt:

One-Dimensional Characters- are just that. They have one-dimension to them. The girl with red hair. The angry guy. They are very seldom memorable, because they do not have a second quality to distinguish them from every other character with the same quality.

If the only thing that sets ‘red-haired girl’ apart is her red hair, she is indistinguishable form all other girls with red hair.

One-dimensional characters appear in almost every work, because not all characters need fleshing out. The messenger who brings the news of the king’s death does not need a personality if he’s never to be seen again. Being ‘the messenger’ is just fine.

He could be the messenger with red hair or the messenger who was missing an arm. But he is still a one-dimensional character because he is indistinguishable from other one armed messengers, having no other qualities.

If the character changed their distinguishing characteristic, the reader could not recognize them. If red-haired girl showed up as a blonde, we would never know her.

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Please donate

This is a major who was killed by a suicide bomber while in service overseas. Please pray for him and donate. Proceeds go to his widow and orphans, two-year-old twins. (hat tip to Mark Shea.)

http://www.youcaring.com/fundraiser_details?fundraiser_id=7264&url=kennedysangels

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Saint Brendan’s Fair Isle

The story of a floating island made of rock, a raft larger in area than the New Jersey, would have been dismissed as a sailor’s sea-yarn if you heard it in a smoke-filled public house in Cornwall from some tattooed sea-dog named Ishmael or Queequeg from Nantucket or Rokovoko.

And yet here it is:

From The Australian by way of Live Science by way of Mark Shea’s Catholic and Enjoying It:

AN undersea volcanic eruption has created a raft of porous volcanic rock in the Pacific Ocean that’s larger than the surface area of Israel, but navy officers say the phenomenon is not a danger to shipping.

Pumice is a porous grey-coloured form of volcanic rock formed when lava and water are mixed. Most pumice is light enough to float on water. The area of floating pumice is 250 nautical miles (463km) in length and 30 nautical miles wide (55km), and covers 25,465 square kilometres.

Spotted by a Royal New Zealand Air Force Orion, the raft was located about 85 nautical miles west to southwest of Raoul Island and investigated by the HMNZS Canterbury, the New Zealand Defence Force says.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

An apology to Atheists

Recently in this space, I made the bold claim that atheism by its very nature, since it defies all tradition and repudiates all the greatest thought of all history Western and Eastern as superstitious nonsense, subjects the atheist to an irresistible temptation to pride and vainglory.

Two readers objected, and their objections proved to me my that the claim was, alas, overbold, and cannot be maintained. I hereby retract the comment.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Book Review CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 3

The inexhaustible Mike Allen brought this to my attention. From http://littleredreviewer.wordpress.com/2012/08/13/clockwork-phoenix-volume-3-edited-by-mike-allen/

Allow me to quote the part that concerns my humble contribution to the anthology Clockwork Phoenix 3:

Murder in Metachronopolis, by John C. Wright – one of the longer works, and purposely presented in an unusual way. Jake Frontino has been brought to the city outside of time, Metachronopolis, the city of the Masters of Time, to work for them as a Private Investigator. They’ve sent him through time on missions to stop terrible things before they happen – to kill the mothers of dictators, to foil marriages and stop meetings from taking place. The Masters of Time supposedly have no enemies, but Jake has met those enemies, been party to their plans for a coup. The story is written in numbered portions, so the reader immediately knows we are not getting the story in chronological order, we are not getting “the truth” in the right order. And you know what I did the moment I finished this story? I read it again, flipping the pages back and forth so that with the help of the section numbers I could read it in chronological order, in the order that things happened to Jake. And it was a completely different story. I love it when that happens, when I can experience the same story in a completely new light.

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.