Back some forty years ago, Thor Heyerdahl, of Kon-Tiki fame, embarked on another ocean voyage aboard an Egyptian papyrus reed boat called Ra. The purpose of the voyage, if my memory serves me right, was to do with proving the possibility of ancient contacts between Egypt and South America. The boat itself was based upon ancient Egyptian designs, culled from manuscripts and tomb decorations etc.
In the course of building it, they ran up against a technical problem arising from the design, something to do with the prow. The more they examined it, the more they became convinced that the feature, even though it was part of the historic design, wasn’t an essential one. They called in the marine engineers, who agreed with them. And so they modified the design, leaving the feature to one side.
A short time into the voyage they ran into trouble, trouble resulting from their failure to follow the traditional design. It proved after all that the discarded feature played an important part in the boat’s seaworthiness. After a couple of months the boat had to be abandoned.
We live in a world where increasingly the demand is that everything that exists justifies itself before the court of reason. It doesn’t matter that this ‘reason’ is often a shorthand for special pleading. What it usually means is that such and such a thing is not reasonable simply because ‘it doesn’t suit me’. Such egoism is easily given a universalist spin by changing the phraseology from ‘It’s not reasonable to ask me to do or believe in this’ to ‘It is not reasonable to ask people to do or believe in this.’ And immediately one has a political programme.
Now change is endemic to the world we live in. Arguably, everything changes under the sun—even the sun itself; and so must we in our thinking and in our practice and in our institutions if we are to have any ongoing relevance. It is just as dangerous to lag behind change as to be too far ahead of it. Yet, in normal circumstances, the changes that we choose or are forced to make, if they are not to be counterproductive, should be reflective of the real state of things in the external world. They should not be undertaken merely as a consequence of well-organised fashionable pressure or dissent.
And it should be recognized that there are often ‘dumb’ things out there in the world, seemingly unable to make a case for themselves in the jostling marketplace of liberal opinion, that are (as in the original detail of the Ra) nonetheless essential to our existence.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Monday, January 25, 2010
Taking the Long Road . . .
Human beings are social animals. It is not something unique to them. It is a trait they share with many other animal species, so that one must suspect that it is an instinct lodged way back the evolutionary stem. When people gather in groups, or engage in the social behaviours of inclusion or exclusion or social climbing, it is not an expression of some higher evolutionary status, but rather it is the more primitive aspects of their nature that are involved.
Being instinctive, the roots of such behaviours are fundamentally unconscious, and our rationalizations of our actions—I did it because . . . etc.—are really rationalizations after the event, justifications made to persuade ourselves that we are really in control and do things from conscious motivations.
But the fact is that neurological science has by now shown exhaustively that it is possible to trace the evolution and existence of a thought before we become consciously aware of it.
Now ethics, whether as a result of divine revelation or human design, represent something different. Ethics open up human behaviour to the field of reason, and offer the individual the possibility of armouring himself in advance against the depredations of the instincts. For any situation, we can have a strategy practiced ahead of time that will stymie the knee-jerk propensities of the unconscious drives.
More than that, ethics and the various ethical systems can tell us a lot about human nature. Take the Ten Commandments: what they tell us about the Jews who came out of Egypt with Moses, the Chosen People, is that they had no inherent belief in or respect for God, were indifferent to family ties, were murderous, adulterous, prone to stealing, malicious liars and gossips, and prey to begrudgery and envy . . . it all has a very modern ring to it.
Above I mentioned ethics in the context of the individual, to the extent that he can convince himself of their relevance. But there also exists a social ethic, in the sense of a composite picture of what a respectable member of a community (to the extent nowadays that it is possible to still talk of community) should be. In terms of modern society, the necessary virtues would, one imagines, still include honesty, the refusal to speak ill of others, an eschewal of violence and pettiness and revenge, a submission to sexual morality, even within the loosened restrictions of the times etc. etc.
Fifty years ago, say, the conditions would have been tougher and much harder to abide by. But then, of course, the social ethic isn’t intended to be literally true of the individual members of a society. It is more an aspiration. Actually, it is more akin to a passport—a passport which is issued to each and every member of the community at birth, so that one doesn’t have to earn one’s reputation, one has it automatically, and can only be deprived of it through one’s own misdemeanours or enemy action, or a combination of both.
[This, of course, is at best broadly true. The process involved is much more complex and contradictory than the one outlined. What is represented here, on my part, is a selective vision—and even as I write it I’m aware of the fact. But sometimes you have to put your thumb into the inkwell and draw a thick black smear through things, one that conveniently blots out all the complexities, if you are to have the possibility of saying anything at all.]
The social ethic is a fiction that people collude in—generally from the best of motives. It is a rare and, one has to say, somewhat unreal human being that would be capable of embodying it completely. For it tends to run contrary to the wellsprings of human nature, as described in terms of the Jews of the Exodus, above.
The Catholic Church, perhaps, encapsulated the reality of the human condition best, with its theology of sin and forgiveness and the inherent frailty of human nature, notwithstanding a general popular commitment, or at least lip service, to doing the right thing. The phrase that perhaps best sums up the traditional approach, in all its humility and wisdom, is ‘There but for the Grace of God go I’.
By contrast, and contrary to what one might expect, the liberals are much more hardline in this regard—and usually much more vicious, too.
Of course, the idea of sinners and sin is now somewhat passé. Sin, to the extent it still exists, is now a behavioural category, involving degenerates and unregenerates—‘not people like us’—so far removed as to constitute almost a separate species.
By the same dispensation, people are no longer compelled to regard themselves universally as sinners. The liberal agenda has narrowed the basis of wrongdoing to such an extent that it is now possible for people to feel positively righteous about themselves—to the extent that, if they had lived two thousand years ago, they would have felt quite within their rights to ‘skull’ the woman taken in adultery (allowing, of course, that relatively speaking adultery is no longer a sin and . . . blah, blah, blah!)
If the wagons of the social consensus (certainly, the social consensus the liberals would have us believe in) were nowadays to be circled, then there would be any number of people inside firing out, who only a couple of decades ago would have been outside firing in. And a few people outside firing in, who . . . well, you get the picture!
If one were to take an inventory of the twelve commandments, in terms of current liberal social practice, one would find that there is not one of them that has not been changed to a greater or lesser degree. The first three, for example, have completely disappeared. Belief in or respect for God are no longer essentials; indeed, we are reaching towards a stage where, like in the warning on the cigarette packet, such things could be positively damaging to your health, or at least your career prospects.
Likewise the prescriptions against adultery and coveting another’s wife, hypocritical protests aside, have also disappeared—as it was necessary that they disappear in order to justify accepted modern social mores.
But this is all by way of a digression—and an illustration of how easy it is to get sidetracked at this game . . .
To get back to where I was: the social ethic doesn’t represent something to be striven for and achieved. Rather it represents a default position—something accorded to individuals almost as a right, and to be protected at all costs. It is not about making one’s reputation, but primarily about saving it. And the process comes less under the first twelve of the commandments than under the thirteenth: Don’t be caught.
The behaviour of the social individual, prey to the demands of unregenerate human nature and, at the same time, the need to keep onside of the social consensus, is akin to that of a snooker player who has the freedom to bend himself into any shape he likes so long as he keeps a foot on the floor.
There are further implications to this . . . but the no-doubt exhausted patience of my readers compels me to put them on hold. This mailing has gone on far longer than I intended—not at all helped by the digression in the middle of it, which logically should comprise a separate posting. As it stands, nothing is satisfactorily resolved. I will return to both strands of the argument at another time
As well, it is probably now time to formalize the disclaimer that has already appeared in various guises in the course of these mailings:
All opinions and commentary in this publication are purely those of a neutral observer and any resemblance to prejudices or hypocrisies on the part of the author, living or dead, are purely coincidental.
Being instinctive, the roots of such behaviours are fundamentally unconscious, and our rationalizations of our actions—I did it because . . . etc.—are really rationalizations after the event, justifications made to persuade ourselves that we are really in control and do things from conscious motivations.
But the fact is that neurological science has by now shown exhaustively that it is possible to trace the evolution and existence of a thought before we become consciously aware of it.
Now ethics, whether as a result of divine revelation or human design, represent something different. Ethics open up human behaviour to the field of reason, and offer the individual the possibility of armouring himself in advance against the depredations of the instincts. For any situation, we can have a strategy practiced ahead of time that will stymie the knee-jerk propensities of the unconscious drives.
More than that, ethics and the various ethical systems can tell us a lot about human nature. Take the Ten Commandments: what they tell us about the Jews who came out of Egypt with Moses, the Chosen People, is that they had no inherent belief in or respect for God, were indifferent to family ties, were murderous, adulterous, prone to stealing, malicious liars and gossips, and prey to begrudgery and envy . . . it all has a very modern ring to it.
Above I mentioned ethics in the context of the individual, to the extent that he can convince himself of their relevance. But there also exists a social ethic, in the sense of a composite picture of what a respectable member of a community (to the extent nowadays that it is possible to still talk of community) should be. In terms of modern society, the necessary virtues would, one imagines, still include honesty, the refusal to speak ill of others, an eschewal of violence and pettiness and revenge, a submission to sexual morality, even within the loosened restrictions of the times etc. etc.
Fifty years ago, say, the conditions would have been tougher and much harder to abide by. But then, of course, the social ethic isn’t intended to be literally true of the individual members of a society. It is more an aspiration. Actually, it is more akin to a passport—a passport which is issued to each and every member of the community at birth, so that one doesn’t have to earn one’s reputation, one has it automatically, and can only be deprived of it through one’s own misdemeanours or enemy action, or a combination of both.
[This, of course, is at best broadly true. The process involved is much more complex and contradictory than the one outlined. What is represented here, on my part, is a selective vision—and even as I write it I’m aware of the fact. But sometimes you have to put your thumb into the inkwell and draw a thick black smear through things, one that conveniently blots out all the complexities, if you are to have the possibility of saying anything at all.]
The social ethic is a fiction that people collude in—generally from the best of motives. It is a rare and, one has to say, somewhat unreal human being that would be capable of embodying it completely. For it tends to run contrary to the wellsprings of human nature, as described in terms of the Jews of the Exodus, above.
The Catholic Church, perhaps, encapsulated the reality of the human condition best, with its theology of sin and forgiveness and the inherent frailty of human nature, notwithstanding a general popular commitment, or at least lip service, to doing the right thing. The phrase that perhaps best sums up the traditional approach, in all its humility and wisdom, is ‘There but for the Grace of God go I’.
By contrast, and contrary to what one might expect, the liberals are much more hardline in this regard—and usually much more vicious, too.
Of course, the idea of sinners and sin is now somewhat passé. Sin, to the extent it still exists, is now a behavioural category, involving degenerates and unregenerates—‘not people like us’—so far removed as to constitute almost a separate species.
By the same dispensation, people are no longer compelled to regard themselves universally as sinners. The liberal agenda has narrowed the basis of wrongdoing to such an extent that it is now possible for people to feel positively righteous about themselves—to the extent that, if they had lived two thousand years ago, they would have felt quite within their rights to ‘skull’ the woman taken in adultery (allowing, of course, that relatively speaking adultery is no longer a sin and . . . blah, blah, blah!)
If the wagons of the social consensus (certainly, the social consensus the liberals would have us believe in) were nowadays to be circled, then there would be any number of people inside firing out, who only a couple of decades ago would have been outside firing in. And a few people outside firing in, who . . . well, you get the picture!
If one were to take an inventory of the twelve commandments, in terms of current liberal social practice, one would find that there is not one of them that has not been changed to a greater or lesser degree. The first three, for example, have completely disappeared. Belief in or respect for God are no longer essentials; indeed, we are reaching towards a stage where, like in the warning on the cigarette packet, such things could be positively damaging to your health, or at least your career prospects.
Likewise the prescriptions against adultery and coveting another’s wife, hypocritical protests aside, have also disappeared—as it was necessary that they disappear in order to justify accepted modern social mores.
But this is all by way of a digression—and an illustration of how easy it is to get sidetracked at this game . . .
To get back to where I was: the social ethic doesn’t represent something to be striven for and achieved. Rather it represents a default position—something accorded to individuals almost as a right, and to be protected at all costs. It is not about making one’s reputation, but primarily about saving it. And the process comes less under the first twelve of the commandments than under the thirteenth: Don’t be caught.
The behaviour of the social individual, prey to the demands of unregenerate human nature and, at the same time, the need to keep onside of the social consensus, is akin to that of a snooker player who has the freedom to bend himself into any shape he likes so long as he keeps a foot on the floor.
There are further implications to this . . . but the no-doubt exhausted patience of my readers compels me to put them on hold. This mailing has gone on far longer than I intended—not at all helped by the digression in the middle of it, which logically should comprise a separate posting. As it stands, nothing is satisfactorily resolved. I will return to both strands of the argument at another time
As well, it is probably now time to formalize the disclaimer that has already appeared in various guises in the course of these mailings:
All opinions and commentary in this publication are purely those of a neutral observer and any resemblance to prejudices or hypocrisies on the part of the author, living or dead, are purely coincidental.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Brave New World . . .
If I want to write a book that can be read equally by people with IQs of, say, 50 and 150—and before anyone gets pedantic about it, the figures are notional and just being used by way of illustration. . . . As I was saying: If I want to write a book that can be read equally by people with IQs of 50 and 150, then, if it is to achieve its purpose, I cannot write it at the median line of 100, but must do so at the lower level of 50.
Years ago—back in the nineties—in the place that I was working, an advertisement for a promotional position at head office was pinned up on the noticeboard. The advertisement stated that applications from staff members with a disability would be (and I am working from memory here) specially welcome, even if (and this I remember more clearly) they ‘could not fulfill the full range of duties’ associated with the position.
Now however laudable the intention, the fact was that ability to do the job seemed suddenly to have become a non-essential, or at least a less-essential, in terms of advancing one’s career path.
Nothing new here, I’m sure many would say . . .
The difference is that the conspiracy against ability involved here is radically different from the old furtive nepotism and who-you-know way of doing things. Here it is all out in the open and operates as a matter of principle.
And if I write in the context of physical ability/disability, it is simply because it arises from the experience related above—but it also serves handily to exemplify what is a much broader cause for concern. The fact is that under the liberal agenda there is any number of pet categories, a potentially infinite number, demanding of special consideration at any particular time.
The liberal philosopher, Mary Midgley, whom I mentioned in an earlier posting, describes (writing in 1983) how ‘the original term [of liberal concern] racism, has proved so fertile, spawning in turn sexism, ageism, speciesism, and uglyism to date, no doubt with more to come.’
Now there is a case to be made for essential interventions in situations where justice demands it. Historically, the advent of free third-level education was just such a necessary intervention, allowing young people of ability from ordinary families to compete on more or less level terms with the sons and daughters of those more privileged. The point here, of course, is that it represented a levelling upwards—it represented the unchaining of ability, not a restriction of it.
By contrast, so many of the pet liberal causes seem to involve a levelling down. The buzz-word, or buzz-phrase, is positive discrimination. This means setting the bar at a level low enough that members of certain pet categories qualify—and more than qualify, are positively advantaged—not on the basis of ability, but purely on the basis that they happen to belong to those categories. It is seen as a counterbalancing discrimination to that discrimination believed to have been practiced as a matter of course over centuries by entrenched, and generally male, elites.
The victim culture that has come into being over the past decades is another aspect of this same race to the bottom. Nowadays it is the victim, or, as is often the case, the alleged or self-proclaimed victim, who is hero, and weakness has become the new strength.
Some twenty or so years ago, a case was reported in the papers concerning a young Irish couple in England—they were settled travelers—whose house had been set on fire and their child killed. Petrol and lighted papers had been put through their letterbox. Except that it transpired that it had not been done by any third party, but by themselves. The fire had got unintentionally out of control and tragedy had ensued.
The reason they had done it, it turned out, was that they wanted their neighbours to accept them—which meant setting themselves up as victims so that people would feel sorry for them.
When I was young any connection between heroism and fire, and any fantasy that one might have regarding the same, would have involved rescuing someone trapped in just such a situation. Nowadays, as in the case above, the road to social approval and acclaim seems to involve instead casting oneself in the role of victim.
Now it was a foolish strategy on the young couple’s part—but they didn’t pick it out of the air. Or rather, perhaps, they did.
The strongest instinct in the general human population is the instinct to belong. This involves shaping one’s face in accord with the prevailing social climate, so as not to seem out of step. In general, people’s social antennae are always on and twitching (even if they don’t consciously realize it), forever checking out the exact climatic balance, and seeking automatically to adjust themselves to it. And anyone testing the temperature of the water of this current age—especially if they feel marginalised or unsure of their place in the scale of things or are just merely neurotic—must surely come to the conclusion that victimhood is the way to go. It’s the new cool.
In the third mailing of this series of blogs, I spoke about how liberalism and the liberal agenda was eating away at the entrails of western society, like the larvae of ichneumon wasps cannibalizing still-living caterpillars. The things I have been talking about here are part of that process. They represent the destruction and dismantling of all the internal support structures of the society, until all that is left is a hollow shell, ready to collapse in on itself at the first blow.
Now as I also said in that earlier blog, the fundamental weakness of western society isn’t ultimately a product of liberalism. Liberalism—left-liberalism—is merely something that battens on this weakness, rather like flies on a carcass. It thinks it is building a new, more enlightened and more equal world—but its delusions don’t count for anything.
At best it is unconsciously fulfilling a natural function—‘like microphages programmed to cleanse a wound / before fibroblasts come to knit it.’ Its purpose is essentially destructive: it is engaged in pulling down a society—admittedly, a sick society, a moribund society—with really no idea at all of what it is opening the door for.
We face a world filled with renewed threats. All the old evils that liberalism has sought to talk away—war, famine, the mass movement of populations—are arguably beating at the door once again. And what have we got with which to face them? A generation of whiners, turned neurotic and self-pitying under the blandishments of the victim agenda. A social structure whose institutions—public and private—are filled to the top with incompetents, whose only asset seems to be an uncanny ability to keep onside of the demands of political correctness.
No wonder we’re fucked.
Years ago—back in the nineties—in the place that I was working, an advertisement for a promotional position at head office was pinned up on the noticeboard. The advertisement stated that applications from staff members with a disability would be (and I am working from memory here) specially welcome, even if (and this I remember more clearly) they ‘could not fulfill the full range of duties’ associated with the position.
Now however laudable the intention, the fact was that ability to do the job seemed suddenly to have become a non-essential, or at least a less-essential, in terms of advancing one’s career path.
Nothing new here, I’m sure many would say . . .
The difference is that the conspiracy against ability involved here is radically different from the old furtive nepotism and who-you-know way of doing things. Here it is all out in the open and operates as a matter of principle.
And if I write in the context of physical ability/disability, it is simply because it arises from the experience related above—but it also serves handily to exemplify what is a much broader cause for concern. The fact is that under the liberal agenda there is any number of pet categories, a potentially infinite number, demanding of special consideration at any particular time.
The liberal philosopher, Mary Midgley, whom I mentioned in an earlier posting, describes (writing in 1983) how ‘the original term [of liberal concern] racism, has proved so fertile, spawning in turn sexism, ageism, speciesism, and uglyism to date, no doubt with more to come.’
Now there is a case to be made for essential interventions in situations where justice demands it. Historically, the advent of free third-level education was just such a necessary intervention, allowing young people of ability from ordinary families to compete on more or less level terms with the sons and daughters of those more privileged. The point here, of course, is that it represented a levelling upwards—it represented the unchaining of ability, not a restriction of it.
By contrast, so many of the pet liberal causes seem to involve a levelling down. The buzz-word, or buzz-phrase, is positive discrimination. This means setting the bar at a level low enough that members of certain pet categories qualify—and more than qualify, are positively advantaged—not on the basis of ability, but purely on the basis that they happen to belong to those categories. It is seen as a counterbalancing discrimination to that discrimination believed to have been practiced as a matter of course over centuries by entrenched, and generally male, elites.
The victim culture that has come into being over the past decades is another aspect of this same race to the bottom. Nowadays it is the victim, or, as is often the case, the alleged or self-proclaimed victim, who is hero, and weakness has become the new strength.
Some twenty or so years ago, a case was reported in the papers concerning a young Irish couple in England—they were settled travelers—whose house had been set on fire and their child killed. Petrol and lighted papers had been put through their letterbox. Except that it transpired that it had not been done by any third party, but by themselves. The fire had got unintentionally out of control and tragedy had ensued.
The reason they had done it, it turned out, was that they wanted their neighbours to accept them—which meant setting themselves up as victims so that people would feel sorry for them.
When I was young any connection between heroism and fire, and any fantasy that one might have regarding the same, would have involved rescuing someone trapped in just such a situation. Nowadays, as in the case above, the road to social approval and acclaim seems to involve instead casting oneself in the role of victim.
Now it was a foolish strategy on the young couple’s part—but they didn’t pick it out of the air. Or rather, perhaps, they did.
The strongest instinct in the general human population is the instinct to belong. This involves shaping one’s face in accord with the prevailing social climate, so as not to seem out of step. In general, people’s social antennae are always on and twitching (even if they don’t consciously realize it), forever checking out the exact climatic balance, and seeking automatically to adjust themselves to it. And anyone testing the temperature of the water of this current age—especially if they feel marginalised or unsure of their place in the scale of things or are just merely neurotic—must surely come to the conclusion that victimhood is the way to go. It’s the new cool.
In the third mailing of this series of blogs, I spoke about how liberalism and the liberal agenda was eating away at the entrails of western society, like the larvae of ichneumon wasps cannibalizing still-living caterpillars. The things I have been talking about here are part of that process. They represent the destruction and dismantling of all the internal support structures of the society, until all that is left is a hollow shell, ready to collapse in on itself at the first blow.
Now as I also said in that earlier blog, the fundamental weakness of western society isn’t ultimately a product of liberalism. Liberalism—left-liberalism—is merely something that battens on this weakness, rather like flies on a carcass. It thinks it is building a new, more enlightened and more equal world—but its delusions don’t count for anything.
At best it is unconsciously fulfilling a natural function—‘like microphages programmed to cleanse a wound / before fibroblasts come to knit it.’ Its purpose is essentially destructive: it is engaged in pulling down a society—admittedly, a sick society, a moribund society—with really no idea at all of what it is opening the door for.
We face a world filled with renewed threats. All the old evils that liberalism has sought to talk away—war, famine, the mass movement of populations—are arguably beating at the door once again. And what have we got with which to face them? A generation of whiners, turned neurotic and self-pitying under the blandishments of the victim agenda. A social structure whose institutions—public and private—are filled to the top with incompetents, whose only asset seems to be an uncanny ability to keep onside of the demands of political correctness.
No wonder we’re fucked.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
More Old Flannel . . .
Earlier in these mailings, I mentioned the story of cattle in the Himalayas who follow travelers in order to lick their sweat, there being an apparent dearth of salt in the region. Now one must surmise that the cattle do not realize that they are suffering from a deficiency, nor what it actually is that they are deficient in. It is the smell or whatever of salt that compels them to automatic action to compensate for their unconscious lack.
Likewise one might imagine a similar situation in relation to religion or philosophy or love. In the film Godfather I, Al Pacino is smitten at first sight—‘hit by the thunderbolt’—by the appearance of the girl, Apollonia. In some sense, she either triggers or fulfils something in himself that he was not even aware of.
I am suspicious of pure reason—of reason unseasoned by emotional insight. Starting off from first premises (which in any event can never be proven to be true) and working purely through logic can lead one to some strange places. But then I don’t believe there is such a thing as a pure process of reason—dig deep enough and you will always find an emotional component involved.
Thomas Aquinas’s five cosmological proofs of God have, for example, always left me cold. They have been incapable of proving anything to me—which may be more a reflection on me than on them. Yet at the same time one has to realize that Aquinas did not formulate them in order to convince himself of the existence of God. He already believed in God, setting out on the process.
Nor am I denying reason a role in the pursuit of truth. Reason is as essential to the outcome as emotion. Emotion (and I am not at all sure where is the dividing line between emotion and spirit) on its own, unballasted by reason, is just as capable of leading one astray as is untrammeled logic.
Indeed, it may be possible to arrive at truth by the purely intellectual path. The thing is, I don’t know. I can’t know. All I can know is that it is a way that doesn’t work for me. The ultimate egoism is to take oneself as representative man (or representative woman) and think that because one thinks or feels in this particular way, so then must the rest of the world. At best we can only know ourselves—and even that is a somewhat dubious proposition. And arguably there are perhaps as many potential paths to God or Truth or whatever as there are people in the world.
Imagine a man who knows in theory what shoes are, but has never owned a pair or seen a pair (we will allow that he takes a size eleven, although he would have no idea what this means). Put him into a shoe shop and watch him randomly try on and discard the various samples. Suddenly he finds and tries on a pair of size nines, then a pair of size tens, and thinks to himself: ‘Now I’m getting somewhere!’
This analogy might best explain my attitude to Simone Weil. Her writings make me feel that I am getting somewhere, without ever providing quite the exact fit. There is much that I am uncertain about in Weil—not least the question (academic, given that she died in 1943) of how her characterization of necessity would have stood up under evidence of the murder of the Jews in Europe during the war. But the fact is, nonetheless, that she touches some internal receptor in me in a way that, say, Aquinas could not.
To date we have looked at different suggested possibilities for approaching the idea (or the reality) of Truth. One is mainly intellectual, via the use of reason. Another is, if you like, akin to Pacino’s ‘thunderbolt’, a sudden and transformative experience, best seen perhaps in terms of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. A third way, as with me and Weil, is individual susceptibility to the infectious influence of another’s insights. Then there is a fourth way—perhaps the most interesting of all.
A footprint in the snow (philosophical quibbling aside) is proof of the existence of the foot that made it. It is a ‘negative’ proof of the foot—proof of its existence despite its absence. We all of us [there I go making representative claims again]—or at least most of us, I think, have something akin to the footprint in our deepest selves, an absence that cannot be assuaged by pleasure or material goods or fame or fellowship, no matter how frantically we might try to fill it. It is, I would suggest, the negative imprint of whatever it is we lack—the equivalent in each of us of his or her own individual Turin Shroud.
The shape of that absence—in the form of our own inextinguishable dissatisfactions and emptinesses—is the mould in which we can blindly trace the lineaments of whatever it is that might satisfy it. But it is beyond our power to force the issue. According to Weil, for example, all one can do is basic housekeeping, sweeping the spot and keeping it clean of all distractions and encumbrances—and then wait.
I write all this as an outsider, an observer. Not necessarily as a player.
Likewise one might imagine a similar situation in relation to religion or philosophy or love. In the film Godfather I, Al Pacino is smitten at first sight—‘hit by the thunderbolt’—by the appearance of the girl, Apollonia. In some sense, she either triggers or fulfils something in himself that he was not even aware of.
I am suspicious of pure reason—of reason unseasoned by emotional insight. Starting off from first premises (which in any event can never be proven to be true) and working purely through logic can lead one to some strange places. But then I don’t believe there is such a thing as a pure process of reason—dig deep enough and you will always find an emotional component involved.
Thomas Aquinas’s five cosmological proofs of God have, for example, always left me cold. They have been incapable of proving anything to me—which may be more a reflection on me than on them. Yet at the same time one has to realize that Aquinas did not formulate them in order to convince himself of the existence of God. He already believed in God, setting out on the process.
Nor am I denying reason a role in the pursuit of truth. Reason is as essential to the outcome as emotion. Emotion (and I am not at all sure where is the dividing line between emotion and spirit) on its own, unballasted by reason, is just as capable of leading one astray as is untrammeled logic.
Indeed, it may be possible to arrive at truth by the purely intellectual path. The thing is, I don’t know. I can’t know. All I can know is that it is a way that doesn’t work for me. The ultimate egoism is to take oneself as representative man (or representative woman) and think that because one thinks or feels in this particular way, so then must the rest of the world. At best we can only know ourselves—and even that is a somewhat dubious proposition. And arguably there are perhaps as many potential paths to God or Truth or whatever as there are people in the world.
Imagine a man who knows in theory what shoes are, but has never owned a pair or seen a pair (we will allow that he takes a size eleven, although he would have no idea what this means). Put him into a shoe shop and watch him randomly try on and discard the various samples. Suddenly he finds and tries on a pair of size nines, then a pair of size tens, and thinks to himself: ‘Now I’m getting somewhere!’
This analogy might best explain my attitude to Simone Weil. Her writings make me feel that I am getting somewhere, without ever providing quite the exact fit. There is much that I am uncertain about in Weil—not least the question (academic, given that she died in 1943) of how her characterization of necessity would have stood up under evidence of the murder of the Jews in Europe during the war. But the fact is, nonetheless, that she touches some internal receptor in me in a way that, say, Aquinas could not.
To date we have looked at different suggested possibilities for approaching the idea (or the reality) of Truth. One is mainly intellectual, via the use of reason. Another is, if you like, akin to Pacino’s ‘thunderbolt’, a sudden and transformative experience, best seen perhaps in terms of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. A third way, as with me and Weil, is individual susceptibility to the infectious influence of another’s insights. Then there is a fourth way—perhaps the most interesting of all.
A footprint in the snow (philosophical quibbling aside) is proof of the existence of the foot that made it. It is a ‘negative’ proof of the foot—proof of its existence despite its absence. We all of us [there I go making representative claims again]—or at least most of us, I think, have something akin to the footprint in our deepest selves, an absence that cannot be assuaged by pleasure or material goods or fame or fellowship, no matter how frantically we might try to fill it. It is, I would suggest, the negative imprint of whatever it is we lack—the equivalent in each of us of his or her own individual Turin Shroud.
The shape of that absence—in the form of our own inextinguishable dissatisfactions and emptinesses—is the mould in which we can blindly trace the lineaments of whatever it is that might satisfy it. But it is beyond our power to force the issue. According to Weil, for example, all one can do is basic housekeeping, sweeping the spot and keeping it clean of all distractions and encumbrances—and then wait.
I write all this as an outsider, an observer. Not necessarily as a player.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
In Praise of an Overlooked Writer . . .
My promised follow-up mailing on Simone Weil and Camille Paglia having already been posted on Friday last, this is just something that has been at the back of my mind for a while . . .
With all this talk of enhanced airport security and new ways of smuggling bombs aboard planes, it is surprising that nobody has dredged up the name of Charles McCarry.
McCarry was a former CIA operative who turned to writing spy novels back in the ‘seventies. His main character was one called Paul Christopher. They were very, very good reading—slightly sub-Le Carre—but still very good. They were also amazingly farseeing.
They envisaged the rise of the suicide bomber—in fact, McCarry has more recently claimed that he ‘invented the suicide bomber’—and, allowing for the ongoing dialectic of development between offensive measure and defensive counter-measure, he saw the ultimate bomber as being one in whom explosives were surgically implanted as a way of bypassing increased security.
He also wrote a slightly futuristic novel (I think this would have been back in the early ‘eighties) that involved the manipulation of a system of e-voting as a means of fixing an American presidential election.
I have not come across anything by him for a great many years, but, as far as I know, he is still alive and writing.
With all this talk of enhanced airport security and new ways of smuggling bombs aboard planes, it is surprising that nobody has dredged up the name of Charles McCarry.
McCarry was a former CIA operative who turned to writing spy novels back in the ‘seventies. His main character was one called Paul Christopher. They were very, very good reading—slightly sub-Le Carre—but still very good. They were also amazingly farseeing.
They envisaged the rise of the suicide bomber—in fact, McCarry has more recently claimed that he ‘invented the suicide bomber’—and, allowing for the ongoing dialectic of development between offensive measure and defensive counter-measure, he saw the ultimate bomber as being one in whom explosives were surgically implanted as a way of bypassing increased security.
He also wrote a slightly futuristic novel (I think this would have been back in the early ‘eighties) that involved the manipulation of a system of e-voting as a means of fixing an American presidential election.
I have not come across anything by him for a great many years, but, as far as I know, he is still alive and writing.
Friday, January 8, 2010
As I was saying (2) . . .
In my previous to last posting, I described Camille Paglia as effectively saying: ‘Abortion is murder, Sisters. A necessary murder—but still murder.’ In the follow-up posting, I suggested that, while still a supporter of the right to abortion, the implication of Paglia’s extended statement was that it was a right perhaps better left unasserted.
I also said that I thought that Simone Weil would have found much to admire in both formulations. Not least, she would, in her own words, have admired the ‘lucidity of mind’ involved in Paglia’s declaration, flensed as it was of the usual hypocrisy and weasel words that generally accompany discussions of the issue.
One thing that Weil paid special attention to was the role of necessity in relation to the physical universe. By ‘necessity’ she meant the fundamental, mechanically-operating processes that lie at the root of all nature and the world. The things that happen to us in life happen as a result of that necessity. Not a purposive necessity, tailoring our experiences to our needs, but rather a blind necessity. The things that happen to us are simply the things that happen to us—containing no special message or wisdom or providence. Yet it is our duty to love that necessity, because it was created by God and works in the way he intended it to work.
This necessity was to be seen as operational also in human affairs: she speaks in places of things happening ‘in conformity with necessity and the mechanism of human nature . . .’
In her essay Forms of the Implicit Love of God, which is contained in the collected edition of her religious writings, Waiting for God, Weil speaks of an episode from the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, as related by Thucydides. The island of Melos, despite being a colony of Sparta, had attempted to remain neutral in the conflict. For its refusal to abandon its neutrality and join them, the Athenians sent an army to conquer the island. The Melians cited the justice of their position, the Athenians dismissed the idea of justice as having any relevance in the situation. Their reply was that it was in the nature of things that everywhere and at all times the strong compelled the weak to do their bidding, a fact that the weak disobeyed at their peril. The consequence was that the Athenians ‘put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and settled the place themselves.’
To Weil, this represented the operation of necessity in the power relationships of the world. It didn’t involve any moral judgement, it was simply the way things were in unvarnished nature. It was the way the world worked in the absence of God. Everywhere and in all situations, the strong must of necessity and in the final analysis oppress the weak.
But what was important to Weil in the words of the Athenians (or perhaps just of Thucydides) was the intellectual recognition that this was the way things were. The Athenians were not just imposing their power out of some mindless instinct, but rather were rationalising it. She supplies a translation of Thucydides that underlines the point:
‘“As touching the gods we have the belief, and as touching men the certainty, that by a necessity of nature, each one commands wherever he has the power. We did not establish this law, we are not the first to apply it; we found it already established, we abide by it as something likely to endure forever; and that is why we apply it. We know quite well that you also, like all the others, once you reached the same degree of power, would act in the same way”’ (emphasis mine).
At one level, Weil would have admired these words for their pure uncluttered objectivity. No weasel words here of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ or ‘poor little Belgium’ or whatever. Rather, to strip it down and paraphrase it: ‘We do what we do simply because it is within our power to do it.’
Equally, I think, Weil, in the context of ‘Abortion is murder, Sisters. A necessary murder—but still murder,’ would also admire Paglia’s declaration for the same reasons: its lack of hypocrisy and its reflection of the reality of power relationships (between woman and unborn infant) in the modern world.
Now this ‘admiration’, if I can use that term, was not at all equivalent to support for or agreement with the operation of necessity as outlined by the Athenians; rather her admiration was—once again—for the intellectual honesty and the factual accuracy of the Athenian statement. If by a trick of the imagination we were to allow her to comment on Paglia, I think the same restrictions would apply.
Weil could write of the Athenian statement: ‘Such lucidity of mind in the conception of injustice is the light which comes immediately below that of charity. It is the clarity which sometimes remains where charity once existed but has become extinguished. Below comes the darkness in which the strong sincerely believe that their cause is more just than that of the weak.’
Weil regarded the Athenian position as one of injustice, and the statement of it as a rationalisation of that injustice. Indeed, she regarded the Athenian position as representative of a fallen state, a step down from the supernatural, or truly human, to the merely material. The Athenian statement was true solely to the extent that one discounted the existence of anything wider than a purely material universe.
The Athenian reply to the Melians, when the latter fell back on the justice of their position, was to say: ‘. . . since you know as well as we do that right [or ‘justice’], as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’
In other words, justice is something that comes into play when one is not certain of being able to achieve one’s end by pure superiority of power. One might read it almost as an inversion of Clausewitz’s famous dictum that ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means.’
Weil herself was to advance a ‘supernatural’ concept of justice that involved the powerful individual lowering himself, like the operation of locks on a canal, until such time as he has raised the weak to a position of equivalent power. Such a demand, taken to its logical extreme, is a call to transcend human nature—effectively, for the strong to go on their knees and expose their throats to the weaker, in the pure and charitable hope that they won’t be cut.
But this is all by the by . . . It is impossible for me to give more than an indication of the richness and complexity of Simone Weil’s thought. What I have written—and to the questionable extent it speaks accurately for her—has all the pallidity of a speared fish in comparison to the marvellous colours of the living specimen. Weil is better read first hand—the totality of her religious writings isn’t large; nor is it for the most part especially difficult.
I set out with the intention of . . . I’m not sure what. Certainly of using Weil to help elucidate aspects of Paglia’s position—even if only for my own sake. There is no doubt in my mind that the first characterisation I gave of Paglia’s position is logically in tune with that of the Athenians, and that Weil’s response to it would have been similar.
The second characterisation—the one that interprets Paglia as taking a step beyond the usual feminist position, and, while still supporting the right to abortion, seeing it as perhaps a right best left unclaimed—could be viewed analogously as perhaps bearing some relationship to Weil’s idea of the ‘supernatural virtue of justice’—although Paglia, as a declared atheist, might well reject the idea. Certainly it involves the notion of the strong relinquishing her power out of respect for the weak.
And the idea that Paglia advances of a pro-life feminism, viewed in the context I have been discussing, perhaps offers the possibility of a way out the current impasse in relation to abortion, and one certainly worth exploring.
Finally, just as I have praised Weil, so also must I praise Paglia—for her iconoclasm and the rawness of her humour, if nothing else. If all you are familiar with is the pedantic leftist whine of mainstream feminism, then read Paglia by way of a hangover cure.
I also said that I thought that Simone Weil would have found much to admire in both formulations. Not least, she would, in her own words, have admired the ‘lucidity of mind’ involved in Paglia’s declaration, flensed as it was of the usual hypocrisy and weasel words that generally accompany discussions of the issue.
One thing that Weil paid special attention to was the role of necessity in relation to the physical universe. By ‘necessity’ she meant the fundamental, mechanically-operating processes that lie at the root of all nature and the world. The things that happen to us in life happen as a result of that necessity. Not a purposive necessity, tailoring our experiences to our needs, but rather a blind necessity. The things that happen to us are simply the things that happen to us—containing no special message or wisdom or providence. Yet it is our duty to love that necessity, because it was created by God and works in the way he intended it to work.
This necessity was to be seen as operational also in human affairs: she speaks in places of things happening ‘in conformity with necessity and the mechanism of human nature . . .’
In her essay Forms of the Implicit Love of God, which is contained in the collected edition of her religious writings, Waiting for God, Weil speaks of an episode from the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, as related by Thucydides. The island of Melos, despite being a colony of Sparta, had attempted to remain neutral in the conflict. For its refusal to abandon its neutrality and join them, the Athenians sent an army to conquer the island. The Melians cited the justice of their position, the Athenians dismissed the idea of justice as having any relevance in the situation. Their reply was that it was in the nature of things that everywhere and at all times the strong compelled the weak to do their bidding, a fact that the weak disobeyed at their peril. The consequence was that the Athenians ‘put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and settled the place themselves.’
To Weil, this represented the operation of necessity in the power relationships of the world. It didn’t involve any moral judgement, it was simply the way things were in unvarnished nature. It was the way the world worked in the absence of God. Everywhere and in all situations, the strong must of necessity and in the final analysis oppress the weak.
But what was important to Weil in the words of the Athenians (or perhaps just of Thucydides) was the intellectual recognition that this was the way things were. The Athenians were not just imposing their power out of some mindless instinct, but rather were rationalising it. She supplies a translation of Thucydides that underlines the point:
‘“As touching the gods we have the belief, and as touching men the certainty, that by a necessity of nature, each one commands wherever he has the power. We did not establish this law, we are not the first to apply it; we found it already established, we abide by it as something likely to endure forever; and that is why we apply it. We know quite well that you also, like all the others, once you reached the same degree of power, would act in the same way”’ (emphasis mine).
At one level, Weil would have admired these words for their pure uncluttered objectivity. No weasel words here of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ or ‘poor little Belgium’ or whatever. Rather, to strip it down and paraphrase it: ‘We do what we do simply because it is within our power to do it.’
Equally, I think, Weil, in the context of ‘Abortion is murder, Sisters. A necessary murder—but still murder,’ would also admire Paglia’s declaration for the same reasons: its lack of hypocrisy and its reflection of the reality of power relationships (between woman and unborn infant) in the modern world.
Now this ‘admiration’, if I can use that term, was not at all equivalent to support for or agreement with the operation of necessity as outlined by the Athenians; rather her admiration was—once again—for the intellectual honesty and the factual accuracy of the Athenian statement. If by a trick of the imagination we were to allow her to comment on Paglia, I think the same restrictions would apply.
Weil could write of the Athenian statement: ‘Such lucidity of mind in the conception of injustice is the light which comes immediately below that of charity. It is the clarity which sometimes remains where charity once existed but has become extinguished. Below comes the darkness in which the strong sincerely believe that their cause is more just than that of the weak.’
Weil regarded the Athenian position as one of injustice, and the statement of it as a rationalisation of that injustice. Indeed, she regarded the Athenian position as representative of a fallen state, a step down from the supernatural, or truly human, to the merely material. The Athenian statement was true solely to the extent that one discounted the existence of anything wider than a purely material universe.
The Athenian reply to the Melians, when the latter fell back on the justice of their position, was to say: ‘. . . since you know as well as we do that right [or ‘justice’], as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’
In other words, justice is something that comes into play when one is not certain of being able to achieve one’s end by pure superiority of power. One might read it almost as an inversion of Clausewitz’s famous dictum that ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means.’
Weil herself was to advance a ‘supernatural’ concept of justice that involved the powerful individual lowering himself, like the operation of locks on a canal, until such time as he has raised the weak to a position of equivalent power. Such a demand, taken to its logical extreme, is a call to transcend human nature—effectively, for the strong to go on their knees and expose their throats to the weaker, in the pure and charitable hope that they won’t be cut.
But this is all by the by . . . It is impossible for me to give more than an indication of the richness and complexity of Simone Weil’s thought. What I have written—and to the questionable extent it speaks accurately for her—has all the pallidity of a speared fish in comparison to the marvellous colours of the living specimen. Weil is better read first hand—the totality of her religious writings isn’t large; nor is it for the most part especially difficult.
I set out with the intention of . . . I’m not sure what. Certainly of using Weil to help elucidate aspects of Paglia’s position—even if only for my own sake. There is no doubt in my mind that the first characterisation I gave of Paglia’s position is logically in tune with that of the Athenians, and that Weil’s response to it would have been similar.
The second characterisation—the one that interprets Paglia as taking a step beyond the usual feminist position, and, while still supporting the right to abortion, seeing it as perhaps a right best left unclaimed—could be viewed analogously as perhaps bearing some relationship to Weil’s idea of the ‘supernatural virtue of justice’—although Paglia, as a declared atheist, might well reject the idea. Certainly it involves the notion of the strong relinquishing her power out of respect for the weak.
And the idea that Paglia advances of a pro-life feminism, viewed in the context I have been discussing, perhaps offers the possibility of a way out the current impasse in relation to abortion, and one certainly worth exploring.
Finally, just as I have praised Weil, so also must I praise Paglia—for her iconoclasm and the rawness of her humour, if nothing else. If all you are familiar with is the pedantic leftist whine of mainstream feminism, then read Paglia by way of a hangover cure.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
As I was saying . . .
In my last posting, I quoted Camille Paglia in relation to the matter of abortion. However when you examine what she says in detail there is a certain ambivalence present. On the one hand, she is defending the right of women to choose abortion, even as she categorises the procedures involved as murder. On the other hand, she is taking the implicit position, effectively a moral position, that abortion is something best avoided—and if it is to be chosen, then arguably only as a last resort, and after deep and heartfelt thinking.
To underline this, here is a more extensive version of the quotation taken from Paglia:
‘Let's take the issue of abortion rights, of which I am a firm supporter. As an atheist and libertarian, I believe that government must stay completely out of the sphere of personal choice. Every individual has an absolute right to control his or her body. (Hence I favor the legalization of drugs, though I do not take them.) Nevertheless, I have criticized the way that abortion became the obsessive idée fixe of the post-1960s women's movement -- leading to feminists' McCarthyite tactics in pitting Anita Hill with her flimsy charges against conservative Clarence Thomas (admittedly not the most qualified candidate possible) during his nomination hearings for the Supreme Court. Similarly, Bill Clinton's support for abortion rights gave him a free pass among leading feminists for his serial exploitation of women -- an abusive pattern that would scream misogyny to any neutral observer.
But the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than my own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand. My argument (as in my first book, "Sexual Personae,") has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.
Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman's body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman's entrance into society and citizenship . . .
What I am getting at here is that not until the Democratic Party stringently reexamines its own implicit assumptions and rhetorical formulas will it be able to deal effectively with the enduring and now escalating challenge from the pro-life right wing. Because pro-choice Democrats have been arguing from cold expedience, they have thus far been unable to make an effective ethical case for the right to abortion.
The gigantic, instantaneous coast-to-coast rage directed at Sarah Palin when she was identified as pro-life was, I submit, a psychological response by loyal liberals who on some level do not want to open themselves to deep questioning about abortion and its human consequences. I have written about the eerie silence that fell over campus audiences in the early 1990s when I raised this issue on my book tours. At such moments, everyone in the hall seemed to feel the uneasy conscience of feminism. Naomi Wolf later bravely tried to address this same subject but seems to have given up in the face of the resistance she encountered.
If Sarah Palin tries to intrude her conservative Christian values into secular government, then she must be opposed and stopped. But she has every right to express her views and to argue for society's acceptance of the high principle of the sanctity of human life . . .
It is nonsensical and counterproductive for Democrats to imagine that pro-life values can be defeated by maliciously destroying their proponents. And it is equally foolish to expect that feminism must for all time be inextricably wed to the pro-choice agenda. There is plenty of room in modern thought for a pro-life feminism -- one in fact that would have far more appeal to third-world cultures where motherhood is still honored and where the Western model of the hard-driving, self-absorbed career woman is less admired.
But the one fundamental precept that Democrats must stand for is independent thought and speech. When they become baying bloodhounds of rigid dogma, Democrats have committed political suicide.’
Simone Weil is someone whom I have mentioned several times in recent postings. She was a noted philosopher and also a mystic who saw herself as close to the Catholic Church without ever formally becoming a member. An ex-communist and participant in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side, she had what she believed was a personal experience of Christ in a church in Solesmes, France in 1938: in her own words, ‘Christ himself came down and took possession of me’. She died in England in 1943, while active with the Free French movement.
The reason that I introduce Weil here is that I think she would have had an admiration, or at least a deep intellectual respect, for the position taken up by Paglia in relation to abortion, in the sense that I have condensed it down in my last posting, and in the first paragraph of this current posting.
It is something I will attempt to argue in my next mailing—sometime within the next few days.
That is, if there is anybody interested . . .
To underline this, here is a more extensive version of the quotation taken from Paglia:
‘Let's take the issue of abortion rights, of which I am a firm supporter. As an atheist and libertarian, I believe that government must stay completely out of the sphere of personal choice. Every individual has an absolute right to control his or her body. (Hence I favor the legalization of drugs, though I do not take them.) Nevertheless, I have criticized the way that abortion became the obsessive idée fixe of the post-1960s women's movement -- leading to feminists' McCarthyite tactics in pitting Anita Hill with her flimsy charges against conservative Clarence Thomas (admittedly not the most qualified candidate possible) during his nomination hearings for the Supreme Court. Similarly, Bill Clinton's support for abortion rights gave him a free pass among leading feminists for his serial exploitation of women -- an abusive pattern that would scream misogyny to any neutral observer.
But the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than my own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand. My argument (as in my first book, "Sexual Personae,") has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.
Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman's body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman's entrance into society and citizenship . . .
What I am getting at here is that not until the Democratic Party stringently reexamines its own implicit assumptions and rhetorical formulas will it be able to deal effectively with the enduring and now escalating challenge from the pro-life right wing. Because pro-choice Democrats have been arguing from cold expedience, they have thus far been unable to make an effective ethical case for the right to abortion.
The gigantic, instantaneous coast-to-coast rage directed at Sarah Palin when she was identified as pro-life was, I submit, a psychological response by loyal liberals who on some level do not want to open themselves to deep questioning about abortion and its human consequences. I have written about the eerie silence that fell over campus audiences in the early 1990s when I raised this issue on my book tours. At such moments, everyone in the hall seemed to feel the uneasy conscience of feminism. Naomi Wolf later bravely tried to address this same subject but seems to have given up in the face of the resistance she encountered.
If Sarah Palin tries to intrude her conservative Christian values into secular government, then she must be opposed and stopped. But she has every right to express her views and to argue for society's acceptance of the high principle of the sanctity of human life . . .
It is nonsensical and counterproductive for Democrats to imagine that pro-life values can be defeated by maliciously destroying their proponents. And it is equally foolish to expect that feminism must for all time be inextricably wed to the pro-choice agenda. There is plenty of room in modern thought for a pro-life feminism -- one in fact that would have far more appeal to third-world cultures where motherhood is still honored and where the Western model of the hard-driving, self-absorbed career woman is less admired.
But the one fundamental precept that Democrats must stand for is independent thought and speech. When they become baying bloodhounds of rigid dogma, Democrats have committed political suicide.’
Simone Weil is someone whom I have mentioned several times in recent postings. She was a noted philosopher and also a mystic who saw herself as close to the Catholic Church without ever formally becoming a member. An ex-communist and participant in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side, she had what she believed was a personal experience of Christ in a church in Solesmes, France in 1938: in her own words, ‘Christ himself came down and took possession of me’. She died in England in 1943, while active with the Free French movement.
The reason that I introduce Weil here is that I think she would have had an admiration, or at least a deep intellectual respect, for the position taken up by Paglia in relation to abortion, in the sense that I have condensed it down in my last posting, and in the first paragraph of this current posting.
It is something I will attempt to argue in my next mailing—sometime within the next few days.
That is, if there is anybody interested . . .
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