Wednesday, December 28, 2005

William Walker (2)


This is a reprint of one of the first articles at this site. I'm reproducing it due to the impending wars we face with Islam in Iran. We must see clearly our future and its goals. If we wage war we should have some reason for it and some goal in mind. Beyond simple self-defence, I argue that we should assimilate our enemies rather than merely beating them to the ground and hoping they stay there. I suggest we follow my very distant and unpleasant relative's course, William Walker's filibustering adventure of the mid 19th century. If war is an evil necessity, let's do more than win it, let's make it good.
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Ours is a revisionist interpretation of the utility of Walker's filibustering activities in Mexico and Central America. Regardless of Walker's personal, political, and historical failings his approach to the solution to today's conflicts between Modernity and reaction is correct in essence, and we must follow in his footsteps to achieve the triumph of Modernity and the universal predominance of the ethos our revolutions over the slavery of tradition and privilege, of the encroachment of fascism and dhimmitude, of the of the barbarism of the pre-modern and retrogressive forces in our world today. In short, to ensure the continued expansion of the universal ideals of Liberal Progress we must face the reality that all such progress grows from the barrel of a gun, and as such, none of us can shirk from our duty to impose modernity upon the entrenched slave-systems of the pre-modern world regardless of how unwilling they might be to accept it. As inheritors of the great revolutions of the 18th century, and as enlightened, progressive moderns it is our duty to impose, paraphrasing Blanqui's coining, "the dictatorship of the dialectic," preserved by a committee of public safety, as it were, and with Stalinesque resolve to extirpate the neo-kulak fascist wreckers who try to stand in our way of bringing the peace and security of Modernity to the universal masses. It is thus that we come to William Walker, American filibuster.

Walker, originally from Tennessee, having lost the love of his life to disease, studied medicine and law at universities in Nashville, Edinburgh, Gottengen, Heidelberg, Paris, and New Orleans. He witnessed the activities of the revolutions of 1848 and the effects of the Paris Commune. He returned to America and practiced law and medicine before finally moving to San Fransisco in 1850 where he found himself amidst the Goldrush 49ers.

Manifest Destiny was in the air at the time, 1853, and with a collection of ex-goldminers and assorted lumpen-proletarians Walker ventured into Sonora, Mexico to establish a state that he envisioned would eventually become a part of the American Union.. Rebuffed, he set sail for Baja with a force of 250 men, announced the formation of the "Republic of Lower California," and, though the project was supported by the populace of America and sent Walker further recruits, he promptly lost the later announced "Republic of Sonora." He survived court proceedings against him for violating U.S. neutrality laws, and in 1855 to 1857 he tried again to filibuster in Nicaragua. His third attempt at conquest of non-U.S. territory, again in Nicaragua in 1857, failed due to U.S. naval interference.

Walker's last foray into Central America ended near Truxillo, Honduras where he surrendered to the British navy. The captain of the British ship Walker surrendered to, having promised him and Walker's men amnesty, had Walker tied up on the beach and shot to death, Sept. 12, 1860.

It was Walker's intention to conquer and rule Central America, eventually incorporating it into the United States as a vote-bloc in support of Southern Negro slavery. As disagreeable as that position is today we should look at it in terms of what the outcome would have been had Walker's plan succeeded: today, all of Central America would have been part of the United States of America, as American as the state of Tennessee, as modern and progressive as any state in the Union, and equally as culturally diverse as any state in the nation. In the same way that the South, having lost the Civil War to the North has assimilated into the unified political entity, so too would the Central regions have become mainstream America with all its benefits and disadvantages at large. And that is so because of Walker's psychopathic personality, his disregard for the sensitivities of others, and his complete lack of empathy regarding local sensitivities, and his penchant for summary execution of those who upset him. All of the negative aspects of Walker's agenda would be easily passed over in light of the genuine advantages of the withering away of the empire of slavery in conflict with superior Northern Liberal force. If Walker had succeeded in capturing Central America as part of the greater state, we would today have a nation that included free citizens from Panama to Alaska, all American, all with the rights and duties of Americans. Compare that possibility to the states of Central America as they are. Walker's failures are an indictment against the morality of today's America. Where Walker failed it is up to the present generations of Americans and the inheritors of the revolutions of America and France to impose modernity and Liberalism on a reactionary world at large.

How does this relate to dhimmitude and jihad? It is our position that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the center of fascist Islam, should be our focus for the private enterprise of modern filibustering, the Dutch word for freebooting. i.e. land piracy. Far from being a racist or fascist agenda, ours is simple human endeavour to expand ones horizons combined with the enlightened project of bringing freedom, liberty, and democracy to the world masses who cannot, for whatever reasons, make it themselves. Those laboring under the illusions of false consciousness, of the idiocies of rural living, of the darkness of fascism, they are not essential in the project of emancipation. Saudi Arabia, its collective native population, as dedicated to the furtherance of Islam and primitivism as they might be, have only a contingent right to existence on their current lands, as Eduord Bernstein points out, which they forfeit in their attempts to prevent progress and human freedom genrally and especially in Arabia itself. The Saudi royals and their supporters and natives of the land have no legitimate right to continue their existence thereon if it means they continue to impede the telos of Humanity, i.e. progress and liberalism.

The heart of Islam must be destroyed by all freedom loving peoples, and those who would rebel against the future of Human progress must necessarily be removed from power and from the lands themselves. This is not an important legal issue to puzzle over but an issue for modern men with arms and determination to prevail in conquest. To win where Walker failed, to impose freedom through the transitional empire of slavery, that is our goal. Those who object are irrelevant, dhimmis and philobarbarist romantics who are not worth the refutation.

It is our position that the fascist Islamic hegemony must surrender in accord with our Melian Dialogue, that we must organize our political and ideological programme on sound Leninist principles of professional revolutionary organization, and that our enemies, dhimmis and Moslems, must be destroyed and enslaved for the further benefit of the future of the human race universally as per the failed attempts of William Walker which we must re-enact-- this time with success. Our enlightened despotism, essential for the survival of the primitive world's population, is a moral imperative, and it is in the hands of men with the will to use their power to achieve it. This time more successfully than Walker's attempts in our past.

Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Melian Dialogue (2)


This is a reprint of an earlier post that becomes more interesting to me the closer we come to war with Iran. Pastorius at CUANAS brings this to mind in his postings on Vlad the Impaler and Papa Ray's reply regarding the nature of war, of which I have also written in great detail. Here is what might be for some a companion piece to Victor Davis Hanson. For more on this, please search for William Walker until such tie as I figure out how to make a proper link. Due to time constraints this evening I can't do more. Thanks for your patience.


Thucydides: Melian Dialogue

The following excerpts from Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, "The Melian Dialogue," concerning the events of a war between Athens and Sparta from 431 to 404, are relevant to this discussion not only because of the modern relevance of the Athenian thesis but because of the counter-points raised in our modern times in the West against the Athenian thesis.

The bare position of the Athenian generals in their dialogue with the neutral allies of the Spartans, the Melians, is that might is right. From Book V, chapter vii we read in this truncated version the dialogue between Athenean generals Cleodes and Tisias and the otherwise unidentified Melian oligarchs. The Athenean generals put it to the Melians that they must surrender to superior force.

The Council of the Melians replied as follows: We see that you have come prepared to judge the argument yourselves, and the likely end of it all will be either war, if we prove that we are in the right, and so refuse to surrender, or else slavery.

Atheneans: If you are going to spend the time in enumerating your suspicians about the future, or if you have met here for any other reason except to lood the facts in the face and on the basis of these facts to consider how you can save your city from destruction, there is no point in our going on with this discussion. If however, you wil do as we suggest, then we will speak on.

Then we will on our side use no fine phrases saying, for example, that we have a right to our empire because we defeated the Persians, or that we have come against you now because of the injuries you have done us--a great mass of words that nobody would believe. And we ask you on your side not to imagine that you will influence us by saying that you, though a colony of Sparta, have not joined Sparta in the war, or that you have never done us any harm. Instead we recommend that you should try to get what is possible for you to get, taking into consideration what we both really do think; since you know as well as we do that, when these matters are discussed by practical people, the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what thay have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.

Melians: Since you force us to leave justice out of account and to confine ourselves to self-interest, in our view it is at any rate useful that you should not destroy a priciple that is to the general good of all men--namely, that in the case of all who fall into danger there should be such a thing as fair play and just dealing, and that such people should be allowed to us and to profit by arguments that fall short of a mathematical accuracy. And this principle affects you as much as anybody, since your own fall would be visited by the most terrible vengence and would be an example to the world.

Atheneans: As for you, even assuming that our empire does come to an end, we are not despondent about what would happen next. One is not so much frightened of being conquered by a power which rules over others, as Sparta does, as of what would happen if a ruling power is attacked and defeated by its own subjects. So far as this point is concerned, you can leave it to us to face the risks involved. What we shall do now is to show you that it is for the good of our own empire that we are here and that it is for the preservation of your city that we shall say what we are going to say. We do not want any trouble in bringing you into our empire, and we want you to be spared for both the good of yourselves and of ourselves.Melians: And how could it be just as good for us to be the slaves as for you to be the masters?

Atheneans: You, by giving in, would save yourselves from disaster; we, by not destroying you, would profit from you.

Melians: So you would not agree to our being neutral?

Atheneans: No, because it is not so much you hostility that injures us; it is rather that if we were on friendly terms with you, our subjects would regard that as a sing of weakness in us, whereas your hatred is evidence of our power...

So far as right and wrong are concerned they think that there is no difference between the two, that those who still preserve their independence do so because they are strong, and that if we fail to attack them it is because we are afraid. So that by conquering you we shall increase not only the size bt the security of our empire. We rule the sea and you are islanders, and weaker islanders too than the others; it it stherefore particularly important that you should not escape.

Melians: Is it not certain that you will make enemies of all states who are at present neutral, when they see what is happening here and naturally conclude that in course of time you will attack them too. Does this not mean that you are strengthening the enemies even against their intentions and their inclinations?

Atheneans: As a matter of fact we are not so much firightened of states on the continent. they have their liberty, and this means that it will be a long time before they begin to take precautions against us. We are more concerned about islanders like yourselves, who are still unsubdued or subjects who have already become embittered. These the most likely to act in a reckless manner and to bring themselves and us, too, into the most obvious danger.

Melians: We who are still free would show ourselves great cowards and weaklings if we failed to face everything that comes rather than submit to slavery.

Atheneans: No, not if you are sensible. This is no fair fight, with honour on one side and shame on the other. It is rather a questionof saving your lives and not resisting those who are far too strong for you.

Melians: If we surrender, then all our hope is lost at once, whreas, so long as we remain in action, there is still a hope that we may yet stand upright.

Atheneans: Hope, that comforter in danger! If one already has solid advantages to fall back upon, one can indulge in hope.... Do not let this happen to you, you who are weak and whose fate depends on a single movement of the scale. And do not be like those people who, as so commonly happens, miss the chance of saving themselves in a human and practical way, and, even when every clear and distinct hope has left them in their adversity, turn to what is blind and vague, to prophecies and oracles and such things which by encouraging hope leads men to ruin.

Melians: Nevertheless, we trust that the gods will give us fortune as good as your, because we are standing for what is right against what is wrong; and what we lack in power will be made up for by our alliance with the Spartans. Our confidence, therefore, is not so entirely irrational as you think.

Atheneans: So far as the favour of the gods is concerned, we think we have as much right to that as you have..... Our opinion of the gods and our knowledge of men lead us to conclude that it is a general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can. This is not a law that we made ourselves, nor were we the first to act upon it when it was made. We found it already in existence, and we shall leave it to exist forever among those who come after us. We are merely acting in accordance with it, and we know that your or anybody else with the same power as ours would be acting in precisley the same way.....With regard to your views about Sparta, we congratulate you on your simplicity but do not envy you your folly.

Melians: But we think they would even endanger themsleves for our sake...since we ae of the same race and share the same feelings.

Atheneans: We are somewhat shocked to find that, though you announced your intention of discussing how you could preserve yourselves, in all this talk you have said absolutely nothing which could justify a man in thinking that he could be preserved. Your chief points are conmcerned with what you hope may happen in the future, while your actual resources are too scanty to give you a chance of survival against the forces that are opposed to you at this moment. You will therefore be showing an extraordinary lack of common sense if, after you have asked us to retire from this meeting, you still fail to reach a conclusion wiser than anything you have mentioned so far. Do not be led astray by a false sense of honour--a thing which often brings men to ruin when they are faced with an obvious danger that somehow affects their pride. For in many cases men have still been able to see the dangers ahead of them, but this thing called dishonour, this word, by its force of seduction, has drawn them into a state where they have surrendered to an idea, while in fact they have fallen voluntarily into irrevocable disaster, in dishonour that is all the more dishonourable because it has come to them from their own folly rather than from their misfourtune. You will see that there is nothing disgraceful in giving way to the greatest city in Hellas when she is offering you such reasonable terms....This is the safe rule--to stand up to ones equals, to behave with deference towward ones superiors, and to treat ones inferiors with moderation. Let this be a point that constantly recurs to your minds--that you are discussing the fate of your country, that you have only one country, and that its future for good or ill depends on this one single decision which you are going to make.

Melians: We put our trust in the fortune that the gods will send and which has saved us up till now, and in the help of men. But we invite you to allow us to be friends of yurs and enemies to neither side, to make a treaty whihc shall be agreeable to both you and us, and so to leave our country.

Atheneans: You seem to us quite unique in you ability to consider that future as something more certain than what is before your eyes, and to see uncertainties as realities, simply because you would like them to be so.

The Melians, trusting to luck and the Spartans, refused to surrender to the superior force of the Atheneans.

The Melians surrendered unconditionally to the Atheneans, who put to death all the men of military age whom they took, and sole the women and children as slaves. Melos itself they took for themselves, sending out later a colony of 500 men.

Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War. Trans. Rex Warner. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972. pp 400-408.

The conflict today between fascist Islam and Western Modernity is little different than war 2,400 years ago. Passing by those who are professionally commited to relativism, anti-imperialism, and those self-satisfied classes of anti-war sentimentalists we are left with the hard reality that those who have power will use it; that the West having power, the West must, as a moral imperative, use it to further the Revolutions of Modernity for the greater benefit of general Humanity.

The analagous nations today in this case are the United States of America and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the latter being a colony of greater Islam, an island in the sand sea. Whether it is moral to conquer and enslave the people of the desert kindom is irrevlevant to the urgent task of bringing freedom and modernity to the whole world, whether the entrenched forces of reaction and privlege like it or not. We have the power, such as we found it in the world, and we will leave that power to othersw when we have left the scene, just as the defeated Atheneans did when their time was up and the Romans took their place in history.

Gunboat diplomacy in the struggle to free the world from the slavery of fascist Islam is perhaps not moral in itself but is necessary and essential for the good of the people regardless. It is on the basis of the Melian Dialogue that we will proceed in our next installment to discuss the fillibustering activities of Wiliam Walker.

Monday, December 26, 2005

The Concept of Comfort



"This is the best in the best of all possible worlds."
Carl Leibniz.

"What? Me worry?"
Alfred E. Neuman.

Those who don't have a concept of comfort won't likely attend to the needs of others. Another's discomfort is just so much "So what?" If your own discomfort is normal and unexamined, then the discomfort of others will not register meaningfully with you. Comfort as a concept is new to people. Very few people understand it, fewer still live it. What kind of world do they inhabit? They share the world with you. Should you be concerned?

Those who lack a concept of comfort still have a concept, some of them, of cruelty. Ah, but not all, and not many, over-all. The concept of cruelty is a rationalist concept, and most of the world is beyond that, for good or ill. All of the Islamic world is Irrationalist. All Islamic culture is primitive. It then varies between the psychopathic and the psychotic. How do we deal with that as members of the Modern West? What do, we do short of killing them, to restrain the primitive Irrationalists who haven't even a sense of comfort, let alone a concept of cruelty?

Must we, in self-defence, kill them all?

We begin this installment with pieces of a short review of a history of the concept of comfort. We who live in comfort must assume that all have always lived in comfort to the best of their means, but below we'll see that such is not the case. Comfort is a new concept in Human life. Few actually share it with the majority.

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Home: A Short History of an Idea
by Witold Rybczynski


Exploration, June 6, 2004

Reviewer:Erika Mitchell (E. Calais, VT USA)

This book is an exploration into the meaning of the word "comfort" and its place in the home. Rybczynski begins the volume with an examination of the Sixteenth Century painting by Durer "Saint Jerome in His Study". He describes each of the objects and furnishings visible in the paining in turn, noting that they are not particularly conducive to comfort or reflective of individuality. Rybczynski goes on to describe how this painting may be representative of the era in which it was painted, how houses at the time had many occupants and were spaces where people lived communally, but not necessarily as a family in the present sense of the term. He argues that in the Sixteenth Century, the nuclear family as a residential unit was non-existent, since children were sent away to live and work with others at a young age, and households always included many unrelated servants or apprentices. It was only later, as the concept of the nuclear family became more established that the need for privacy came to the fore, and private and public spaces began to be differentiated within the house. Later developments in technology, especially plumbing, ventilation, and lighting also came to influence housing design. One of the themes of the book is how the field of interior design has often been faced with the conflict between what looks good and what feels good. Rybcynski stresses that often the style of a design wins out, leaving the residents with the very least in comfort (to the point of having to carry their toothbrushes to and from the bathroom for lack of proper storage there, for instance).

[....]

The book is academic in style, although quite accessible and engaging for the general reader. Sources are listed in the extensive endnotes, and there is an index. ****

Rybczynski, if I recall rightly nearly 20 years later, offers evidence that the Dutch were the first to consider the concept of personal comfort, it being part of the newly rich merchant class pose to have objets d'art and things useless in the home, keeping in mind the Roman sumptuary laws of roughly 1,000 years before. Most people lived lives that were literally hard. As a concept, comfort was lacking. Today in the Modern West the concept of comfort is so deeply ingrained in the culture and the mind of the average man that the idea of it being a recent custom, one that few grasp, is alien and alienating. We assume too much when we assume that everyone wishes for comfort. Most have no idea of what comfort is. If they don't understand that, and if we don't understand them, then we will have no understanding of our battle with Islam and our own dhimmi fascist Left.

We can dismiss the Utilitarian view that people act to increase pleasure and to decrease pain simply by looking at women's shoes. Comfort is not the big issue we might like to think it is. Knowing what comfort is we might opt for it, but that is not a universal assumption we can make. Muslims do not, as a rule, care about comfort. It is not part of their culture and world-view. Given that, you can be sure they do not care about your comfort.

Comfort, to a certain extent, is a social good. Those who concern themselves with their own comfort will often have a sense of empathy, and they will tend to your comfort if they can. A society of comfort won't as likely turn to torturing you. It won't be a culture of cruelty. But there is a problem with comfort. When comfort becomes a fetish it turns to self-indulgence and apathy. Some will not give up their comfort for anything, not even for their own comfort. Not even to save their own lives.

There are comforts of all sorts, ideologies being one. There is the comfort of terrible certainty, such as dhimmitude. There is the comfort of hatred. There is the comfort of self-annihilation.

We in the affluent West might find that once we are comfortable in our own lives that we suffer from pangs of guilt at the discomfort of others. We might feel the need to tend to their comfort by attending to their unmet needs. Some might tend to the needs of a friend, others might tend to the needs of their communities, and yet others still might tend to the needs of the whole of the world's populations. Some tend to the homeless, or animals, or birds, or forests, or the Earth Some tend to the needs of their families, some adopt, and some tend to the needs of the entire world and its people. Tending to the comfort of others turns to tending to the needs of others. The needs of others requires that the tender infantalize the tendee. Folks, welcome to the world as kindergarten. "We are the world; we are the children."

We become so sophisticated and comfortable in our lives that we extend our power to give comfort to all, whether they want it or not. Those who would say no are discomforting not only to the suffering of the Earth's peoples but to those who would save and comfort. They say no because they are: bigots, racists, homophobes, Islamophobes, Right wing religious bigots, American Republicans, evil people who care not for the comfort lacking in the lives of Others. The need of the one to comfort devolves into the need too punish those who would make suffer the children.

It's comforting to know in ones heart and mind that one is good, that one is not an evil person, unlike them, those who are indifferent to the suffering of others. And to know that one is good means one must be right and superior to the bigots. One cannot deal with them other than to hate them. The latter cause the suffering of the world's peoples. It's comforting to know that the good people of the West do what they can to extend comfort to the rest of the people. They do so by consuming less, by sharing, by caring. The more one cares and shares and comforts the less others do so. And since one can identify those who are evil and uncaring, one can sort them into a set one is against. One can even go so far as to say those are the people who are the cause of the suffering of others, and one would rightly hate them. Hatred is a lovely addition to the rooms of the the mind of the righteous. Hatred becomes a comfort in itself. But it must be organized, it must be aesthetically pleasing, it must be intelligent: it must be societal.

To help one homeless man is good, but to save all homeless men requires the understanding of homelessness itself, its causes, its cures. One must find those who cause homelessness, combat them, and make new homes for those who have none. One must hate homelessness and those who cause it. And the cause of so many homeless men is the very system of housing that excludes some from homes. One must hate the system itself for being as it is. It's quite comforting to know that greedy landlords in a capitalist system are the cause of homelessness. One can hate the landlord and the system itself. One can give comfort tot he homeless too, if not in ones own home, then in a group shelter where the homeless can be tended, can be comforted, can be medicated.

If one can be found who is oppressed for reasons of accident, through no personal flaw, only by virtue of birth or circumstance, then one must rightly tend to that victim. One must stop the oppression of a person tormented for nothing. And if one is of a group of victims, identifiable as a group member, then one finds comfort in the group, finds the power to increase ones physical comfort and ones societal value by being more than one but one of many. Comes then the comfort of belonging. One group of victims with another group is a movement with power to comfort them.

To comfort a group is better than to comfort merely the one. And from the confines of ones office writing reports is a comfort too. Comfort in hatred of discomfort of other, comfort in doing good for the many, comfort in knowing the causes of evil, these are major comforts. Comfort in the certainty. No more disturbing ambiguity. Now there is certainty that soothes.

Not all care to comfort others, nor do they care. Life is comfortable, and that it becomes circumscribed by the encroachments of others is something one accepts rather than discomfiture oneself by moving against its source. More pot, more beer, more television. That this will all come crashing down is a comfort to the mind too. Utter passivity is a comfort few could hope to achieve. Those who do are possibly blessed. Who'd know? They themselves likely do not know.

Those who do know, and who know with total certainty, they are comfortable. Those who have certainty are beyond all definition of comfort, and if they suffer the tortures of the damned, that is comfort from Heaven. There is no greater. That they will annihilate themselves with volition is a beauty of certainty that makes all other comforts weak and pale.

Those who would comfort the suffering meet the suffering in their glory. The West yawns and rolls over. Everybody's happy and comfortable.

Well, not all of us. Some of us are right nervous about the state of comfort around us. We're not happy with the comfort of others, it being a source of discomfort to us. Some of us recognise that comfort is a lost concept in much of the world, that comfort is not a thing of cushions and velvet. Some of us recognize comfort as a madness. Some even see comforting those who would kill us as wrong. Some even go so far as to argue that making the many uncomfortable is a good thing, even if their discomfort is hard.

Cushioning the circumstances of the psychotic does nothing for the good of the people at large. In fact, it brings on catastrophe. We might consider examining our approach to comforting others, those who have no modern sense of comfort to begin with. We might look at the world as something more than an upgradable homeless shelter. We might profitably give up our comfortable assumptions about the needs of others and examine their needs objectively. They might not require our comforts but our wrath.

To assume that all require material comfort is to dismiss the lives of the many who have no such immediate concern. Perhaps our better course of action in the tending to the comforts of others is to make them suffer. Perhaps we must relearn the concept of discomfort. In the process we might relearn the concept of the value of others as they are rather than as they should be were they like us. We might discover in the process that we hate them. We might even find that we will kill them. We might find that if we kill some they will come to realize that they must conform to us and our notions of Modernity and well-being, at which point we might live comfortably together.

Saturday, December 24, 2005

Merry Christmas


United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959)
Principle 3: The child shall be entitled from his birth to a name….

Mary and I entered the shopping mall, comfortable like a couple who've been together for many years, but timid like those who've spent very little time in this unfamiliar city, we being tired and haggard, bitten by the wind and the rain and the years. We've been on the road too long, it seems, and those around us, young, happy, and affluent, brushed by without noticing us, as beautiful as we are. Inside the mall I unzipped all three of my leather jackets so those around us would see the beautiful new Chinese silk shirt Mary got me for the holiday, a shirt that makes me more beautiful. No one noticed, I'm sure. Except Mary. Mary says I don't need the shirt, that I'm beautiful already. I gaze lovingly at her, she being beautiful beyond measure. 

Mary and I entered the shopping mall and made our way to the stationery store for me to buy new journals for the coming year to record the mileage of our time. We entered the mall, and I was proud of myself in my beautiful new shirt, and Mary held my arm like an old wife used to the foibles of her man; and I, tired from these long days of our journey here, looked lovingly at her as she held the little bundle that gives her so much joy, a bag of stuff she clutches tightly to her bosom as she goes from here to there, smiling, sometimes delighted, sometimes overcome by the flashing lights at Radio Shack, the electronic video games capturing her heart in a soulful way till her aeroplane crashes into the tarmac upon landing, and until the store clerk states: "Is there something here you'd like to bu-uy?" He stands unsmiling, frowning at an empty space on a shelf as Mary asks for a different game to play since the last one really sucked. I puff up my chest and show off my new silk shirt protectively. I turn discretely to display my plastic bag of store bought stuff, our parking validation bag, our cue to the world that we belong in the mall as legitimate folks. But, hey: off we go to get samples of ice-cream, off we go so Mary can increase the volume in her bag with shopping brochures and old lottery ticket stubs. Off we go. I show off my purchase to good effect, I think, until I see that my fingers have sweated so badly that the ink has smeared all over the bag, and my fingers are black. I put my hands in my pockets and pull open my jackets to show off the beautiful shirt Mary gave me. We shall be all watched over.

"They act like we're dead," Mary says. "They don't even look at us. When I want to ask about something, they turn away and talk to someone else." Maybe we don't look just right. Maybe we look like we've been on the road too long. Maybe we look like a couple of weathered fence posts.

But we're not dead. Just look at my shirt. I'm beautiful, and especially so is the beautiful girl I'm with. "They don't seem to want to sell us anything," Mary says.

What is there to say to man playing "Sometimes I feel like a motherless child" on a guitar, a man who responds: "It's a tune by Ritchie Havens from the movie Woodstock."
Mary's hat is falling from the grace and style it might once have had when in its younger years its velvet was full and shiny brown; when the crown rose up with inner dignity, before it fell down to look more like the worn beret of a World War Two resistance fighter. Yes, the threads are loose. It is unraveled at the seams. My queen's crown is tarnished. Man, we've been on the road so long that longer than this we'll look like pavement.

I look ahead, beyond the mall, and I say to Mary: Listen to this, beautiful girl, this poem by Rimbaud, this poem called "Childhood," this poem that comes to my mind as I gaze at you with the bundled treasures at your breast:
The paths are bitter
And the broom flowers cover the hills.
The air is still…
How far are the birds and the fountains!
                        To go on can only lead to the end of the world.

We should go there, you and I, I say, and I mean it truly.

"You're taking up a good stall in the barn, buster," Mary says, though not to me but to a picture of a kitten on a postcard, though she could be speaking to me, I don't know, not being myself a psychologist of any repute.

We stand, side by side in the mall, and for once I'm happy, happy because I look like a king, and my beautiful girl is my queen. We slowly shuffle off to the department store to play air hockey, which I thought I'd won but that Mary says we tied, which probably means I lost. We look at black refrigerators and black stoves and black furniture. Black.

Mary's bundle grows as we walk through the mall. She finds things to add to her bag. Mary finds wonderful things that make her bundle of stuff better than it was. I don't understand female things like that, but I stand by smiling at those who stop to not look at us.

Beyond the road: the mall at Christmas. We have arrived.
Our gods: I recall a bit from Conrad's Lord Jim and I want very much to tell Mary:

"Some, very few and seen there but seldom, lead mysterious lives, had preserved an undefaced energy with the temper of dreamers. They appeared to live in a crazy maze of plans, hopes, dangers, enterprises, ahead of civilization, in the dark places of the sea, and their death was the only event of their fantastic existence that seemed to have a reasonable certitude of achievement."

I'd meant to cheer us up. Hope? Yes; but if times get any harder, we could drift into the sea, I think, or some tranquil place. They really don't see us. They don't see us at all.

My mind is calm. Mary rubs her hand against my beautiful shirt. We are beautiful together. I stand close and protective as Mary gently bounces her bag up and down in her arms to disconnect the battery inside the rooster alarm clock buried deep inside her bundle. Still, the bag makes a choking noise like that of a child locked in the root cellar. People stare. I look down to avoid their gaze, and I see I've dripped ice-cream on my beautiful shirt, and when I tell Mary how sorry I am that I've made a such a mess of myself, Mary just smiles and says it doesn't matter because she got a huge sack of such shirts; and even though the Chinese lady stole most of them as Mary was going for more, Mary still has some left for me and the really big guy and the little fat guy.


Mary's warm smile. I still have the strength to go to the end of the world. I have a name, though I'm not certain Mary can remember it.

People swirl throughout the mall buying up even those things they don't much want to buy but must because there's time and things left yet. Mary asks me if I'd like a refill at McDonald's, it being a good deal because she's got some cups stashed. And I want very much to get away from those people who look at us and don't look at us because we look like we're dead. Maybe we show up on the video surveillance.

When I lived in a commune and sold candles at the mall in Berkley, California back in 1970 I didn't grasp the significance of Richard Brautigan's poem "All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace." I read it then, and I didn't understand. The poem was old even then, but I wasn't. Telegraph Ave. was old then, but I was just a lad.
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
……...(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think
……..(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labours
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by the machines of loving grace.

Mary smiles at me shyly sometimes, not knowing quite why I stop in mid-step and gaze off into space. She looks up at me from under the brim of her floppy velvet hat, and she waits gently like a warm breeze wafting around me. She holds her bag and smiles.

Our coffee gone, our evening long, we wonder where to find a place to stay for the night, given that all the rooms at the hostels are taken. We huddle in a doorway for a while. Three folks dressed up like they must have traveled from a Las Vegas Magic Show come by the doorway of the Starlight Diner and see us shivering in the damp. They give us a can of beer and a half pack of cigarettes. Mary sees a tea box in their bags, and she wants it because it's got a colorful label, the very thing Mary likes so much. One of the trio wisely passes it over, and Mary sticks it in her bag. The rooster clock starts making noises again, "erk er erk erooo," and Mary shakes it till it's quiet. The Magic Show girl cries out: "Be careful, you'll hurt him." I'll take that bitter path, I say to Mary, but I'll bet she's already forgotten about it.

"One of the defining characteristics of human beings is that their adaptation to the world depends," writes Anthony Storr in his book, Feet of Clay, "principally upon learning rather than upon those built-in behavioral patterns which govern the lives of creatures lower down the evolutionary scale. Man's infancy and childhood, relative to historical life-span, has been prolonged by evolution, with the consequence that there is additional time for learning to take place. Learning does not cease with the end of childhood. Many of us continue to learn all our lives, and enjoy doing so…. Our predisposition to go on learning is adaptive, but remaining teachable into adult life demands the retention of some characteristics of childhood…. One might add that man's adaptation is by means of maladaptation…. If we were perfectly adapted to the environment and the environment remained constant we might live in a state of blissful ignorance, unaware of any problems, but we should not be inventive because there should be no incentive to be so."


Outside, it's raining and cold, and no one smiles at us because I have my jackets done up to the chin, and no one can see my beautiful silk shirt. People don't look at Mary because they think she's a bag lady or something. Rain drips off her nose. She's very pretty. This is a bitter path, indeed. Mary has a bus pass. I tell her to get on the bus, warm up, dry out. Mary won't leave me. Instead she pecks at the discarded tickets in front of the subway station till she finds one she thinks I can use. It's really no good, I have to walk; and so-- Mary walks with me. It's a long way to some place to go. We go together. I feel beautiful again for some reason. It's not my beautiful shirt. It's because Mary is beside me. What was I thinking?

I was thinking of Rilke. I was thinking of an "Autumn Day." I was thinking of you.

Lord, it is time. The summer was so short.
Impose upon the sundials now your shadows
And round the meadows let the winds rotate.
He'll not build now, who has no house awaiting.
Who's alone now, for long will so remain.
Sit late, read, write long letters, and again
Return to restless perambulating
The avenues of parks when leaves down rain.


So on we go, we three: Mary holding close her nameless bag, grinning as she looks up at me with her beautiful green eyes. The paths are so bitter, and we are so far away from home. For dreamers it could only mean the end of the world.

Friday, December 23, 2005

The Lion Sleeps Tonight

Thanks, Callie.

Announcing Dag's Christmas Story for Tommorw.

Please return Saturday afternoon for Dag's annual Christmas story, a bit of rollicking good fun that has nothing to do with hanging Prsbyterians from lamposts. Hope you'll join us then.

Dies irae, dies illa

Just in time for Christmas we come again to the Presbyterians cheer leading for killers. Presbyterians who engage in terrorism, who are directly responsible for murdering men, women and children, people who are my friends, people I lived among thanks to their generosity and kindness, people who are lovely and worthy of life and the peace everyone is entitled to. But, our Presbyterians think not, preferring rather to kill my friends.

There are those who will stand up to Death and play him till the end. Those would be the ones who love life. I'm one. You will meet me.

Presbyters: I will not stand for this. Any Presbyter in a land outside the law is fair game for those who follow the law, and that's all there is to say of it.
***

Hezbollah official Nabil Qawuq is undoubtedly a busy man. As Hezbollah's commander in Southern Lebanon, Qawuq is responsible for leading the bulk of the Shi'ite terrorist group's combat forces, while frequently overseeing attacks on Israeli positions and attempts to kidnap Israeli soldiers or civilians. A confidante of Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah, Qawuq is also a fixture on Al-Jazeera and Lebanese television, his appearances generously mottled with calls for the destruction of the Jewish state.


Nevertheless, Qawuq recently found the time in his busy schedule to meet with -- of all things -- a church group. On October 20th, a delegation from the Presbyterian Church of the USA (PCUSA) met with Qawuq and other Hezbollah leaders for an hour in southern Lebanon as part of their three-week regional tour. Led by the head of the Chicago Presbytery Reverend Bob Reynolds, the meeting was convened for supposedly "educational" purposes, with Reverend Reynolds suggesting "I think one way people can learn from one another is to learn the way people talk about themselves and describe their own reality."

Unfortunately, the conversations which took place between the two parties were anything but realistic. Quwaq opened the conference with a lengthy harangue against the "chaos" and "fear" created by President Bush and "American policy," whose true purpose he defined roughly as enabling Ariel Sharon to "turn Lebanon into a bridge to harm Syria." Eager to endear himself to the perturbed Hezbollah commander, PCUSA delegation spokesman Robert Worley, a retired seminary professor, assured Quwaq that all delegation members had voted for John Kerry. Furthermore, Worley promised his host to help disavow Americans of the notion -- impressed upon them by the Western media -- that Hezbollah was a terrorist group, stating:

"Americans hear in the Western media that Hizbullah is a terrorist organization, and they do not hear any other opinion. They know nothing about the party's concern for the people of the south."

Worley then pointed out that Hezbollah and his church share similar goals, along with comparable opponents: Continue reading "Devenny: The Church of Jihad"--
***
pages.zdnet.com/wassman/id23.html

(Germans Hanged.)
***

Christmas, and the filthy Presbyters are out to kill my friends, smiling. These sanctimonious scums will find themselves facing the wrath of God someday, and it's a day I long to witness. Presbyter scum: I hate you.
***

Dies irae, dies illa
solvet saeclum in favilla,
teste David cum Sybilla.

Quantus tremor est futurus,
quando judex est venturus,
cuncta stricte discussurus.

Tuba mirum spargens sonum
per sepulchra regionum,
coget omnes ante thronum.

Mors stupebit et natura,
cum resurget creatura,
judicanti responsura.

Liber scriptus proferetur,
in quo totum continetur,
unde mundus judicetur.

Judex ergo cum sedebit,
quidquid latet apparebit,
nil inultum remanebit.

Quid sum miser tunc dicturus?
Quem patronum rogaturus,
cum vix justus sit securus?

Rex tremendae majestatis,
qui salvandos salvas gratis,
salva me, fons pietatis.

Recordare Jesu pie,
quod sum causa tuae viae,
ne me perdas illa die.

Quaerens me sedisti lassus,
redemisti crucem passus,
tantus labor non sit cassus.

Juste judex ultionis,
donum fac remissionis
ante diem rationis.

Ingemisco tanquam reus,
culpa rubet vultus meus,
supplicanti parce, Deus.

Qui Mariam absolvisti,
et latronem exaudisti,
mihi quoque spem dedisti.

Preces meae non sunt dignae,
sed tu, bonus, fac benigne,
ne perenni cremer igne.

Inter oves locum praesta,
et ab hoedis me sequestra,
statuens in parte dextra.

Confutatis maledictis,
flammis acribus addictis,
voca me cum benedictis.

Oro supplex et acclinis,
cor contritum quasi cinis,
gere curam mei finis.

Lacrimosa dies illa,
qua resurget ex favilla

judicandus homo reus -
Huic ergo parce, Deus.

Pie Jesu Domine,
dona eis requiem.

Thursday, December 22, 2005

Knowing the Obvious


Just how much of this fancy fransy philosophy is enough to determine how we should respond to the obvious threat of jihad and social disintegration? Is any of this interior inspection of historical opinion making worth the time and trouble? We all know more or less what needs to be done, though we might differ on the details. Islam is a sick ideology that has many millions of poor and ignorant people perched on the verge of catastrophe, threatening not just the West but the world itself with war and annihilation. It's clear that any religion, so-called, that enslaves its female members, reduces them to sex toys and baby farms, that sexually mutilates little girls for the sake of controlling their behaviour, that's obsessed with appearances at the cost of achievement and productivity, that is in every respect an unworthy idea and a danger to the public good and the very safety of the common world of Humanity, that that ideology should be rooted out and destroyed as a matter of course, as a matter of ordinary decency and common sense, if not of prudence and self-preservation. Our political and social leaders, our intelligentsia and our moral leaders collude in the game of "Let's pretend Islam is a religion of peace and that the West is filled with racists." We don't need much detail to know that Islam is evil. And if we need any proof other than what we have and have had since day one, all we really need to debunk the idea that Islam is anything other than evil are these two words: "nine eleven." So why all this about philosophy?

If our reaction to Islamic madness is to counter it with dhimmitude and suicide, then we must look at ourselves to ask why we are reacting as we are. It's obvious that Islam is a madness, and that it's violence and savagery are a threat to us. That needs no further investigation. We do. We need to do some serious navel gazing. We have to ask ourselves how we can look at the obvious and not see anything sensible. How can we look at our own lives, in that case, and trust ourselves to act responsibly toward our children? We are definitely doing something extremely wrong, and we should give it a bit of thought before we commit ourselves to anything further.

Below we can take a look at looking and knowing. How we approach these things will tell us how we approach tomorrow and jihad without the dubious benefit of our leaders. We must, soon, learn to lead ourselves. We have to know how to see and know the real without being taken in by nonsense, even the most obvious nonsense that we convince ourselves is true.
***

Sorites Paradox

The sorites paradox is the name given to a class of paradoxical arguments, also known as little-by-little arguments, which arise as a result of the indeterminacy surrounding limits of application of the predicates involved. For example, the concept of a heap appears to lack sharp boundaries and, as a consequence of the subsequent indeterminacy surrounding the extension of the predicate 'is a heap', no one grain of wheat can be identified as making the difference between being a heap and not being a heap. Given then that one grain of wheat does not make a heap, it would seem to follow that two do not, thus three do not, and so on. In the end it would appear that no amount of wheat can make a heap. We are faced with paradox since from apparently true premises by seemingly uncontroversial reasoning we arrive at an apparently false conclusion.

This phenomenon at the heart of the paradox is now recognised as the phenomenon of vagueness (see the entry on vagueness). Once identified, vagueness can be seen to be a feature of syntactic categories other than predicates, nonetheless one speaks primarily of the vagueness of predicates. Names, adjectives, adverbs and so on are only susceptible to paradoxical sorites reasoning in a derivative sense.

Sorites arguments of the paradoxical form are to be distinguished from multi-premise syllogisms (polysyllogisms) which are sometimes also referred to as sorites arguments. Whilst both polysyllogisms and sorites paradoxes are chain-arguments, the former need not be paradoxical in nature and the latter need not be syllogistic in form.

[....]

1. The Sorites In History The name 'sorites' derives from the Greek word soros (meaning 'heap') and originally referred, not to a paradox, but rather to a puzzle known as The Heap: Would you describe a single grain of wheat as a heap? No. Would you describe two grains of wheat as a heap? No. … You must admit the presence of a heap sooner or later, so where do you draw the line?

It was one of a series of puzzles attributed to the Megarian logician Eubulides of Miletus. Also included were:

The Liar: A man says that he is lying. Is what he says true or false?

The Hooded Man: You say that you know your brother. Yet that man who just came in with his head covered is your brother and you did not know him.

The Bald Man: Would you describe a man with one hair on his head as bald? Yes. Would you describe a man with two hairs on his head as bald? Yes. … You must refrain from describing a man with ten thousand hairs on his head as bald, so where do you draw the line?

This last puzzle, presented as a series of questions about the application of the predicate 'is bald', was originally known as the falakros puzzle. It was seen to have the same form as the Heap and all such puzzles became collectively known as sorites puzzles.

It is not known whether Eubulides actually invented the sorites puzzles. Some scholars have attempted to trace its origins back to Zeno of Elea but the evidence seems to point to Eubulides as the first to employ the sorites. Nor is it known just what motives Eubulides may have had for presenting this puzzle. It was, however, employed by later Greek philosophers to attack various positions, most notably by the Sceptics against the Stoics' claims to knowledge.

These puzzles of antiquity are now more usually described as paradoxes. Though the conundrum can be presented informally as a series of questions whose puzzling nature gives it dialectical force it can be, and was, presented as a formal argument having logical structure. The following argument form of the sorites was common:

1 grain of wheat does not make a heap.
If 1 grain of wheat does not make a heap then 2 grains of wheat do not.
If 2 grains of wheat do not make a heap then 3 grains do not.

If 9,999 grains of wheat do not make a heap then 10,000 do not.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
10,000 grains of wheat do not make a heap.

The argument certainly seems to be valid, employing only modus ponens and cut (enabling the chaining together of each sub-argument which results from a single application of modus ponens). These rules of inference are endorsed by both Stoic logic and modern classical logic, amongst others.

Moreover its premises appear true. Some Stoic presentations of the argument recast it in a form which replaced all the conditionals, 'If A then B', with 'Not(A and not-B)' to stress that the conditional should not be thought of as being a strong one, but rather the weak Philonian conditional (the modern material conditional) according to which 'If A then B' was equivalent to 'Not(A and not-B)'. Such emphasis was deemed necessary since there was a great deal of debate in Stoic logic regarding the correct analysis for the conditional. In thus judging that a connective as weak as the Philonian conditional underpinned this form of the paradox they were forestalling resolutions of the paradox that denied the truth of the conditionals based on a strong reading of them. This interpretation then presents the argument in its strongest form since the validity of modus ponens seems assured whilst the premises are construed so weakly as to be difficult to deny. The difference of one grain would seem to be too small to make any difference to the application of the predicate; it is a difference so negligible as to make no apparent difference to the truth-values of the respective antecedents and consequents.

Yet the conclusion seems false. Thus paradox confronted the Stoics just as it does the modern classical logician. Nor are such paradoxes isolated conundrums. Innumerable sorites paradoxes can be expressed in this way. For example, one can present the puzzle of the Bald Man in this manner. Since a man with one hair on his head is bald and if a man with one is then a man with two is, so a man with two hairs on his head is bald. Again, if a man with two is then a man with three is, so a man with three hairs on his head is bald, and so on. So a man with ten thousand hairs on his head is bald, yet we rightly feel that such men are hirsute, i.e., not bald. Indeed, it seems that almost any vague predicate admits of such a sorites paradox and vague predicates are ubiquitous.

As presented, the paradox of the Heap and the Bald Man proceed by addition (of grains of wheat and hairs on the head respectively). Alternatively though, one might proceed in reverse, by subtraction. If one is prepared to admit that ten thousand grains of sand make a heap then one can argue that one grain of sand does since the removal of any one grain of sand cannot make the difference. Similarly, if one is prepared to admit a man with ten thousand hairs on his head is not bald, then one can argue that even with one hair on his head he is not bald since the removal of any one hair from the originally hirsute scalp cannot make the relevant difference. It was thus recognised, even in antiquity, that sorites arguments come in pairs, using: 'non-heap' and 'heap'; 'bald' and 'hirsute'; 'poor' and 'rich'; 'few' and 'many'; 'small' and 'large'; and so on. For every argument which proceeds by addition there is another reverse argument which proceeds by subtraction.

Curiously, the paradox seemed to attract little subsequent interest until the late nineteenth century when formal logic once again assumed a central role in philosophy. Since the demise of ideal language doctrines in the latter half of the twentieth century interest in the vagaries of natural language, and the sorites paradox in particular, has greatly increased.
***

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/

***

I think these things are not only interesting but valuable for us as individuals. It's not for everyone, of course, but for those who enjoy it, this is fun, and with that, I wish you a Merry Christmas.

We'll be back tomorrow with more jihadi thrills and dhimmi chills.

The Windows of Perception

Why is the West encumbered by dhimmi idiots? What motivates our citizens and our leaders to chant the mantra "Islam means peace?" Why do we make excuses for Muslims when by any reasonable standard we would be at war with the whole lot of them to the point of utter destruction of one or the other side? It's not because we hate war, are good guys, too advanced, or that Islam is anything other than exactly what we know it is. So why?


It's because of how we decide to interpret our world. It's our collective intellectual attitude that makes our world and us within it act as we do. We might change our collective mind about things as we see them today.

If you are primarily a mental creature existing inside a meat puppet, then you are some kind of mental creature rather than a mental creature. You might be a mental creature that thinks in terms of rationality and reason, looking at the world as a physical space in time, knowable to you as a physical creature through your senses and appeals to reason. You might construct your version of reality according to the rules of reason, examining the world you experience and filtering out that which is not reasonable or logical but that is still attuned to intuitive realities you might not have reason to discard even if you don't have evidence as yet to make logical or rational sense of them. Or you might be an irrational creature, one who relies for your understanding of reality based on what you hear from your local imam who describes reality according to the Qur'an and ahadith and Sira, according to the sunna as interpreted by the imam and your own knowledge. Depending on which approach to knowing what is true about the reality of existence you choose to live in you will be one kind of mental creature or something altogether different. You can be rational or you can be, for example, Muslim. Among other possibilities of deciding what is and how we can know it as mental creatures there is the option of neither science nor revelation but of social science. That choice too will make you some kind of creature not like others.

If you are a mental creature, knowing reality and existence through your mind rather than strictly through you senses like my cat, for example, living beyond a purely intuitive and sensory experience of life, you can choose also to learn the ways of reality according to reason, revelation, faith, or ideology. You can choose all of those approaches all at once, but one must be dominant, must be the ruling motif of your mental life. If one is Muslim then one lives ones mental life according to the idea that reality is the work of Allah. All that can be known of the work of Allah is what is revealed rather than that which can be reasoned. In Islam, Allah is unbound by logic or even the law of non-contradiction. From that first principle of complete incoherence one is not able to be a different kind of mental creature. One cannot ever be a rational Muslim. That gateway to a different way of knowing reality, the gate of ijtihad, is forever closed and barred.

If we, as mental creatures, are what we know, then we are according to how we can know. No Muslim can ever adapt to Modernity. Each and all are total write-offs. If a person is mental, then his mind is not just what his memories and thoughts are but how he knows and continues to know reality. If one were to be irrational today, believing in the omniscience of Allah in the universe, and then tomorrow believing in the primacy of the laws of physics, then one would no longer be Muslim. And what would the Muslim apostate's life be if all that preceded his apostasy were known henceforth as invalid? It's a question most Muslim will never ask, and rightly so, given that a man is seldom likely to destroy his mental world lightly, to commit mental suicide, as it were, not even for the chance of a resurrection into a better life. And worse for the Muslim he seldom if ever has any chance to examine his world-view critically. No, instead he has usually only disincentives, like death for apostasy for a beginning, and permanent exile from his previous life for another.

We have spent much time and effort looking at how we know our universes, how we can know if what we believe is true. We've looked at Steven Dutch on curiosity, and we've looked at Socrates on elenchus and aporia, and we've looked at numerous others on thinking and knowing and understanding. We always come back to the division between Modernity with its rationalist approach to knowing reality and the primitivist approach to knowing reality. We spend great amounts of space here looking at the alternative view of epistemology, the Romantic Irrationalism of philobarbarism, that of Western pseudo-science, the ideological view from anthropology and sociology, for example. It is our unvarnished opinion that social (pseudo)-science is the cause of Left dhimmi fascism and its creation of naive public opinion in support of primitive neo-feudalist fascism. How we as societies view reality, how we decide what is truth and what is falsity, determines how we live our lives, if at all.


Muslims do not examine their own minds. They are the slaves of Allah, and they are so from birth. We might as well forget about them and deal with them as they are and as that dealing requires. It's our own who are the problem: those who decide to look at reality as a social construct that follows mechanical norms determined by outside ingluences, those who would engineer reality to make people conform to it rather than those who would accept reality as it rationally is and make reality conform to Humans. It's an intellectual choice that determines how one will decide reality, and if one comes down on the side of social "science," then one is doomed to be irrational.

Thus, we come to the first part of an essay on Irrationality, the rest of which we'll leave the reader to find and contemplate privately if he or she so chooses. this is an introductionto an essay of some value to those who would pursue this topic further.
***

The Rise of New Irrationalism and its Incompatibility with Inclusive Democracy

Takis Fotopoulos

Abstract

The double aim of this article is, first, to examine the causes of the rise of 'new' irrationalism which is contrasted with the classical irrationalism of the 19th century and, second, to show the incompatibility of all sorts of irrationalism (from religion to esoterism, New Age mysticism and so on) with democracy. Finally, the need to develop a new democratic rationalism and democratic ethics, as opposed to the usual attempts to derive an 'objective' ethics from natural or social evolution, is explored.

1. Old and new irrationalism

Rational discourse versus irrational beliefs

The irrationalism, which has flourished both in the North and the South in the last quarter of this century or so, has taken various forms ranging from the revival, in some cases, of the old religions (Christianity, Islam etc) up to the expansion of various irrational trends (mysticism, spritualism, astrology, esoterism, neopaganism, "New Age" etc) which, especially in the West, threaten old religions. We may generally define an irrational belief system as a system whose core beliefs are not derived by rational methods (i.e. reason and/or an appeal to 'facts') but by intuition, instinct, feeling, mystical experience, revelation, will etc. As such, these beliefs are therefore outside any rational discourse. This is particularly true for all religions which have always been characterised by the existence of a set of irrational core truths (God, immortal soul, karma and so on) which are usually inscribed in a sacred text like the Gospel, Koran, Veda etc. In this sense, the world of core truths that characterize all religious systems is and has always been not an open system but a world of closure.

Still, the fact that irrational belief systems usually resort to irrational methods to derive their core 'truths' does not mean that they never use rational methods. Even religious systems sometimes use reason in deriving their truths, albeit within strictly defined limits. These limits are laid down by faith in some core irrational truths. In other words, reason is used by religious systems mainly to justify non-core or peripheral beliefs. Thomas Aquinas, for example, was a rationalist in the sense of believing that the larger part of revealed truth was intelligible to and demonstrable by reason. Still, he also maintained that a number of dogmas which were impenetrable to reason must be accepted on faith alone. Similarly, orthodox Hindus not only give full authority to the Veda but they also hold that human reason errs whenever, on the grounds of perceptual experience, it takes issue with the sacred writings.

In the light of this, It is not therefore surprising that the Pope in his last encyclical,[1] where he considered the relationship of truth, faith and reason, came out in favour of reason (presumably, to attack the irrationalism of New Age which threatens his own and any other established church)! However, his attempt to reconcile faith and reason, which were at odds since the Enlightenment, is clearly formulated within the problematique of Thomas Aquinas.[2] Thus, although the Pope encourages all philosophers , both Christian and non-Christian, "to trust in the power of human reason" he goes on to declare that we must not 'abandon the passion for ultimate truth' since anything which is true , cannot be threatening to faith, because God is truth. As he puts is: "Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth." Faith, for the Pope, stirred reason to reach out and attain what was "beautiful, good and true" and in this way became the advocate of reason.

Of course, the conception of reason to which the Pope refers to has little relation to the Enlightenment's conception, which was identified with the power by which man understands the universe and improves his/her own condition. In fact, one might argue that the three main Enlightenment pillars were: dedication to reason, the belief in Progress and the search for freedom in political and social institutions. But, here, we have to make an important distinction between the 'old' and 'new' 'irrationalism' something that will bring us back to the "Age of Reason", i.e. the Enlightenment and the development of rationalism. This distinction becomes necessary by the fact that the causes of the rise of modern irrationalism, as we shall see in the next section, are specific to our own era and as such differ considerably from the historical causes which have led to the rise of classical irrationalism, which flourished in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, as a reaction to classical rationalism.

Rationalism was the philosophical view that regarded reason as the chief source and test of knowledge. In this sense, rationalism has intrinsically been the rival of belief systems claiming esoteric knowledge, whether from mystical experience, revelation, or intuition. For the same reason, rationalism has always been opposed to various irrationalisms that tended to stress the biological, the emotional or volitional, the unconscious, or the existential, at the expense of the rational. In fact, it was in the context of fighting religious irrationalism, which was rampant in Christian West, that the Enlightenment thinkers embarked on the project of establishing a science of history and society, comprising hypotheses and laws of an explanatory power analogous to that attained by theories in the physical sciences. People like Condillac and Condorcet in the 18th century and Henri de Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill, and Henry Thomas Buckle in the 19th century believed that it was feasible to apply scientific procedures to the study of human society. It was in the same context that modern social science was born, either of the 'orthodox' type, which takes the status quo for granted, or of the radical type, which aims at a new society (scientific socialism).

The reaction to the rationalism which characterized the Enlightenment came in the form of the 'old' irrationalism, which developed in 19th century Europe. Still, the objective of this 'old' irrationalism was not to go back to religious absurdity and truth by revelation. Its declared objective was to enrich man's apprehension of life by expanding it beyond the rational to its fuller dimensions. Irrationalism's roots were either in metaphysics or in an awareness of the uniqueness of human experience. Its emphasis was on the dimensions of instinct, feeling, and will as over and against reason.

Manifestations of the irrationalist movement could be seen in various areas:


In ontology, where irrationalism implied that the world is devoid of rational structure (as rationalists argued), meaning and purpose (as religions, particularly Christianity, maintained). In epistemology, where it meant that reason is inherently defective and incapable of knowing the universe without subjective distortion;
In History, where it implied that there is much in the life of the spirit and in human history that could not be dealt with by the rational methods of science;
In ethics, where it signified the futility of the attempt to develop any objective standards;
In anthropology, where it implied a view of human nature as predominantly irrational and;
In art and literature, where romanticism (which emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental) was a reaction against the Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general. Similarly, the surrealist movement this century represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the "rationalism" that had guided European culture and politics in the past and had culminated in the horrors of World War I. Surrealism was seen by the founders of the movement as a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in "an absolute reality, a surreality.

As it is obvious from the above list, similar views are expressed on many of the above topics by contemporary irrationalists. The difference is that today it is not just irrationalists of various sorts who, using a variety of irrational methods, adopt such views. Today, rational methods can be employed, and have been successfully employed, to show that:

the world is indeed devoid of any meaning apart from the one that we assign to it;
there can be no science of History, or of society and the economy because there is indeed subjective distortion in interpreting social phenomena;
there is no linear or dialectical Progress in History;
it is impossible to derive any 'objective' ethics from natural or social evolution;
there is no fixed human nature, rational or irrational;
it is possible to interpret in a rational way the unconscious and its interaction to the conscious realm of experience.

In fact, the very existence of a rational discourse, which can be used to justify the above conclusions today, is what makes the 'new' irrationalists even more irrational than the old ones. If, a century ago, it may have been forgivable to examine the limitations of science with the use of non-rational methods it is obviously nonsensical to do the same today, when the rational discourse on the limitations of science (particularly social science) and the rational critique of several core Enlightenment ideas, like that of Progress, is fully developed.

Today, with hindsight, we can pronounce that the project of creating a 'science' of society, economy and history, which would command a comparable degree of intersubjectivity to that in natural sciences, was doomed to failure. But, one does not have to use irrational methods anymore to criticize Progress, science and technology. The fact, for instance, that there are no 'laws of history' does not have to be shown by viewing History intuitively as an irrational process of organic growth and decay, as Oswald Spengler[3], an old irrationalist, tried to do. Without having to resort to the conformism of post-modernists, radical thinkers like Castoriadis, far from an irrationalist himself, have also shown the impossibility of scientifying or 'rationalising' History (History is essentially creation-creation and destruction.)[4]

Similarly, as I attempted to show elsewhere,[5] most of what passes today as social science is in fact ideology, i.e. a set of rational interpretations (namely, interpretations derived through reason and/or an appeal to 'facts') of society's or economy's structure and dynamics from a particular world view's point. As such, this study always reflects particular interests. At a high level of abstraction, social 'science' reflects either the interests of the ruling elites (orthodox social 'science'), in which case it takes the present socio-economic system (market economy/liberal 'democracy') for granted, or those of the rest of society (radical social 'science'), in which case it does not. As I argued there, the very object of study of social 'sciences' (society), versus that of natural sciences (nature), precludes the possibility of developing a science of social phenomena which would enjoy a comparable degree of general acceptability to that of the study of natural phenomena. The reason is that it is much more difficult, if not impossible, to separate subject from object of study in the former case compared with the latter. We live in a divided society and therefore the social scientist's worldview plays a crucial role in the assumptions s/he makes and the conclusions s/he derives. So, it is not just the lack of the possibility of experiment, which differentiates the two types of studies, as it is usually asserted. The crucial difference between social and natural sciences arises from the fact that whereas the tenets of natural sciences are generally accepted by natural scientists at a given time period, the tenets of social sciences are not, since there can never be a single paradigm about social reality, as long as society is divided. In fact, the very choice of paradigm to be adopted by a social scientist depends on a preconception: whether the present socio-economic system is taken for granted or not.

Rational ideologies and irrational belief systems

Still, notwithstanding Bertrand Russell,[6] I think it is wrong to compare a rational ideology like Marxism, with an irrational belief system like Christianity, Buddism, or Islam. In other words, I would not agree with the argument put forward by some writers[7], who, following Russell, argue that modern Western ideologies like Marxism and Liberalism were just variations of the Judeo-Christian conception, in the sense that they all were dogmas based on an unquestionable truth, irrespectively of whether this truth is transcendental, (as in the case of religion), or rational, (which can be 'proved' as 'objective' by the use of some rational method, eg. positivism or dialectics).

I think that although there are superficial similarities between an irrational belief system like Christianity and a rational ideology like Marxism (church/party, priests/avant guard etc), still, the crucial differences between them cannot be ignored. As I mentioned above, a fundamental characteristic of every irrational belief system is the existence of a set of core beliefs which are derived by non-rational methods (intuition, instinct, feeling etc). The fact that in many irrational belief systems there are also peripheral beliefs which may have been derived through the use of rational methods does not change their fundamentally irrational character. An irrational belief system is therefore irrefutable, since it is based on core beliefs, which are not expressed as rational hypotheses about reality, but as dogmas, intuitions etc, which are outside rational discourse.

On the other hand, a rational ideology is refutable by an appeal to reason and/or the 'facts' because not only its peripheral ideas, but also its core ones, have been derived through a rational process. By "refutability" I do not of course mean strict "falsifiability" in the Popperian sense.[8] As I attempted to show elsewhere[9], it is not possible to derive any objective scientific criteria for the verification/falsification of the Marxist hypotheses as scientific hypotheses. But, the same applies to orthodox economic theory and to social 'sciences' in general. So, when I talk about the refutability of a rational ideology vs. the irrefutability of irrational belief systems what I mean is that the former contains refutable hypotheses, (i.e. hypotheses which although cannot be 'proven' or 'disproven' by 'facts' still are amenable to rational discussion, namely, to discussion which can be informed by reason and evidence) whereas the latter contains a core of irrefutable hypotheses. The Marxist hypothesis, for instance, that as capitalism spreads all over the world it "creates a world after its own image"[10] is refutable and can be discussed rationally; in fact, it has been successfully challenged by radical development theory in the 1960s and the 1970s. On the other hand, there is no way to discuss rationally, for instance, the Christian belief in the Second Coming, or the Buddhist belief in reincarnation, the deep ecology's intuition on biocentric equality, or the New Age's belief in the 'inner dynamic' since all these beliefs are not refutable hypotheses derived through rational methods but irrational beliefs derived through intuition etc.

Of course, the refutation of some of the core beliefs of a rational ideology like Marxism does not constitute a refutation of the entire ideology and it is more than likely that it will not 'convert' the fanatic. Still, it may persuade the more sophisticated supporters of the ideology to start questioning some at least of their cheriched beliefs. In fact, core Marxist hypotheses (like some of the Marxist economic 'laws') have been tested by an appeal to reason/facts both by Marxists and non-Marxists and found wanting and this has significantly contributed to the decline of Marxism as an ideology (although some basic Marxist insights are still valid), much before the collapse of actual existing socialism. But, this kind of refutation is absolutely impossible with respect to irrational belief systems. First, because many of these beliefs cannot be refuted by any kind of rational method since they usually consist of non-refutable hypotheses (metaphysical beliefs, intuitions etc). Second, because even for those of such beliefs for which an appeal to reason and/or 'facts' is possible (e.g. various superstitions which we may rationally explain using today's knowledge), no such an appeal will ever be acceptable by believers, unless they are in the process of abandoning their faith. This is why very few, if any, core religious truths have collapsed (I am not talking about 'heresies'), despite the huge growth of knowledge, particularly in the last two centuries.

In other words, what matters in distinguishing between rational ideologies and irrational belief systems is the source of 'truth'. If the source of truth of the core ideas is reason/'facts', despite the fact that these ideas cannot be shown to be ?objective? (in the sense of general acceptability as in natural sciences), then we are talking about a rational (and refutable) ideology. On the other hand, if the source of truth of the core ideas is an irrational method (revelation, intuition etc) then we are talking about an irrational (and irrefutable) belief system. Of course, what is considered as a rational process of thought, varies in time and space. As Castoriadis[11] puts it "what is different in another society and another epoch is its very 'rationality', for it is 'caught' each time in another imaginary world." Still, this does not negate the criterion I used to distinguish between rational and irrational ideas: that in a rational ideology both its core and peripheral ideas are derived through a rational method (albeit spatially and historically constrained), whereas in an irrational belief system some at least of its core ideas are derived through a non-rational method.

The practical implication of the above distinction is that an irrational belief system, although perhaps useful for those that need it (for psychological or social reasons, or because they cannot just accept death as the end of existence, the burden of personal responsibility etc), it surely cannot be the basis for any rational interpretation of reality. For a rational interpretation of reality (always, of course, from a particular world-views?point of view) a rational ideology is needed.

One possible objection to the exclusive use of rational methods in understanding reality is that in the world of art, in particular, intuition as well as other non-rational methods have for long been used by artists in deriving their own 'truth' which, when successful, is identified with universal "truth." However, one must point out here that a work of art is of an entirely different nature than an ideology or an irrational belief system. As even Ernst Fisher, a Marxist, had to recognise in his classic work The Necessity of Art:

True as it is that the essential function of art for a class destined to change the world is not that of making magic but of enlightening and stimulating action, it is equally true that a magical residue in art cannot be entirely eliminated, for without that minute residue of its original nature, art ceases to be art. Art is necessary in order that man should be able to recognise and change the world. But art is also necessary by virtue of the magic inherent in it.[12]

In other words, given the dual function of art to enlighten but also to make magic, it is obvious that, leaving aside the issue of the artist's objectives, art is a completely inappropriate tool for a rational interpretation of reality. The magic element in art, which draws on the artist's non-rational inspiration, may be compatible with an irrational belief system, but not with a rational ideology. Therefore, for the same reasons for which an irrational belief system is completely inappropriate to give a rational interpretation of reality, art, because of its magical dimension, is correspondingly inappropriate for this purpose, although, of course, nobody could dispute its power to offer important insights about reality.

***

We in the modern West have the ability to choose how we will think, and we have the choice of not choosing, as well, as Keirkegaard writes: "Not to decide is to decide." We make choices regardless, and they determine what kind of persons we are. Our choices today determine whetgher we will phsically survive, and whether our children will live freely as we do or if they'll live in slavery as dhimmis under the boot of Islam. It will all depend, this struggle for the future, on which course of reality we collectively decide to take.