Hate Mail 1 - Why I Don't Trust Materialists Especially Those Who Pretend To Be Lefties

IN STUDYING the American left of which I am arguably a part,  I have come to distrust the materialist-atheist-scientistic "left" which I now see as no left at all but a variant of the same anti-democratic gangerism that fascism is.  Hardly a week goes by when I don't hear an ideological materialist claim that free-will is impossible and, needless to say, materialists don't believe there is any such a thing as sin or moral obligation, except as some kind of social convention.  No leftist who holds any such beliefs can be anything but an anti-democratic thug waiting to mature into full depravity.  

That wasn't always the case, though I was never a Marxist I was a socialist and think the tragedy of socialism is that it so early was co-opted by materialist-atheist-scientism, anti-Christianity and other forces that never would do what any real socialism should have been based in, admit to the spiritual character of human beings and human life.  There were some early Christian socialists and even some who persist till today but socialism as a category of thought and in any productive political sense was certainly ruined for the present by that early takeover by ideological materialism, atheism and scientism.  I do respect some socialists, including some who started out as Marxists such as Victor Berger but who, in the necessities of human life, chose for practical reality over academic and journalistic fantasy.  I don't know, if he had lived longer than he did, what his socialism would have been though, like the Marxism of the great legal scholar Louis Boudin.  He was an early critic of Russian and then Soviet Communism.  I suspect that seeing Marxism in reality instead of theory, he gave it up.  I like to think gave it up in disgust.  His change of heart contrasts with that of the Trotskyites who, once Trotsky was murdered by Stalin's agents, saw no prospect of their ideology taking power and converted to American fascism, both the corporate-academic type and, in some cases, the indigenous racist form of that, as well.  American conservatism to one extent or another is an inevitable accommodation to white supremacy as that elsewhere is an accommodation to their own indigenous fascism.  And that is absolutely relevant to my response to the objection to what I said about materialist-atheist-scientism and its anti-democratic tendency.  

I simply don't trust people who believe human beings, living beings, are merely objects without any durable and consequential moral obligations and responsibilities owed them or inherent rights endowed equally on us by God.  I might, at times, find some of what they say on some things has some merit, though much less frequently what they do - in my observation and experience they're not very big on the doing part of that - but I can say that I don't trust them in the end.   I think the history of that secular left warrants that refusal to trust them, I hold them up to a very high level of skepticism, as high as that which I hold anyone else to.  As I recently pointed out, I hold two recent Popes I didn't like at all and trusted not very much to that same level of skepticism though, as I admitted, I agreed with them on some specific points such as the moral depravity of considering human beings as a means to an end.  

I especially distrust the self-identified media of the left, by and large, with a few, a very few, exceptions to that rule.  I especially distrust those tiny organs of the American left who, after witnessing and experiencing Trump, Republican-fascism, the Bush II regime and the Reagan and Bush I administrations before that are sandbagging Joe Biden and Democrats.  I totally distrust In These Times, TYT, and a myriad of other impotent organs who never produce anything but undermining Democrats' chances of winning elections and gaining and holding offices and making real change in real law.  Joe Biden and the Democrats in his first two years made more change than all of the lefty media and all of the lefty "third parties" have in their entire existence magnified by any large number.  And that was even with a Senate not in actual Democrats control but with that once darling of the play left, the atheist Sinema and the corporate gangster Manchin in it.  I can report that even as I support the Democratic Party, there are a number of Democrats who I have blasted and wished to burn in hell - I don't hold back my skepticism of anyone who does wrong.  There are even Democrats I once admired highly, such as Barney Frank who I don't much trust now.

About actually doing things and producing things, the highest achievement of any socialist office holder in American history is Bernie Sanders' committee chairmanship in the Senate under Democratic control from where he has done some actual things, making him probably the highest achieving socialist in American history, even as his former dead-end supporters turn on him as he actually does things that they may have claimed to want.  I don't think the American secular-left, at least in its very large play-left faction, really wants to do anything but whine and pose and compete for attention and, in those parts of it that are actually money making, suckering the gullible into sending them money.   I am fully confident that some of them are on the take from Republican-fascists and other billionaire ratfuckers of American democracy.  I think in that they are not markedly different from the Trump crime family operation, just far more penny-ante.  I think the Greens are one of the bigger of those minor con jobs as well as just about any other "third party" effort.  I think RFJ jr. is perhaps even more vile than the Putin asset, Jill Stein.   Though she is plenty vile in herself.

If you want evidence, I've given evidence in scads here.  I'd suggest looking for "Marxism" "Green Party" "The Left Forum" "third party" and other such seach terms, individual MAS lefties, too, Lillian Hellman among so many others.  Look for "The Nation Magazine,"  "In These Times,"  "The Progressive," "ACLU."  I seldom wrote about them without presenting evidence, citations and links.  Look for "the civil liberties industry".  

The American secular left has pretty much nothing good to show for it's existence and anything it may claim to have achieved it has more than taken back in its usefulness to Republican-fascist and the corporate media use of them to discredit the real left, which, by the way, is often overtly religious in its character and motivation.  As recently as 2006 I believed the secular even anti-religious "left" was a vitally important part of making any real change, I now think that any good change it had a pinky finger in would soon be endangered by them and their ideological program and posturing.  In many cases the struggle to make change had to contend with bad publicity from their claimed involvement, The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. had that problem.   I more than loathe them, now.  I hold them in the contempt that I do a Max Eastman or Whittaker Chambers (who both started out on the materialist left) and former Trot-neo-cons and the organized atheism that the trust-fund Stalinist Corliss Lamont mounted and financed.  That last one is still is in existence, though much of it has abandoned any political lefty pretensions to push ideological atheism, Lamont's first and true and, really, only love.   I don't trust atheists much, not until they've consistently earned my trust but never if they hold their religious ideology above their claimed devotion to rights and the common good.  I hold the same suspension of trust for white evangelicals and Catholics who, I have to say, sometimes have proven to me that they can be trusted.  Far more than hard core atheists have.

The fact is, the secular left just isn't left enough, it's not even really left at all, as I've pointed out repeatedly about the Left Forum and the lefty magazines, they have to be left behind by the real American left, the left of the Reverend MLK, the left of Dorothy Day and Pax Christi and a myriad of other religious  based People and organizations that are the real, effective, productive left.   I'm many degrees farther to the left now as a Christian leveler than I was as an agnostic socialist.   There is nothing more radical than The Gospel, nothing anywhere.

Women's Voices Chorus - "Magnificat," Christine Donkin

 

Women’s Voices Chorus – 

"Magnificat," Christine Donkin (b. 1976)
Conductor/Artistic Director: Allan Friedman
Pianist: Deborah Hollis
Soloist: Kim McCorkle

Magnificat – Joanna Forbes L'Estrange | St. Thomas Girl Chorister Course 2022

 

On Wednesday, July 27, the Choristers of the Saint Thomas Girl Chorister Course were joined by the Gentlemen of the Choir for Choral Evensong.

This setting of the ‘Magnificat’ by Joanna Forbes L’Estrange from her King’s College Service was a chorister favorite.

Joanna Forbes L’Estrange is a British singer, composer and choir director. Having graduated from Oxford University with an MA (Hons) music degree, she began her career touring the world as Soprano/Musical Director of the five-time Grammy® award-winning vocal group The Swingles. Since then, she has continued to perform, write and record music in a huge variety of genres.

the God of Israel is unlike the God of any scholastic theology and unlike any of the forces imagined in any of the vague spritualities available among us

AS IS TRUE EVERY YEAR RMJ does the best Advent posts.   I'll leave what I was writing aside with the recommendation to read his, today and go with a few provocative quotes from, who else, Walter Brueggemann's An Unsettled God - he quotes, Jurgen Moltmann in this place and I'll riff off of that with other passages from other things:

God in Pathos

We may take one further step in articulating the categories through which we will understand "God as partner."  The general dialogic, relational quality of covenantal faith was given special and focused attention by Abraham Heschel in his exposition of YHWH's pathos.  While the notion of pathos, especially lined out by Heschel, may be taken specifically in the capacity of God to suffer, in fact the implication of Heschel's work is much broader.  It concerns the engagement of YHWH with Israel and with the world, and therefore YHWH's vulnerability and readiness to be impinged upon.  The particular focus of Heschel on God's hurt in the traditions of Hosea and Jeremiah makes abundantly clear that the God of Israel is unlike the God of any scholastic theology and unlike any of the forces imagined in any of the vague spritualities available among us.  The particular character of this God is as available agent who is not only able to act but is available to be acted upon.

I may mention two derivative studies that are primally informed by the work of Heschel.  On the one hand, Kazo Kitamori has poignantly written of God's pain.  Special attention may be given to his appendix concerning Jeremiah 31:20 QNE Isaiah 63:15.  Kitamori notes how discerningly both Luther and Calvin, without any sentimentality, were able to take  notice of God's pain.  The articulation of that pain, moreover, required the poetic imagination of ancient Israel to speak in terms of bodily upset and consternation, resisting any attempt to permit this God to float off as an ephmeral spirit.  The God of dialogic engagement is fully exposed to the realities of life in the world that we might most readily term "creaturely,"  except that those reatlies are, on the lips of the poets, the realities of the Creator as well.

It is obvious that this line of reasoning, so characteristically Jewish, has immense implications for Christian theology.  Jurgen Moltmann, informed by the work of Heschel,  has forcefully carried the issue of God's vulnerability in Christian theology:

"It was Abraham Heschel who, in controversy with Hellenism and the Jewish philosophy of religion of Jehuda Malevi, Maimonides and Spinoza which was influenced by it, first described the prophets' proclamation of God as pathetic theology.  The prophets had no "idea" of God, but understood themselves and the people in the situation of God.  Heschel called this situation of God the pathos of God.  It has nothing to do with the irrational human emotions like desire, anger, anxiety, envy or sympathy, but describes the way in which God is affected by events and human actions and suffering in history.  He is affected by them because he is interested in his creation, his people and his right.  The pathos of God is intentional and transitive, not related to itself but to the history of the covenant people.  God already emerged from himself at the creation of the world "in the beginning."  In the covenant he enters into the world and the people of his choice.  The "history" of God cannot therefore be separated from the history of his people.  The history of the divine pathos is embedded in this history of men. . . .

Abraham Heschel has developed his theology of the divine pathos as a dipolar theology.  God is free in himself and at the same time interested in his covenant relationship and affected by human history.  In this covenant relationship he has spoken of the pathos of God and the sympatheia of man, and in doing so has introduced a second bipolarity."

Moltmann has considered the way in which classical Christian theology has asserted the apatheia of God.  It has done so by acknowledging the suffering of the Son in which the Father does not participate.  Moltmann has shown, against this propensity, that in Trinitarian thought the Father as well as the Son suffers:

"To understand what happened between Jesus and his God and Father on the cross, it is necessary to talk in trinitarian terms.  The Son suffers dying, the Father suffers the death of the Son.  The Fartherlessness of the Son is matched by the Sonlessness of the Father, and if God has constituted himself as the Father of Jesus Christ, then he also suffers the death of his Fatherhood in the death of the Son."

Moltmann's statement is completely congruent, in the categories of Christian theology, with what Heschel had already discerned in Israel's prophets.  The God of Christians, understood in the midst of God's revelation to ancient Israel, is a God deeply at risk in the drama of fidelity and infidelity in the world.  

----------------

Which leads me to this passage from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James in which Spinoza's mathematical materialism as an assumed oracle of what it cannot be shown to be relevant to comes into play.  

The next thing the intellect does is to lay bare the causes in which the thing originates. Spinoza says: “I will analyze the actions and appetites of men as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids.” And elsewhere he remarks that he will consider our passions and their properties with the same eye with which he looks on all other natural things, since the consequences of our affections flow from their nature with the same necessity as it results from the nature of a triangle that its three angles should be equal to two right angles. Similarly M. Taine, in the introduction to his history of English literature, has written: “Whether facts be moral or physical, it makes no matter. They always have their causes. There are causes for ambition, courage, veracity, just as there are for digestion, muscular movement, animal heat. Vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar.” When we read such proclamations of the intellect bent on showing the existential conditions of absolutely everything, we feel—quite apart from our legitimate impatience at the somewhat ridiculous swagger of the program, in view of what the authors are actually able to perform — menaced and negated in the springs of our innermost life. Such cold‐blooded assimilations threaten, we think, to undo our soul’s vital secrets, as if the same breath which should succeed in explaining their origin would simultaneously explain away their significance, and make them appear of no more preciousness, either, than the useful groceries of which M. Taine speaks.

No doubt there are more to the point passages in Spinoza to oppose against the Scriptural presentation of the pathos of God and our more banal reality but that's what I had available here on this Sunday morning.  

This footnote by William James, though not attached to this part of his text comes to mind, as well.

When I read in a religious paper words like these: “Perhaps the best thing we can say of God is that he is _the Inevitable Inference_,” I recognize the tendency to let religion evaporate in intellectual terms. Would martyrs have sung in the flames for a mere inference, however inevitable it might be? Original religious men, like Saint Francis, Luther, Behmen, have usually been enemies of the intellect’s pretension to meddle with religious things. Yet the intellect, everywhere invasive, shows everywhere its shallowing effect. See how the ancient spirit of Methodism evaporates under those wonderfully able rationalistic booklets (which every one should read) of a philosopher like Professor Bowne (The Christian Revelation, The Christian Life, The Atonement: Cincinnati and New York, 1898, 1899, 1900).

I attempted to read Bowne, struggling with his "Personalism" for a few weeks and found it to be entirely arid and pointless.   I had problems with the later and quite different personalism of the French Catholic tradition but it wasn't as bad as that.   That school of personalism is relevant to the theology of JPII and Benedict XVI which I touched on here last week, which might be why I remembered the footnote. 

There's probably more to be found in listening to any setting of the Canticle of Mary than in such religion under the yoke of philosophy. 

". . . and justice for all." Henry Kissinger Dying Outside Of Prison Is Confirmation Of The Failure Of Liberal Democracy

NO ONE KNOWS if Henry Kissinger is in hell or not but, if there is a hell, he certainly earned his place in it.  Because those who knowingly bring about mass murder are rightly held to be as guilty as those who did the killing, he was one of the most accomplished mass murderers in the Post WWII period.  Though a runner up to Mao and others remembering, also that there are U.S. Presidents who outdid him by putting him into power. In a numerical body count as a measure of criminal evil, the rightly infamous and reviled Pol Pot comes somewhat after Kissinger in the millions of deaths attributable to him because Kissinger and Nixon share responsibility for the illegal expansion of the Vietnam war into Cambodia which brought Pol Pot to power.  The duly elected president, Richard Nixon and his appointee, Kissinger share in that alongside the millions murdered through the action and encouragement of Nixon and Ford and Kissinger in East Timor, East Pakistan (Bangladesh), the fascist takeovers in Chile and Argentina (Kissinger complained to the generals in the "Dirty War" that they weren't killing People fast enough) and in many other places.  Especially after he cashed in on his governmental climb over millions of bodies, Kissinger had a business career and among the things he and his associates did was arm many murderous regimes and movements in Africa and, of course Latin America and Asia.  

America is only one among the lands where such world-class criminals are almost never punished but prosper and are media anointed or even created heroes and celebrities.  I would put the big networks and such august organs of the media as the New York Times* on the list of those fully and knowingly complicit in that.  I don't think modern media leads to there being a distinction between the two, as can be seen in both Reagan and Trump. They certainly don't regularly call out the evil of those with wealth or in service to wealth, especially not that from NYC or other big media center celebrities.  That's not unusual, there has never been any real holding into account even the most evil of human beings except in rare instances in which their regimes are toppled from the outside.**  In the United States legal and "justice" system hasn't even held the insurrectionist Trump to account for his crimes and I'm beginning to doubt it ever will.  Our Constitution and, especially, as that has been interpreted by our "justice" system, the judges and "justices" can't even prevent Republican-fascists from using the TV created fiction of Trump to destroy our liberal democracy as they prove more than competent to prevent real democracy, one based in equality before the law.  

That such a man as Henry Kissinger can have led such a life as he did, can have a career so drenched in innocent blood and be glorified  within politics, within the media as a hero instead of punished as one of the most dangerous criminals America has produced is, in fact, as much an indictment of liberal democracy as the crimes of Mussolini, Pinochet (put into power by Kissinger and Nixon), etc. are an indictment of fascism and Stalin and Mao** and Pol Pot (I'll repeat, another one that Kissinger and Nixon helped to power) are of Marxism.  And Kissinger is hardly alone, liberal democracies here and elsewhere have examples of other extremely dangerous criminals who not only will never be brought to justice but who it is forbidden to suggest that they should be brought to justice.  Britain certainly has many, France does, Italy, etc.   No doubt there is a long list to be made of such criminals around the world.  The first place to start looking is among those with lots of money.  [As an aside, here is a story about the businessman from my state who led to America being a shooting gallery for his own profit and was buried with great praise by Maine's political system, including our nasality of evil, Susan Collins.]  Balzac's famous observation that there is crime behind all great fortunes is one of the wisest observations made in the 19th century.  Though Paul got closer to the root of the matter bout 18 centuries earlier.  

I could go into the role that Kissinger played in torpedoing the Paris Peace Talks in 1968 to ensure Nixon won the election - with the media's active complicity - and, I wouldn't be surprised, the similar effort in 1980 that brought Reagan to power.  Starting the United States down the path to Trump.   Kissinger and his president, Nixon had the blood of millions on their hands even before they expanded the war into surrounding countries.  

Henry Kissinger's death certainly should be an occasion for the "free press" to examine their consciences about how it helped him come to power to do such evil things and how it covered up for him and the various elected politicians who gave him that chance and how it treated him as a celebrity instead of the mass murderous criminal he was.  And it is as certain that won't ever happen in our media.  I could list a huge number of those at the top of American media who played the same role for Kissinger and Republican-fascists that the Nazi supporting  media played in 1920s-45 Germany.  I will be unfashionable enough to say it, the media are whores who peddle their craft and selves in service to the same gangsterism that Kissinger was so good at. and, like any gangster's whore, they do it for money and proximity to power.  Such is the legacy of our inspecific and dangerously abbreviated First Amendment as it really is instead of in scholarly and journalistic and, in order of rising danger, show-biz  mythology.  Such is the legacy of the form of democracy that is congruent with such gangsterism, the liberal democracy which, as I noted over the last two posts, is so vulnerable to even the looniest of reactionary gangster efforts to topple it.***  If liberal democracy worked, Kissinger never would have come to power because the media lies and bias that brought Nixon to power would never have happened.   And if there's one thing that's obvious from the state of liberal democracy around the world, it doesn't work, in the end.

No legal system in which a Henry Kissinger could have reached the age of 100 without being imprisoned for his crimes against humanity can be held to be a part of legitimate governance.  The same legal system will likely let Trump off, too.  Our "free press" will be thick as thieves with them on that effort just as it was in his case, it, no doubt, will continue in its praise of him as he enters hell.  

* I almost called this Ode to Kissinger, after Byron's scathing Ode to Napoleon but that would risk misunderstanding.  I've been thinking about the Ode to Napoleon a lot and how holding him to something a little like justice didn't keep France from its catastrophic history in his wake.  If there is an example of how dangerous trying to make reform through revolution is, France is a good one as is Russia, as is China as is, . . .   America's romance for revolution is an anti-historical absurdity.  

**  Nixon and Kissinger had no problem doing business with Mao who may well have been responsible for the deaths of more innocent victims than Hitler was.  Most of them being Asians is supposed to, somehow, make that not matter in the great game of assigning value to human lives.

** Athens' oligarchic, slavery-supported, male supremacist democracy was the original example of how such inegalitarian democracy can, itself, be a gangster ridden governmental system.  As in our democracy for most of our history for American People of Color, for all Women, all slaves, all foreigners, and many non-citizens, Athens may as well have been no democracy at all.  One that is, unsurprisingly, vulnerable to internal dictatorial putsches and external threats.  A vote by elites, results in what those elites want.  I think one of the biggest reasons that those who controlled the government in the Federalist period and their rivals, starting with Jefferson found it necessary to gradually expand the franchise was because they couldn't depend on men who it didn't work for and, so had no stake in the United States, risking their lives for it during wartime.   I would bet you anything that if the Revolutionary soldiers who may have believed the egalitarian promises of the Declaration of Independence and fought for equality could have predicted what the Constitution would say, a lot of them would certainly not have been willing to die for such an aristocratic swindle.  As proof of that you have those who rebelled against the government who had fought in the Revolution, once they realized the Founders were cheating them.  The Black Revolutionary Soldiers who weighed so heavily on the conscience of Washington would never have fought if they realized they and their families and friends would be reduced by two-fifths and the three fifths of representation assigned to them would be stolen by those who held them in slavery.  Not having put their lives on the lines as Washington did, not having direct experience of Black soldiers, those like Jefferson and Madison became, if anything, more enthusiastic about slave holding as the Revolution faded in their memories.  

I think one of the worst things about America's liberal democracy is that, eventually, under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, AND ESPECIALLY THROUGH RULINGS OF THE SUPREME AND LOWER COURTS,  it has been made gradually less and less workable for those who are not rich or affluent, which leaves us vulnerable to media-promoted fascists and thugs. Is it any wonder that convincing an effective margin of voters that they have a stake in democracy is increasingly difficult when it is ever more an engine of inequality and injustice.  One in which the Harvard educated, Obama-Supreme Court nominated Garland was so slow and timid about pursuing the overt criminality of the celebrity boss, As Seen On TV "billionaire" Trump as he had no problem going after those so much lower in the scheme.  I don't have any sympathy for those lower on the scheme but that discrepancy leaves the pursuit of justice vulnerable to that observation.  I think that Jack Smith earned so much of his reputation in pursuing the criminals who were left with no protection of the kind Kissinger had has something to ponder in it.

Along with "liberalism" being made useless by calling thinks like laissez-faire capitalism, selfish libertarian notions and worse by that name, "democracy" is as damaged by it being used for anti-egalitarian systems of government.  We might just need a new word for the only legitimate form of government there is because "democracy" is about as meaningless as "socialism" is.  And it's entirely more important than even the best scheme of socialism.

Simps Never Got Over Me Making Fun Of The Mop Heads

Simps  says:

Hey Sparky -- they played John Lennon's "Imagine" at Roslyn Carter's memorial service the other day. At Roslyn's request. I await your post saying what a tasteless middle-brow atheist piece of shit she was.

Hey,  Stupy, there's no accounting for taste.  I told my family they could sing Amazing Grace at my funeral but only if they were absolutely sure I was dead and couldn't hear it.   Not that they'd choose that overdone thing. 

"Imagine" is a piece of crap but, then, so are many 19th and 20th century hymns that were, on the other hand, a sincere statement by their composers and authors of how they tried to live their lives.   John Lennon didn't mind imagining no possessions for the time it took him to dribble out that song but he obviously never intended to live it. 

 

Update:  Simps, you're so thin skinned there's no need for a cutting edge,  a cotton puff would give you a critical wound.  

"an admittedly difficult and abstruse topic" Too Complex For The Media, And Far Too Hot To Treat Honestly

Maybe Maddow could handle it in a podcast but I doubt she'd dare to, she'd probably lose her job if she tried.

IN THE LAST POST I did on the second part of Michael Sean Winters' articles about Kevin Vallier's new book, All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism I gave you some reasons Vallier and Winters give for why, especially in the context of Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court, in Congress and in other high offices, we should be taking the threat of neo-integralist Catholic cults very seriously.  

I have to, though, more than half disagree with their explanation of how this latest retread of integralism came about.  They say that it arose from a crisis in "liberalism" but in saying that I think they mix two different things that are both called "liberalism".  Something I've been critical of since I started writing these posts so many years ago, now. Talking about the book this passage in Winters' first article starts:

It is not an easy read, fluctuating between academic verbiage and a chatty, conversational style, and tackling an admittedly difficult and abstruse topic. It is nonetheless an important read because none of us yet knows how influential these integralists will become and because Vallier takes the movement seriously.

Integralism did not just happen. It grows out of a crisis in liberalism. "The integralists have given a voice to young Christians, many of whom have grown up alienated from their institutions," Vallier, who teaches at Bowling Green State University, writes. "These young people, often on the political Right, are not traditional small-government conservatives. They are not especially enamored of the Constitution, and they do not care about reading it according to original public meaning."

No doubt those who read my posts will know I'm extremely critical of the United States Constitution due to the still firmly in place and still very consequential slave-power articles and passages and the truncated, minor poetical slogans of the Bill of Rights. Especially the latter which were put there in place of specific and seriously considered rights and distinguishing those from the privileges that can be made to fall under "rights" if you're not careful.  Most seriously of those is the Constitutional oversight that while there is a right to tell the truth, there is no such thing as a right to lie and while there is a right to have a well ordered and democratic police force, there is no private right to own and carry weapons of mass destruction or even a hunting rifle without that potentially very dangerous privilege being subject to regulation by a democratically elected and staffed government.  

Not that I would agree with an assertion that the secular "originalists" or the "textualists" or the other would-be Constitutional fundamentalists care about how its read so long as it can be made to read according to what they want it to mean.  As Walter Brueggemann once pointed out, Atonin Scalia never seemed to find an "original textualist" meaning in the Constitution that went against what he wanted to start with.  The same is certainly true of many of the most reputedly august members of that body.  I doubt there is a Harvard Law professor who actually doesn't read into the document what they want it to mean, "originalist-textualist" or not.  And I'm certain there is no journalist or lawyer or even many a Constitutional Scholar who doesn't do the same thing, despite what slogan they repeat to claim their neutrality and impartiality in judgement on the matter.  

Vallier does not use the word, but it popped into my head reading those sentences: sophomoric. In our time, alas, sophomoric thought does not keep one from the highest positions of political power nor from prestigious posts in academic life.

Vallier's analysis of liberalism rings true, even if it is depressing. He writes:

"Today liberalism has become associated with abstract academic theorizing. Liberals obsess over esoteric debates about sex and gender that make no sense to most humans. The authoritarian leaders of the world have noticed, eagerly pointing out liberal insularity. Consider the bizarre spectacle of Russian president Vladimir Putin complaining that transgender activists have mistreated famed children's book author J.K. Rowling. Why does Putin care? He doesn't. He wants to delegitimize liberal order by drawing attention to its flaws."[*]

Vallier's next sentence — "In most places, liberalism was a practical program of reform" — put me in mind of philosophy professor Martha Nussbaum's brilliantly savage takedown of Berkeley professor Judith Butler for leading liberalism — and feminism — astray. When liberalism became performative rather than practical, it began the long process of alienating itself from the working class, paving the way for integralism — and for Donald Trump!

The integralist response to liberalism's flaws is, like Trumpianism, brutish. But while Trump's vision has a certain cultishness to it, it lacks any rootedness in religious theories and beliefs. Trump is too solipsistic to engage theology; he is the only god permitted into his tent.

I don't think the analysis of this is right, at all, especially in the general activities of the integralists, announced as such or merely alligned with that lunatic idea.  Certainly not in the American context.  

It may be easy for straight men to attribute the rise of a movement in Catholic intellectual circles to the very recent debates about sex and gender as, for them, those debates are as relevant as the debates about equality for Black People and other People of Color were to the Northern white Ripon Society Republicans I remember from my youth.  Those who just knew that while there was something to the claim that there was something wrong with segregation, Martin Luther King jr. was going too far in his demands for equality.  

That Catholic integralist fascists have latched onto that as the motivation of their cult is no different from Republican-fascists latching onto the Lou Dobbs-CNN whipped up hysteria about Latino immigrants so as to improve their chances of gulling the gullible into voting fascists into office.  Fascists who would permit their bosses to treat them like dirt and rob them of their earnings.

If there is any excess in LTGTQ+ People and our allies in regard to things like J. K. Rowling's controversial statements about TransWomen, that's the only way it figures in the use of the issue by fascists from Putin to those in Harvard Law School.  Considering the exposure of the private lives of some of them and, especially their allies in the Catholic clergy, they couldn't really give a damn about it.  That Putin's puppet, Trump appeared in a televised skit with Rudy Giuliani in drag and that never being brought up by those who are supposedly so morally against drag acts shows how important that really is to them.  About as important as the legislative record of the drafting and adoption of the 14th Amendment is to the Supreme Court "justices" and the judges who use that at clear cross purpose to what that the amendment says said and what the legislative record shows.

I have written endlessly about the crisis in liberalism which certainly predates this phenomenon by not only decades but centuries, it is the crisis between notions of freedom without moral responsibility, more correctly called "privileges" and notions of freedom that are all about moral responsibility.  It is the difference between libertarianism and the license to amorality embedded in "enlightenment" notions of freedom of "property" free from moral restraints and the abolitionist movement and Women's rights movement that sought to free those held as "property" under the law and subject to subjugation by those the law already granted privileged status.  That is the recurring crisis in liberalism which may well continue UNTIL GENUINE MORALLY RESPONSIBLE LIBERALS JUNK THE OLD WORD AND ADOPT A NEW ONE THAT MAKES IT CLEAR WHAT THEY REJECT.  Such a neologism will have to start from the idea contained in Scripture and, as I so recently noted those arch-conservative Popes who Catholic reactionaries and conservatives adored so much, JPII and Benedict XVI that People are never to be considered, talked of or ESPECIALLY TREATED AS MEANS TO ENDS BUT AS POSSESSING THEIR OWN PROPER DIGNITY and that that is true of them simply because they are alive.  Would that their papacies practiced what they preached.  That is certainly something that the inegralists reject in practice.  Not in their lunatic dreams of setting up a Catholic fascist gangster rule, the wet-dream fantasies of a wimpy Harvard Law prof about Popes calling new crusades, or, as they really pose a danger here and elsewhere, making common cause with other fascists, lunatic or not, cutting whatever corners of morality that they need to to stay within the circle of power.  They will never live up to those words of John Paul II or Benedict XVI.  The opposite is exactly what those on the Supreme Court have done in so many instances, exactly what those Republican-fascist, Harvard and Yale, etc. trained lawyer Senators and Congressmen who fled from the January 6th insurrectionists did, exactly as the formerly mainstream servants and possessors of great wealth in the Republican-fascist party did when they harnessed the force of white racism and its development in neo-fascist, segregationism originating "Christianity" (white evangelicals) and later the cabloid cults.  

Conservatism is and always has been about treating People as means to ends, workers, serfs, peasants, slaves, Women, etc. it has been an intrinsic aspect of conservatism since the concept was first formalized.  That treatment of People as objects for use or disposal is thoroughly embedded into legal codes and legal systems and the professional habits of judges and "justices," none of which have those of any alleged striped away, not any from totalitarian fascist to liberal democratic has expunged the legal basis for doing that or the law treating them as such.  The key to wiping that out is equality, making the law apply equally to everyone without privileges and without judicial evasion, and no conservative has ever really wanted that to happen.  No more than they made Nixon or, now Trump pay for their crimes.

If there is a crisis in conservatism it couldn't be so easily solved as to come up with a word that distinguished a genuine conservatism from the morally corrupt kind because there is nothing called "conservatism" around today which is not all-in on moral corruption because, in the end, it is about getting as much unearned wealth as possible in as few hands as possible and those who profit from serving that end.   In that it is really not different from the 18th century style of "enlightenment" liberalism which is not really much different from it.  The integralists are dangerous but not because there is much of a prospect of setting up that old Chick Publications style Protestant fundamentalist fever dream of a pipeline between JKF's White House and the Vatican so the Pope could give him orders.  It's remarkable that no one has accused the second and, I'd say, far more faithful Catholic, Joe Biden of that.  Such is the clear absurdity of such an idea that even Biden's political and financial enemies (they're really one in the same) have sought to market the idea.  No, the integralists are so Catholic that Pope Francis is probably seen as the enemy.  They'd never want a Pope Francis ruling, too egalitarian for them. I suspect the next Pope may be even more rejected by them.  As someone said about the deposed Bishop Strickland of Tyler Texas, now he's free to join the heretical cult of Society of Pius X.  I think there will probably be a major schism in the United States and, especially, among English language Catholics in the near future.

While I disagree somewhat with Vallier and Winters as to the motivation of the integralist fascists, most of what they say about its dangers is important and too little discussed in the American media.  Maybe that's because it's more complex than will fit into a TV or even radio news story but really getting into what's wrong is not in the medias financial self-interest.  The failure of education in its struggle against electronic media is another universal crisis that, as well, is important in this.  People kept in ignorance and believing lies cannot maintain a democracy.   As Winters started his first article on this:

Integralism is the latest iteration of right-wing zaniness in Catholic circles. It is different from the other more populist expressions of reactionary Catholicism in part because it is proposed by brilliant scholars such as Harvard University's Adrian Vermeule and University of Notre Dame's Patrick Deneen. Political philosopher Steve Schneck recently reviewed Deneen's latest book for NCR and NCR staff reporter Brian Fraga wrote about a conference at which Vermeule spoke.  The Schneck article is especially worth reading because I think that version of it is actually more dangerous. 

The billionaire-financed, EWTN spread cult of "traditional Catholicism" appealing to the ignorant and gullible is probably as dangerous on a  vulgar, popular and electoral level but, as noted, the elite Catholic identifying fascists are already in seats of power, many of them Ivy League credentialed lawyers and judges and "justices."  I don't know how much Jeffery Clark identifies with integralism or still considers himself a Catholic but I'd consider him as at least in league with them.  

I, for my part, would distrust anyone who participates in that modern innovation of such impiety, the lawyers' Red Mass generally, I believe, staged on the feast day of Thomas Moore (no doubt another example of another friggin' movie that uses an historical figure badly).  If I were Pope I'd ban those show-biz uses of the liturgy and sacraments by some of our more corrupt political figures.  

* Far more dangerous than Putin's attempt to weaponize the criticism of J. K. Rowling by LGBTQ+ supporters is his exploitation of American free-speech-press absolutism based in the inadequacy of the slogan ridden First Amendment as read by "liberal" justices on the Supreme Court.  THAT is a real "crisis in libealism" the one which has been weaponized by the fascists, especially America's indigenous form of that, white supremacists, to destroy democracy.  Putin and his billionaire colleagues in destroying American democracy have benefited greatly from that line of liberal Supreme Court and lower court doctrine and, especially, the vulgar, popularized habits of thought that comes from the simple failure to distinguish the right to tell the truth from there being no right to lie.  

The insane notion that anyone has violated Trumps' or his cronies and lackeys, "freedom of speech."  He wasn't the first to exploit that, though, Republicans and then Republican-facists on the Supreme Court and other courts used it to attack the political system by freeing the media to spread lies (the Sullivan Decision), making money "speech" and endowing billionaires with billions of times more "speech" and the fascist millionaire who brought the suit with millions more (Buckley v. Valeo) and onward to the ones with which the Berger and Renquist and Roberts Courts struck down legislative attempts to protect elections from billionaire and millionaire ratfucking on the basis of "free speech."  I remember first appreciating the irony of that old-line liberal whine of "free speech violation" when I heard the ubiquitous DC area journalist and husband of NPR's Cokie Roberts, Steve Roberts whining about his freedom of speech being violated from the nationally broadcast Diane Rehm Show, probably on one of his other routine appearances on TV shows as he whined piteously about being deprived of his "free speech."  You have to hand it to Putin, he has studied and weaponized the popular understanding of "freedom," and as dictated from the Supreme Court bench even as it's something he has wiped out under his regime.  Of course he'd study that and how he could use one of our self-imposed and iconized follies against us.  He's smarter than most of the American media figures, pundits, the legal profession and judicial system, in that.  They're friggin' clueless even as they moan about its effects in endangering democracy while propping up the ultimate origin of those.  

That use of "freedom" and "rights," entirely more than those who want TransPeople to have the freedom to live as they feel they need or simply choose to, violating no one's rights in that, is the crucial issue.  Putin appealing to bigots among American and other voters in the West to get them to junk democracy has certainly not led to a critique of a right to lie and bear false witness and to exploit hatred, especially in the billionaire-millionaire owned media.  It's the same "right" that Lou Dobbs used to gin up the freakout about "illegal immigrants" something which has become endemic to fascist movements around the world.  I'd be surprised if Putin didn't notice that nightly spectacle.  It's the same one that Trump used as he used New York's racism in his publicity campaigns before he got the TV gig that made him a real danger to democracy.  Trump, Putin's puppet who he leads by the balls, holding out real-estate prospects, the one who controls the Republican-fascist party, the party that was the traditional home of Russo-phobia, the one which used to be the home of nativist anti-Catholic paranoia.  

I would like to ask Winters and Vallier to consider that their critique of liberalism on the basis of trans-rights plays right into the Catho-fascist use of it.  If, at times, some of the rhetoric of the LGBTQ+ movement gets out of hand, that's the nature of all human discourse.  I've often criticized that excess among some of my fellow LGBTQ+ People myself but most of my criticism is based in its counter-productive effect, hindering the achievement of equality.  As mentioned in the passage about the Ripon Society (Does that thing still exist, you may well ask.  Yes it is still doing it's two-step with American fascism.) even those without a stake in the matter but who claim to support equality will think something far short of equality is already going too far.

As I said, this discussion is far more complex than you're ever going to see it treated in the media.

This Should Chill You To The Bone - "Indeed, in both men’s visions, you will see intelligent Christians educated at elite schools entering the service of the regime"

SINCE RIGHT-WING, even fascist Catholics dominate the Supreme Court and have been high up in Republican-fascism, I think it is important for people to have some understanding of one of the dominant intellectual sewers feeding that, the resurrected cult of neo-inegralism.   Entirely less known than "white evangelical" Protestantism, it is probably at least as dangerous among those who will actually rule a Republican-fascist state,  the Supreme Court's recent program of destroying the progress made in the 20th and even 19th century towards egalitarian democracy is a good example of how elite-prep->Ivy-League->ruling class white collar gangsters are at least as dangerous as middle-class Trumpsters and lower class fascist gangsters are.  I, however, will say that I don't think their Catholicism is very Catholic, certainly less than it is Republican-fascist. 

Michael Sean Winters has written a two-part review of a book by Kevin Vallier that sets out a lot of the danger of the neo-integralists.  I recommend reading both as an introduction to the public.  I have not read the book - I will have to wait for copies of it to show up on ABE Books - but I was familiar with it both in its original form and in its more recent and more recent retread version which is, I think, far more dangerous for the United States.  Protestant anti-Catholicism ruled in its previous heyday. 

You should especially note three things,  that Winter's article points out that integralism is pretty much entirely at odd with Catholic social teaching:

The chapter on "Transition" exemplifies this problem with the book, the precise and thoughtful analysis of what is, in the end, insanity. Vallier makes the argument that the transition from a liberal state to an integralist one would require the integralists to violate the very Catholic moral norms they claim to want to embed into the body politic.

He notes that the value of democracy, which has become central to Catholic social doctrine in the post-World-War-II era, is abandoned: "Integration from within attempts state capture," he writes. "The goal? Install integralists in powerful positions in a liberal nation-state. As liberalism falls, integralists seize the state and turn it toward religious objectives."

The second is that you have to understand that "liberalism" has so many varied meanings,  I would certainly not include my understanding of liberalism in the traditional American meaning of the word has any relevance to the integralists' rantings about it, though I'm sure they would oppose my liberalism based in Scripture and the Gospel as much as they would 18th century "enlightenment" notions of liberalism, which they more directly rail against.  My liberalism is probably even more opposed to what they want. 

The third is what's in this passage from his second article which will give you an idea of why it's so dangerous when the Ivy-league training schools for elite gangsters teach this stuff.  I ASK YOU TO KEEP IN MIND HE'S ON THE FACULTY OF HARVARD LAW SCHOOL, WHICH HAS PROVIDED MOST OF THE SUPREME COURT AND MANY OF THE LEADING REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS IN THE CONGRESS AND AMONG OTHER REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS LAWYERS AND JUDGES.

In addressing Harvard University's Adrian Vermeule's approach to transition specifically, Vallier observes:

 As Vermeule so evocatively claims, we must "sear the liberal faith with hot irons." It must not rise again. Only a strong state combined with a strong church can complete this urgent task. Vermeulean protectors must become conquerors. They must rule with an iron rod. And, so, however much Vermeule wants to avoid coercion, he is stuck with it. Integralists must exercise hard power.

Images of the Jan. 6 insurrection flood the mind, only led by the cross and nationwide. It is too horrific to contemplate, and Vallier is right to insist we must not avert our eyes. 

In this same chapter, Vallier provides a useful, concise history of the development of the "thesis-hypothesis" theological framing of church-state relations. In an effort to "soften the blow" of Pope Pius IX's condemnation of liberal regimes, the great Bishop Félix Dupanloup of Orleans, France, argued that the pope had articulated the "ideal" situation of the state supporting the Catholic Church as a "thesis," but that the "hypothesis" governed situations where Catholics were in the minority or where, for particular reasons, the ideal could not be realized. In the latter situation, such as in the United States, religious liberty could be embraced.

Vallier goes on to note, "This distinction, designed to save liberalism, later became an obstacle." This is a useful reminder that we ought not abstract issues from the times in which they were debated.

Vallier makes many other intelligent, incisive remarks about a variety of topics in his treatment of "Transition," exposing flaws in the integralist approach.

But every few pages you come across a sentence like this: "The specter of the pope authorizing crusades anew will create global controversy." And you remember that, notwithstanding all the fine distinctions being drawn, the whole topic of integralism is bonkers.

And that's just a tiny fraction of what these Ivy-league thugs and gangsters are proposing as a mere "transition" to their neo-fascism.   Harvard having such a person on its faculty.   How dangerous it is becomes apparent in what Vallier writes, himself.   For example from his own  article Railliement: Two Distinctions.

Naive vs. Strategic

The first distinction goes to the goals of ralliement. I believe there are actually two distinct ways to understand those goals, which — entirely tendentiously — I will call the naive and strategic versions. In the naive version, Catholics seek a genuine long-term rapprochement with liberal-democratic political orders, hoping to baptize them from within and even to recall liberalism to its best self, while otherwise retaining the regime’s outward character. Speaking in very broad terms, one might see the project of European Catholic Democracy after World War II in this light, although there are obviously many qualifications to be discussed here.

In the second, strategic version, Catholics deny that liberalism has any best self to which it might somehow be recalled. They work within a liberal order towards the long-term goal, not of reaching a stable accommodation with liberalism, even in a baptized form, but rather with a view to eventually superseding it altogether. Pater Edmund Waldstein sees this strategic version as the one Leo XIII himself favored: “For Leo the ralliement was meant as a stage towards an integral restoration of Christendom. That is, Catholics were to work for the common good in the current un-ideal framework of a state that did not recognize the superiority of spiritual over temporal authority, but the hope was that this would lead eventually to a restoration of an integrally Catholic state.“

"In the short run, there are superficial similarities between the two approaches. After all, both reject visions in which Catholics retreat from politics into thick local communities. But in their long-run aims, the two versions of ralliement are entirely different, indeed diametrically opposed. Here let me quote with approval an analysis of the difference between Ross Douthat’s backward-looking version of ralliement and my own: Neither Douthat nor Vermeule retreats into gated communities or enclaves … in the bayou. Indeed, in both men’s visions, you will see intelligent Christians educated at elite schools entering the service of the regime. Some will go into government, some will go into the institutions the government serves, like finance, and others will go back into elite schools to prepare the next wave. In time, perhaps not a very long time, you will see the regime get better. But this is where Vermeule and Douthat’s visions diverge sharply. At a certain point, Douthat and those who agree with [him] will [say that] “Liberalism is itself again.” Vermeule will say, simply, that we are well on our way to our goal."

Parliamentary Democracy vs. Bureaucracy

The second distinction goes not to the goals of ralliement, but to the institutional context in which it occurs. An important objection to ralliement holds that participation in liberal institutions tends to suborn those who do the rallying, in part by forcing them to participate in public practices and discourses that can only ever be cast in liberal terms, and that will bind the ralliés to liberal presuppositions. On this view, “the procedural principles liberal strategies are based on, being the only common ground, the only language anyone can use in public, quickly become the only acceptable creed.” . . . 

This is only an introduction to what is, truly, among the most dangerous of the Republican-fascist sewers that are well advanced in their plans to destroy egalitarian democracy in favor of a very fascist form of gangster governance.  And, as you will certainly understand, now, is by plan inserting those "intelligent Christians educated at elite schools," into the highest positions of power, especially in the Senate and on the Supreme Court.  I will note that Notre Dame, where Coney-Barrett comes from, is another strong hold of integralism.   This is the Ivy-league acceptable, clean, fingered, well dressed front of American fascism.    They will take advantage of the rag-tag January 6 style thugs or, as I suspect, fully end up in concert with them as their lunatic ideas for a Catholic-fascist government fail to materialize. 

Haven't Said How Much I Love The Merriam Webster Website in a While

I WAS WONDERING why no one said someone was "gormy, " now I know.

Gormless began life as the English dialect word gaumless, which was altered to the modern spelling when it expanded into wider use in the late 19th century. The origins of gaumless are easy to understand; the word derives from a combination of the dialect noun gaum, meaning "attention" or "understanding," and the suffix -less. This gaum has a related verb, also limited to dialect use, meaning "to pay attention to" and "to understand." Perhaps surprisingly, the four-letter gaum has multiple additional dialectal uses that are etymologically unrelated to these. Also noun-and-verb pairs, gaum means "a sticky or greasy mess" and "to smudge or smear especially with something sticky or greasy," as well as "a stupid doltish person" and "to behave in a stupid or awkward manner." Use of all of these pales in comparison to that of gormless, however, which is most frequently seen in British English. 

Merriam Webster  online

Hate Mail

THE ARTICLE mentioned in that footnote is:

 Christian Personalism vs. Utilitarianism by Peter Colosi.  Linked to through the National Institute of Health, of all places though it's published in a Catholic journal of medical issues. 

 I have major areas of disagreement with him as I did Popes JPII and Benedict XVI, I was certainly not mentioning him or them as an endorsement of all of their ideas, just as an example of how religious tradition is far more radical than secular, academic philosophy generally is.   I certainly don't agree with Colosi on Humane Vitae or on sexual morality or, in fact, many other things.   Citation isn't endorsement, I cite all kinds of things I then attack.  It's one of the things adults used to do, read things before they talked about them.   And to admit that even those I don't like much can have good ideas or make good points. 

Update:   "Citatiion isn't endorsement...even those I don't like much can have good ideas or make good points."

Oh sure, Sparky. But when I paraphrase Mencken, that means I'm as horrible a human being as he was. Thanks for clearing that up, you unself-aware hypocritical nitwit.

No, you were a jerk before you paraphrased Mencken,  one who I doubt ever read any Mencken.  I wouldn't, by the way, fault you for not having read Mencken, he's hardly worth the time to read him.  When I read him in the 1970s to find out why everyone was "as H. L. Mencken said"ing all the time I thought he was a narrow-minded, bigoted jackass, journalistic scribbler who was a crappy reporter who had an enormous over-estimate of his self worth.  Someone who, in the cheap style of modern erudition, replaced the hard work of knowing what he was saying with a cynical style that was just a cheap substitute for substance.   Something like you and the rump community at that baby-blue blog you probably still frequent.   It surprised me not at all to find out he was a racist and antisemite, as well. 

 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Louis Kornfeld - The Talk

 The Talk 

MR. ZUFFI - Christian Paluck
TIM - Dmitry Shein
TROY - Willy Appelman
ANGELINA - Elana Fishbein

Written by Louis Kornfeld
Produced by Jonathan Mitchell
Associate produced by Kerry Kastin

As I said a while back, The Truth is a source for excellent audio drama which was sometimes heard on the radio.  I hope they go into production again, soon.  But there is the archive. 

They're short so I'll give you another one.

Remember The Lakehouse 

 

It’s been five years since her stroke, and Ann is still struggling to make new memories. But an ancient technique might be the key she needs to put her life back together.

ANN - Ann Carr
IZZY - Dennis Pacheco
CHRISTINE - Amy Warren
RICH - Jake Smith
SOFIE - Sadie Mitchell
WAITRESS - Liz Noth
BUS DRIVER - Louis Kornfeld
WOMAN - Megan Stein
PA - Timothy Cooper

Written by Louis Kornfeld
Produced by Jonathan Mitchell
Associate produced by Sophie Yalkezian and Nichole Hill

This story is a sequel to our story Remember the Baby.

 A third one for a bonus. 

 

The Flimflam of Utilitarian Ethics

THERE ARE A NUMBER of so-called public intellectuals who I think are a lot less intellectual than they are public, Peter Singer is one of those.  I found myself thinking of the phrase "The Davos crowd" when I read this section of the interview that Daniel Gross did with him.   As it turns out for all his talk about the welfare of People in poverty he's mighty comfortable with the way things are in this billionaire ridden age.  Think of this as the just elected fascist leader of his own country blasts Pope Francis as a terrible leftist and ask who are the plutocrats and autocrats more afraid of.  Which one is more likely to advance the equality that Peter Singer goes through some minimal motions about.

Beginning in talking about his young adulthood Singer said:

You couldn’t live through that period without having seen footage of starving children—particularly from the Biafra crisis, when part of Nigeria broke away and was essentially besieged by the rest of Nigeria. We were living in Oxford, which is where Oxfam, the international aid organization, had its headquarters. They seemed to be trying to do things along the right lines, and so we started supporting them.

A lot of people thought that we don’t have to help people in extreme poverty, because we’re not responsible for their poverty. You can say, “Yes, we are responsible because we benefit from an unequal global trading system,” but that’s a complicated debate. I was trying to cut around that by saying, “Look, if you came across a child drowning in a shallow pond, and you could rescue that child at relatively minor cost to yourself, but you just decided not to do it because you didn’t want to ruin your clothes, that would be horrible.” But, then, if you accept that, you are accepting that we have responsibilities for people who are in need.


You seem to be a skeptic of Marx’s ideas in practice. Why did you write a book about Marx?

I was invited to do a book for an Oxford series. I had studied Marx when I was a graduate student, and there was this view of early Marx, largely based on some unpublished writings, that was all about alienation, and that there was a decisive break that came somewhere around 1848—first you had the kind of Hegelian-philosophy Marx, and then you had the different, scientific Marxism, and there wasn’t much of a connection between the two. In studying this, I’d been persuaded that was wrong, that there was continuity, and that you could explain what Marx was on about in his later writings by looking at the early writings—and that this also explained some of the flaws in Marx’s thinking. The idea that history is leading toward this goal, where all the contradictions will be resolved, came straight from Hegel. I think there are some interesting critiques of what’s going on in capitalist societies, but he really thinks that the revolution is inevitable. I think that was clearly wrong.

It seems like one of your least “instructive” books, in terms of how to live.

That’s true. I guess it’s one way in which we ought not to live. And that is still relevant because, very often, when I speak about global poverty, somebody gets up and says, “Well, isn’t the problem really capitalism? And shouldn’t we be doing what we can do to overthrow capitalism?”

I'd like to say that for an "ethical" philosopher to figure that was a situation where the choice was either one or the other of those two atrocities "in practice" is just lazy.  Considering his ease with the idea of going back to infanticide you'd think he'd at least try to come up with something more "ethical" than what he has.  He doesn't even really make a stand for his supposed ethical content within the framework of capitalism but, rather, goes for the easiest targets of the moribund philosophy of Marxism.  Even the Marxists have absolutely no use for Marxism, any more, give or take a few of the more marginal figures in academia and small-media scribblage and online babbleage.  Communism turns out to be just a more oppressive form of capitalism on the steroids of state control, eminently positioned to best the old-fashioned kind in which wealth and control remains outside of the governmental apparatus.  Western capitalists and their academic and lawyerly possessions are in the business of making sure, instead, that the government apparatus is in their hands without any effective democratic involvement from the underclass.  I'm no "public intellectual," media-darling, Princeton "ethicist" but I can see that situation clearly, enough.

It seems to me that the movement that has grown up around your philosophical work has ended up being very compatible with capitalism, in the sense that some of its practitioners are people who set out to earn a lot of money—some of them are billionaires who have decided to give away the money that they’ve amassed. Was that something you expected, for capitalism to almost be incorporated into your philosophical work?

I don’t think capitalism is incorporated into my philosophical work. I think my philosophical work is neutral about what is the best economic system—but it’s also realistic, and I think we’re stuck with capitalism for the foreseeable future. We are going to continue to have billionaires, and it’s much better that we have billionaires like Bill and Melinda Gates or Warren Buffett, who give away most of their fortune thoughtfully and in ways that are highly effective, than billionaires who just build themselves bigger and bigger yachts.

I'd strenuously reject the idea that his philosophical work is neutral (that most absurd and nearly universally claimed of "enlightenment" ersatz virtues) about such preferences in economics.  I distrust anyone who doesn't start out with what is called in modern theology "a preferential option for the poor," which is intentionally not neutral and, over all, opposed to a philosophy of inserting People into a scheme of economic valuation.  As I've demonstrated here rather exhaustively, biological science under natural selection is constantly involved in setting economic value on human beings and, certainly, on animals and plants within an overt economic framing.  That that use of economics may have started to be intended as a metaphor doesn't matter as it has come to completely dominate thinking in it.  Metaphors so often seem to become mistaken for what they characterize in that way.  

That is especially true of most of the social-so-called sciences which built on scientism and its gaudiest area of growth, natural selection, though it started before that.  Economics, the earliest of those and the one which directly infected science.  Malthus was an early example on which Darwin built.  Given the ease with which science was polluted, philosophy was an even easier mark.  I completely reject any claim that any utilitarian philosophy, from Bentham to Mills to Singer is not constantly in the business of estimating economic valuations in exactly the capitalist manner, it is embedded in its most basic procedures, it is all about making premonitory statements of valuation of even human lives.  It's philosophy as a financial prospectus.   The only widely practiced alternative of that is a close and serious reading of the Gospel of Jesus in which such valuation and wealth amassing are presented as wrong.*    While I respect the efforts of using Marx's critique of capitalism, by far his best work, by liberation theology, to go past that on the basis of prescriptive Marxist theory is a mistake.  The history of Marxism in practice proves that it is as dangerous as capitalism.  As can be seen, is work is not only comfortable with capitalism, it's a boon for the most powerful and dangerous class of People in the world, billionaires, in practice.**

In regard to "neutrality," I think more than a majority of the time it's not neutral, as with the American courts it is perfectly willing to go along with the laws that keep both billionaires and the homeless from sleeping under bridges or on air vents and especially in places where the middle-class and even the affluent will see them.  As soon as it comes to applying laws that send the poor and destitute to prison, they will always carve out exceptions for the rich and powerful.  The entire judicial system in most places and certainly the United States demonstrates that cultivated and claimed "neutrality" that claims to not take the condition of People as being at all determinative ALMOST ALWAYS IS WEIGHTED IN FAVOR OF THOSE WITH WEALTH AND POWER.  Allowing the wealthy to pay lawyers to get them off,  as Trump always has, makes that "neutrality" of the law a lie, all up and down the criminal code. And the judges and, especially, "justices" are as in on the scheme as anyone.  The same is true in most other institutions, universities not much less than any others.  

Does that mean you’re not that interested in the question of whether billionaires should exist?

Look, I think it would be better if you had an economic system in which we didn’t have billionaires—but the productivity that billionaires have generated [sic] was still there,  and that money was more equitably distributed. But, really, there hasn’t been a system that has had equity in its distribution and the productivity that capitalism has had. I don’t see that happening anytime soon. If one country starts to tax billionaires so that there can’t be any billionaires, those billionaires are going to go to other countries where they can continue to be billionaires.

In short, the billionaire class, the Davos crowd, and especially those who wouldn't bother going through that exercise in cover-up publicity, have nothing to worry about from the "ethics" of Peter Singer.  Which is, I'm sure, to the economic and publicity and academic benefit of Peter Singer.  That immediately becomes friggin' obvious.   Note his next argument and note he doesn't compare C.E.O. compensation to that of the lowest paid workers, THOSE WHO ACTUAL PRODUCE THAT "PRODUCTIVITY."  As you can read in my masthead, I take the benefits of LEVELING BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE far more seriously than this very famous "ethicist."  It will prove impossible to retain anything like a democracy with billionaires ready to rat fuck it, as almost all of them are.  I go a lot farther and say anything but egalitarian democracy is an unstable, illegitimate government.  The United States lost the vestiges of genuine democracy we finally got under the Voting Rights Act, by court fiat last week in a judiciary bought with billionaire money.  

One thing that surprised me, in “The Life You Can Save,” is that you argue in favor of very high salaries for C.E.O.s. You also write that inequality is a problem only insofar as it leads to oppressive relationships—that inequality in itself is not wrong.

I think my point there was simply that it’s rational for corporations that are doing billions of dollars’ worth of business to be prepared to pay tens of millions of dollars to hire somebody who can maintain that level of profitability. That makes perfect sense. So I don’t think we should be surprised by the way they do it now.

If you’re asking me, “Would it be a better system if no C.E.O. would want to earn fifty million dollars?” Yeah, that would be a better ethos. But I see the difficulties in a real transformation, not only in a culture, but perhaps pushing against some aspects of human nature that a culture has emphasized and that people then come to see as natural. It’s not easy to change that.

And that aspect of the culture, in this case, is self-interest?

Yeah, and a belief in market competitiveness, I guess. And an assessment of worth in terms of how much you earn, rather than the social good that you produce. But there are lots of books that have been pointing this out and have said, “This is not good, and we should change.” But it doesn’t seem that writing books about this actually has a very lasting impact. I suppose I’ve come to think that encouraging people—wealthy people—to give fifty per cent of their income, or all the different sliding percentages that I talk about in “The Life You Can Save, ”that’s more likely to do some good.

This reminds me of Marilynne Robinson's brilliant critique of British social thinking as a country manner weekend party in which everyone is related to everyone else and the favored party game, "Philanthropy," has the goal of ending up in exactly the same place that they all started with everyone in the same place and holding the same wealth they had, anyway.  An intrinsic part of that game is to come up with reasons that all virtuous attempts at improving the lives of those without are really disguised vices. Jeremy Bentham is one of those party guests she names.  It is one of the most spot-on intellectual critiques I've ever read and as true of today as it was for the Georgian and Victorian periods. That it came in her "Mother Country"  the one book of hers which underwent overt suppression in Britain and here by the New York Times' predictably unfavorable review death of a few crucial cuts in the U.S. isn't any real shock.  Its one of the most radical books I've ever read from what turns out to be one of the most radical intellectuals alive today.  The Gospel, indeed, is radical.  So is the Mosaic Law's economic justice.  I'm unaware of any of Peter Singer's books which underwent such a suppression or even a critical critique that affected its publication and distribution.  Marilynne Robinson gets asked a lot more about her novels than about her essays that endanger the economic order and make a Biblical and theological critique on the truth of Scripture.  They are subversive of the current holders of power in ways that those in the next list of academics who I'm familiar with can be counted on not to be.

A lot of your works cite white male academics who, for lack of a better phrase, take up a lot of space in intellectual conversations: Joshua Greene, Steven Pinker, Timothy Garton Ash, Michael Sandel, Benedict Anderson, John Rawls, to name a few. Because so much of your work is fundamentally about equity, I wonder if that is something that’s on your radar.

That’s the manner in which I was educated, I suppose, and which still is very influential in the ideas that I’m involved with. I’ve certainly worked with a lot of philosophers who are not male, but they have been white generally. I’ve got a project now about the issue of global population, with Alex Ezeh, a demographer of Nigerian origin at Drexel University. I worked with Pascal Kasimba when I was at Monash University, who is of African descent, on a project relating to in-vitro fertilization. I have also co-authored things with people of Asian descent, with Yew-Kwang Ng, for instance. But, I have to say, I want to work with people whose ideas are, you know, at a level of discussion that I’m interested in, and that I’m progressing. If you’re thinking of the work of Africans, for example, I don’t know the work of many of them that is really in the same sort of—I’m not quite sure how to put this—participating in the same discussion as the people you’ve just mentioned.

I was going to hold this passage for another post to make a fuller critique of how conventional academic scribbling is largely done within the same confines that almost all previous intellectual and, especially, academic content comes from, white, male voices on behalf of the existing order.  I would compare the situation in academic philosophy with that within even academic theology in which there are entire schools of theology springing from Women, People of Color, People of many different ethnic and, of course, religious identities.  A book I've cited here several times, Quest For The Living God by Elizabeth A Johnson is about many different theologies from Women of diverse identity, People of Color, People of various ethnicities, and from some white men that are deep and critical and important.  That is to the extent to which something so ill funded and promoted can be said to flourish under the secularist, materialist-atheist-scientistic ruling conformity of academia.  As I said, I realized quite a while ago that I found reading theology was intellectually challenging and stimulating in a way that I almost never find modern philosophy to be.  That they deal with real problems instead of ideological word juggling has a lot to do with it.  They don't start from a pose of impersonal ersatz objectivity, as well. James Cone whose theology comes directly from his knowledge of living under white supremacy is infinitely more important as a thinker than Peter Singer who can't say that about his knowing of his family history under Nazi genocide.   "Neutrality" and "objectivity" is no way to find out much of anything about real life, those don't really mean that the one posing that has not actually made a subjective choice from where they are starting.  If more people in real life find James Cone's theology speaks for them, that's because he did speak for them.  Singer speaks for little to no one.  I think People will be reading Cone when most of those others have gone the way of most of the big-name philosophers of the past and appear nowhere but in obscure academic papers and PhD dissertations and MA theses.  When their work doesn't lead to political and legal and military and financial consequences that make them, rightly, infamous.  

Singer on in-vitro fertilization.  I would like to know what utilitarian equations in regard to performing that very difficult, very expensive first-world medicine Peter Singer has come up with, especially in regard to caring for disabled infants and other currently living People.  In a world where there are so many unwanted, uncared for children who could benefit from adoption it strikes me as at least ethically challenging. Not to mention the medical resources that could be used elsewhere by living People.  Remember, the Nazis' reasoning for why they started their mass murder program with the disabled with the motive of shifting resources for their care to soldiers who would be injured in their "Lebensraum" genocidal invasion of Poland.  How does Singer view the ethics of in-vitro fertilization where the resources are spent on those who don't yet exist?    Maybe I'll look for that but I think someone who looks at it from a different framing would probably come up with a better view of it.  They might come up with a conclusion that arrives in a place they didn't start out from instead of one which I suspect by design informed is by "public intellectuals" self-interest.

*  I would note that there are certain parables which have been read to support capitalism but when I read them as just a using the common experience of those People he was talking to.  The sharp master who give his servants money to invest in his absence isn't, in the end, about God anymore than it's about the proto-capitalist.  Nor than that the judge who is nagged into giving the importunate widow is a picture of the God of Jesus and Moses and the Prophets.  

There's a reason that the founder of utilitarianism who is now a meat-poppet, Jeremy Bentham, rejected the morality of Jesus.  It was the typical British reason, that the Gospel is in the economic disinterest of the aristocrats, the wealthy, the monarchy and the so-called nobility and the power holders of Britian, including those who ran the universities. Just as it was a problem for the financial interests of the Romans who put him to death and the Temple elite who conspired in that. The materialist-atheist-scientistic rejection of Christianity is intimately tied up with British and other class systems for which the Gospel of Jesus is financially costly and making it academically and legally and sociably unfashionable is very desirable from that point of view.  One way to get a leg up in all class ridden societies is to kick down and not up.  That Marx's system which had its own motives in ideological materialism and atheism and scientism, is a pathetically inadequate replacement for the morality of the Jewish tradition and Christianity that takes Jesus seriously, it's little wonder that sharing the secondary motive of the non-Marxist rejection of Christianity, that shared motive would be fatal to implementing something like egalitarian economics or real rule by the People, democracy.  What Marxism shares with capitalism is, as well, the reason that the United States was doomed as a democracy by those "enlightenment" founders who wrote the Constitution and exercised such control from the start.  Especially those who never had to face the voters, the Courts and the Supreme Court who have, from the start, been invested in the same economic scheme.  That is such a ubiquitous scheme that it accounts for much of the most loudly media magnified "Christianity" that rejects the Gospel, if anything, even more soundly than the materialists do.   Mike Johnson, Marjorie T. Greene, the media hallelujah peddlers, "traditional Catholics," . . .

I don't see Peter Singer's philosophy as being even a baby step out of line with that scheme.  

For those who wonder about what I called Bentham, maybe one of the reasons Singer, as an Aussie, was attracted to him was he left provisions in his will to have his hide tanned when he died, as it were.  Lenin at least wanted his corpse buried instead of being turned into a materialist-atheist-scientistic side show spectacle.   I can't say that it inclined me to be less skeptical of his philosophy when I became aware of it.
 
** I may write about a paper I read from, of all People, a conservative Catholic, which shows that even those most arch-conservatives among recent popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI argued out of a far more radical alternative to any philosophical position that holds people as means to an end, something else intrinsic to utilitarianism whether it admits that or not.  And, as I have noted, I didn't like either of those two Popes and have been, if anything, more consistently critical of them than I have ever been to Peter Singer.  I suspect I have little to nothing much in common with the writer of the article, perhaps Singer and I overlap more.  I'll have to look farther into the sources of those quotes to see how consistent their arguments are, though, like Singer, they both were more accommodating to the practice of right wing governments and billionaires and their AstroTurf operation, "traditional Catholics" than are compatible with their personal integrity on those points.  Even conventional Catholic social teaching is radical in comparison to most secular social-thought on most points.  I think Francis has been far more consistent in applying Catholic social teaching as if it really matters.  

College Credentialed Philosphers Seem To Prefer Academic Folly Over Wisdom

MORE OF THE interview with Peter Singer.

How did your family first come to live in Australia?

My parents were both living in Vienna in the nineteen-thirties. They were around thirty years old when Hitler marched into Austria, and they were both Jewish. They realized very rapidly that they had no future in Austria. Jews could not own businesses under Nazi laws, and my mother was just qualified as a physician. The Nazis said that Jewish doctors could only treat Jewish patients. I don’t think they actually, at that stage anyway, really thought that they could be murdered. But my father wrote to an uncle in America, and said, “Could you provide a sponsorship for me and my wife?” And the uncle wrote back, saying, “I’m very happy to sponsor you. But, unfortunately, as I’ve not had the opportunity to meet your wife, I can’t sponsor her.” So, obviously, that was a pretty devastating blow.

My mother then remembered that she had met an Australian who had come to Austria to ski, and she’d been invited to join him and some friends at one of the wine bars on the edge of Vienna. He had then sent her a card from Australia, thanking her for the company. She thought she would write to this man. He was not Jewish. He was a Catholic of Irish descent, but he was very supportive and moved rapidly to organize visas for my father and for her. And that’s why they came to Australia. We went to see the man who sponsored them, Jerry Donovan, in Melbourne, when I was a child.

Of my four grandparents, one, my mother’s mother, survived the Holocaust and came to Australia just about when I was born, in 1946. She lived until 1955. We were very close. We had other Jewish friends in Melbourne, some of whom had concentration-camp numbers tattooed on their arms. I wondered what that meant.

Did your family history influence your views of ethics?

I’m sure, but I can’t say that I was really conscious of it. The elements that I was conscious of were an abhorrence of racism and violence. I read a lot of history of the coming of Fascism in Europe, and how the Holocaust was conceived and planned. Some people have said, “Well, if you’re aware of this kind of sheer physical suffering being inflicted on your family, then it’s easier to empathize with the suffering that’s being inflicted on nonhuman animals.” Isaac Bashevis Singer, who is no relation to me, said the same kind of thing—in one of his stories, he has a character saying, “For the animals, every day is Treblinka.

This might be the most incredible passage of the entire interview.  How could such a family history NOT knowingly influence his view of ethics?  Both of my parents and a couple of my uncles were in the American military during World War Two, none of them saw the death camps though they learned of them earlier than most and knew those who did see them.  They all saw terrible things, no one in my family died because of Nazi eugenics, no one of them was ever in a German prisoner of war or a death camp but I've been aware of the role that the Nazis' genocides, the genocides of the fascist Italian and French Vichy regime and other European gangster run countries, the Japanese Imperial crimes against humanity played in virtually every conclusion about morality those are related to which I've ever come to.  I will include other genocides under other regimes, those derived from Marxism, certainly.  I can honestly say that every political and legal area I've thought about is highly influenced by knowing that history.  There is no philosophical or theological or academic area in which I've thought that is uninfluenced by knowing that history.

Surely, a world-promoted Ivy-League and big-press anointed expert" in "ethics" should be more aware of such a thing than "I’m sure, but I can’t say that I was really conscious of it."  

That Peter Singer can't tell you that when he's world famous as an 'ethicist' and philosopher has to be the most unbelievable thing I've heard or read this month, and I follow the news of the lying Republican-fascists quite closely.   I think that his response to that is to cite the evils and cruelty of animal husbandry and the meat industry without making the connection between that treatment of non-human beings and the equally objectifying, materialistic, devaluation of human beings into objects for use or disposal is pathological.  And I do mean that word literally,  to be so detached from such proximate history which is such an important part of your own family history is exactly that.  If nothing else in his professional discourse led me to be skeptical of his ideological framing, that would make me highly doubtful as to its depth or attachment to reality.  I have come to have such skepticism about a good part of current academic discourse, probably most of all that which mimics the methods of science or mathematics, though as the thinking of lawyers and judges and "justices" is more exposed, I think that is probably more immediately dangerous.  

In a book about your maternal grandfather, “Pushing Time Away,” you write that he met your grandmother, in part, because he was attracted to men, and she was attracted to women, and they were meeting to discuss that. That seemed like a real discovery.

That was a real discovery, yes. I learned about it only when I obtained letters that my grandfather had written to my grandmother, which had been brought to Australia. I found this whole stack of letters in my aunt’s apartment. I read German, but this earlier style of handwriting was a lot of trouble to read. When I got somebody to transcribe them, I was completely amazed. I had no idea that their original connection was because of attractions to people of their own sex.

What motivated you to go through all that, and write a book about it in the end?

I originally was interested in learning more about my grandfather, because he was the person in my family who I could perhaps most see as a forerunner to myself. I knew that he had been a member of Freud’s Wednesday circle, that he had co-authored a paper with Freud, and that then he had been involved with Alfred Adler, the founder of Individual Psychology. I wanted to see: Were there any parallels between his thinking and mine? But then I found out other things that I didn’t expect.

I got the sense, from the book, that you questioned whether it was worthwhile to write about your family history.

That’s right. And I still have that feeling a little bit. Which of my works have done the most good? It’s not going to be “Pushing Time Away.” It’s going to be “Animal Liberation” or “The Life You Can Save.” I think it’s good for my children and grandchildren, but from an impartial calculation of how I can do the most good, this was something of an indulgence.

Peter Singer calls himself a consequentialist: he believes that actions should be judged by their consequences.

This reminds me of a disability rights advocate's critique of Oliver Sachs that called him "The Man Who Mistook His Patients For A Literary Career."  Only Peter Singer used his grandparents in that way.  I have to question the ethics of revealing so much about private people who were not there to give their grandson permission to use their intimate lives to do that.  I don't know if he got the permission of their living descendants to do it, though, of course, the two who mattered the most aren't around to give him that permission.

However, that's just my sense of morality.  But I don't think the consequences of what he did in violating his grandparents privacy , which he apparently believes are minimal, are the only matters to consider.  One is the devaluation of personal and family privacy which such uses of other private People by writers and others leads to.  It normalizes it and presents it as acceptable.  I think there has been a devaluation of privacy that is ongoing throughout the modern period in which tabloids and cabloids and the publicity industry and the gossip industry have led to a disturbing number of People to have no sense of value for their own privacy and the privacy of those around them.  The internet has made that quite consequential.  I remember having long, drawn out arguments with people freaking out about the NSA collecting very general data about their online behavior when they, themselves, gave away much larger parts of their privacy voluntarily.  Giving it away to companies and online forums in forms that anyone, from greedy corporations, malicious gossips to the worst dictatorships and gangsters in the world could read about their most intimate lives.  I think celebrities who use the private lives of other People to get something published contribute to that.  It does have malignant consequences in real lives of real, living People.   When there is a person who has chosen to have a public life, especially people in politics, in the judiciary, those who chose to be in a position to have an impact on many others, involuntarily, the right to an expectation of privacy is a quite different matter.  I would not be commenting on Peter Singer or his use of his grandparents if he didn't take it on himself to have a career in prescriptive disposal of other peoples' lives.  

I realized about ten years ago that I was finding reading contemporary theology a lot more compelling than much if any contemporary philosophy I tried to read was.  About the same time I realized that the field of "ethics" was anything but what it used to be.   These points are relatively minor compared to his advocacy of killing people but they're of a piece in why I conclude he and his colleagues are such asses.