It's usually thought that the traditional notion of usury was that of lending out money at interest. This is not incorrect if it's understood in a very specific way; but from the High Middle Ages to the Early Modern period, at least, the standard view was not that usury is any sort of lending at interest but that it is "when gain is sought to be acquired from the use of a thing not fruitful in itself, without labor, expense, or risk on the part of the lender." I say the 'standard view'; there were actually quite a few variations both leading up to this particular formulation (established by the Fifth Lateran Council in 1515) and afterward. But the basic idea was that the mere fact of loaning something gives no automatic right to charge interest on the loan; money on its own never carries an intrinsic title to interest, although under particular circumstances there can be extrinsic titles to interest; and thus usury consists in acting as if one had a right to treat borrowers a certain way when one has no such right, treating the loan as carrying a title to interest when it has no such title. And it certainly was the case that moral philosophers and theologians were very, very picky about what counted as a title to interest. But the entire late Medieval period was a period of considerable economic change, and that final clause of the Lateran interpretation of usury, "without labor, expense, or risk," turn out continually to require more careful specification as new means and ways of making money developed and as it became easier and easier to make loans of very different kinds. If we were to allow ourselves to give a rough, crude summary of how our modern finanical institutions, one way to describe this history would be to say that it was a sort arms race between moral philosophers and moral theologians on the one hand and usurers on the other as increasing economic prosperity changed the typical ways loans worked; a race in which the usurers kept finding new ways to skim profit from loans and the moral philosophers kept refining their classifications in order to sort out legitimate profit from genuine usury. It was an arms race that the usurers effectively won.
The key instrument by which the moral philosophers made sense of the new economic world was by this idea of titles to interest. An intrinsic title to interest would mean that, in and of itself, a loan would allow for interest. The medieval position was very firm here, drawing from both its theological and philosophical sources: money does not breed. It carries no intrinsic potential for profit, and it is immoral and unnatural to treat it as if it did -- 'unnatural', indeed, is the word they often used for it. I have here and there seen arguments that in our modern economy money is somehow different from what it was in the medieval period, so that now it does carry an intrinsic title to interest; but this is not a reasonable position at all, for it would mean that lenders would have the right to charge borrowers interest even if the borrowers had never contractually committed to paying the interest: if you just lent someone five dollars in a casual transaction, and there was intrinsic title to interest, then you could arbitrarily choose to start charging them interest, simply on the basis of the fact that you loaned it to them, even if you had never mentioned that you were going to do so. Clearly there is no reasonable way this could work; money does not carry any sort of automatic percentage of interest so that you can only charge a particular amount of interest, nor does it carry any special timeline to restrict you to charging interest only monthly rather than (say) by the minute, so far from serving as the foundation for a rational lending system, taking money to have an intrinsic title to interest would be the foundation for an utterly insane and arbitrary system in which borrowers were totally at the mercy of lenders.
So that leaves only extrinsic titles to interest. Extrinsic titles to interest do not derive from the loan itself but more generally from the common good. Because they are dependent on the common good, they are also sharply limited by it. More precisely, extrinsic titles to interest did not run afoul of the principles of justice because justice (in financial matters) is fair and equally beneficial exchange, and the extrinsic titles to interest existed precisely to equalize the benefits of the exchange. Lending is a risky business in many ways, so it's very easy for the lender to lose out in some way in a loan; and borrowing is also a risky business, but sometimes a very necessary one, and so there need to be standards in place so that borrowers don't tend to lose out but can still find lenders from whom they can borrow. This is an extraordinarily complicated problem that took all the ingenuity of some the most brilliant minds of the High Middle Ages and Renaissance, and led both to some clever analysis of banking practices and to the invention of entirely new financial institutions, like the montes pietatis, the forerunners of both pawn shops and modern banks. (Indeed, a few of the oldest European banks and pawn shops started out as montes pietatis founded by Franciscan theologians who have since been canonized as saints.)
There was no general unanimity about legitimate extrinsic titles of interest, although virtually everyone agreed they existed. And the discussions are greatly complicated by the rivalry between the Dominicans, who tended to take a much more conservative view of what could be allowed, and the Franciscans, who tended to be much more generous and adventuresome in their views on the subject. But five kinds of extrinsic title were often proposed as legitimate reasons for taking interest on a loan:
(1) lucrum cessans
(2) damnum emergens
(3) poena conventionalis
(4) praemium legale
(5) periculum sortis
Damnum emergens was probably the one that was least controversial and most widely accepted. The idea is basically that in certain kinds of loans it is clear that in the very fact of doing the lending the lender is taking damages. We're not talking about hypothetical harms; sometimes the lender is incurring harm or expense by the very fact of doing the lending. Thus the Franciscans argued that it was fine for a mons pietatis to charge interest on a loan if the interest were for the clear and carefully defined purpose of covering the operating expenses of the institution. Obviously simply to lend at zero interest while simultaneously paying your employees is not, as we would say, a sustainable business model, so there was a damage incurred in the fact of lending in the first place, one that allowed for legitimate compensation.
Somewhat more controversial was lucrum cessans. Sometimes lending, even lending that does not involve any particular sort of actual damage to the lender, means that the lender is losing out on profit that he would have certainly had if he had not done the lending. It's important to be careful here, because we tend to have a very generous notion of how this would work, but the scholastics did not. Many of the early scholastics did not even think that it was possible to be certain of counterfactual profits, the profits you would have had if you had done something differently. However, as lending became more stable, people began to allow that in some cases it was sufficiently certain that the lender was losing out on profit due to making the loan. An obvious case would be if the lender actually pulled mony out of a profit-making venture to make the loan. But it was never accepted that you could simply stipulate that you would have made profit on the money you were lending; you had to have specific reasons leading to certainty for practical purposes that you were losing out on legitimate profits by lending.
I have seen arguments that in our current financial system loans almost always carry extrinsic title of damnum emergens and lucrum cessans. I think this is transparently false if you actually look at the circumstances surrounding most loans, and the arguments otherwise are equally transparent attempts to get answers that had already been predetermined. But even if it were true, it would not justify our current systems of interest. Damnum emergens only allows you to break even on the particular loan you are making; and lucrum cessans only allows you to keep your profits from other ventures relatively stable over the duration of the loan -- one might think of it as a different sort of breaking even. They keep lending from being a bad situation for the lender, but that's it. You can't make a profit from lending itself if these are your only titles to interest. In fact, damnum emergens and lucrum cessans were very carefully and deliberately formulated to prevent them from being used as justifications for profits on mere lending.
The other three allow a tiny bit more wiggle room. Poena conventionalis is an interest, determined by contract between borrower and lender, that compensates for inconveniences the lender will be likely to experience if the borrower fails to return the loan by a certain period of time. That is, the borrower agrees to pay an additional percentage beyond the loan itself if his payment is not timely, due to the fact that his delay (mora) would hurt the lender in some way. You can see that we are slowly getting less concrete in these extrinsic titles: damnum emergens and lucrum cessans compensate for harms you have reason to think are actually being occurred in the very loan itself. Poena conventionalis is for a harm that one has reason to think will occur if certain conditions aren't met. But it's still anchored: you really do have to have reason to think that you will be hurt in some way by the delay, and you can't charge interest on the loan until the delay actually occurs.
Praemium legale, on the other hand, is much more indirect. Moral theologians and philosophers who were dealing with the problems of the emerging banking industry began to realize that the common good was genuinely improved if you had people who were willing to lend to those who for some reason needed to borrow. Thus lending was to that extent a civic activity that should be encouraged, at least within certain bounds. So it was occasionally suggested that the government, when it saw that lending needed to be encouraged, could allow a certain amount of interest on loans generally in order to provide an incentive for engaging in the risky and occasionally expensive business of lending. Obviously there were some people who thought that this was just giving the store away; but those who proposed it as a legitimate title to interest seem typically to have regarded it as a fairly restricted thing, and it's easy enough to see why. If you are trying to encourage actual lending, you can't make the incentive to lenders so great that borrowers no longer want to borrow, however desperate they are. You need to find a level of incentive that won't be a serious disincentive for borrowers. Since the point of the whole title is to serve the common good, you can't have an incentive that in general leaves borrowers worse off -- for instance, it would be self-defeating from the point of the common good law serves if you gave the lenders an incentive that regularly drove borrowers into bankruptcy and poverty. To be a just exchange, a loan has to leave both lender and borrower better off, allowing, of course, for the fact that sometimes unforeseeable events can make this impossible through no real fault of either the lender or the borrower. The tendency of the loans has to be in some way to the benefit of both parties, because only if your lending system has general tendency to improve everyone's life can it be said to be conducive to the common good, and it is only to the extent that lending is conducive to the common good that praemium legale can be a title to interest. (Some Catholics today worry about interest on savings accounts and the like, and wonder whether it violates the prohibition on usury. There's certainly nothing wrong with refusing to take interest on such things, as Dorothy Day did; but if praemium legale is a legitimate title to interest, the very small amount of interest on such accounts, which mutually benefits both parties and encourages both saving and lending, would certainly fall under it.)
One of the trickiest issues involved in lending is the defaulting of loans. None of the other titles to interest do much to handle this very risky part of lending, especially in the case where the default is real, that is, where the borrower no longer has the means to pay the loan. If the above titles were all that were involved, lenders would simply have to take the damage of defaulted loans: it's unjust and oppressive to squeeze money deliberately from those who can't afford to give it to you, so if a borrower suddenly comes into serious and unavoidable expenses (medical bills would probably be the modern example), trying to continue to collect the loan would be unjust and oppressive. Because of this, some moral philosophers suggested that periculum sortis, the chance that the loan might never be paid back, could be considered a legitimate title to interest, a way of limiting the danger posed by sheer bad luck. Such a title is rather dangerous, in the sense that it is difficult to pin down precisely. Not every borrower is equally likely to default; not every loan is equally damaging if never repaid; not every lender is equally endangered by defaults. So this title would require careful consideration of circumstances, and obviously would involve a great deal more approximation than the other titles. Because of this, those who allowed this title to interest tended to put serious restrictions on it, to prevent it from being used as a sneaky way of skimming money off of people.
So the prohibition of usury did not absolutely prevent the charging of interest; interest could be charged if you had a legitimate title to it. It was never assumed, of course, that the lender had an automatic right to charge interest; and it would have seemed utterly absurd to the moral philosophers and theologians who discussed the matter that a contract that in fact tended to harm the borrower could possibly be regarded as acceptable by a right-minded person. If Bernardino of Siena or Antonino of Florence were alive today, they would not condemn every kind of interest that we charge. But it is pretty clear that they would be horrified out our easy acceptance of kinds of interest that harm people who are already poor or in need, at our complete failure to hold interest-charging institutions to the standard of actually showing that they have the right to charge the interest they do on the loans they make, and would insist that Christians not sit around and simply accept it as the way of things, but use their ingenuity and reason to develop new kinds of institutions that would be more suitable to the common good.
And I rather suspect that in this age of lukewarm and lazy Laodicea their plea for this inventiveness and creativity would fall into the void.
UPDATE
John Wilkins asked for some further online reading. The study of scholastic economic thought is relatively hopping, and constantly changing, so it's tricky to find works that are both accessible online and not outdated. Indeed, I can't guarantee that the above is anything more than an approximation, since someone somewhere might have come up with a better way of looking at this or that point by looking more closely at heretofore overlooked or misunderstood passages. In addition one has to be somewhat careful with the online works; many of the works online that discuss the matter discuss it entirely from the perspective of one modern school of economics, which can lead to a somewhat selective reading of the texts. But even the outdated material is sometimes good for at least getting the basic terminology and issues down. As for primary sources, there are a few of them online, but not very many.
The Montes Pietatis, Interest, and Usury articles from the old Catholic Encyclopedia
The SEP article on Gregory of Rimini briefly discusses his economic thought in section 6
Thomas Aquinas on the sin of usury. St. Thomas allows damnum emergens, but that's about it; later theologians often interpreted him a bit more loosely in order to get various practices in, but Thomas's hard line on the subject is one reason for the fact that the Dominicans tended to be more conservative on the subject.
Session X of the Fifth Lateran Council
Benedict XIV, Vix Pervenit (1745)
Brian McCall, Unprofitable Lending: Modern Credit Regulation and the Lost Theory of Usury (PDF)
Robert Mochrie, Justice in Exchange: The Economic Philosophy of John Duns Scotus
George Augustine Thomas O'Brien, An Essay on Mediaeval Economic Teaching
Owen Aloysius Hill, Ethics, General and Special. This and the previous are somewhat dated in their discussions of usury and interest, but still decent enough for getting a sense of the terminology and issues.
A lot of the late medieval and early modern scholastic work is associated with the School of Salamanca; Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson's The School of Salamanca is still after all this time a good first introduction to Salamanticensic economic theory, although I can't find it online. And Eric Kerridge's Usury, Interest, and the Reformation does a good job of assembling relevant sources.
Incidentally, the most famous philosophical defense of usury (on the grounds that people have a right to enter into any monetary contracts they please) is that of Jeremy Bentham; which is perhaps worth noting, since outright defenses of usury as moral are very, very rare.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Physics and Philosophy
Sean Carroll has a post up titled Does Philosophy Make You a Better Physicist? This is the sort of question that can be understood in several different ways, and so it's worthwhile to pin down a bit more clearly what Sean is asking by considering the different sorts of (not mutually exclusive) answers that could be given to it.
(1) Yes, obviously, because logic and ethics are parts of philosophy, and good luck trying to be a good physicist without logic or ethics. And better logic and ethics would clearly make you a better physicist in some sense.
(2) Yes, trivially, because physics itself is a form of philosophy, and always has been; the reasons we don't still call the sciences "experimental philosophy" are entirely due to the historical contingency of how the nineteenth century rearranged funding, curricula, and departments in philosophical subjects.
(3) Yes, in an indirect way, because philosophy involves higher-level thinking that generates questions; and thinking about, and asking yourself questions about, the adequacy of your interpretations, the cogency of your inferences, and the implications of your work is the sort of thing good physicists do. One might call this the Heisenberg answer, since Heisenberg uses it in several places: philosophers don't give physicists the answers, but they do often ask the right questions.
(4) No, obviously, because most of the things philosophers deal with are irrelevant to either physical experiment or physical theorizing.
(5) Unknown, because we have no clear reason to think one way or another about whether training in philosophy would lead to better results in physics.
Each of these depends on reading the question in a slightly different way; Carroll, I take it, is reading it in the way assumed by (5), namely, by taking it to be a question about whether physics would progress more adequately if physicists had better training in philosophy or better interaction with those who have it. And I think he's right that this is simply unknown. It would make sense that some sort of philosophy would conduce to progress in physics; philosophy is such an immense field that there's almost bound to be something useful. But at the same time and by the same token, it's such an immense field that it looks suspiciously like a field of haystacks that probably contain some needles somewhere: there's really no guarantee that what physicists would actually be trained in, or what their philosophical interlocutors were trained in, would be the parts of philosophy that would hold the key to progress at any particular point in time.
As for the Yes answers, it's pretty clear that the philosophy required is the sort of thing intelligent, thoughtful physicists already do for themselves, just by being competent physicists, although there are probably cases of (3) and perhaps (1) where it's handy to have an outsider asking questions as well, just to reduce the danger of tunnel vision.
(1) Yes, obviously, because logic and ethics are parts of philosophy, and good luck trying to be a good physicist without logic or ethics. And better logic and ethics would clearly make you a better physicist in some sense.
(2) Yes, trivially, because physics itself is a form of philosophy, and always has been; the reasons we don't still call the sciences "experimental philosophy" are entirely due to the historical contingency of how the nineteenth century rearranged funding, curricula, and departments in philosophical subjects.
(3) Yes, in an indirect way, because philosophy involves higher-level thinking that generates questions; and thinking about, and asking yourself questions about, the adequacy of your interpretations, the cogency of your inferences, and the implications of your work is the sort of thing good physicists do. One might call this the Heisenberg answer, since Heisenberg uses it in several places: philosophers don't give physicists the answers, but they do often ask the right questions.
(4) No, obviously, because most of the things philosophers deal with are irrelevant to either physical experiment or physical theorizing.
(5) Unknown, because we have no clear reason to think one way or another about whether training in philosophy would lead to better results in physics.
Each of these depends on reading the question in a slightly different way; Carroll, I take it, is reading it in the way assumed by (5), namely, by taking it to be a question about whether physics would progress more adequately if physicists had better training in philosophy or better interaction with those who have it. And I think he's right that this is simply unknown. It would make sense that some sort of philosophy would conduce to progress in physics; philosophy is such an immense field that there's almost bound to be something useful. But at the same time and by the same token, it's such an immense field that it looks suspiciously like a field of haystacks that probably contain some needles somewhere: there's really no guarantee that what physicists would actually be trained in, or what their philosophical interlocutors were trained in, would be the parts of philosophy that would hold the key to progress at any particular point in time.
As for the Yes answers, it's pretty clear that the philosophy required is the sort of thing intelligent, thoughtful physicists already do for themselves, just by being competent physicists, although there are probably cases of (3) and perhaps (1) where it's handy to have an outsider asking questions as well, just to reduce the danger of tunnel vision.
Monday, July 06, 2009
Notes and Noted Links
* Arsen Darnay discusses a little-remembered aspect of Montessori's philosophy of education: the education of adolescents. Adolescence really does seem to be the ideal time to transition from the classroom to the world at large through a process of apprenticeship; and our current tendency not to give adolescents important responsibilities is a recipe for mischief in itself. It would make for a very different culture. Digging around I found this interesting summary of Montessori's Erdkinder idea.
* James Hanley has a good post on what often passes for academic assessment.
* Mr. Patterson's cipher
* Thony C corrects some notable myths about Newton. One thing that people forget is that pre-Lavoisier, alchemy was in some sense science: it did experiments, it theorized, it made genuine discoveries, many experimental philosophers besides Newton did work in it. One of the common exchanges in the early day of the Royal Society was of various 'recipes' for getting various chemical effects. When Berkeley appeals to Newton, Boerhaave, and Hamberg in Siris he wasn't dabbling in the weird: he was appealing to speculations based on the most advanced chemical knowledge of the day. It was a time when, as Thony notes, alchemical investigation could very easily be a part of one's life as an active scientist. What Lavoisier and others did in order to make what we think of as modern chemistry was reorganize the alchemical work already done, regularize terminology, discard some problematic assumptions, and approach questions more systematically; there was definitely change, but the break was not as sharp as we often seem to think it was.
* An Anne Rice interview at Busted Halo
* A good analysis of the excessive media coverage of Michael Jackson. This was especially amusing:
* John Henry Newman will most likely be beatified.
* The canonization cause for controversial Mary Ward looks like it's underway in earnest. Ward founded the Congregation of Jesus and the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary on radically different principles than most religious institutes had at the time, walked from France to Italy to get recognition for them, was jailed, was condemned by the Inquisition as a heretic under Urban VIII, and had her cause for canonization opened in the 1930s by Pius XI.
* Secretum Meum Mihi is an interesting spirituality website for Catholic women.
* Despite what the BBC says, "the Vatican" has not asked Catholics to stop donating to Amnesty International. Rather, the president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace has suggested that Catholics do so, which is very, very different, since a Pontifical Council is effectively a think-tank, and has no actual authority over anyone; and the mere fact that a Cardinal has an opinion on a subject doesn't mean much.
* Rebecca reviews a book on Calvin; it looks interesting.
* Sherry's Hundred Hymns list continues:
#72 O Love that Will Not Let Me Go
#71 Jesus I My Cross Have Taken
#70 Hark the Herald Angels Sing
#69 All My Hope on God Is Founded
Apparently there are three more hymns coming that are often regarded as Christmas carols; my guesses would be "Silent Night", "Joy to the World", and (my own preference) "O Come, O Come Emmanuel". We'll see how close my guesses are over the next few weeks.
* Rather remarkably, Google Book claims that the author of this book, on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, is -- the Holy Trinity.
ADDED LATER
* Alexander Pruss has an excellent post on rigorous comparison of infinities in decision matrix interpretations of Pascal's wager.
* James Hanley has a good post on what often passes for academic assessment.
* Mr. Patterson's cipher
* Thony C corrects some notable myths about Newton. One thing that people forget is that pre-Lavoisier, alchemy was in some sense science: it did experiments, it theorized, it made genuine discoveries, many experimental philosophers besides Newton did work in it. One of the common exchanges in the early day of the Royal Society was of various 'recipes' for getting various chemical effects. When Berkeley appeals to Newton, Boerhaave, and Hamberg in Siris he wasn't dabbling in the weird: he was appealing to speculations based on the most advanced chemical knowledge of the day. It was a time when, as Thony notes, alchemical investigation could very easily be a part of one's life as an active scientist. What Lavoisier and others did in order to make what we think of as modern chemistry was reorganize the alchemical work already done, regularize terminology, discard some problematic assumptions, and approach questions more systematically; there was definitely change, but the break was not as sharp as we often seem to think it was.
* An Anne Rice interview at Busted Halo
* A good analysis of the excessive media coverage of Michael Jackson. This was especially amusing:
CNN.com posted a story the next day describing the problems entitled, "Jackson Dies, Almost Takes Internet with Him."
So many Google users searched for information about the dead singer that the popular search engine mistook the interest as a potential malware attack. For a short period of time, Google users were greeted with a message that read, "We're sorry, but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application."
The popular communication site Twitter crashed, and Wikipedia experienced more than 500 edits to Jackson’s profile in less than 24 hours. AOL’s popular instant messenger service went down for approximately 40 minutes and the company released a statement that read, "Today was a seminal moment in Internet history. We've never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth."
* John Henry Newman will most likely be beatified.
* The canonization cause for controversial Mary Ward looks like it's underway in earnest. Ward founded the Congregation of Jesus and the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary on radically different principles than most religious institutes had at the time, walked from France to Italy to get recognition for them, was jailed, was condemned by the Inquisition as a heretic under Urban VIII, and had her cause for canonization opened in the 1930s by Pius XI.
* Secretum Meum Mihi is an interesting spirituality website for Catholic women.
* Despite what the BBC says, "the Vatican" has not asked Catholics to stop donating to Amnesty International. Rather, the president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace has suggested that Catholics do so, which is very, very different, since a Pontifical Council is effectively a think-tank, and has no actual authority over anyone; and the mere fact that a Cardinal has an opinion on a subject doesn't mean much.
* Rebecca reviews a book on Calvin; it looks interesting.
* Sherry's Hundred Hymns list continues:
#72 O Love that Will Not Let Me Go
#71 Jesus I My Cross Have Taken
#70 Hark the Herald Angels Sing
#69 All My Hope on God Is Founded
Apparently there are three more hymns coming that are often regarded as Christmas carols; my guesses would be "Silent Night", "Joy to the World", and (my own preference) "O Come, O Come Emmanuel". We'll see how close my guesses are over the next few weeks.
* Rather remarkably, Google Book claims that the author of this book, on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, is -- the Holy Trinity.
ADDED LATER
* Alexander Pruss has an excellent post on rigorous comparison of infinities in decision matrix interpretations of Pascal's wager.
Sunday, July 05, 2009
The Shifting Blogosphere
A number of blogs have been linking to Laura's reflection on how blogging has changed in the past six years. I don't think there has actually been much decline in quality overall -- when it declines in one part it improves in another. But certainly a lot of things have shifted. I think Laura's probably right that people have localized -- blogger used to range far more widely, but now mostly stick to comfortable neighborhoods. I think regular use of feed readers has changed things; it helps people to organize their reading more efficiently, but by the same token means that they focus on things they already know they'll be interested in, leaving less room for the occasional delightful surprise. It's also been a major factor in the decline of the blogroll. I think the link monitoring thing has made a major difference; the TTLB Ecosystem used to be very useful, and then broke, and has never really been brought back to its former usability. Technorati used to be extraordinarily reliable; it's still useful, and still pretty much the handiest thing in this regard, but now it does weird things at regular intervals and is often very slow in listing links.
And things shift internally, too. Many excellent blogs have been quiet for years, or vanished entirely -- it seems like my blogroll has had a high attrition rate over the years, as I seem to have a taste for the excellent blog that lasts only a year. Most bloggers don't retain quality over long periods of time; it takes discipline and time, and people go through long spells of low quality. (I remember when, however much one disagreed with Myers, Pharyngula was a real science blog, with some very nicely written science posts here and there, rather than a blog devoted mostly to open threads, repetitious claims about religion, geeky adolescent jokes about sex and geekier but less adolescent jokes about squid, and bored trolling for online polls to crash. All those things used to be there, of course, in some form; it's the more interesting posts that have become much, much more rare.) Blogging isn't a wholly independent activity: sometimes people really do have more important things to do, and sometimes those more important things crowd out blogging itself. That's life. You can tell when I'm busy (or at least away from my computer much more than usual) because for weeks poetry, quotations, and links will be the primary kinds of posts; I do them even when I'm not busy, because they build up fairly steadily (the poetry less so than the other two), but when I am busy, they are the sorts of things that keep coming through the pipeline. They're easy to blog, and the material for them builds on its own. Blogging is not a very stable thing to begin with; it's not surprising that it changes.
Oh, and one obvious sign of shift: memes are much less common. There was a period where I was tagged for a meme at least once a week. Internet quizzes, book lists, ice-breaker-like things-about-your-self games -- they were extraordinarily common. But you hardly see them anymore. They never really contributed much to quality or content, but they did make blogging in general much more playful, and they did have the nice function of allowing you the opportunity to link to nice or interesting people who might not otherwise have been linked. They were the harmless neighborly chit-chat of the blogosphere, like talking about the weather with the neighbor two doors down, the one whom you like but with whom you have little in common and whom you rarely see. The blogosphere still has a playful streak running through it, but it's not so obvious anymore.
I think many things have remained constant, though. The majority of political blogs are still poisonous parasites or mindless bottom-feeders; and they are still widely read because it's hard to recognize the poisonous parasites who agree with you. The most interesting blogs are still usually those where people write in order to think things through, although some blogs are interesting more as enjoyable curiosities or as insights into other types of life or career (I have no interest in fashion whatsoever and yet I can spend a lot of time looking at the street fashion pictures at The Sartorialist -- so many people who are interesting in so many different ways). There are still trolls in comments threads, with some blogs attracting them more than others. Blogs are still a great way to discover and touch minds with people you would never have met otherwise. And for all the folly and malice, all the silliness and foible, all the sulking and vindictiveness, that can be found in the blogosphere, the level of discussion is still extraordinarily high for such free and open interaction.
And things shift internally, too. Many excellent blogs have been quiet for years, or vanished entirely -- it seems like my blogroll has had a high attrition rate over the years, as I seem to have a taste for the excellent blog that lasts only a year. Most bloggers don't retain quality over long periods of time; it takes discipline and time, and people go through long spells of low quality. (I remember when, however much one disagreed with Myers, Pharyngula was a real science blog, with some very nicely written science posts here and there, rather than a blog devoted mostly to open threads, repetitious claims about religion, geeky adolescent jokes about sex and geekier but less adolescent jokes about squid, and bored trolling for online polls to crash. All those things used to be there, of course, in some form; it's the more interesting posts that have become much, much more rare.) Blogging isn't a wholly independent activity: sometimes people really do have more important things to do, and sometimes those more important things crowd out blogging itself. That's life. You can tell when I'm busy (or at least away from my computer much more than usual) because for weeks poetry, quotations, and links will be the primary kinds of posts; I do them even when I'm not busy, because they build up fairly steadily (the poetry less so than the other two), but when I am busy, they are the sorts of things that keep coming through the pipeline. They're easy to blog, and the material for them builds on its own. Blogging is not a very stable thing to begin with; it's not surprising that it changes.
Oh, and one obvious sign of shift: memes are much less common. There was a period where I was tagged for a meme at least once a week. Internet quizzes, book lists, ice-breaker-like things-about-your-self games -- they were extraordinarily common. But you hardly see them anymore. They never really contributed much to quality or content, but they did make blogging in general much more playful, and they did have the nice function of allowing you the opportunity to link to nice or interesting people who might not otherwise have been linked. They were the harmless neighborly chit-chat of the blogosphere, like talking about the weather with the neighbor two doors down, the one whom you like but with whom you have little in common and whom you rarely see. The blogosphere still has a playful streak running through it, but it's not so obvious anymore.
I think many things have remained constant, though. The majority of political blogs are still poisonous parasites or mindless bottom-feeders; and they are still widely read because it's hard to recognize the poisonous parasites who agree with you. The most interesting blogs are still usually those where people write in order to think things through, although some blogs are interesting more as enjoyable curiosities or as insights into other types of life or career (I have no interest in fashion whatsoever and yet I can spend a lot of time looking at the street fashion pictures at The Sartorialist -- so many people who are interesting in so many different ways). There are still trolls in comments threads, with some blogs attracting them more than others. Blogs are still a great way to discover and touch minds with people you would never have met otherwise. And for all the folly and malice, all the silliness and foible, all the sulking and vindictiveness, that can be found in the blogosphere, the level of discussion is still extraordinarily high for such free and open interaction.
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Douglass on July 4, 1852
Fellow citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, "may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!" To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave's point of view. Standing, there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the profes sions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery--the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;" I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.
From Frederick Douglass's Independence Day Speech at Rochester
From Frederick Douglass's Independence Day Speech at Rochester
Campbell Against the American Revolution (repost)
A repost of a discussion from 2006, with some slight revisions.
Should the United States have seceded from the British Empire? There are, of course, two different questions being asked. The first is a moral or jurisprudential question: Was the status of the secession just, or at least reasonably justifiable at the time? The second is a utilitarian question: If we could judge the two timelines, would things have turned out better had the U.S. remained a part of the British Empire? I'm more interested here in the moral question. We have Jefferson's argument for its rightness, in the Declaration of Independence. But I thought it might be interesting to summarize an intelligent argument against its rightness, put forward by George Campbell. Campbell was one of the shining lights of the Scottish Enlightenment; his criticism of Hume in A Dissertation on Miracles and his work on rhetoric had a lasting influence on philosophy and on society. On December 12, 1776, which had been appointed a fast day for the rebellion in America, Campbell preached a sermon on the duty of allegiance, using the text, Meddle not with them who are given to change.
He opens by reflecting on national calamity, seeing it as a punishment for national vice: "National calamities we are taught to regard as the punishments of national vices, and as warnings to the people to bethink themselves and reform." The misery of a civil war, he argues, whether it be due to a usurpation of power on one side or a failure of obedience on the other, is an especially important occasion on which to reflect on our sins and reform. So Campbell calls for people on both sides of the Atlantic to take this attitude to the rebellion. War is an indicator of human failing and sinfulness; it is not merely a punishment, it is a natural effect of sin. The direct cause of every war is some sort of immorality on one side and "not seldom on both." Our response to war should be reflection, prayer, repentance for sins, reflection on the cause of the war, and the development of remedy for it. Not only this, but we must begin on this road as quickly as possible; because when people begin to go down an evil path, the farther they proceed, the more dfficult it is to stop them and set them on a better road.
With this as background, Campbell decides that, in order to make his own little contribution to the day set apart for this very purpose, he will try to show "the obligations which as men, as citizens, and as Christians, you lie under to give obedience to the powers which Providence has set over you, and not to meddle with them that are given to change; that is, to avoid giving your countenance or aid, either by speech or action, to the measures of those who would, on the slightest pretexts, subvert all established order, and throw everything into confusion."
Of course, in a sense he's preaching to the choir, and he fully recognizes this fact. The people he is addressing are, by and large, unlikely to have much sympathy with the rebellion. But Campbell points out that there are undoubtedly a few who might, and that it is easy for a few to grow into a many. Misrepresentations must be dealt with or they will spread discontent. Discontent tends to disaffection, disaffection tends to disloyalty, and disloyalty tends to revolution. It is better to prevent the malady than cure it after the fact. And, moreover, he wishes not merely to deal with the rebellion, but address its root causes by starting everyone on the small first steps toward reform. "Let us then, in the present great national contest, inquire impartially where the radical error lies; for that there is an error somewhere, is allowed on both sides." Campbell's inquiry proceeds by looking at two topics: the rights of magistrates and the grounds of the colonial war.
(1) Campbell begins the discussion of the rights of magistrates by reflecting on the dangers inherent in sudden and violent innovation of government. Good government contains within itself the means for legal and legitimate change. It is gradual, but gradual change, unlike sudden change, may be done constitutionally and with a view to the improvement of the whole society. In fact, everyone in power has a duty to engage in such reformation, "to exert the power which the constitution gives him, in such a way as will most promote the public welfare, correcting whatever is amiss, and improving whatever is found defective." But his primary concern in this question is how innovation is to be dealt with by the governed.
The general precept that the governed should follow is to obey those who govern. He admits that in cases of gross tyranny and oppression there may be exceptions; after all, most general rules admit of reasonable exceptions, so we should not assume that a general precept is exceptionless unless the nature of the case requires it. And in this case it is fairly clear that the nature of the case does not require it; there are exceptions every reasonable person would admit. We are obliged to obey and submit to government only because doing so is good for society; obedience is a means to common good. If government ever deteriorates to such an extent that civil war would be better for society than the continuation of the government, then (and only then, insists Campbell) could rebellion be lawful. It would have become an instance of self-defense; and self-defense is as legitimate for societies as for individuals. (Campbell, it should be noted -- and as he in good faith openly notes himself -- is going through all this trouble in order to disassociate the claim he is making from the doctrine of passive obedience. Passive obedience was a major issue in political philosophy in the eighteenth century. Berkeley, for instance, wrote an essay in favor of it; Hume wrote an essay against it. Berkeley's essay can be read here and Hume's essay can be read here.)
So the extent of the precept, that the people should obey their governors, is defined by the end or purpose of government, which is the public welfare. Note that the end here is that of the government itself, rather than everything the governors do in governing -- the precept is not that we should obey to the extent the measures put forward by the governors conduce to the good of society, but that we should obey to the extent that the governance of the governors in general tends to the good of society. While we shouldn't obey something morally wrong, throwing off obedience entirely merely because the governor errs or sins in governing is unreasonable. Most of the bad measures put forward by those who govern are nonetheless lesser evils than the total subversion of government would be. Even when the magistrate demands that we do something wrong as a part of the law, we are not always entitled to resist by force. When Christians were persecuted by the Roman empire, they did not resist by building armies to attack Rome; they resisted by affirming allegiance to Rome but refusing to obey laws they regarded as immoral. Even religion is not usually an adequate grounds for rebellion, although in rare cases it might be. Religious toleration, Campbell argues, is a natural right. Civil law is limited in authority by the impossible and the immoral; if you command a person to believe something he doesn't you ask the impossible, and if you command them to affirm something they do not believe, you ask the immoral. If violations of this right were sufficiently egregious, there would be call for active resistance -- both out of self-defence, and because such actions are detrimental to the good of the whole society, and not just a part, because they are self-subverting. The extraordinary circumstances would make the rebellion excusable. But it would be an exception to the general rule, a rule which we all must admit as a matter of reason.
Campbell goes on to note that the grounds for rebellion would not only have to be important and public; it would also have to be generally understood to be so. A handful don't have the right to drag the whole community into a war just because they think it needful. And if there is general and widespread doubt about the advisability of rebellion, safety requires that we stick to the general rule -- which is to submit to government. (Campbell further insists in a footnote that the right of the people to resist begins not with imagined wrongs but with real ones. The public is not infallible, anymore than sovereigns are. The necessity of the war must be real, and discernibly so.) He denies that the social contract provides any basis for an alternative conclusion:
(Campbell's rejection of social contract thinking is fairly standard for the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume wrote an essay on that, too; he thinks it's as problematic as the theory of passive obedience.)
It is clear that rulers themselves can be the cause of rebellion; the rights and liberties of the people are as real and as much to be respected as the powers and prerogatives of the magistrate. So the question arises: What is the case in the colonial war? Is it due to misgovernment and tyranny? Has anything been done to justify violent revolt? Or might we say that "artful and ambitious men, both on their side of the water and on ours, had the address, for their own private ends, to mislead a people whom wealth and luxury have corrupted, and rendered prone to licentiousness and faction?"
Since he's only delivering a sermon and not writing a political treatise, he can't go into all the different details. He can, however, discuss what he thinks is 'the hinge' of the dispute: the right and authority of the government of Parliament to tax the American people. He points out that this authority is supported by custom; that this custom has always been considered constitutional; that the colonists, who had not yet discovered their "natural and unalienable right to pay no taxes, but such as have been imposed with their own consent" (as Campbell sarcastically calls it), submitted to these measures as part of their duty to government. The only real difference between then and now, Campbell says, is that they used to be poor and humble, and now were rich and arrogant. He points out that the colonial charters implicitly, and in one case explicitly, reserve Parliament the right of taxation. Everyone recognizes the right of Parliament to make laws for its colonies in other matters (e.g., criminal law). And he points out that Parliament had passed laws protecting the trade of the colonies even when it required restricting it on the other side of the Atlantic.
He then goes on to mock the claim (which we find in the Declaration of Independence) that it is self-evident that government should be by consent, noting that, despite the fact that something so supposedly self-evident has been undiscovered for so long, the people who make this claim never give any arguments for it, but only treat with contempt those who question it. Moreover, the claim is hardly intelligible -- what clear meaning can be given to 'consent' here that would not either be arbitrary or be inconsistent with government in general? The consent needed is obviously not actual and explicit; so it must be implicit and virtual. But any implicit and virtual consent would often be contrary to actual and explicit consent -- laws often are passed by duly elected and representative legislatures that are seriously disliked, even though everyone recognizes the prerogative of the legislatures to make them. So 'consent' here would be opposite to any actual consent. Campbell suggests that, because of this, talking about consent in this context can only be done with the purpose "to darken, to perplex, and to mislead."
The basis for all this "blundering," as Campbell calls it, is the confused and absurd notion that government can be compatible with limitless freedom. "The very basis of political union is partial sacrifice of liberty for protection." The notion is inimical to rule of law, or "legal government," as Campbell calls it. And it is inimical to free government, in which people are not only protected by law from arbitrary power, but are ruled by laws that tend to be conducive to justice and common good. Does the British constitution have safeguards to guarantee that, whatever its flaws, it is a free government? Campbell answers resoundingly that it does:
He then argues that the principle that people should be self-legislating is obviously false if taken in a strong sense, because such a society would be anarchy; and if taken in a reasonable sense means no more than that people should acquiesce to the law for reasons of private and public good (in which case it is an absurdly misleading way to state it). He has a biting and important footnote to the published sermon in which he attacks the attempt to justify the rebellion by appeal to the natural equality and rights of men, in which he points out that the colonists keep slaves and mistreat Indians, and so really don't have the moral high ground here (and attacks Burke's intimation that they did). The footnote is worth quoting at some length.
Campbell allows that Americans are entitled to all the rights and privileges of British subjects; and that British subjects are entitled to be taxed only if they are represented in a broad sense. But he denies that they are entitled to be taxed only if they are represented in particular. The natural remedy for the woes the Americans imagine would be to allow them a few representatives in Parliament, and Campbell's OK with that. But, he says, they've always protested that possibility. It would be reasonable for them to want a modest fixed rate of taxation determined relative to the revenue produced by Great Britain. But they've protested that as well. What solution have they proposed themselves? Only total immunity, which is unreasonable.
Campbell's sermon concludes with the exhortation not to be angry at the people across the Atlantic, but to pity them. The unlearned masses who have been mired in this war by a few scheming men (on both sides of the water, Campbell still says) have ignorance as their excuse. Any guilt they might have is being expiated in the misery of war. Pretending to pursue liberty, they have turned away from it; they are wandering in the dark, without a clear destination. The people of Britain ought to pray that the God who calms the tempest will still the tumults of the people -- for their sake.
And that's Campbell's argument that the American rebellion was wrong: It was an attack on the principles of rule of law and free government, perpetrated by a selfish group of people out only for their own good and not that of society at large, justified by a dense veil of philosophical gobbledygook and the shockingly immoral presumption that you have the right to appeal to the natural equality and rights of men while enslaving your fellow man. It must be admitted that in a few places it has some bite.
You can read Campbell's sermon here.
Should the United States have seceded from the British Empire? There are, of course, two different questions being asked. The first is a moral or jurisprudential question: Was the status of the secession just, or at least reasonably justifiable at the time? The second is a utilitarian question: If we could judge the two timelines, would things have turned out better had the U.S. remained a part of the British Empire? I'm more interested here in the moral question. We have Jefferson's argument for its rightness, in the Declaration of Independence. But I thought it might be interesting to summarize an intelligent argument against its rightness, put forward by George Campbell. Campbell was one of the shining lights of the Scottish Enlightenment; his criticism of Hume in A Dissertation on Miracles and his work on rhetoric had a lasting influence on philosophy and on society. On December 12, 1776, which had been appointed a fast day for the rebellion in America, Campbell preached a sermon on the duty of allegiance, using the text, Meddle not with them who are given to change.
He opens by reflecting on national calamity, seeing it as a punishment for national vice: "National calamities we are taught to regard as the punishments of national vices, and as warnings to the people to bethink themselves and reform." The misery of a civil war, he argues, whether it be due to a usurpation of power on one side or a failure of obedience on the other, is an especially important occasion on which to reflect on our sins and reform. So Campbell calls for people on both sides of the Atlantic to take this attitude to the rebellion. War is an indicator of human failing and sinfulness; it is not merely a punishment, it is a natural effect of sin. The direct cause of every war is some sort of immorality on one side and "not seldom on both." Our response to war should be reflection, prayer, repentance for sins, reflection on the cause of the war, and the development of remedy for it. Not only this, but we must begin on this road as quickly as possible; because when people begin to go down an evil path, the farther they proceed, the more dfficult it is to stop them and set them on a better road.
With this as background, Campbell decides that, in order to make his own little contribution to the day set apart for this very purpose, he will try to show "the obligations which as men, as citizens, and as Christians, you lie under to give obedience to the powers which Providence has set over you, and not to meddle with them that are given to change; that is, to avoid giving your countenance or aid, either by speech or action, to the measures of those who would, on the slightest pretexts, subvert all established order, and throw everything into confusion."
Of course, in a sense he's preaching to the choir, and he fully recognizes this fact. The people he is addressing are, by and large, unlikely to have much sympathy with the rebellion. But Campbell points out that there are undoubtedly a few who might, and that it is easy for a few to grow into a many. Misrepresentations must be dealt with or they will spread discontent. Discontent tends to disaffection, disaffection tends to disloyalty, and disloyalty tends to revolution. It is better to prevent the malady than cure it after the fact. And, moreover, he wishes not merely to deal with the rebellion, but address its root causes by starting everyone on the small first steps toward reform. "Let us then, in the present great national contest, inquire impartially where the radical error lies; for that there is an error somewhere, is allowed on both sides." Campbell's inquiry proceeds by looking at two topics: the rights of magistrates and the grounds of the colonial war.
(1) Campbell begins the discussion of the rights of magistrates by reflecting on the dangers inherent in sudden and violent innovation of government. Good government contains within itself the means for legal and legitimate change. It is gradual, but gradual change, unlike sudden change, may be done constitutionally and with a view to the improvement of the whole society. In fact, everyone in power has a duty to engage in such reformation, "to exert the power which the constitution gives him, in such a way as will most promote the public welfare, correcting whatever is amiss, and improving whatever is found defective." But his primary concern in this question is how innovation is to be dealt with by the governed.
The general precept that the governed should follow is to obey those who govern. He admits that in cases of gross tyranny and oppression there may be exceptions; after all, most general rules admit of reasonable exceptions, so we should not assume that a general precept is exceptionless unless the nature of the case requires it. And in this case it is fairly clear that the nature of the case does not require it; there are exceptions every reasonable person would admit. We are obliged to obey and submit to government only because doing so is good for society; obedience is a means to common good. If government ever deteriorates to such an extent that civil war would be better for society than the continuation of the government, then (and only then, insists Campbell) could rebellion be lawful. It would have become an instance of self-defense; and self-defense is as legitimate for societies as for individuals. (Campbell, it should be noted -- and as he in good faith openly notes himself -- is going through all this trouble in order to disassociate the claim he is making from the doctrine of passive obedience. Passive obedience was a major issue in political philosophy in the eighteenth century. Berkeley, for instance, wrote an essay in favor of it; Hume wrote an essay against it. Berkeley's essay can be read here and Hume's essay can be read here.)
So the extent of the precept, that the people should obey their governors, is defined by the end or purpose of government, which is the public welfare. Note that the end here is that of the government itself, rather than everything the governors do in governing -- the precept is not that we should obey to the extent the measures put forward by the governors conduce to the good of society, but that we should obey to the extent that the governance of the governors in general tends to the good of society. While we shouldn't obey something morally wrong, throwing off obedience entirely merely because the governor errs or sins in governing is unreasonable. Most of the bad measures put forward by those who govern are nonetheless lesser evils than the total subversion of government would be. Even when the magistrate demands that we do something wrong as a part of the law, we are not always entitled to resist by force. When Christians were persecuted by the Roman empire, they did not resist by building armies to attack Rome; they resisted by affirming allegiance to Rome but refusing to obey laws they regarded as immoral. Even religion is not usually an adequate grounds for rebellion, although in rare cases it might be. Religious toleration, Campbell argues, is a natural right. Civil law is limited in authority by the impossible and the immoral; if you command a person to believe something he doesn't you ask the impossible, and if you command them to affirm something they do not believe, you ask the immoral. If violations of this right were sufficiently egregious, there would be call for active resistance -- both out of self-defence, and because such actions are detrimental to the good of the whole society, and not just a part, because they are self-subverting. The extraordinary circumstances would make the rebellion excusable. But it would be an exception to the general rule, a rule which we all must admit as a matter of reason.
Campbell goes on to note that the grounds for rebellion would not only have to be important and public; it would also have to be generally understood to be so. A handful don't have the right to drag the whole community into a war just because they think it needful. And if there is general and widespread doubt about the advisability of rebellion, safety requires that we stick to the general rule -- which is to submit to government. (Campbell further insists in a footnote that the right of the people to resist begins not with imagined wrongs but with real ones. The public is not infallible, anymore than sovereigns are. The necessity of the war must be real, and discernibly so.) He denies that the social contract provides any basis for an alternative conclusion:
I have not mentioned the original compact, one of the hackneyed topics of writers on politics. My reason is, I neither understand the word, as applied by those writers, nor know where to find the thing to which they refer. That there may have been politics founded in compact, I make no question; but the history of the world will satisfy every reasonable person, that in many more cases, perhaps thirty to one, states have arisen from causes widely different....As the matter stands, I consider it as one of those phrases which are very convenient for the professed disputant, because they are both indefinite and dark, and may be made to comprehend under them all the chimeras of his own imagination.
(Campbell's rejection of social contract thinking is fairly standard for the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume wrote an essay on that, too; he thinks it's as problematic as the theory of passive obedience.)
It is clear that rulers themselves can be the cause of rebellion; the rights and liberties of the people are as real and as much to be respected as the powers and prerogatives of the magistrate. So the question arises: What is the case in the colonial war? Is it due to misgovernment and tyranny? Has anything been done to justify violent revolt? Or might we say that "artful and ambitious men, both on their side of the water and on ours, had the address, for their own private ends, to mislead a people whom wealth and luxury have corrupted, and rendered prone to licentiousness and faction?"
Since he's only delivering a sermon and not writing a political treatise, he can't go into all the different details. He can, however, discuss what he thinks is 'the hinge' of the dispute: the right and authority of the government of Parliament to tax the American people. He points out that this authority is supported by custom; that this custom has always been considered constitutional; that the colonists, who had not yet discovered their "natural and unalienable right to pay no taxes, but such as have been imposed with their own consent" (as Campbell sarcastically calls it), submitted to these measures as part of their duty to government. The only real difference between then and now, Campbell says, is that they used to be poor and humble, and now were rich and arrogant. He points out that the colonial charters implicitly, and in one case explicitly, reserve Parliament the right of taxation. Everyone recognizes the right of Parliament to make laws for its colonies in other matters (e.g., criminal law). And he points out that Parliament had passed laws protecting the trade of the colonies even when it required restricting it on the other side of the Atlantic.
He then goes on to mock the claim (which we find in the Declaration of Independence) that it is self-evident that government should be by consent, noting that, despite the fact that something so supposedly self-evident has been undiscovered for so long, the people who make this claim never give any arguments for it, but only treat with contempt those who question it. Moreover, the claim is hardly intelligible -- what clear meaning can be given to 'consent' here that would not either be arbitrary or be inconsistent with government in general? The consent needed is obviously not actual and explicit; so it must be implicit and virtual. But any implicit and virtual consent would often be contrary to actual and explicit consent -- laws often are passed by duly elected and representative legislatures that are seriously disliked, even though everyone recognizes the prerogative of the legislatures to make them. So 'consent' here would be opposite to any actual consent. Campbell suggests that, because of this, talking about consent in this context can only be done with the purpose "to darken, to perplex, and to mislead."
The basis for all this "blundering," as Campbell calls it, is the confused and absurd notion that government can be compatible with limitless freedom. "The very basis of political union is partial sacrifice of liberty for protection." The notion is inimical to rule of law, or "legal government," as Campbell calls it. And it is inimical to free government, in which people are not only protected by law from arbitrary power, but are ruled by laws that tend to be conducive to justice and common good. Does the British constitution have safeguards to guarantee that, whatever its flaws, it is a free government? Campbell answers resoundingly that it does:
In regard to our own, That one of the essential branches of the legislature is elective, that its members must be men of such rank and fortune as give them a personal interest in preserving the constitution, and promoting the public good, that they are elected from all the different counties and boroughs in the island, by those who have a principal concern both in agriculture and in trade, that they are but temporary legislators, and may soon be changed, that the laws they make for others must affect themselves; these are the great bulwarks of BRITISH FREEDOM, as they afford the supreme council of the nation, the best opportunities of knowing, and the strongest motives for enacting, what is most beneficial, not to one part of the country, or to one class of the inhabitants, but to the whole.
He then argues that the principle that people should be self-legislating is obviously false if taken in a strong sense, because such a society would be anarchy; and if taken in a reasonable sense means no more than that people should acquiesce to the law for reasons of private and public good (in which case it is an absurdly misleading way to state it). He has a biting and important footnote to the published sermon in which he attacks the attempt to justify the rebellion by appeal to the natural equality and rights of men, in which he points out that the colonists keep slaves and mistreat Indians, and so really don't have the moral high ground here (and attacks Burke's intimation that they did). The footnote is worth quoting at some length.
It is indeed scarcely credible that any who entail slavery on their fellow-creatures, whom they buy and sell like cattle in the market (and some such, it is said, are in the congress) should have the absurd effrontery to adopt this language. If they really believe their own doctrine, what opinion must they entertain of themselves, who can haughtily trample on what they acknowledge to be the unalienable rights of mankind? Will they dare to elude this charge, by declaring that they do not consider negroes and Indians as of the human species? That they account them beasts, or rather worse, one would naturally infer from the treatment they too commonly give them. But I have not yet heard, that they openly profess this opinion. How well does their conduct verify what has been remarked with great justice of all those republican levellers, who raise a clamour about the natural equality of men, and their indefeasible rights; that they mean only to level all distinctions above them, and pull down their superiors, at the same time that they tyrannize over their inferiors, and widen, as much as possible, the distance between themselves and those below them.
Campbell allows that Americans are entitled to all the rights and privileges of British subjects; and that British subjects are entitled to be taxed only if they are represented in a broad sense. But he denies that they are entitled to be taxed only if they are represented in particular. The natural remedy for the woes the Americans imagine would be to allow them a few representatives in Parliament, and Campbell's OK with that. But, he says, they've always protested that possibility. It would be reasonable for them to want a modest fixed rate of taxation determined relative to the revenue produced by Great Britain. But they've protested that as well. What solution have they proposed themselves? Only total immunity, which is unreasonable.
Campbell's sermon concludes with the exhortation not to be angry at the people across the Atlantic, but to pity them. The unlearned masses who have been mired in this war by a few scheming men (on both sides of the water, Campbell still says) have ignorance as their excuse. Any guilt they might have is being expiated in the misery of war. Pretending to pursue liberty, they have turned away from it; they are wandering in the dark, without a clear destination. The people of Britain ought to pray that the God who calms the tempest will still the tumults of the people -- for their sake.
And that's Campbell's argument that the American rebellion was wrong: It was an attack on the principles of rule of law and free government, perpetrated by a selfish group of people out only for their own good and not that of society at large, justified by a dense veil of philosophical gobbledygook and the shockingly immoral presumption that you have the right to appeal to the natural equality and rights of men while enslaving your fellow man. It must be admitted that in a few places it has some bite.
You can read Campbell's sermon here.
Berkeley on America
America or The Muse's Refuge
A Prophecy
The Muse, disgusted at an Age and Clime,
Barren of every glorious Theme,
In distant Lands now waits a better Time,
Producing subjects worthy Fame:
In happy Climes, where from the genial Sun
And virgin Earth such Scenes ensue,
The Force of Art by Nature seems outdone,
And fancied Beauties by the true:
There shall be sung another golden Age,
The rise of Empire and of Arts,
The Good and Great inspiring epic Rage,
The wisest Heads and noblest Hearts.
Not such as Europe breeds in her decay;
Such as she bred when fresh and young,
When heav'nly Flame did animate her Clay,
By future Poets shall be sung.
Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way;
The four first Acts already past,
A fifth shall close the Drama with the Day;
Time's noblest Offspring is the last.
It was this poem, by the way, that led to a city in California being named after the Irish philosopher (albeit under an Anglicized pronunciation). Berkeley went to great lengths to gather together the resources for building a college in Bermuda for Native Americans. He even went across the Atlantic for it, although he never got to Bermuda, and crucial funds were never handed over to him. Instead he spent some time in New England, where he enriched the libraries of some backwoods colleges there called Harvard and Yale. When he left he also turned his farm over to Yale so that the rent from it could help support the tuition of three students in Greek and Latin.
Berkeley's poem is in a sense less about America -- which in the early eighteenth century was still more a matter of promise and hope than any definite greatness -- and more about the light of education; it was education, the possibility of the establishment of America as a "Muse's refuge," that struck him as being so full of potential.
'Weak Man' Arguments
About a year ago there was an article in Scientific American that claimed to identify a new fallacy, the weak man argument. I was not at all impressed with it at the time. But, of course, these things enter the mish-mash of popular philosophical folklore all the time, and here and there you find people uncritically accepting the article's claims about 'weak man' arguments as part of their notion of what critical thinking involves. I recently came across another mention of this, but this time with sensible things said about it:
Both of these points are right and admit of reasoned defense, so I thought I'd briefly say something about them.
Let's think about why philosophers always insist that people focus on the strongest rather than the weakest argument (even if they do not always comply with this themselves). The reason is that attacking a weak argument is not like finding the weak point on a chain -- break the weakest link and you break the whole chain. Rather, weak arguments are arguments that do the least real work. If you want to bring down a roof or a wall or a fortress, you can't do it by sapping the supports that aren't really supports; you have to find the load-bearing supports and bring down some of those. All a position needs is one thoroughly good argument; by criticizing the strongest argument and showing that it is not enough to support the position, you both remove the position's strongest support and, a fortiori, show that it is unlikely that anything else will support it either. But there are cases where you'll want to focus on criticizing the weaker arguments, anyway; for instance, if you think they are distracting people from more serious issues.
What norms govern such a case, determining whether it is a good move or a bad move? Not logical ones, at least primarily; demolishing a weak argument does nothing to undermine the position, and while a weak argument may have logical problems, very often the weakness will lie elsewhere -- e.g., false assumptions. Rather, the primary norms here are ethical. I've noted before that arguments have two aspects: their logical structure and their rhetorical presentation. When we are looking at weaker arguments rather than stronger ones, we are very far from considering crucial arguments for the conclusion, and thus very far from considering the conclusion in itself; our only concern is basic persuasion about the arguments themselves, and this is a rhetorical matter. But rhetorical matters, while they are not strictly bound to logical standards (since persuasion does not depend wholly on logical standards), are still governed by ethical standards. Thus the attacking of a weak man can be dishonest or imprudent, unjust or incompetent; it's not actually a fallacy, just one of the things you might be doing with an argument, but like any sort of action it can be done well or badly, rightly or wrongly.
We can therefore see the underlying basis for Steven Maloney's two suggestions.
(1) If an argument is widespread, it might indeed be reasonable to attack it rather than stronger arguments, if you are primarily concerned with eliminating that argument from the discussion (precisely because it is such a weak argument).
(2) But the weaker arguments are not load-bearing; that is, the positions for which they argue do not depend on them, and therefore attacking these weaker arguments does little to nothing to harm the position itself. It would be intellectually dishonest to suggest otherwise, and therefore we can reasonably expect people who chose to attack the weaker arguments because they are more widespread to acknowledge the fact that they are weaker and that their criticisms of these arguments do nothing to address the larger question.
However, I think there is utility in attacking a weak man argument when (1) the weak man argument is widely believed or distributed and (2) when there is an acknowledgment that the defeat of the weak man argument does not settle the larger question the argument was said to address.
Both of these points are right and admit of reasoned defense, so I thought I'd briefly say something about them.
Let's think about why philosophers always insist that people focus on the strongest rather than the weakest argument (even if they do not always comply with this themselves). The reason is that attacking a weak argument is not like finding the weak point on a chain -- break the weakest link and you break the whole chain. Rather, weak arguments are arguments that do the least real work. If you want to bring down a roof or a wall or a fortress, you can't do it by sapping the supports that aren't really supports; you have to find the load-bearing supports and bring down some of those. All a position needs is one thoroughly good argument; by criticizing the strongest argument and showing that it is not enough to support the position, you both remove the position's strongest support and, a fortiori, show that it is unlikely that anything else will support it either. But there are cases where you'll want to focus on criticizing the weaker arguments, anyway; for instance, if you think they are distracting people from more serious issues.
What norms govern such a case, determining whether it is a good move or a bad move? Not logical ones, at least primarily; demolishing a weak argument does nothing to undermine the position, and while a weak argument may have logical problems, very often the weakness will lie elsewhere -- e.g., false assumptions. Rather, the primary norms here are ethical. I've noted before that arguments have two aspects: their logical structure and their rhetorical presentation. When we are looking at weaker arguments rather than stronger ones, we are very far from considering crucial arguments for the conclusion, and thus very far from considering the conclusion in itself; our only concern is basic persuasion about the arguments themselves, and this is a rhetorical matter. But rhetorical matters, while they are not strictly bound to logical standards (since persuasion does not depend wholly on logical standards), are still governed by ethical standards. Thus the attacking of a weak man can be dishonest or imprudent, unjust or incompetent; it's not actually a fallacy, just one of the things you might be doing with an argument, but like any sort of action it can be done well or badly, rightly or wrongly.
We can therefore see the underlying basis for Steven Maloney's two suggestions.
(1) If an argument is widespread, it might indeed be reasonable to attack it rather than stronger arguments, if you are primarily concerned with eliminating that argument from the discussion (precisely because it is such a weak argument).
(2) But the weaker arguments are not load-bearing; that is, the positions for which they argue do not depend on them, and therefore attacking these weaker arguments does little to nothing to harm the position itself. It would be intellectually dishonest to suggest otherwise, and therefore we can reasonably expect people who chose to attack the weaker arguments because they are more widespread to acknowledge the fact that they are weaker and that their criticisms of these arguments do nothing to address the larger question.
Friday, July 03, 2009
Two More Poem Drafts
Selkie
He fell in love with a selkie-girl
by the shores of the waving sea
where the winds are trick and the moonbeams curl
in frenzied lunacy;
she danced on the wave with flawless grace
and she sang with the voice of a bird
but fairest of all were the eyes of her face,
which could rob Irish tongues of their words.
By the shores of the waving sea
lived the man with his selkie-wife
but neither steel nor love nor powers that be
can bind such a girl to that life;
for as sure as summer to autumn descends,
as sure as the lunatic raves,
as sure as the river to sea-tide wends,
so the selkie to the salt-drunken waves,
and love of a life to sorrow must fall,
leaving nothing but sadness and ache;
where breakers crash and seagulls call
the selkie-girls catch hearts to break.
Youth and Age
'Youth is wasted on the young'--
this is spoken as if truth,
but it is not true;
the young are wasted on their youth--
this holds a better clue
through mazy paths, and if we are bold
we will find an even better saying writ:
youth is only wasted on the old,
for the young do not yet remember it,
nor can they, as each day turns,
look back and learn from it,
its balms and burns.
He fell in love with a selkie-girl
by the shores of the waving sea
where the winds are trick and the moonbeams curl
in frenzied lunacy;
she danced on the wave with flawless grace
and she sang with the voice of a bird
but fairest of all were the eyes of her face,
which could rob Irish tongues of their words.
By the shores of the waving sea
lived the man with his selkie-wife
but neither steel nor love nor powers that be
can bind such a girl to that life;
for as sure as summer to autumn descends,
as sure as the lunatic raves,
as sure as the river to sea-tide wends,
so the selkie to the salt-drunken waves,
and love of a life to sorrow must fall,
leaving nothing but sadness and ache;
where breakers crash and seagulls call
the selkie-girls catch hearts to break.
Youth and Age
'Youth is wasted on the young'--
this is spoken as if truth,
but it is not true;
the young are wasted on their youth--
this holds a better clue
through mazy paths, and if we are bold
we will find an even better saying writ:
youth is only wasted on the old,
for the young do not yet remember it,
nor can they, as each day turns,
look back and learn from it,
its balms and burns.
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Prince of Clouds
L'Albatros
Charles Baudelaire
Souvent, pour s'amuser, les hommes d'équipage
Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.
À peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
Que ces rois de l'azur, maladroits et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traîner à côté d'eux.
Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, naguère si beau, qu'il est comique et laid!
L'un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,
L'autre mime, en boitant, l'infirme qui volait!
Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer;
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher.
You can find various translations of Baudelaire's "L'Albatros" here. What follows is not so much a translation as a 'take' on it in English.
Albatross
Crewmen to idle time
capture great albatrosses
that glide over deep brine;
great sky-kings, now made awkward,
drag wings oar-like behind,
winged voyagers thus made weak,
once lovely, now ugly,
mocked as lame who once had flown!
The poet, prince of clouds,
rides the tempest, mocks bowmen,
but, banished to the mob,
his vast wings impede his walk.
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Respect, Rational Scrutiny, and Circumstances
Peter Smith has a somewhat vague answer to a question about "respecting someone's beliefs":
Whether this even makes sense depends very much on what is meant by "vigorous rational scrutiny" and "belief". If the first means "scrutiny showing that it is not arbitrary," which is not what we would usually mean by the phrase, and the second means "any sort of cognitive judgment in which something is definitely accepted," then it probably stands; a belief that doesn't stand up to vigorous rational scrutiny isn't worth having. Or to be more accurate, a belief that was not capable of standing up to scrutiny of this sort, whether the scrutiny was actually performed or not -- it would be absurd to demand actual scrutiny of every belief to see if it has such reasons, because then you would be demanding the impossible. You believe that your socks came from your sock drawer? What are your reasons for it? So you believe those are good reasons for it? What are your reasons for believing that those are good reasons for it? O, really; what are your reasons for believing that those reasons are good reasons for believing that the things you said were good reasons for believing that your socks came from your sock drawer really are? &c., &c.
So if we take "if a belief doesn't stand up to vigorous rational scrutiny it really isn't worth having" to mean something so weak and general, it's probably true. But we have lots of beliefs worth having that couldn't stand up to vigorous rational scrutiny if "vigorous rational scrutiny" meant something like a full-scale investigation involving "a stringent dose of scepticism", not because the beliefs themselves are bad, but because we would simply lack the resources for defending them against a "stringent dose of scepticism". How in the world could you ordinarily defend your belief that your socks came from your sock drawer from someone who was not willing to take anyone's word for it? That level of scrutiny for that sort of belief is itself absurd and irrational.
This sort of claim sounds good enough, and is almost certainly true in some meaning or other. But it depends very much on which meaning we take it to have. Likewise, the claim that "the way to show respect for those we disagree with is indeed precisely to engage critically with their ideas and argue" depends very much on the context and what is supposed to be involved in 'engaging critically with their ideas and arguing'. Someone who feels that he has to argue with everything he disagrees with until others agree with him is not respecting anyone; he is just acting like an idiot, and showing that he is more interested in his own beliefs than in the people around him. Sometimes the most respectful way to argue is simply to give your reasons for thinking otherwise, and leave it at that. Sometimes it's not reasonable or respectful to pursue an argument at all. The belief that a man was a decent and upright citizen may not withstand vigorous rational scrutiny; trying to argue his widow out of it at his funeral is hardly reasonable or respectful for all that. What counts as respect varies according to circumstances; this is true of any sort of respect. Likewise any sort of argument can be couched in insinuating or insulting terms that are not respectful, and even morally despicable, so how you go about arguing is important as well.
But in any case respect for those with whom one disagrees isn't precisely the same as respect for someone's beliefs, although the former may under certain conditions contribute to the latter. There are lots of reasons you might respect someone's belief even though you think it's wrong -- it might be very clever, very beautiful, very intelligent, very intriguing; even if probably wrong it still might in some way be worthy of serious and openminded inquiry; they might be an expert in the field, or very rational and reasonable people, and thus you would see their wrong opinion as nonetheless being one that has to be taken seriously because it's the sort of opinion rational and reasonable people are likely to have; etc. Indeed, you may respect someone's belief even when you don't respect them at all; we do it quite often, because the people we have difficulty respecting will certainly believe some things in common with ourselves. Most of us, I take it, regard our own beliefs as respectable; at least, the only time people ask whether they should respect someone's beliefs is when that someone disagrees with them.
But the question was a tricky one, particularly given how it was stated; I'm not sure precisely how I would have answered it myself. Smith was right to point out that it doesn't make much sense to see oneself as trying to "root out beliefs as much as possible". I would probably also have pointed out that, whatever may be the case for occasional contempt, regularly feeling contempt for people is neither reasonable nor morally healthy, regardless of what occasions it. And I would have pointed out that respecting someone and feeling respect for them are not the same thing; very often when you respect someone you aren't feeling anything distinctive at all, and sometimes you most definitely show respect for someone by doing so when they make it difficult to feel respect for them. And, of course, that respecting people and respecting beliefs are different things, however related they may be. It's difficult to find any fully adequate account of respect itself, however; and without that, we are still in dialectical mode whenever we talk about respecting beliefs.
And what if we think others are holding onto (say) religious or political beliefs that are dubious? Well, again the same applies: a stringent dose of scepticism is what is needed. (Which isn't to say that it is always appropriate or polite to try to administer it!) For if a belief doesn't stand up to vigorous rational scrutiny it really isn't worth having. So in fact the way to show respect for those we disagree with is indeed precisely to engage critically with their ideas and argue: which is, of course, how we learn to improve our own views. On the other hand -- and I take it that this is perhaps the thought behind the question -- the opinions of believers who try to insulate certain of their beliefs from such vigorous scrutiny, or who try to block open critical enquiry of their ideas, deserve no respect at all.
Whether this even makes sense depends very much on what is meant by "vigorous rational scrutiny" and "belief". If the first means "scrutiny showing that it is not arbitrary," which is not what we would usually mean by the phrase, and the second means "any sort of cognitive judgment in which something is definitely accepted," then it probably stands; a belief that doesn't stand up to vigorous rational scrutiny isn't worth having. Or to be more accurate, a belief that was not capable of standing up to scrutiny of this sort, whether the scrutiny was actually performed or not -- it would be absurd to demand actual scrutiny of every belief to see if it has such reasons, because then you would be demanding the impossible. You believe that your socks came from your sock drawer? What are your reasons for it? So you believe those are good reasons for it? What are your reasons for believing that those are good reasons for it? O, really; what are your reasons for believing that those reasons are good reasons for believing that the things you said were good reasons for believing that your socks came from your sock drawer really are? &c., &c.
So if we take "if a belief doesn't stand up to vigorous rational scrutiny it really isn't worth having" to mean something so weak and general, it's probably true. But we have lots of beliefs worth having that couldn't stand up to vigorous rational scrutiny if "vigorous rational scrutiny" meant something like a full-scale investigation involving "a stringent dose of scepticism", not because the beliefs themselves are bad, but because we would simply lack the resources for defending them against a "stringent dose of scepticism". How in the world could you ordinarily defend your belief that your socks came from your sock drawer from someone who was not willing to take anyone's word for it? That level of scrutiny for that sort of belief is itself absurd and irrational.
This sort of claim sounds good enough, and is almost certainly true in some meaning or other. But it depends very much on which meaning we take it to have. Likewise, the claim that "the way to show respect for those we disagree with is indeed precisely to engage critically with their ideas and argue" depends very much on the context and what is supposed to be involved in 'engaging critically with their ideas and arguing'. Someone who feels that he has to argue with everything he disagrees with until others agree with him is not respecting anyone; he is just acting like an idiot, and showing that he is more interested in his own beliefs than in the people around him. Sometimes the most respectful way to argue is simply to give your reasons for thinking otherwise, and leave it at that. Sometimes it's not reasonable or respectful to pursue an argument at all. The belief that a man was a decent and upright citizen may not withstand vigorous rational scrutiny; trying to argue his widow out of it at his funeral is hardly reasonable or respectful for all that. What counts as respect varies according to circumstances; this is true of any sort of respect. Likewise any sort of argument can be couched in insinuating or insulting terms that are not respectful, and even morally despicable, so how you go about arguing is important as well.
But in any case respect for those with whom one disagrees isn't precisely the same as respect for someone's beliefs, although the former may under certain conditions contribute to the latter. There are lots of reasons you might respect someone's belief even though you think it's wrong -- it might be very clever, very beautiful, very intelligent, very intriguing; even if probably wrong it still might in some way be worthy of serious and openminded inquiry; they might be an expert in the field, or very rational and reasonable people, and thus you would see their wrong opinion as nonetheless being one that has to be taken seriously because it's the sort of opinion rational and reasonable people are likely to have; etc. Indeed, you may respect someone's belief even when you don't respect them at all; we do it quite often, because the people we have difficulty respecting will certainly believe some things in common with ourselves. Most of us, I take it, regard our own beliefs as respectable; at least, the only time people ask whether they should respect someone's beliefs is when that someone disagrees with them.
But the question was a tricky one, particularly given how it was stated; I'm not sure precisely how I would have answered it myself. Smith was right to point out that it doesn't make much sense to see oneself as trying to "root out beliefs as much as possible". I would probably also have pointed out that, whatever may be the case for occasional contempt, regularly feeling contempt for people is neither reasonable nor morally healthy, regardless of what occasions it. And I would have pointed out that respecting someone and feeling respect for them are not the same thing; very often when you respect someone you aren't feeling anything distinctive at all, and sometimes you most definitely show respect for someone by doing so when they make it difficult to feel respect for them. And, of course, that respecting people and respecting beliefs are different things, however related they may be. It's difficult to find any fully adequate account of respect itself, however; and without that, we are still in dialectical mode whenever we talk about respecting beliefs.
Notes and Links
* There has been quite a bit of discussion about accommodationism and anti-accommodationism the past while. For those who haven't followed it, you can find it by way of Technorati. I'll summarize it so you are all caught up. With admittedly a few notable exceptions, the argument is between one group of self-righteous atheists and another group of self-righteous atheists, both preening themselves on their rationality, fiercely debating whether religious people should be treated like lunatics and fenced off or treated like idiot children and patronized. And that's about all of it, since the rest of it consists mostly of vague generalization, handwaving and sometimes logically inconsistent arguments, and agenda-driven claims without adequate evidence: tangible barbarie della riflessione. Debates between Boors and Prigs quickly cease to be of much intellectual interest and begin to take on the appearance of farce. Eventually one begins to realize that the whole thing might be moot, anyway; if the people implementing the policy are like the people debating, it's bound to be bungled regardless of what policy is chosen.
* Thony Christie has finally buckled to that fount of wisdom, peer pressure, and started his own blog. Christie is well known from the comments threads of various blogs around the blogosphere for leaving excellent comments on the history of science; so it's great to have him discussing these matters in a single place. Very much a blog to watch.
* Bora has a good post on the concept of a biological clock.
* Michael Liccione reflects on issues with petitionary prayer.
* I had intended several weeks ago to link to DarwinCatholic's The Vatican's Rifles, but somehow never did. It's about the M1868 Pontificio, the cartridge rifle manufcatured for the army of the Papal States prior to 1900.
* Arsen Darnay on philosophy and practicality (among other things):
* Kyle Cupp had a very good post on fatherhood recently.
* I didn't really say anything about Michael Jackson. I don't think he was a musical genius, but he certainly did know how to put on a show. And I can't help but link to what I think is the best music video ever made. It helps that I really like Vincent Price; and yes, despite Ron Rosenbaum's assessment otherwise, the song itself is quite good, although considered on its own not Jackson's best. And it's difficult to think of any other pop musician who could pull this sort of thing off. (I'm also mystified by Rosenbaum's challenge to name one post-Thriller song; the obvious response is "Smooth Criminal".)
* Sherry's Hundred Hymn List continues:
#76 I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say
#75 Redeemed How I Love to Proclaim It
#74 The Battle Hymn of the Republic
#73 Shout to the Lord
#74 is the first hymn on the list that was among my recommendations.
* Steven Hales with a quick guide to proving a negative.
* Christina Hoff Sommers responds to some of her critics. There are indeed a number of persistent myths running around feminist scholarship (this sort of thing is always a danger when philosophers deal with issues of immediate practical import); although, of course, there are criticisms of Sommers that focus on other aspects of her work besides her criticism of misused statistics.
ADDED LATER:
* In the comments Vanna gives a link to what looks like an interesting documentary on Zen Buddhism.
* Thony Christie has finally buckled to that fount of wisdom, peer pressure, and started his own blog. Christie is well known from the comments threads of various blogs around the blogosphere for leaving excellent comments on the history of science; so it's great to have him discussing these matters in a single place. Very much a blog to watch.
* Bora has a good post on the concept of a biological clock.
* Michael Liccione reflects on issues with petitionary prayer.
* I had intended several weeks ago to link to DarwinCatholic's The Vatican's Rifles, but somehow never did. It's about the M1868 Pontificio, the cartridge rifle manufcatured for the army of the Papal States prior to 1900.
* Arsen Darnay on philosophy and practicality (among other things):
In ordinary life people make distinctions between the practical and the philosophical. I hear people say: "Well, let’s not get too philosophical about that." This stance puts philosophy into an airy-fairy region of reality and suggests that it has no practical bearing, thus that it isn’t real. I note here that one does not encounter this attitude uniformly across the globe. It is the product of a culture. For a while, about fifteen years ago, I had frequent dealings with a number of Russian immigrants. These were ordinary people, not intellectuals. They tended to come alive precisely when "things got philosophical"; they valued that mode of thought; it stimulated them; they could and did participate.
* Kyle Cupp had a very good post on fatherhood recently.
* I didn't really say anything about Michael Jackson. I don't think he was a musical genius, but he certainly did know how to put on a show. And I can't help but link to what I think is the best music video ever made. It helps that I really like Vincent Price; and yes, despite Ron Rosenbaum's assessment otherwise, the song itself is quite good, although considered on its own not Jackson's best. And it's difficult to think of any other pop musician who could pull this sort of thing off. (I'm also mystified by Rosenbaum's challenge to name one post-Thriller song; the obvious response is "Smooth Criminal".)
* Sherry's Hundred Hymn List continues:
#76 I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say
#75 Redeemed How I Love to Proclaim It
#74 The Battle Hymn of the Republic
#73 Shout to the Lord
#74 is the first hymn on the list that was among my recommendations.
* Steven Hales with a quick guide to proving a negative.
* Christina Hoff Sommers responds to some of her critics. There are indeed a number of persistent myths running around feminist scholarship (this sort of thing is always a danger when philosophers deal with issues of immediate practical import); although, of course, there are criticisms of Sommers that focus on other aspects of her work besides her criticism of misused statistics.
ADDED LATER:
* In the comments Vanna gives a link to what looks like an interesting documentary on Zen Buddhism.
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