Misplacement

 Someone can have misplaced gratitude, that is, misplaced acts of gratitude. You can also have misplaced compassion, misplaced generosity, misplaced honesty, misplaced respect. When we look at all of the cases, a pattern starts to result:

(1) In these 'misplaced' cases the virtue itself is fine. That is, misplaced gratitude is the act of gratitude; even if your gratitude is misplaced, it can express a genuine virtue of gratitude. You can acquire the virtue of gratitude by acts that include misplaced acts of gratitude. Something is wrong with the act, but the acquired virtues are unaffected.

(2) All of the relevant cases seem to be closely tied to what St. Thomas calls the potential parts of justice. You can occasionally make a case for misplaced acts of virtue from some other region of the realm of virtue (misplaced caution, perhaps, or misplaced patience, or misplaced docility), but I think when we look at such cases more closely, we will always find that a potential part of justice is always involved somewhere. I think we can actually rationally prove something like this. By the very nature of the case, misplaced acts of virtue require two things:

(a) An identifiable standard of right action: They need this in order to be misplaced. There has to be something to distinguish the misplaced and the correctly placed.

(b) A latitude in how this standard applies: They need this to prevent the misplacement from making the act inconsistent with the virtue.

This is exactly the profile of potential parts of justice, which are virtues that (like justice) have a standard of rightness based on what is in some sense due but (unlike justice) have a looseness in the debt or in how it is paid. Gratitude, like justice, is in some sense a rendering of what is due: it can be misplaced. Gratitude, unlike justice, doesn't make things even: thus there is no exact standard that it has to fit. Because of this combination, we can have misplaced gratitude: gratitude in cases where we are not getting what's due right can at least sometimes still be real cases of gratitude.

This would also explain, of course, why it's difficult to make sense of 'misplaced justice' in a sense where the justice would still be genuinely just. If you aren't actually contributing to making things even, you're not meeting the standard of justice. Justice has fairly strict and exact standards, and the misplacing the act means that you are no longer meeting them, however well intentioned you might be.

(3) I said before that I think that in non-justice-family virtues we only get misplacement if a potential part of justice is involved. Virtues can 'command' acts of other virtues. (The same is true of vice.) For instance, you could, out of gratitude, sacrifice to God; then the act of the virtue of religion (sacrifice to God) is also, as if it were an instrument, an act of grattitude. So when a virtue annexed to justice 'commands' another virtue, it introduces the above conditions, and misplacement becomes possible, because the non-justice-family virtue is acting as a sort of instrument to the justice-family virtue.

(4) Do all potential parts of justice allow for misplacement. St. Thomas gives the following as virtues annexed to justice as if they were potential parts:

religion
filial piety
observance (respect)
truthfulness (honesty)
gratitude
vindication
liberality (generosity)
amiability 

Of these, we've already noted that you can obviously have cases of gratitude, honesty, generosity, and respect. 

Vindication is trickier, because it is the virtue concerned with punishment, and misplacement of punishment could very well be unjust, as one of the key components of justice is not to harm. Obviously if every misplacement of vindication involved injustice, misplacement would not be possible here. However, I don't think this is the case. I think there are genuine cases in which punishing the wrong person as an honest error, while obviously a defective act, could very well be consistent with the virtue. But perhaps it's easier to think of the misplacement not in terms not of persons but in terms of punishments, in which one could apply the wrong punishment in a way that does not involve acting viciously. Misplaced vindication may be rare, but I don't think it's impossible.

The three best candidates for potential parts of justice that do not allow misplacement, then, are religion, filial piety, and amiability. 

Religion obviously doesn't allow much room for misplacement, because misplacement gets you easily into idolatry (if you misplace by worshipping something other than God) or undue worship (if you misplace by worshipping with the wrong kind of worship). In a sense, the seriousness of worship squeezes out most of the room for misplacement by introducing a higher strictness of standard. In a sense this is what justice was doing with vindication: it was introducing a stricter standard of what is due that could cause problems with misplacement. Since here the stricter standard is part of the virtue itself, rather than another virtue, there's even less room. Nonetheless, it's perhaps just difficult to have misplaced religion that is still virtuous religion, and not absolutely impossible. Think of Emeth in C. S. Lewis's The Last Battle, for instance.

Filial piety is a candidate for much the same reason as religion -- it involves a stricter standard of what is due. If religion can be misplaced, then obviously filial piety could, in principle, although the reverse is not necessarily true. The distinctive difficulty with filial piety is that it's harder to think of how misplacement would work. Filial piety is respect for parents, but the way it works extends to others -- you can have acts of filial piety to people who are not literally your parents. Obviously you can have them to any of your ancestors, but also to those who are in a parental position to you for some other reason, and to people and things who are associated with your parents in a way that concerns filial piety. So merely extending acts to people other than parents is not misplacement; if we are thinking in terms of other people, it would have to be people who have no parental association with you at all, and it's difficult, although perhaps not impossible, to think of real-world cases. But perhaps again we should think of it not in terms of different people, but of acts of filial piety toward parents (or parental figures) that happen to be inappropriate for some other reason -- for instance, we could perhaps talk of misplaced piety in cases where a child is giving a parent the kind of respect that would ordinarily be right, but is not appropriate because of (say) sexual abuse.

Amiability, or friendliness, is in some sense at the opposite end. Religion and filial piety are candidates because they are most like justice in terms of strictness of what is due; they differ from justice primarily in that there is no payment adequate to making things even. Amiability on the other end is the potential part of justice that is least like justice in terms of strictness of what is due -- it has the most latitude of all the virtues annexed justice. You can think of it in terms of a kind of debt -- you owe it to people try to be friendly -- but that's so loose a sense of debt that one might think it merely metaphorical. That there is some kind of connection with debt, however, is perhaps more obviously seen negatively: if you treat people in an unamiable way, you have treated them in a way that they do not deserve.  Nonetheless, this is quite loose. This might make one worry whether we then would still have enough of a standard to allow the misplacement, particularly as we owe our 'debt' of friendliness to everyone -- i.e., we owe it to everyone to act in such a way that we ourselves are not shutting down all possibility of genuine friendship. Nonetheless, friendship is not anything goes, and it seems you can very well have misplacement in the same way we suggested with filial piety, but even more easily: your act of friendliness, while consistent with the virtue, can be the sort of thing that would ordinarily be appropriate, but is not in the case due to some extrinsic reason.

Thus I think it is in fact true that all potential parts of justice allow misplaced acts of the virtue, although in cases where there can be additional strictness, either due to the matter of the virtue or due to interaction with some other, stricter, virtue like justice, it can be more rare because more difficult.

Doctor Subtilis

 Today is the memorial of Bl. John Duns Scotus. He is thought to have been born in 1265 or 1266. There is a longstanding dispute over whether the 'Scotus' in his name means that he was from Scotland or Northern England, but the 'Duns' is usually thought to indicate that he was born in Duns, Scotland. He became a Franciscan (usually thought to have taken the habit in Dumfries) and was ordained in England in 1291. He studied at Oxford, and then taught at Paris. He was suddenly sent to teach in cologne in 1307, and died in 1308. Thus the famous poem on his sarcophagus in Cologne: 'Scotia birthed me, Anglia accepted me, Gallia taught me, Cologne holds me.' From the Ordinatio, Book I, distinction 3, part 3, question 4, article 1.1, section 580, on the image of God in the soul (my rough translation):

The soul has in itself some perfection according to which it is first act with respect to generated awareness (notitiae genitae), and it has in itself some perfection according to which it formally receives generated awareness, and it has in itself some perfection according to which it formally receives volition. These three perfections are called 'memory', 'understanding', and 'will' -- or 'soul', inasmuch as it has these. Thus the soul, inasmuch as it has the total first act with respect to intellection (to wit, something of the soul and the object present to it as intelligible), is called 'memory', and this in particular 'perfect memory', including both intellect and that by which the object is present to it. The same soul inasmuch as it receives generated awareness is called 'understanding', and 'perfect understanding' as it is under that generated awareness. The will is also called perfect inasmuch as it is under a perfect act of willing. Therefore, taking these three on the part of the soul as they are under their three acts, in these three terms, I say, is consubstantiality as these three realities that are on the soul's part, but there is distinction and origin as these actualities are received in the soul according to these realities of the soul.

(It's worth remembering that 'perfection' in medieval Latin is a synonym for 'completeness' or 'completion', and thus is here a technical term for 'what completes something as a being'. 'Genitum' can also mean 'birthed'.)

Witness

 We, too, though we are not witnesses of Christ's actual resurrection, are so spiritually. By a heart awake from the dead, and by affections set on heaven, we can as truly and without figure witness that Christ liveth, as they did. He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself. Truth bears witness by itself to its Divine Author. He who obeys God conscientiously, and lives holily, forces all about him to believe and tremble before the unseen power of Christ. To the world indeed at large he witnesses not; for few can see him near enough to be moved by his manner of living. But to his neighbours he manifests the Truth in proportion to their knowledge of him; and some of them, through God's blessing, catch the holy flame, cherish it, and in their turn transmit it. And thus in a dark world Truth still makes way in spite of the darkness, passing from hand to hand. And thus it keeps its station in high places, acknowledged as the creed of nations, the multitude of which are ignorant, the while, on what it rests, how it came there, how it keeps its ground; and despising it, think it easy to dislodge it. But "the Lord reigneth." He is risen from the dead, "His throne is established of old; He is from everlasting. The floods have lifted up their voice, the floods lift up their waves. The Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many waters, yea, than the mighty waves of the sea. His testimonies are very sure; holiness becometh His house forever."

[John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, Volume 1, Witnesses of the Resurrection.] 

Dashed Off XXXIV

 "The salvation that Jesus obtained through his death and resurrection encompasses all dimensions of human life, such as culture, the economy and work, family and marriage, respect for human dignity and life, health, communication, education, and politics." Leo XIV

The work of baptizing the nations does not begin at the start of the rite of baptism but large before. Both catechesis and preparing for infant baptism are part of the work of baptizing, although not yet baptism itself.

Signs can be united by (1) interobjectual relations (including various kinds of sameness); (3) mereological relations of representamen to representamen; (3) relations of their interpretants to the same capacity for interpretance; (4) one sign's representamen being the object of another; and so forth.

We generally make signs by introducing differences that can serve as representamen, with teh aim of representing an object.

aphoristic condensation of the conclusions of many lines of reasoning, taken together

The most basic 'magical' effects of writing -- externalized memory, communication in absence -- are fairly immediate; but its more powerful effects  take a considerable amount of art -- rhetorical, poetical, cryptographical, etc.

To understand human death requires both tragedy and comedy.

Joy is the orderliness of love.

"Genuine intellectual nourishment not only strengthens and frees our minds, but also plants in us the seeds of humility --  a virtue necessary to all aspects of the intellectual life, including the practice of composition." Brian Kemple

A philosophical approach can be improved by improving (1) its archive (accessible history); (2) its means of analysis (3) its means of synthesis (4) its mode of presentation (for communication) (5) its means of collaboration (6) its depth of conversation.

The true Christian politics bears the wounds of Christ.

Proof grows up in a stew of things unproven, and yet for all that is proof still.

The human person is both child of God and gift of God, both divine representative and divine means of love.

By identifying causes and effects, the mind fulfills its own ends.

The adequation of mind and thing involves not merely correspondence but also resonance.

aesthetic causality in fiction

Fictional characters have the same material presence to us that most of our fellow human beings do.

A sustainable morality requires not having to think things through explicitly at every poitn.

We say that something is good for something if it allows it to be and even more so if it contributes to its being.

We accumulate probabilities in order to determine where to place our certainty.

Not all thought is metaphor, but no thinking mind can avoid metaphoricizing.

We primarily learn not by private judgment but by cooperative, collaborative, common judgment.

Ward, On Nature and Grace (pp. 44-45) anticipates the open question argument in arguing against divine command theories of obligation; see also "Ethics in its bearing on Theism," which is more general. (Cf also the distinct but related argument argument pp 46-47).

"The object of thought always presents itself either as contingent or as necessary." Brownson
"Contingent existences are active only in their relation to the necessary; consequently are intelligible or cognizable only in their relation of contingency."

"Cognitum est principum specificativum cognitionis." Cajetan

External things that begin to be understood, and thus to be intellectual objects, do not exist in their own nature in the intellect, but still they must appear to the intellect in such a way that they can be actually understood; structured in its activity by this appearance, the intellect must understand the thing appearing. But the understanding is not an activity of the thing understood; so it must be an assimilative activity of the intellect that is properly the appearing of the thing to the intellect, to which the intellect adds its own intentional actions, thereby forming concepts through which it understands the thing appearing, and can continue to understand it when it is not present, and moreover can understand it in one aspect and not another, and, of course, can communicate this by further actions relying on the concepts.

Kant's categories do not apply to what is prior to judgment.

As formal languages have their notational grammar and logic, so also they have their own particular rhetoric, concerned with their communicative presentation.

Extrinsic formal causes get their relevance to any particular situation from final and efficient causes.

Boswell's Life of Johnson gives us more of Johnson than it explicitly says, through juxtaposition and composition of anecdote.

We participate in ecosystems by sharing final causes, making cooperation possible.

"One law of nature traverses and controls or reverses another." Gladstone

Marian intercession as a symbol of the work of the Holy Spirit who overshadows her

Our social relations are part of our intellectual resources.

We make choices both to gratify and to oppose our desires.

A strictly Humean account of 'uniformity of nature' would make it nothing other than consistency in present experience between our memory and our experience.

"If there be Necessary Truth, there must be a Necessary Being, on whom such Truth is founded." W. G. Ward

If you want to be completely and unqualifiedly creative about anything, you must first invent the cosmos; and if you want to be humanly creative, you must first quasi-invent it, in a point of view.

All the galaxies of all the universe are but part of the dowry of Christ's Bride.

We learn by reducing complicated chains and networks of reaosning to simple habits of thought distinct from those chains and networks.

Claims are confirmed by postulational as well as by evidential routes, by being useful to inquiry as well as probable in light of it.

A very large portion of reasoning is not so much inferential (central as that is) but simply re-sorting, re-examining, and re-organizing one's thoughts, both individually and collectively.

'Seek well to do good well.'

All constitutions are in a sense mixed constitutions, but in most parts are existent in only moral persons or in fictional/symbolic presentation. Eveyr constitution suggests mixed constitution as its fulfillment.

"Sense attains existence in act without itself knowing that it is existence." Maritain

aphorism and system built unsystematically

No person is a member of only one society.

The human person has a twofold nature, natural personhood and moral personhood that overlays it.

national landmarks as passive members of society

the educational and eleemosynary rights of the Church

"A society which has lost its religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture." Christopher Dawson 

'Affective states' and 'cognitive states' are not two different groups of component states, but constructs in two different ways of analyzing mental actions and passions.

With many forms of compatibilism, fictional characters have real free will.

Characterization is often a matter of making sure that character conduct is reasons-responsive and able to be an object of reactive attitudes.

constitutive vs attribute approaches to free will

Better to be humiliated by saints than to be praised by the damned.

Love is always the root of genuine liberty.

The skills needed to make parenting work heavily overlaps the skills needed to make conjugal partnership work.

Being for something is a resultant of integrations of attitudes.

(A) He went to the store but (B) he came home with nothing.
(A & ~(~B))
If but is and-not-not, a question is how it works in systems without double negation rule.

Etiquette and fine art have affinities in how they relate to morality as a higher system of norms.

We learn in childhood many good habits and survival skills that have to be re-learned in adulthood.

palliative and curative medicine as both forms of sub-creation (Sirach 38:1-5)

The history of the Roman See has been alternating between walking on water while focusing on Christ and sinking into the sea on attending to the waves.

The reason we find in us is an echo-reason.

'The world is everything that is as it falls.'

Human beings are active personators.

Ps 73:12 LXX (Ps 74:12 in MT): God as "our king before ages"

The principle of noncontradiction is implicit in the notion of method and in the notion of clear and distinct perception.

The First Day of the Church: The Light of the Gospel, as separated from heresy (First Eight Ecumenical Councils), approximately to 1000 or so
The Second Day of the Church: The Boundaries of Authority (up to & including Vatican II at least) approximately to 2000 or so
--- by this speculative scheme, the third day would be symbolized by gathering together land and seas, and by vegetation. Perhaps this suggests the building of a framework for a massive pluralism of institutions in the Church.

In the end, only Eternity can remember us as we ought to be remembered.

There are many stories on the theme of 'Sometimes you have to wander to find the right version of your life'.

The Holy Virgin in the Annunciation represents all of Israel and all of humanity, making the most important decision after Christ's own acceptance on the Cross, and as daughter of Adam, the son of God, she willingly becomes the ground (adamah) from which God forms the New Adam, Christ, the Son of God and Son of Man (adam).

Covenant is the framework by which God works with human beings and not merely above or through them.

We can understand a stone as a composition of atoms, as a system of forces, as a tangle of relations within and without, as a logico-mathematical structure, as a symbol of other things, and as a type of higher things.

semiotics as the origami of intelligibility

All human events have a rationality, and while they often have it very defectively and in an absolute sense, they only rarely have it defectively in a local sense.

'Advisability' is a moral notion connected with the virtue of prudence.

If you're a moral error theorist, you should stop trying to give advice; it's optional, and you have no basis for it.

causation -> dependent intelligibility

Sociology of religion is often very poor at explaining the social self-image of religious participants, despite the fact that this is one of the things it is supposed to explain.

In one-directional (single process) causation C -> E, we can use E to estimate C, if there is a connected measurement.

A contract only has force within a legal system; this would have to be true of the social contract as of any other.

Like gardening, building a good vicinage and neighborhood is hard work; like gardening, a healthy society will do reasonable things to facilitate it; for civil society, however, good vicinage and neighborhood is an actual end and thus facilitating and supporting it is a requirement.

Liberal Christianity always has difficulty with the concept of disciple; this seems not logically necessary, but rather emergent from the kinds of motivations that typically lead to explicit Liberal Christianity.

An interesting aspect of 19th century Anglo-American philosophy and theology is its slogany nature; people are always trying to condense systems, positions, and dsiputes to catchy phrases and capitalized nouns, and then they factionalize with them.

There is never a single art or skill for coming to know things.

the role of scientifically adjacent hobbies in science education and popularization

Adventure, literal or figurative, often begins with a windfall, literal or figurative.

Love is the principle of the possibility of value.

ordinary language philosophy as clearing up "ragged-outlined notions" without worrying about strict formalization

"Dilemmas derive from wrongly imputed parities of reasoning." Ryle

The natural, used socially, becomes conventional as well.

In fiction we often explore the logical powers of words, including the lesser-used powers.

The person is that to which all kinds of talk can be related.

The fact that the verb 'know' does not wholly behave like the word 'run' is the impress of the world on our language.

Much of domain-specific competence is just knowing how to avoid the most likely avoidable errors.

Sometimes when we speak fo virtues we are really speaking of virtue-skill complexes or of complexes of different virtues.

Acquired virtues are connected because (1) they have a common architectonic standard (prudence) which we know from the definition of virtue; (2) they have shared general properties, which we also can derive from the definition of virtue (activity, reasonableness, moderateness, and firmness), although in different proportions; (3) they are cooperative in a shared pursuit, that of the life of eudaimonia; (4) they converge toward a shared exemplar, God; (5) they express one shared kind of source, personal subject of human nature; (6) they facilitate each other incidentally in many ways, in that there are circumstances in which only one virtue can safeguard or support the action of another virtue.

Before we have virtues, we have habits that can become virtues.

Everything in both Ockham's life and his moral philosophy suggests that he did not really understand prudence.

Notitia complexa is only one action of prudence.

Ockham's arguments on the connection of virtues seem little more than an unintentional admission that he uses the term 'virtue' equivocally.

Acts of prudence are not merely natural acts.

Okham's five degrees of virtue are in fact just things that might be done by a virtue; anyone withou courage might act at any of those levels, although one might perhaps argue that, all other things being equal,  more developed virtue more consistently attains the higher degrees under difficult conditions.

Stone holds us up, and stone weighs us down, and such is law.

We form legislatures because reason already legislates; we form courts because reason already judges.

the sitos and the opson of an argument

"(1) Christ entrusted His religion to the care of one corporate Society as its infallble expositor, (2) He declared that the corporate Society should last to the end of the world. (3) in every age, therefore, one corporate Society exists which is thus infallible. (4) But there is no existing corporate society of which any one even alleges that it is thus infallible, except the Chruch in communion with Rome." W. G. Ward

A problem with nineteenth-century freethinking explanations of miracles is that they often just take the miracle and deem it psychological, despite there being no more a psychological mechanism for it than a physical. Thus they stay miracles; they are just now located in the mind, as if that somehow made them ordinary.

Edwin Abbott Abbott has a rather bizarre argument (in The Anglican Career of Cardinal Newman) that 'holiness' is a concept made otiose by Christ, lingering in the NT only as a relic, that should be 'used with caution' because it reintroduces, or can, the servitude of law. Does he talk about this elsewhere?

We don't make beliefs; we grow them. But it is *we* who grow them.

Tractarianism was a movement of young men enamored of tactics, negligent of strategy, inconsistent in logistics, disparaging of diplomacy. That they had the effect they did is an indicator of how much can be achieved on will alone.

As sacramental person, the Church has features of both natural person and moral person, although, if forced to classify it as one or the other, it should be classified as moral because of its collegial solidarity.

John Froelich's invention of the gasoline tractor was a greater achievement for civilization than you would likely learn from history books.

Analytic propositions are grounded on (logical) genus-species relations. Synthetic propositions are grounded on broader classificational matters that these relations presuppose, or that these relations force either singly or (more often) collectively. Therefore if there are a prior analytic propositions, there are a priori synthetic propositions, namely, those based on what is presupposed or force by the subject matter of a priori analytic propositions themselves.

From deduction we get the (at least conditionally) certain. From induction we get the (at least conditionally) reliable. From abduction we get the (at least conditionally) explanatory. From examination or trial we get the (at least conditionally) secure.

'Exact' is a relative term and always presupposes measurement against a standard.

Whether something is exactly true or approximately true is a matter of how the truth is measured, not of whether it is true.

We trust memory like we trust the only person who helps, by necessity and availability, independent of (but not exclusive of) any further reasons to trust it. Indeed, this trust is a precondition for even getting to the point of knowing enough about memory to ask about further reasons.

The veracity of the Creator is the explanation for why we have a capacity to discover truth, but not the reason why we know it is a capacity to discover truth.

Nature Weaves a Marvellous Braid

Entangled
by Lucy Larcom 

Birds among the budding trees,
Blossoms on the ringing ground:
Light from those? or song from these?
Can the tangle be unwound? 

For the bluebird's warbled note,
Violet-odors hither flung;
And the violet curved her throat,
Just as if she sat and sung. 

Dandelions dressed in gold,
Give out echoes clear and loud,
To the oriole's story, told
With gay poise and gesture proud. 

And the swaying yellow-bird,
Trilling, thrills their hollow stems,
Until every root is stirred,
Under their dropped diadems. 

Swallows thicken through the air,---
Curve and drift of plumy brown,---
Wafting, showering everywhere,
Melody's light seed-notes down. 

Beauty, music on the earth;
Music, beauty in the sky;
Guess the mystery of their birth!
All the haunting what and why. 

Nature weaves a marvellous braid;
Tints and tones how deftly blent.
Who unwinds the web she made?
Thou, who wearest her wise content. 

Wrapped within her beauty's fold,
Of her song thyself a part,
Plainly are her secrets told
Unto thee, O pure of heart!

Blue

I happened to wear a blue shirt today, and a student asked me if I was wearing it because Texas turned blue. (She was just curious.) That was definitely not the reason; the reason is that I need to do laundry, and the clean shirt I still had was blue. But it's a sign of how interesting this midterm election was that it's in the air; I haven't come across people talking about an election so much since Trump's first win.

Here in Texas, James Talarico (D) beat Ken Paxton (R) for the Senate. That wasn't really surprising; Paxton is not widely liked, even by Republicans, because he is widely regarded as corrupt. You can tell that by the fact that in the lead-up to the election there were an astounding number of political advertisements about how it's important for Republicans to remember that they aren't only voting for the person but for the party. If Paxton had won, it would have been a narrow victory. The surprise was that Talarico beat Paxton by quite a lot. This is surprising. Talarico is also not very widely liked; he is widely seen as an opportunist and as a bit smarmy-televangelist in his approach to things. But Democrats were much more willing to turn out for Talarico than Republicans were to turn out for Paxton, and the result was a very solid Democratic victory, by percentage of actual votes. But notably, Talarico got less than Cruz got in 2024 (by a lot). (And as I have noted before, Ted Cruz is literally famous for being difficult to like; Republicans back him because he is seen as generally delivering on what he promises, and perhaps a little bit because he drives Democrats crazy.) There was not much enthusiasm for voting in the Texas Senate race this year. [ADDED LATER: I have revised this paragraph slightly; I had accidentally spliced two different sentences together so that it seemed to misstate the comparison of votes.]

The truly astounding thing is that Gina Hinojosa beat Greg Abbott. Abbott had seemed completely unassailable. He is a paraplegic with excellent business connections and a Hispanic wife and a daughter who are very popular, running as a Republican in a very Republican state. In every election to this point, he has absolutely blown away the Democratic contenders. He is very hard to run against. But he was beaten soundly by Hinojosa. Hinojosa is not completely unknown, but compared to Abbott she might as well have been. She was a very good campaigner. I would be skeptical of the idea that Talarico's campaign contributed much to his success, but I think Hinojosa's probably helped at least a little. She's a charming person who ran on education and the economy; I doubt the former had much of a role to play, but the latter might. I think Abbott's loss was primarily a combination of two things, however: Paxton massively dragging down the Republican vote and Abbott doing relatively little to campaign. Some people suggest that high gas prices and the Iran war, on the national stage, were also contributors, and maybe they are partial contributors, although I don't think they dominated here. The election was Abbott's to lose, and Abbott lost it; it was not purely his fault, but it was his responsibility to adjust to the conditions.

Texas has what is known as a 'plural executive'. The Governor is not powerless, but the Texas Constitution deliberately limits the Governor's power; the Governor is not even the most powerful political office in the state. The Lieutenant Governor is, however unintuitive that may seem. The Democrats won that office too, with Vikki Goodwin beating the Republican incumbent, Dan Patrick. That is the election loss that the Republicans will find painful; the Lieutenant Governor guides the legislative agenda and controls key committee appointments in the legislature. In Texas, the state legislature is king; while there are checks and balances of a limited sort, the entire state is set up so as to make it difficult to mount any opposition to state law. The party that controls the state legislature, which is now the Democrats, can mostly do whatever it wants.

In principle, if Democrats govern moderately, they could keep many of the offices across the country that they have won this election for a long time. I don't think they will be able to keep Texas, either Senate-wise or Governor-wise, for very long, even if they do govern moderately (which I do not expect, based on their recent track record). Texas in some sense turned blue, strikingly so, but it's been a weird election. The Democrats seized the offices in a moment of Republican weakness and stupidity, but this is not quite the same as Texas actually 'turning blue' if we turn and look at the voting population rather than the offices. As noted above, this was an extraordinarily weak turnout for Texas Republicans, in which the Republican Senate candidate was actively despised as corrupt by a significant portion of Republicans. The Republicans are all still here, though. There has also not been a huge surge in the Democratic population of the state. That the Republicans lost, and lost so badly, is a sign that even in our polarized times, political parties cannot treat themselves as entitled to votes.

Restoration of the Likeness

 But man is not merely a nobler animal, fashioned by degrees to reason or dignified into genius. His peculiar and distinctive excellence—his real essence—his true nature and destiny consist in his likeness to God; and from this principle proceeds a view of history totally different from that we have just described; for, according to it, man's history must be the history of the restoration of the likeness to God, or of the progress towards that restoration. That this sublime origin of man being once supposed—the divine image has been much altered, impaired, and defaced in the inmost recesses of the human breast, both of man in particular and of mankind in general, is a truth we may learn, independently of the positive doctrine of religion; for clearly is it vouched and confirmed by the testimony of our own feelings, our own experience of life, and a general survey of the world. No man who well knows that the image of God has been stamped on the human soul,—an image, whose old, half-obliterated characters are still to be found on all the pages of primitive history, and whose impress, not utterly effaced, every reflecting mind may discover in its own interior—can ever forego the hope, that, much as that divine image may seem, or may in fact be, impaired, its restoration is still possible. The man who knows from human life, and from his own experience, how great and arduous is this work—how many obstacles oppose its accomplishment, and how easily, even after a partial success, what already appeared won, may be again lost;—the man understanding this, will not be at a loss to comprehend any pause or retrogression, real or apparent, in the march of mankind; he will judge the fact with more equity, and consequently more accuracy; and will, in every case, confide in the guidance of that superior Providence, clearly visible in this regeneration of the world.

[Friedrich Schlegel, The Philosophy of History, James Burton Robertson, tr., Volume I, Lecture VII.]