Fragmenta Philosophica

Frankl

As Auschwitz is remembered around the world, I think of a man I admire greatly, and from whom I have learned much: Viktor Frankl.

His writings breathe wisdom, and are profoundly humane.

Pyromania

With the discussion and debate over the future of social security, I'm starting to feel happily connected again to my "libertarian" roots. I regret that a concomitant of that may be that I alienate some with whom I was (and am) in sympathy regarding the merits of dethroning Saddam Hussein - and may further alienate those patient souls who suffer my ramblings, with yet another reason to doubt my sanity - but, hey ... as I say in my "About Me" section: "I don't believe that a greater sphere of personal liberty would by any means be a painless or perfect curative for various societal ills, but I am strongly drawn to a system which weds maximal rights to responsibilities (consequences), and creates a protected sphere for the culturally antinomian individual"; and, "I err on the side of the individual and the private, vs. the collective and the public."

Consequently, I err on the side of liberty in the great, perennial tension between liberty and equality. In fact, I'd argue that if that ever-elastic epithet, the signatum of which everyone loves to hate, "fascism," has any stable meaning in the common parlance, it connotes a modern regime in which liberty is heedlessly traded for security - in a collective frenzy.

The welfare state (the natural domain of "social security") is not, of course, socialism - though according to Von Mises' celebrated dictum, "Middle of the road policy leads to socialism" (in my view he's correct, in terms of the logic of economic intervention, though certainly is incorrect, existentially). I take serious Leftism very seriously - especially orthodox Marxism, which though considered to be a dead letter by many, is still a doctrine of great explanatory power and comprehensiveness (I don't believe this accounts for its "evangelical" potency during much of the 20th century, by the way, but that's another matter). Thus I often think about socialism vs. the market order, and find that opposition to be absolutely fascinating, in terms of the presuppositions and entailments of each allegiance.

The historical "dialectic," if you will, of the relation of the "free market" - or, rather, the cosmos in which it historically was situated, "Liberalism" - to Socialism was brilliantly encapsulated by one of my heroes, the great English Catholic historian, Christopher Dawson.

"[T]he Socialist criticism of Liberalism was at least in its early form a product of Liberal ideology. It was the extension to a wider class of the ideal which had been at first limited to the politically conscious minority. The fundamental appeal of Socialism lay in its assertion of real social rights against abstract political ones. It is a recall to the same principle which has inspired English Liberalism and which was stated so admirably by one of the spokesmen of Cromwell's army when he declared, 'The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the richest he.' ...

"This assertion of the right of every man to live a full human life is the essence of Socialism, and thus far from being in opposition to the Liberal Tradition [namely, the wider tradition of which 19th century Liberalism was a manifestation - Ed.] it is an extension of that tradition from the sphere of law and politics to economics and culture."

Despite this sympathetic reading, Dawson adds,

"Yet it is impossible to ignore the existence of an anti-liberal element in Socialism which has contributed more than any other factor to the breakdown of freedom in the modern world."

(The Judgement of the Nations, "The Failure of Liberalism," 1943)

Why might that be? Putting Dawson's account aside, for a moment, it's instructive to consider the view of Robert Heilbroner - no orthodox Marxist, admittedly, but long a foe of the market order, and a Socialist of a kind - who wrote in 1978:

"Socialism...must depend for its economic direction on some form of planning, and for its culture on some form of commitment to the idea of a morally conscious collectivity....

"If tradition cannot, and the market system should not, underpin the socialist order, we are left with some form of command as the necessary means for securing its continuance and adaptation. Indeed, that is what planning means...

"The factories and stores and farms and shops of a socialist socioeconomic formation must be coordinated...and this coordination must entail obedience to a central plan...

"The rights of individuals to their Millian liberties [are] directly opposed to the basic social commitment to a deliberately embraced collective moral goal... Under socialism, every dissenting voice raises a threat similar to that raised under a democracy by those who preach antidemocracy."

(quoted at The Man who Told the Truth)

While it would be a mistake to assume that this pronunciamento of a once-prominent Leftist is authoritative-normative for all thinkers on the Left, it was the view of a sympathetic theorist.

Ergo, putting the historical record of avowedly "communist" regimes aside, it would be good to know which factors allow simultaneously to square the expected benevolence, "liberation" even, of a society in which private ownership of the means of production has been entirely abolished with the consequent "... revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, the use of the power of the state as a weapon to destroy every social element which is opposed [to the proletariat], the substitution of the mass for the individual as the centre of all cultural and moral values ..."
(Dawson, ibid.).

In other words, on what reasonable grounds could one expect that this alleged interrugnum would indeed be just that - a temporary, albeit extreme, series of measures, which will eventuate in the evanescence of the state's coercive apparatus, of the "state" itself, even? Is this not, rather, "the idolatry of the state"?

Fragmenta Catallactica

"The welfare state's compulsory aid paralyzes people's willingness to take care of their own needs and its financial burden considerably weakens people's ability to do so, while on the other hand, this limitation of self-provision makes people more and more dependent upon compulsory public aid and increases their claim on it."

(Wilhelm Roepke, "Robbing Peter to Pay Paul: On the Nature of the Welfare State")

If the true believers in the nobility and necessity of "social security" will prevent its conversion to a program which explicitly encourages and facilitates even a modest kind of "self-provision," then I hope that it can at least be transformed into a social mechanism of bare-bones coherence: sc., a straight-up, means-tested, Dole for the Elderly, etc. At least then it would truly be social insurance - securing it beneficiaries against extreme indigence. 

Amen

At Reason.com, Chris Lehmann reviews a new book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason –
which takes the not unfashionable view that it is religion, per se, which is to blame for the dynamics and
exigencies of the “War on Terrorism.”

The author of the book, Sam Harris, seems to make some points which deserve a more sympathetic reception than Lehmann
allows, but Lehmann takes him to task in a respect which dovetails quite nicely with some things which I’ve been thinking about
recently.

“For nearly as long as there have been villages, there have been village atheists, the hypervigilant debunkers who lovingly
detail the many contradictions, fallacies, and absurdities that flow from belief in holy writ … village atheists are
as numerous, and as shrill, as they’ve ever been, for the simple reason that the successive revolutions in thought that
have furthered their cause—the Enlightenment and Darwinism—have been popular busts. As the secular mind loses mass
allegiance, it becomes skittish and reclusive, succumbing to the seductive fancy that its special brand of wisdom
is too nuanced, too unblinkingly harsh for the weak-minded Christer, ultraorthodox scold, or wooly pagan.”

And further,

“Harris’ stolid—dare one say dogmatic?—failure to see anything in contemporary religion other than the exclusive,
world-conquering fantasizing of monotheism at its worst keeps his book mired squarely in a painfully anachronistic
atheist’s bill of indictments, cribbed in most particulars from the heyday of Enlightenment skepticism.”

Even as a non-believer, it seems to me to be a great mistake intellectually – and an injustice – to fail to distinguish
qualitatively between the various world-religions, as well as to gloss over distinctions which obtain within those
religions (“deonominationally”). Village atheism is just dumb – and annoying. It almost makes one long for a providential
cudgel to materialize and rap the two-dimensional villagers on the head.

I’m often bemused that some atheists think that there’s a sort of fellowship entailed by atheism. Atheism is pure
negation – what’s important and revealing isn’t what one lacks a belief in or what one isn’t (a-theism = not being a
theist, sc., a believer in god(s)) but rather what one is for. Many of my intellectual heroes weren’t /aren’t mere
theists, but pious men since, among other factors, a certain kind of piety imbues with moral seriousness and profundity.

It’s that note of “piety” – or, rather, its lack – which to me captures the poverty of prosaic atheism; a ho-hum, hidebound
creed, which has no feel for the mysteries and terrors of existence, and thus lacks a sense of reverence (I acknowledge that
there can be a fine line between seeing terrors and being terrified, and beholding mystery and being mystified).
I’m puzzled that a younger Nietzsche idealized atheism as a kind of recognition-mark for a new era, “In hoc signo vinces”
(Daybreak, I.96). By contrast, I’m partial to the ethos of a later literary creation, Zarathustra, who is described as
the most pious of the non-believers - a character type beyond the garden variety, to be sure.

In conclusion, I call Hegel as my witness:

"Immature minds delight in argumentation and fault-finding, because it is easy enough to find fault, though hard to see the
good and its inner necessity. The learner always begins by finding fault, but the scholar sees the positive merit in
everything. In religion, this or that is quickly dismissed as superstitious, but it is infinitely harder to apprehend
the truth underlying the superstition" (Philosophy of Right, Addition to para. 268)

Wading back in

I'm havin' trouble gettin' the bloggin' groove goin', know what I'm sayin' sayin'?

I do notice, with some bemusement, that the most popular google hit to this site of late is for "Doggy Style." That, and (as ever?!) "Rita Hayworth Nude"." Why the latter I cannot fathom (and more shall come, since I've just repeated the offending phrase).

By the way - Is there mirth in Myrrh?