Late-Night Pre-Final “Wow”

From G. D. Davidson over at The Sci Fi Catholic:

I would pay money to see this. …Or, you know, the feature-length version.

Case in Point

Just as an example of what I meant in the end of the last post…

While I am very sad that Simcha’s blog is on an indefinite hiatus, I’m not going to try to do anything to force her to post further. It just wouldn’t be right.

Democracy, Liberty, and the Modern Species of Man

Final exams looming near in law school land - nay, they are already here! - invariably leads me to wax contemplative upon the themes of man, justice, and the πόλις. And since the examination most lately dispatched was one for a class on the history of American jurisprudence, there’s actually some pragmatic value for me in these musings. Of course, the speculative side of my nature will, through force of habit, charge off in a direction that totally negates whatever slivers of practicality might have existed at the start. Nevertheless, I persist - it entertains me to do so. And it gives me things to write about, so everybody wins.

Something that bothered me back in my first year of law school was tort law. In spite of the best efforts of my professor and the textbook to establish some boundaries and reasonability to the matter, it seems to me that the evolution of tort law has been a process of gradually inverting the common-sense notions of personal responsibility.

First let me explain what is getting inverted. Say that I own a parcel of land, upon which I build an expensive house. Say further that I fill this house with expensive and luxurious amenities. Would I not be justified in wanting to protect this mass of material wealth? So say I build a fence, hidden amongst hedges so that it isn’t aesthetically unpleasant; and say that I post regularly and often on the perimeter of my property that trespassing is not allowed, and that I keep guard dogs to discourage such trespass. Dogs? Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention the half-dozen large Dobermans that roam the grounds.

Okay, so my stuff is now secure, right?

Well, as it turns out, some moron decides to ignore the signs, jump the fence, and try to make it to my house. Predictably, my canine security force corrals him - albeit roughly - and the police take him away to be charged with attempted robbery. Just another dumb criminal who underestimated the seriousness of my security precautions, right?

Oh, yeah, and he’s suing me.

What, you ask? He broke onto my property…what on earth is he entitled to sue about? The fact of the matter is that I’m not actually allowed to use deadly or potentially deadly force to protect my personal assets by default. Realistically, I’m not allowed to use deadly force unless I or another person are at risk.

Why is this, exactly? Because living in a society requires as a matter of course a certain amount of limitations on free will. I may want to eviscerate anyone who tries to break into my home, but society prevents me from doing this because uncontrolled killing is not perceived to be a general good. I can hardly fault the judgment, either.

But there are other sacrifices that autonomy must make in order for the individual to participate in society - and these are regulated far more subtly. Specifically, you as an autonomous individual must respect me as an autonomous individual when I make choices that you disagree with. There are limits to this rule created by overarching moral considerations, but for the general, day-to-day decisions of one’s life, it holds. For example, if you are friends with someone whom I find grating and unequivocally unpleasant, then you may be friends with him and I will choose not to be. You have absolutely no right to try to force me to be friends with him. You might tell me that you think I’m unreasonable, you might tell your friend you think I’m unreasonable, but that’s it. You can’t try to undermine me. It just won’t work - and even if it did, by placing your will over mine you are committing a moral infraction.

Like I said before, this rule has its limits. But that would require a whole new post…and it will come eventually.

Working

In the throes of finals, things move slowly. My actually-substantive posting, for example. Well, I’m going to risk disappointing you yet again, but you’ll have to wait to Wednesday.

Sorry…forgive? Believe me, I’m at least as annoyed as you are.

Lethargy

Well, I did intend to post something today. It’s not like I don’t have the idea. I’m just suffering from a combination of writer’s block and springtime…

I’ll work on it over the weekend, never fear.

As Usual, My Thoughts Through Mediation

As always happens when I have difficulty expressing my thoughts on a particular subject (for example, my dubious feelings regarding Twitter) I have found somebody else who explains exactly what the problem is. Do read the associated text entry, also, since some people think better textually than visually. It may work better for you. Also, “Tycho” is prose gold as it stands, so you’re doing yourself a favor either way.

To return to the subject at hand, let me phrase it now in my own words. Twitter is the Borg with closed captioning. Collective consciousness for the hearing-impaired. A facially mind-blowing mass of continuous, streaming thought. It’s scary.

I understand that there are ways to actually filter the unrelenting flood of “tweets” so that you only obtain the thoughts of the people who you want to follow. Be that as it may, the whole concept of Twitter implicitly embraces a degree of connectivity that I do not want. Now, I’m all for connectivity. I get twitchy if my cell phone is AWOL. I would like to say that I don’t need to check my email every day, but that would be a filthy dirty lie. Still, I have my limits. I like my privacy. I like being unplugged every once in a while. The day I want to hear everything going on with everyone everywhere is the day that I have an interplexing beacon in my head and nanoprobes in my bloodstream:

At least then you get personal force fields.

As a Fence-Hopper I Say “Bugger Off!”

Courtesy of Fumare:

I think that this clip speaks for itself, quite honestly. My initial sentiment was to drive directly to the Capitol building and cause Tom Tancredo to choke to death by (brace for irony) a burrito, but then I thought it was better to let him live and continue to do inadvertent violence to his cause through his asinine xenophobia. I’ve been on both sides of the fence around this issue, I will confess, but the plain fact of the matter is that the Holy Father was making an observation on human nature and fundamental moral rights. I think the underlying point is that since prosperity is a gift from God and not (as the Puritans, Pharisees, and William Kristol would argue) a right stemming from some sort of virtuous industry, then it is something that is properly shared as much as possible. To that end, I would say that the deepest the Holy Father would wade into the nitty-gritty of the immigration debate is to say that our border shouldn’t aspire to the security of Fort Knox.

I don’t mean that Benedict isn’t saying that there’s something wrong with the way we do business now, but he, like all good Pontiffs, isn’t going to presume to give us a 12-step plan for immigration reform. He just gives us the moral imperative. What we do with it (or not) is our business, and that of our eternal souls. Or in Tancredo’s case, his racist, fascist little raisin of an animating principle.

In other news, it was brought to my attention that last Friday’s post was at least potentially obscure - specifically, it was alleged that my treatment of mores created the impression that I was merely swapping a simplistic determinism for a complex determinism. This bothered me, so I went back and reread the thing and came to this conclusion: I am assuming a knowledge of Tocqueville that may be a bit greater than standard, so let me briefly revisit the subject before going forward.

Mores are not deterministic in the way that Marx claims economics is. Mores are, roughly speaking, “habits of the heart” that form a communal morality and generalized code of conduct across the entire polity. It is not adhered to with total consistency throughout (especially in a polity as large as America’s) but it is present in the minds.

Perhaps an example will help. Take the democratic idea of equality, which I mentioned in Friday’s post. This principle advances the idea that all men are basically equal, deserving of parity in treatment. This is not an equality of condition - such an idea would ignore natural inequalities that we can do nothing about and would be, therefore, absurd - but rather of dignity. I have no exalted dignity over and against any other human being, for example. At the most basic level, we are equally created and loved by God. This rule remains the same regardless of who you plug into the equation. I and my brother are of equal in dignity. I and Pope Benedict XVI are of equal dignity. I and Hitler are of equal dignity. Barack Obama and George Bush are of equal dignity. Clear?

This is the principle. The mores that follow from this principle (at least in Tocqueville’s estimation) are social judgments on acceptable conduct. The idea that nobody is particularly entitled to have more weight accorded to their opinion than to another’s, for example, is a democratic more. It’s a faulty judgment, to be sure - since it is a priori true that my opinions are automatically at least twice as weighty as anyone else’s, except for the Pope’s - but it colors the American mind subconsciously.

Again, this is not deterministic because it’s a social moral, not an instinct. The former arises after birth and is seldom compelled, doing its work purely by implication and suggestion; whereas the latter are hard-wired into the brain and are inexorable - it is only with great force of will that they are overcome.

A preview of Friday’s episode: I talk about freedom and its limitations in a society. Stay tuned!

After We Listen to Dick the Butcher…

I of course refer to King Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene II, Line 59. Since I first conceived my grand design to conquer the world, I knew that it should be at the top of the post-coronation agenda: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” It just makes sense, if you think about it. Since all law shall flow through the conduit of my own self under the title of Juris Dictor (one of my many titles, and which shall be on the list of the top five read by my herald every time my presence is announced) there is really no need for a class of professional legal advocates. This is not to say that there will be no true law under my reign, or that my judges will be capricious, tyrannical, or unchecked. Just trust me, it’ll be okay.

Anyway, the second thing I’m going to do is kill all the entirety of the professional media. Them, and all those “experts” and analysts that they have on as a part of the endless procession of talking heads. Also all clowns, because clowns are inherently evil - and mimes, because mimes are like undead clowns. I’m getting ahead of myself, though. There’s still a fair amount of time before I start my campaign up, and I don’t want to tip my hand.

All the same, I feel like I should explain to the second of my target classes why their heads will be on the chopping block, metaphorically and perhaps literally, depending on my mood. (I haven’t decided exactly how I will conduct state executions yet. I’m kind of torn between death by a stadium full of drunk college kids armed with BB guns and death by partial immersion in Coca-Cola - have you seen what that stuff does to chicken bones?) I don’t want to steal the thunder of Del from Old World Swine, but I am tired of clueless pluralists deliberately missing the point of events so completely, and with such blatant bias. I don’t see anyone dredging up some penny-ante dissident Buddhist theologian whenever the Dalai Lama shows up in town. (Incidentally, I would love to know if any such thing even exists. Do Buddhists have schisms and heretics?) And yet for some reason, while the good Tibetan spiritual leader is treated as the dignified head of a worldwide religion, whenever Catholicism comes up it gets treated by a social movement with a disunified base repressed by an unreasonably hierarchical leadership.

When will you people get it? My religion is not a club. It’s a…wait for it…religion. And a religion has tenets, to which one must adhere to be considered a member of the faith. Would a Hindu who ate beef be considered a “real” Hindu? Certainly not by other Hindus, I’m willing to wager. Similarly, a Moslem who thinks that the Prophet was “just a really good guy,” aside from any fatwahs that might issue, would be pretty definitively not be considered a “real” Moslem. Arguably, an uncircumcised man parading around claiming to be a Jew would get laughed out of (hopefully) any synagogue he entered. So why exactly do you treat a Catholic who asserts the “right” to dissent from Church teaching on human life, sexuality, priesthood, or anything else, as if he was a full member of the Church with some sort of validity, clout, or authority? You know what I call someone like that? Not “Catholic,” that’s for damn sure.

I think I’m going to try to pass myself off as a Rastafarian theologian and get “expert” status with some media outlet. I will be a full and practicing member of the religion…except I’ll respectfully dissent from the teaching that Haile Selassie is God Incarnate. Oh, and pot is for losers, even if it’s claimed as a religious observance.

Not Hegel’s Sphinx

Let’s start out by not talking about Hegel until later.

So Karl Marx had this theory of economic determinism. Like all reductionistic historical models, it attempts to take a single aspect of man and make it the ultimate defining characteristic of H. sapiens. And like all such models, while it gets the big picture utterly wrong, it is disturbingly accurate in observing details.

Marx was partially right about one thing: a society and its members are influenced by their economic system. It’s more complicated, obviously - economics, politics, terrain…they all go into shaping what Tocqueville called “mores.” Every society has mores that are unique to themselves. The English, French, Germans, Italians, Spanish, Americans, Russians, Chinese. Every society. And everyone born into a particular society absorbs those mores from day one.

American mores are, of course, unique to America. Again, if you’re raised here, you’re raised in those mores. You can’t help it. The democratic idea of equality, the Puritanical acquisitiveness of capitalism, the onus of self-determination, of license, and so on - everything that America is gets inculcated, rooted in the subconscious.

Now, just because mores are primal like this doesn’t mean that they’re right. It doesn’t mean that they’re wrong, but it doesn’t dictate that they’re right, either. The problem with mores is that they break down over time, causing an erosion of the psyche of the people and the gradual downfall of a society. The killer is that it’s incredibly hard to do anything about it, because the people imbued with the mores don’t perceive the deterioration.

It all sounds terribly depressing and deterministic, doesn’t it? Well, not to worry. Just because someone has the mores of his society doesn’t mean he can’t recognize that and start to change things. I did, through my education. So did a great many others, the same way. There’s the additional advantage of introducing competing mores, such as might be furnished by a religion. I have that in my favor as well, as does every thinking Catholic that I know. So things aren’t as dark as a deterministic view might suggest.

Now comes Hegel…sort of. In his Philosophy of History, Hegel describes the Egyptian Sphinx - with its human head on a feline body - as an expression of man attempting to emerge from the natural world. It is, as my political science professor used to say, a beautiful image. Wrong, because that was not what the Sphinx was built to symbolize; but still, it is an apt analogy for what I am trying to express in this blog - to whit, how it might be possible to pull oneself out of the morass of degraded mores while bringing along what is good and salvageable.

Not Hegel’s Sphinx. Just words, reason, order. A different Sphinx.

Sleep Can Wait

I couldn’t turn in without sharing this. Get’s the Wolfanwalt Insubstantial Trophy in the “Most Original Instrument for Playing a Video Game Theme” category.