Month: January 2009

A reader writes:

It sounds to me like Jonah Lehrer has very shallow understanding of ‘the Greeks’ and philosophy in general.  Aristotle and Plato are both acutely aware of the effects of the passions on judgment.  So is Decartes.  Hume thought morality was all emotion.  Even Aquinas, in the secunda pars, talks about the effect of passions on our decisions as much or more than he talks about the intellect.

It is my absolute pet peeve when scientists ‘discover’ something that philosophers have been writing about for thousands of years, but think they’re hot shit because they don’t do their homework.

"If I had been watching from the treadmill I probably would have fallen off the treadmill," – Oprah Winfrey, upon learning that Blago considered her for Obama’s Senate seat.

Get your goatee-saver here:

Wilkinson rants:

In the debate over economic stimulus, I hear many otherwise brilliant people making a lot of baseless conjectures about mass psychology — about consumer and creditor “fear” and “uncertainty,” and what to do about it. But, as far as I can tell, none of them has even a rudimentary theory about the causes of micro-fear or how it scales up to aggregate consumer demand or aggregrate credit supply, etc. So I feel like I’m hearing a lot of smart people talking out of their asses about a subject they’ve never actually studied –the psychology of coordinated expectations — and pretending it is “economics,” a subject with much greater rhetorical prestige and political power than amateur psychology.

In Europe, they have enough distance to see the truth that stares back at us:

George Bush was not a conservative, but rather a curious hybrid of reactionary and progressive. He was a reactionary by temperament and conviction whose methods were borrowed from the most radical progressives. He besmirched the conservatism that he had forsaken and led it from the corridors of power into the political wilderness. Because progressive commentators depict Bush as an arch-conservative instead of the curious amalgam of reactionary and radical revolutionary that he actually was, they remain blind to Obama’s conservatism…

The Obama presidency is not a revolution, but instead a restoration. The "values upon which our success depends", Obama reassures America, "these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout history". He asks for a "return to these truths". Nothing new is needed, neither fresh ideas about the human condition’s betterment nor utopias; merely a return to and vindication of the past.

I find this indisputable. If you are a conservative but not a partisan, there is much to admire in Obama.

Rove:

"One year from now, Gitmo won’t be closed. If it is, there will be an uproar in the U.S. about where to put these people."

Rove planned to run the 2006 campaign on torture. It’s the natural reflex of an authoritarian Dolchstoss party. But the polls suggest that, once again, Rove has misjudged the times.

Take a wild guess. A reader writes:

In his letter "Girls at University" he cites three 750 year old reasons given by Aquinas that preclude women from teaching (or learning) and then goes on to say: "To grasp these three reasons, let us back up another five millenia to Adam and Eve."

Meanwhile, John Schwenkler responds once again:

So Richardson’s views on the Holocaust don’t warrant his continued excommunication, but the potential for bad publicity does? Look: either Williamson and the other Society bishops have made sufficient reparations for the circumstances of their ordination, or they have not.

Reid Buckley calls for a green conservatism:

Not all development is bad, not all logging is reprehensible, and some eyesores cannot be avoided. Industrialization, which provides surcease from want, can neither be stopped nor should it be. But within the hysteria and exaggeration of political activists, mostly of the Left, too often supported by cooked science, there is often a kernel of legitimate concern, be it economical, sociological, aesthetic, or environmental. We conservatives have shut our ears.

My first real piece of published writing – for Margaret Thatcher’s think-tank, the Center for Policy Studies, was called "Greening The Tories." It was a plea for conservatives to take conserving the planet seriously. It was published in 1985. Thatcher was uninterested. (Hat tip: Wolcott)

The leaders of No On 8 describe how they outsourced their entire campaign to highly-paid professionals scared of actually talking about gay people. Sounds like the story of the Human Rights Campaign for the past twenty years.

A reader writes:

So Bishop Williamson’s views are canonically irrelevant. So what? Or, more to the point, why ARE they irrelevant?

If the Bishop denied the existence of the ‘sin’ of abortion by saying it didn’t exist … or the ‘sin’ of homosexuality saying those who called it sinful were wrong, would they be ‘personal’ opinions?  Would he be welcomed into the Church? (For an enlightening view of just such a situation, see the wikipedia entry on Bishop Jacques Gaillot who was demoted to Titular Bishop of Parthenia for promoting the rights of gays).

Why is it a ‘personal’ opinion to deny the shoah or the facts behind 9/11, but not ‘personal’ opinion to approve of homosexuality?  It seems a terribly selective view of ‘sin’ (if not, indeed, a rationalization), to call sex related issues a matter of dogma, and issues related to genocide and fascism ‘personal’ opinions.

That’s one of the problems plaguing the Catholic Church. Its morality is almost exclusively sex related. It has no mechanism for dealing with the real world.  When crimes like genocide and mass murder are ‘personal’ opinion, but issues dealing with sex are part of the ‘culture of death’, the institution has lost its bearing and has failed in its leadership role.  It’s become an instrument of oppression rather than guidance.  The very things it chooses to call ‘sin’ vs. ‘personal’ tell us about the mindset of those making the distinctions.

And they are ugly distinctions indeed.