Touring Muncie

One thing that the past month of ill health has done for me is watch videos.  Two YouTube that make a case for Muncie—not a good case, but a case. 

 

sch 3/17

Touring Anderson

 I found myself truly impressed and surprised by the people who want to drive around Anderson and Muncie.

 

 

And I have to admit there was an unsettling feeling when I drove around the Mounds Mall area last year.

sch 3/17 

How I Spent St. Patrick's Day 2026

 I took a break from around 4 to 8 pm. I forced myself to walk down to the convenince store for smokes. I confess that I broke fast with a chicken thigh.

Yesterday, I read  The German Philosophy that Emancipated America (Marginalia Review of Books).

Unlike Brown, most of American Christendom believed that owning black persons was morally permissible if not biblically sanctioned. Moses and Paul said nothing definitive for or against racialized slavery; they asked simply that masters show reasonable benevolence—or reasonable wrath—toward their property. But if not Christian soldiers, who marched in the Captain’s antislavery army?

 In An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War against Slavery, and the Refounding of America (W.W. Norton, 2024), the intellectual historian Matthew Stewart serves up some revisionary surprises to the received history of antebellum abolitionism. A sequel to Stewart’s Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic (W.W. Norton, 2014), the book claims that John Brown’s closest conspirators in the antislavery cause were not in fact upright Christians but a pack of Northern infidels whose radical philosophy complemented his radical faith. 

White Christian Nationalism either gets its block knocked off or is exposed as blasphemous cretins. 

When Douglass did speak about God, he emphasized His proportional justice. The line from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural that stirred him concerned the size of the payment God would exact for slavery. Douglass praised Lincoln for implying that slavery could not have ended except in catastrophic bloodshed and that God’s retributive justice in America was necessary. The horrors of war were real and regrettable, but equally so were those of slavery, and the world could now measure on the battlefield how much blood had been spattered on the cotton field. Douglass’s “sanguinary abolitionism” resembled John Brown’s, except that, for Brown, belief in God’s justice came from revealed religion, whereas for Douglass, it was an inference of reason. The God of the abolitionist infidels was “Nature’s God” (or as the Dutch-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza once called Him, “God or Nature”). To them, Nature’s God was not some anthropomorphic legislator of positive laws that mortals could bend if they pleased. On the contrary, He was the very laws of nature from which no living thing, even free human beings, could veer. In the shooting war over slavery, Douglas reasoned, the laws of nature would at last supersede the corrupt civil laws of the United States. The less responsive that religious abolitionists were to this message, the louder Douglass proclaimed it. As early as 1852, at an antislavery conference in Ohio, he received a question about it from Sojourner Truth, a black activist of the moral-suasion school. Truth asked, “Frederick, is God dead?” Douglass replied: “No, and because God is not dead, slavery can only end in blood.”

It also has a reminder of why separation of church and state is good for religion.

According to Hartman, however, Marx’s pivot toward America started well before his newspaper gig. As early as 1843, Marx was studying the complex interaction between the U.S.’s secular political state and its popular religious culture. Unlike in Prussia, the U.S. Constitution did not affirm Christianity or any other official religion and even specified in its First Amendment that the state must never establish one. Yet, as Alexis de Tocqueville discussed in Democracy in America, religion was endemic in American civil society. Marx concurred with Tocqueville that the secularization of the public sphere was not antithetical to, but in fact encouraged, the proliferation of private creeds. On the one hand, Marx believed the state’s decoupling from religion was progressive insofar as it rendered conflicts between private religion and public law as political (legal, constitutional) rather than theological (scriptural, cultural) questions. On the other hand, the coexistence of a thoroughly secular state with a deeply religious society showed that the political emancipation from religion did not complete the human emancipation from religion. Marx followed Feuerbach in thinking that religion was a mode of self-alienation in which human beings projected the essence of their own being onto an illusory deity, and he saw an analogy in the secular state’s respective orientations to religion and private property. A state could abolish religious belonging or asset ownership as preconditions for political enfranchisement without abolishing them from civil society. The American order was the near-perfection of modern Christianity—i.e., a totally secular state bulwarked by a totally religious society—and of bourgeois capitalism—i.e., a political-economic system that safeguarded capital’s right to dominate labor.

I will admit that I have not thought much of the difference between society and government; I just presumed it.

I also learned something that makes me less antipathetic to Marx:

Hartman thinks that most Cold Warriors, whether they bear-hugged America or Russia, failed to grasp the truth of Marx’s dialectical historiography. “The most important thing to know about [Hegelian-Marxist] dialectic,” he writes,

is that…history was a process of unfolding…in which every paradigm contains the seed of its undoing. The unfolding of contradictions conserves the past and reembodies it in the future. Just as we detect some semblance of the present in the past, we seek to detect some semblance of the future in the present. Yet this does not mean that the future is more of the same. Nor does it mean there is a definitive path to the future, or that humans have no role in carving such a path…[H]umans do not sit idly by awaiting the unfolding of history. Humans are the unfolding of history.

This is the same species of humanistic necessitarianism that the radical abolitionists invoked in their cause to abolish slavery. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Parker believed that the laws of nature necessitated slavery’s abolition because the system was antithetical to human self-preservation. They might have underestimated just how long it would take to abolish slavery’s “badges and incidents” (a political project that is ongoing two centuries later), but they were right that corrupted Christian theology, not any natural law, bulwarked slavery. Similarly, Marx’s materialist philosophy held that industrial capitalism could not survive its own contradictions and would have to evolve into a more rational social order that better met humanity’s needs. And while he and his American adherents underestimated their foe’s resilience, they were not wrong about its totalitarian underbelly or its compulsive greed – grotesqueries that remain on full display into the second quarter of the twenty-first century.

 When is the time for free human beings to make the necessary happen? Neither Stewart nor Hartman fully answers that most important question, but then, neither could their very capable muses.

Reading that is listening to What is “white culture,” anyway? | Code Switch (NPR Podcast). I must be less than white. Like John Donne, I think I am part of a continent.

As for other things considered today. 

 Who were Clan MacLean?

 Russia has no ideology. Therefore, no fig leaf for its land grabs.

Yes, Caprica sucked (it was boring in execution and characters), but I do not think it was the end of a Battlestar Galatica franchise. Ronald D. Moore left nothing to be done with the characters when he put together a series that did have an ending. 

 The SyFy series deserving more was Farscape.

Not all historical what-ifs are created equal:

 What I really took away from this one was the hidebound approach of the French towards military doctrine. That may have beat them more than German arms. Something to think about as Donald Trump bungles his way in Iran.

 Suzi Quattro has never been a big figure in my musical universe, but she is still kicking, and I like this one:

 So is Peter Weller, who I like but never really followed:

 One of several videos watched due to my curiosity about naval warships; not something you might have expected from one living landlocked:

 

 

James Cagney showing class and outwitting Gore Vidal:

 Why “London Calling” mattered - and I think this album matters even more now.:

 

A little Byzantine history because why not? Being Eastern Orthodox enhanced an earlier interest in the Eastern Roman Empire.

 

 Musical break, Luis Russell - Doctor Blues:

 Lectures in History: The Spanish-American War

 

 

Not only is it not so dry and boring as its title might lead you to think. More importantly, since Donald J. Trump thinks he is channeling William McKinley, it is timely.

Fewer problems, less pain, but I have some things still to write and do. Good night.

sch 

War What Is It Good For? Political News, Videos!

 Let us count the ways:

1. Russia
2. China
3. Oil companies
4. Distracting from the Epstein files
5. Benjamin Netanyahu 
6. For showing the stupidity and craven nature of Trump and Trumpists: Corruption And Stupidity…What Could Go Wrong? 

First Draft: 💀 Our Rulers Sound Like Serial Killers 

No one seems to notice that for all of MAGA's blather about terrorists sneaking across from the border, there have been no terrorist attacks by Iranian proxies.

I had a bad night last night and did not get moving until 11 AM today. This has been going on for almost three weeks now. Please bear with the following being a bit dated.

  

  

 

The view from Turkey: 

Top US anti-terror chief quits over Iran war, cites Israeli pressure 

The director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, resigned Tuesday, declaring he could not “in good conscience” support President Donald Trump’s war on Iran, while noting that the conflict was launched without an imminent threat and under pressure from Israel and its lobbying network in Washington.

Kent said on social media that Iran "posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

There was no immediate comment from the White House.

Kent, a former political candidate with connections to right-wing extremists, was confirmed to his post last July on a 52-44 vote. As head of the National Counterterrorism Center, he was in charge of an agency tasked with analyzing and detecting terrorist threats.

A new crusade: How US-Israeli language justifies war against Iran 

U.S. President Donald Trump’s remark, “Any time I want it to end, it will end,” together with his demand for Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” captures the tone from Washington.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s language does the same from the Israeli side. He has spoken of “two existential threats,” described the conflict as a struggle between “the children of light and the children of darkness,” and cast Israel’s war in the language of civilization versus barbarism.

The White House presented the campaign under the slogan “Peace Through Strength” to “Crush Iranian Regime, End Nuclear Threat.” At the same time, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described Tehran as a “death cult” driven by “prophetic Islamist delusions.”

Taken together, these are not simply emotional wartime remarks. They reflect a broader institutional discourse repeated across the White House, the Pentagon, the Israeli political and diplomatic establishment, and the media in both countries.

That discourse does not present Iran as a strategic rival within a harsh regional power struggle. It presents Iran as something beyond normal politics: a uniquely dangerous, irrational and morally illegitimate actor. Once that framing takes hold, domination begins to sound like order, escalation begins to sound like necessity, and war begins to look like the only reasonable response.

 From the Irish Times: US allies reject Trump call for escorts on Strait of Hormuz 

Trump also said the US has hit 7,000 targets and sunk more than 100 ships so far. “They have been literally obliterated. The US and Israel are doing what should have been done many years ago”, he said.

Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said the Strait of Hormuz remained open. “It is only closed to our enemies, to those who carried out unjust aggression against our country and to their allies,” he said.

 

 

I have to go out some time. Cold and snowy here. Ending this report now.

sch 

Pain, Frances Burney, Philisophical About Prisons

Pain sitracts. It has kept me from getting to sleep tonight. It has done the same since Friday. Before that, it was one good day, two bad days. That is what it has been like the past two weeks.

I am supposed to be keeping a journal for my Friday class when I indulge in cognive disorders. Well, hard to do much of that when your thinking is how to stop this insistent, tiresome pain. It is challenging to make judgments when one is more worried about the operation of their bowels. 

I did not go to the writer's meeting last Wednesday. That disappointed me. I did not go to church on Sunday - not been there since Vespers on Friday. That is even more disappointing. I try telling me this is a lesson about Lent, but the pain distracts me even from that. It feels that the body overrules the spirit. 

An outline for a play was written. Emails have been kept manageable. Videos have been watched when I could not sleep. That does not seem like many accomplishments. 

 Natasha Joukovsky's On the Genius of Frances Burney, Jane Austen’s Most Important Literary Predecessor (Literary Hub) discusses the influence of Frances Burney on Austen and her own qualities. I took it also as another example of my ignorance, the wide expanses of books unread, and the precarity of reputation, regardless of skill, talent, and merits.

 Spencer J. Weinreich's review essay There Are More Prisons in Heaven & Earth… (Public Books) touches on a subject that came to interest me in 2011. He makes several interesting points, which will be ignored by our politicians, and omits education as the best means of avoiding prison (well,e cluding people like me), but provokes me with the idea of a philosophy of prison in a democratic society. The interesting ideas:

The prison we know today does not really promise reform (and would not be believed if it did) and works to fragment any sense of political community. Abolafia conjectures that prison abolition has such potency as an idea in the realm of the scholar and the activist precisely because the ideological foundations of the prison have rotted away. “Neither of the intellectual resources on which the modern theory of the prison initially relied—the idea of reform and the value of incarceration for popular self-rule—can be plausibly endorsed in the United States in the age of mass incarceration.” Reform through punishment seems to be well and truly dead. Not only because every technique yet developed to reform prisoners has failed, Abolafia explains, but also because any successful method would prove incompatible with contemporary norms around autonomy, equality, and liberty.

But perhaps there’s life in the popular authorization tradition yet. Abolafia concludes with the possibility of a prison for “the preservation of political principles like equal voice, equal respect, and people power,” through the punishment of the violent and the anti-democratic. A realigning of carceral priorities from drug dealers and petty thieves to insider traders and would-be tyrants. The book’s last line—a provocation both exasperating and stimulating—invites the reader “to imagine a future of thinking about incarceration that rises to the moral challenges set by the past.”

The instinctual reaction of a prison abolitionist such as myself is to recoil. A democracy that relies upon the prison is not the democracy we ought to want. Engaging more seriously, I see a loophole of some breadth: to take a single example, if you asked the late Alexei Navalny’s jailers, they would tell you that he was imprisoned for massive corruption and for anti-democratic political activity. As a matter of history, the road to American mass incarceration was paved with democratic intentions, from the 18th-century penitentiaries that promised a suitably republican form of punishment to the shibboleth of citizenship that justifies the detention of undocumented immigrants.

Even supposing we sought a democratic prison, could we get there from here? Abolafia acknowledges that contemporary mass incarceration is “antithetical” to those democratic values. The implication is that that antithesis is incidental, rather than inherent (or so ingrained as to become inherent). Out of the crooked timber of mass incarceration, how are we to make something straight?

We might find our prison systems where the first place America expressed its contempt for democracy. 

 Happy St. Patrick's Day!

sch 3/17

Recent Readings: 3/10 - 3/15

The lack of energy, the weariness brought about by health issues, extended to reading much online (and even less offline). The following comes (mostly) from the past few days.

And Trump's War continues insanely along: Dismay as ancient heritage sites across Iran damaged in US-Israel bombing. Why did Congress let a man known best for his irresponsibility continue this misadventure of putting other people's lives on the line?

 They make the minds behind Vietnam the best and brightest. Cheney and Rumsfield look like geniuses. I can blame the guys for Vietnam for their arrogance - that was born of ignorance. Bush's team thought they were no longer bound by history. Trump thinks he makes reality even more than the Bushies did.
 
A thought that has recently occurred to me is that we have been repeating Vietnam - Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran. Maybe it is an open sore in the psyche of Republicans. 
 
They know no history. We started the Iranian problem in 1953. Apparently, they do not understand geography. I feel drained and achy, so my mind is not in its best state. We may be American rarities - we know a little history, we know a little geography; we know what did not work, we know one size does not fit all.  

The Times of Israel has coverage that needs your attention. 

International law and the Iran war (The Article)

An extraordinary social video came out of the White House last week, a mix of actual “strike footage” from Iran, illustrating the promised “death and destruction all day long”, alongside clips from Top Gun, Spiderman and (perhaps a nod at Trump’s Scottish ancestry) Braveheart.  Entitled Justice the American Way, its moral depravity is striking. Just as Archbishop Blaise Cupich of Chicago wrote in response, it depicted a “real war with real death and real suffering being treated like it’s a video game”: an “American way” which ignores the very existence of international law and the values it attempts to preserve.   Pete Hegseth, self-styled US Secretary of State for War, a man responsible for the largest military force in the world, both approved it and appeared in it.  Archbishop Cupich’s is a refreshingly clear voice of condemnation, with his focus on the victims of war.

How can a 79-year-old have the morality of a seven-year old? More importantly, what does such moral bankruptcy say about this country? 

 Perhaps it's not our leaders who fool us but ourselves?

To Be, or Not to Be, Misunderstood (LARB) by Robert N. Wilson changes my reading of Hamlet.

In Hamlet’s soliloquy, he is considering whether the wise choice is to stop caring about bad things you probably can’t change, as the widely beloved Serenity Prayer recommends. The alternative to such acceptance, Hamlet says, is “to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing end them.” That doesn’t sound like suicide, which would be more like surrendering.

The other crucially misunderstood word in the soliloquy is “quietus.” Hamlet says: “For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, […] When he himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin?” People generally assume that when Hamlet considers making “his quietus […] with a bare bodkin,” he is envisioning stabbing himself with a dagger, because they think “quietus” refers to the silence of the grave—“resting in peace,” as the familiar funeral language puts it, and as Hamlet’s dying line “The rest is silence” might seem to confirm. But “quietus” didn’t necessarily indicate quiet; it was a legal term for a debt paid off (“quietus est,” which translates to “he is quit,” would then be written on the loan document). It meant getting even (as when we lament “unrequited love,” love that’s not repaid in kind). Shakespeare’s only other use of the word is in the last line of Sonnet 126, where “quietus” signals a settling of accounts.

Big Men and Little People: Two recent books on Idi Amin’s Uganda present an African mirror for Trump’s United States to see itself. (LARB) by  Samuel Fury Childs Daly makes a comparison that, by the end of the review, does stand up. 

THE BEST HISTORICAL analogue for Donald Trump probably isn’t an American. It also isn’t one of the great villains of 20th-century Europe, despite a long and tired debate about his relationship to fascism. Rather, Trump’s most obvious predecessor comes from one of the “shithole countries” in Africa he disdains: General Idi Amin, the autocrat who ruled Uganda from 1971 to 1979. “It is not only the braggadocio, the self-regard, the love for military ceremony,” historian Derek R. Peterson writes in A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda (2025); it’s also the cruelly funny rhetoric, the demonization of immigrants and outsiders, and the political chaos that comes from constantly hounding your rivals and betraying your friends. Amin and Trump carry themselves alike, and they give the same belligerent speeches. They share a catty kind of charisma. Like Amin, Trump tells his supporters he’s fighting for their freedom, all while turning the screws.

Let us hope Trump does not start feeding us to crocodiles.

Not much of a Liza Minelli fan, but I could not resist The Guardian's review of Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! by Liza Minnelli review—a heady brew of gossip, glamour and defiance

 3/14:

The Buried Tombstone, the Melting Iceberg, and the Random Bullet: History, Memory, and Antagonism in Ireland by R.F. Foster  (Hedgehog Review) has much to offer for those interested in Irish history or the writing of history in general. Gore Vidal wrote several times in his essays about America's historical amnesia, and I do not want to question that sharp mind, but the essay suggests another word.

...David Fitzpatrick, has acutely pointed out that the excision of World War I from the national memory was not a case of “amnesia.” The memory of Ireland’s involvement was all around us. Rather than amnesia, the proper diagnosis was aphasia, an inability or refusal to speak because the sound and meaning of words are disassociated. 

Do we not speak of some parts of our history because we have consciously forgotten them, or is it because we cannot associate words like lynching with ourselves? I do not want to excuse MAGA its efforts to literally whitewash American history, but their inability to speak on the cruelties Americans and their governments have imposed on the powerless does not seem like they have forgotten history as much as they can speak about it and maintain their charmless pursuit of an imaginary America.

 From Epstein files to Gaza and Iran: Crisis of world’s conscience (Daily Sabah). KH thought Epstein would be a story that would go away. So did more than a few pundits. That Trump completely mishandled the release of files promised by him during the campaign has helped keep this sore oozing its pus.

Consequently, within such a civilization, it is not surprising that even its most educated and prominent elites can live in ways detached from the societies they inhabit, often operating at unrestrained extremes without perceiving any wrongdoing until their actions are exposed. In such a setting, the value of other people’s lives can effectively be put up for sale. In this hierarchy of worth, the lives of Muslims in particular are often subject to devaluation and distortion. As a result, every attempt to reconcile their proclaimed moral discourse with their actual political practices ends in failure. In truth, consistency does not seem to concern them greatly; what ultimately prevails are their own interests and advantages. Yet the world, taken as a whole, is increasingly growing weary of these contradictions and is gradually becoming less willing to tolerate them.

For this reason, the crisis we are experiencing today is not merely a political or military one. It is a deeper crisis of legitimacy. Humanity has always struggled to establish institutions capable of limiting power and making it accountable. Yet, the point reached today at the global level under modern Western civilization shows that this problem has become – or has been made into – not merely an issue for individual states, but a fundamental problem of the entire international order. The growing unrest in many parts of the world today is not merely a reaction to specific wars or political crises.

In fact, people are witnessing the visible emergence of a sense of injustice that they have long felt deep inside. If the global order continues to treat human life differently depending on geography, religion or political interests, the legitimacy of that order will increasingly erode. History has shown us again and again that no system of power can endure for long once it loses its moral legitimacy. Therefore, the real question that must now be answered is this: can the world establish a new moral order in which the human being, as a valuable and dignified entity, stands at the center rather than power? Perhaps what humanity needs most today is not a new technology, but a moral horizon that enables us to value the life of another as much as our own. For when the life of the other is devalued, even the systems that appear strongest begin to collapse precisely at this weakest point.

Does culture make emotion? (Aeon) got me thinking I still have not caught up with my notes of my group sessions; we are back talking about cognitive disorders caused by emotions. But I think this applies as much to my fiction (and makes this probably the last post containing the "On Writing" tag; I have taken baby steps regarding my new blog).

 This is an example of how cultural givens become cognitive and emotive ‘habits’ that underlie shared emotions but also produce categories, prejudices and ideologies. They are built into our mental makeup and thus may seem inherent in the self. But they are in fact dynamic, cultural ‘patterned practices’. Language itself is one such instance of a patterned practice. What I hear is culturally conditioned. This is the process involved in how I internalise and then voice what seem to be collectively and normatively acceptable, authentic emotional responses to the voices of the world, such as outrage, pride or disgust. They may feel authentic, but they are precisely what can blind me to the complexity of felt experience, and to the lenses through which I inevitably look at others, or even in the mirror – because top-down goes all the way down.

Our eyes wouldn’t adjust to seeing without the lenses. But we have the metacognitive ability to become aware of their shape and understand the conditions of our own apperception, as Boas did and entreated us to do too. ‘I’ can, to an extent, stand beside the ‘we’ of which each of us is such an intricate part. In this way, we may retrieve its hidden or forgotten elements, perhaps overcome prejudices and neuroses, as Freud helped us do, and so help cultivate a healthy, plural, attentive and democratic collectivity.

The Point published Moral Mysteries: Reading Iris Murdoch on her own terms
by Parker Henry. Which reminded me I have not even tried to crack her Golden Notebook, and that time is not on my side. Coming to me during this tortuous Lent and having acquired an idea for a play on philosophical issues, this passage gave me several things:

The fantasies we project are personal. Our stories are necessarily idiosyncratic. I think this is precisely the difference that scares us. But if we have a moral philosophy that moves us away from some abstract capacity to make logical sense of the world and toward imagining the other through personal narrative, are we not saved—at least a little bit—from our loneliness? Perhaps my intuition of loneliness was itself a projection of my ego, which sought to protect me from that fear of getting closer to others. Murdoch recognizes that we may not come to a full understanding of the other, but through loving attention, we can at least glimpse them. “The tragic freedom implied by love is this,” she writes in “The Sublime and the Good”:

that we all have an indefinitely extended capacity to imagine the being of others. Tragic, because there is no prefabricated harmony, and others are, to an extent we never cease discovering, different from ourselves. Nor is there any social totality within which we can come to comprehend differences as placed and reconciled. We only have a segment of the circle. Freedom is exercised in the confrontation by each other, in the context of an infinitely extensible work of imaginative understanding, of two irreducibly dissimilar individuals. Love is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this otherness.

Maybe glimpsing the segment of the circle is just enough to keep us sane.

 Orthodox Christianity teaches that we are to see others as an icon of Christ and to love them; the Other is not an enemy. The Other brings out our selves. As for the play, it gave me the basis for an argument against moral nihilism: monsters lack power of imagination; they are stuck in the stink of their own hatred.

I also decided that the play needed a little bit of David Hume, and to refresh my memory, I resorted to Hume’s Moral Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). I find myself in agreement with Hume about revolutions, albeit my route is more Locke; I do not find them incompatible in their results.

Hume’s predecessors famously took opposing positions on whether human nature was essentially selfish or benevolent, some arguing that man was so dominated by self-interested motives that for moral requirements to govern us at all they must serve our interests in some way, and others arguing that uncorrupted human beings naturally care about the weal and woe of others and here morality gets its hold. Hume roundly criticizes Hobbes for his insistence on psychological egoism or something close to it, and for his dismal, violent picture of a state of nature. Yet Hume resists the view of Hutcheson that all moral principles can be reduced to our benevolence, in part because he doubts that benevolence can sufficiently overcome our perfectly normal acquisitiveness. According to Hume’s observation, we are both selfish and humane. We possess greed, and also “limited generosity” — dispositions to kindness and liberality which are more powerfully directed toward kin and friends and less aroused by strangers. While for Hume the condition of humankind in the absence of organized society is not a war of all against all, neither is it the law-governed and highly cooperative domain imagined by Locke. It is a hypothetical condition in which we would care for our friends and cooperate with them, but in which self-interest and preference for friends over strangers would make any wider cooperation impossible. Hume’s empirically-based thesis that we are fundamentally loving, parochial, and also selfish creatures underlies his political philosophy.

In the realm of politics, Hume again takes up an intermediate position. He objects both to the doctrine that a subject must passively obey his government no matter how tyrannical it is and to the Lockean thesis that citizens have a natural right to revolution whenever their rulers violate their contractual commitments to the people. He famously criticizes the notion that all political duties arise from an implicit contract that binds later generations who were not party to the original explicit agreement. Hume maintains that the duty to obey one’s government has an independent origin that parallels that of promissory obligation: both are invented to enable people to live together successfully. On his view, human beings can create a society without government, ordered by conventional rules of ownership, transfer of property by consent, and promise-keeping. We superimpose government on such a pre-civil society when it grows large and prosperous; only then do we need to use political power to enforce these rules of justice in order to preserve social cooperation. So the duty of allegiance to government, far from depending on the duty to fulfill promises, provides needed assurance that promises of all sorts will be kept. The duty to submit to our rulers comes into being because reliable submission is necessary to preserve order. Particular governments are legitimate because of their usefulness in preserving society, not because those who wield power were chosen by God or received promises of obedience from the people. In a long-established civil society, whatever ruler or type of government happens to be in place and successfully maintaining order and justice is legitimate, and is owed allegiance. However, there is some legitimate recourse for victims of tyranny: the people may rightly overthrow any government that is so oppressive as not to provide the benefits (peace and security from injustice) for which governments are formed. In his political essays Hume certainly advocates the sort of constitution that protects the people’s liberties, but he justifies it not based on individual natural rights or contractual obligations but based on the greater long-range good of society.

3/11:

I think I found where people like my sister get their ideas about sharia law: moronic Republicans. 

The most sensible thing I have read about Epstein.

 sch

Becoming Human

Nowadays, I am a miserable reader. Reading online serves as an excuse, but an insufficient one. The truth is poor discipline on my part.

Nor have I been diligent with my blog posts. Maybe I have spent too much time watching videos; catching up with lost time and missed opportunities is another weak excuse.

So, this morning, having gotten a start on the last project I had planned for these past weeks, the new blog, I am trying something different. I am drafting this post in Google Docs. The Edge browser lets me split the screen with Netflix in a way that Zen does not.

I finished perhaps two books last year. The other has been sitting on my desk, awaiting me to comment upon it. That is John Behr’s Becoming Human: Mediations on Christian Anthropology in Word and Image (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press). From the SVS page:

This book reflects upon various dimensions and implications of the astounding fact that Christ shows us what it is to be God by the way he dies as a human being. In so doing, he simultaneously shows us what it is to be a human being. Connecting the end - "It is finished" - with the beginning - "Let us make a human being," Fr John Behr challenges us to think again about who we are, as male and female, what we are called to become, and the relation between life and death in this journey.

Presented in a poetic and meditative manner, adorned by images and offset quotations, this book inclines the reader towards a meditative reading, weighing, rather than skimming, each word and image.

A bit of the old soft sell there. It is a short book (121 pages, including notes) that is actually shorter—the format is a very small book, one that can fit into a jacket pocket. This is also a beautiful book with its reproductions of icons and other religious art. Its formatting is both stylish and purposeful. This is an essay meant to be meditated over.

And that stylishness makes quotation difficult—the formatting conveys a sense of movement for the text.

Human nature is fragile; death teaches us to understand the strength of God.

That we only become truly human by saying to Christ, Let it be.

There is another point, too subtle for me to accurately draw out of context, that becoming human does reject the world for Christ, but that is to live as a better human being.

Even more subtle is the discussion of marriage as being for our embracing of the Other. The Other is not an enemy; no human being deserves that title. The Other enhances our understanding of humanity.

Quite a lot of hard punches made in such a short book. It deserves to be read and thought about. 

 

sch 3/7