So, QED.
Notes John Nolte:
what a disconnect. While Academy Award-winner and Obama supporter Tom Hanks and Eagles musician Glenn Frey parade around in the worst racial stereotypes imaginable, they mock Republicans. I guess they believe that inoculates them from bathing in open racism.
Because it does, John.
In Ameritopia — and in fact in any tyrannical or liberal fascist leftist regime — your political identity determines your moral worth. Therefore, it is impossible to be racist and be progressive, because by virtue of being progressive you are good and moral and right — while racism is evil and immoral and wrong.
It is, as I’ve argued repeatedly (most recently here), a self-serving and self-insulating political worldview — one that argues for its righteousness by virtue of an appeal to its own presumed righteousness. That is, it is the institutionalization of a question beg, circular reasoning not only appealed to but embraced and aggrandized.
And the purpose of that institutionalization — itself based on nothing more than a manufactured consensus, Platonic “noble lies,” and a constant will to power — is to assert moral authority while simultaneously shielding believers from charges of hypocrisy. As Stanley Fish notes, in counseling his fellow travelers in the ways of anti-foundationalism (itself essentially a spirited embrace of sophistry), “once you step outside of the liberal calculus in which all persons, no matter what their moral status as you see it, are weighed in an equal balance […] you will not be displaying a double standard; you will be affirming a single standard, and moreover it will be a moral one because you will be going with what you think is good rather than what you think is fair. “Fair” is a weak virtue; it is not even a virtue at all because it insists on a withdrawal from moral judgment.”
Might makes right. The ends justify the means. The political is the personal. You are no more or less than your tribal identity, and your tribal identity is what marks you as who you are.
Meaning, once you choose “progressivism,” you have chosen moral superiority. And having chosen moral superiority, claims against that moral superiority are on their face incoherent: how can someone who moral existence is predicated on identifying with a particular belief system be called immoral without first rejecting that belief system or renouncing that identity?
— Which, I suppose, from the perspective of the Enlightenment is almost the secular leftist version of irresistible grace.
And to think, people actually try to argue progressivism isn’t a religion.
NO ONE EXPECTS THE PROGRESSIVE INQUISITION!
Bill Maher doesn’t like this medicine. It’s not everyday I agree with everything he says, but this is one of those days.
Meanwhile, EIB pimp-slaps Media Mutters to great effect.
“QED” link is boogered. Also, “institutionalization of a question bag”?
Nit-picky, yes… but what you’re saying is both right and righteous, so it might as well be flawless as well. For the trifecta.
One quibble with the stinking Fish, his replacement of two standards isn’t one standard, it is three standards, or four standards, or whatever number you choose which effectively means no standards. One standard (which implies either objecticity at some level or subjectively something beyond ourselves) is the last thing progressives and statists want. I mean, can you imagine one clear, coherent set of rules for everyone to follow and be judged by? The horror!
Thank you for recognizing that ensconcing themselves in cloaks of Absolute Moral Authority—which are absolute and moral only because they say so—is what they do, not what they believe.
Far too many starboard-siders give them the benefit of the doubt by mocking the absurdity—as if people like Fish actually embraced the incoherent landscape they rhetorically weave.
They believe only one thing—that they should be in charge. All utterances are calculated to achieve that goal, not to express an opinion.
Isn’t it funny how this is the same bunch that accuses the SOCONS of using religion to try and assert moral authority and that those folks are a bunch of hypocrites for trying to do so
I mean, it’s like progressivism is an erstwhile religious faith to them. Hmmmmm, where have I heard that before…
From some visigothy hater perhaps :)
Oh sure, they’re applying one moral standard…Sure…
That standard being, “if it serves my argument, it’s moral”, but any standard you use to judge me by is moralizing hypocrisy incarnate, because to the proggs all morality is relative, and ethics situational at best…
Maher is just worried that if he has to “sand down” all his edges there won’t be any him left to see. That and the heat on HBO over him must be boiling his froggy self.
Thanks, John B. Should be fixed.
Very true, geoffb. But he’s still right.
So he’s a broken clock? ‘k.
I cannot take what Maher is saying at face value, not given the course of recent events.
Had he truly taken the lead on this when Rush’s comments were first being criticized he might have been something more than self-serving.
Taken in context his is nothing more than special pleading.
He has sided with the left, let him abide by the ‘standards’ of the left.
Just an aside on the matter of the noble lie in the context of The Republic. First, it has to do with what’s called autochthony and the stories pertaining thereto. Second, a question: is it simply descriptive, prescriptive, or complexly both?
Those sound like extra credit questions sdferr.
It seems to get bent to other purposes sometimes LBascom.
It is descriptive for purposes of the narrative, and prescriptive if you take the Republic to be a blueprint for Utopian governance.
Plato knew it to be a failure, and so — if read historically — it really should be a warning. But that’s requiring a lot of a busy ideologue to figure out.
Taking the Republic as a blueprint is a bad idea in general, I think, depending on what sort of blueprint we mean, anyhow. The usual sort it isn’t. A strange other sort, it may be.
I’d say mainly descriptive as to the structure of society. But, where it is subtly prescriptive might be in its recognition of the observable benefits of the division of labor in the city. It’s not that people are of the earth and have the metals in their blood and all of that (that’s the lie, right?) but some people are better farmers, some are better soldiers and yet others are better philosophers.
It’s the point about those being unchangeable classes of people that I would take as the warning. Surely Plato knew of men from one class (from a family of farmers) excelling in another area personally (leaving the farm and becoming a rhetorician or general, for instance).
Man, I’ve forgotten now. I remember that you’re born a thing but I don’t remember if you’re born the same thing as your parents or not.
Okay, I checked, most often you’re the same metal as your parents but occasionally you’re different.
I take the lie more particularly as “we here spring from the very ground here” (and are sanctified therein), insofar as I take it to be about the stories of the Myrmidons, or Cadmus’s dragon’s teeth and the like stories from elsewhere. It’s descriptive of what the Greek sees when he looks to see what is good: that what justifies our polity here is what is old old old: the tales of our father’s father’s father’s, time out of mind. This phenomenon may then be taken as a conditional of political organization as such, in the absence of a vision contrariwise, like the U.S., say, which is entirely independent of the soil itself. We can be proper Americans by holding to an idea of liberty. We have no need of the earth under our feet itself as justification of right.
Arendt somewhere, I think, likes to point to the very different story of Romulus and Remus, where the city is founded on crime, or seizing. Though dollars to doughnuts she picked that up from Machiavelli. heh.
most often you’re the same metal as your parents but occasionally you’re different
metal? Or mettle?
I think it is a compexity of both, sdferr. The Constitution, that is. It is both descriptive and prescriptive.
metal
I’m not sure (don’t live in other people’s minds) but I’m guessing most people think of the class distinctions and their maintenance — with the rulers being an actual class — as the “essential” noble lie in the Republic. (Which it may or may not be but I think that’s what most people mean in conversation.)
That lie does, indeed, spring from the same “of this very earth” that gives the justification for ethnic proto-nations (don’t know what else to call them).
Thanks, sdferr.
Yes bh, I think that’s what people do mean when they refer to the noble lie. Which is why I’m hard pressed to point out that it’s not altogether what Plato seems to have meant.
I wasn’t referring to the Constitution though leigh, not there anyhow.
Stuff gets strange indeed if we end up telling a noble lie about the noble lie.
My pagination between the centuries got stuck. It’s my fault for misreading.
Went looking for some relevant Strauss (without asking because I’m sure you’ve directed me in the proper direction before and I’ve forgotten) and stumbled across this at Wiki:
Which I thought I’d mention as it gives ol’ Cicero and Strauss on your original “descriptive or prescriptive” question above.
I assume you’re referring to Levin treating The Republic as prescriptive rather than descriptive as the noble lie about the noble lie?
I shouldn’t say “treating”. “Maybe/possibly/sorta treating” I should really say as I’ve only seen some peripheral things about it and haven’t read any part of his new book.
Had to go get smokes (‘n burgers), so a minute to catch up.
Yes and no about Levin’s use of the thing, mostly on account I think the idea that the city will always be founded on a (questionable) sanctity gets pretty close to Plato’s thought on the subject, but that goes to the general case and not this particular one. As to the particular myth told of the metals in The Republic, certainly not prescriptive in any actionable sense.
About the noble lie on the noble lie, it’s looking like a “could be” to me. But I’d have to work harder on that before I’d be comfortable enough to assert it positively.
I should just reread it already but didn’t Plato say that even a model aristocracy inevitably degenerates to the next form of government because unqualified people will take power?
With Plato granting that as a given, that’s my basic stumbling block to seeing The Republic as utopian. Progressives believe in the positive arrow of history that ends in utopia. Plato was all about how every form degenerates to the next thing.
With that being the case, with aristocracies guaranteed to degrade, isn’t utopian a strangle label? I guess I always think of utopian thinking involving an aspect of “once we get there, it’ll all perfect forever and ever”.
it’ll all be perfect forever
Plato would have laughed at Auguste Comte (“Progressives believe in the positive arrow of history that ends in utopia”, even — or perhaps especially — if we were to modify “utopia” to “the best regime we can institute now“), is my guess while we’re attributing stuff to Plato that Plato never did or could do. I suspect Plato would have sooner gone for Aristophanes’ Nephelokokkygia (Cloudcuckooland), than the scientific administrative state.
I wonder if that really isn’t the rub here.
Maybe we have The Republic itself and The Republic as thought of by the sorts of people who are always that degrading force within all the possible forms.
When I think of Plato’s philosopher king, I imagine someone such as Socrates who doesn’t really exert any power whatsoever because he’s so sure of how little he knows. A quite small government, indeed. Hayekian, even. (Now, we hate the idea of that arrangement regardless because the power doesn’t reside in the people as we know to be proper.)
Regardless, that philosopher king is the exact opposite type of person from any progressive leader I’ve ever heard of.
Imagine Socrates announcing the regulation of all aspects of the economy! Socrates doing this.
I can imagine a sheepish exhortation that geometry is beautiful so maybe people would like to check out a lecture being given at the university. Maybe in another couple months he’d ask a guy on the street what he thinks justice means.
It isn’t easy to make plain how insoluble a paradox Plato understood the philosopher king idea to be. But I don’t think he thought it at all probable in the realm of possibilities, and if infinitesimally possible (like, would Marcus Aurelius count?) as Madison correctly recalls, merely a thing to be wished, and even then, I think, not obsessively so.
Still, in the meantime, distilling the effects of Plato’s works on men like Madison, Montesquieu and Locke? That’s an interesting question to me, particularly in regards to freedom of conscience and religion as Madison comes to see it.
In real terms, a philosopher is not a king and a king is niot a philosopher. Unless the tools of governance are held by people who know how to use power, a state ruled by a philosopher king will collapse in short order.
But if the tools of governance are held by those who know how to use power, while using it out of public view because everyone’s watching the king, God help the people.
Seriously …. a drunk with a microphone? SS’really cool.
Thinking about it, I don’t think I’d count Marcus Aurelius as an example. Succession is such a basic thing to get wrong.
Kind of shows that inevitable degeneration even with the best of them though. (Keep thinking about regression to the mean for some reason.)
So your sense is that the candidate philosopho-king has to be successfully succeeded (as a matter of his own doing, I assume) in order to count as an example of the felicitous accidental union of the spirit of a philosopher in the person of an inheriting king bh? That’s a tough row to hoe, seems to me, insofar as it’s really impossible to fashion with precision the arrangements of all the elements producing such a spirit, at least as that spirit is described in the Republic.
Yeah, I think I am saying that. Would I say that a populace electing Obama was composed of philosophers?
Well, he had the one vote and he picked his son.
Couldn’t we just say that he was a pretty good emperor?
And, yeah, I think it is an extremely hard row to hoe.
I’m down with ya. Such is the ferocity of the paradox x eleventy.
You know what? I can think of a philosopher dictator though, Cincinnatus. And a philosopher president, Washington.
Admittedly, I’m granting them the status of philosopher because they had such a firm grasp on that succession issue.
Don’t they fall more into the kaloikagathoi type, i.e. gentlemens (I’m not as closely familiar with Cincinnatus as G. W., about whom this type seems correct to me). Their deal is honor, no?
Heh, yeah.
The thought occurred to me that a real philosopher king might just immediately resign and, bam, Cincinnatus and Washington were in my mind.
I wonder though. Maybe it’s not just honor. Or, maybe, that honor was at least partially born of giving the matter some thought.
The esteem of the countryman isn’t something to sneeze at in political affairs anyhow. The whole problem Socrates is called to account for in The Republic is the dis-esteem (is that a word?) of the philosopher, especially in light of his utter lack of concern for honor in the first instance: he could care less about it, caring instead only for approaching knowledge of the whole. Adeimantus and Glaucon are all like, everyone scoffs at you philosophers as they would at idiotes: defend yourself and your professed life Socrates, or else we’ll take the common opinion of you for the truth of the matter. This, obviously, as a retrospect on his condemnation by the jury.
And through that, Socrates held the honor of his philosophy as higher than anything the greater fools around him could bestow and thus earned great esteem from other philosophers.
(Obviously, something about that never quite worked for me.)
If he cared nothing about honor he’d have said whatever it took and lived to seek knowledge for years to come.
I’ve never understood this.
Also, his not running away. He cared what people thought of him.
Ehhh, I guess this puts us a distance away from the philosopher kings and noble lies and all of that from the post though.
Me neither. Still don’t. But it’s the honor of the city, political honor, he doesn’t care about.
But he does honor philosophy, to the extent he sees it necessary to stick to his guns on behalf of the future of philosophy in the city — even unto death. But then he doesn’t seem to honor a fear of death either (hence dishonoring life?), which is also strange. Of course, his particular circumstances may play an outsized role in that appearance, being 70 or so already and who knows (only he knows) how plagued with what troubles and pains of old age.
And that apart from being brought up on charges at such a late date, since he never made a secret of his philosophical pursuits (and how could he with Aristophanes’ help?), so potentially to be disgusted to live further among such people. So possibly being possessed of a “goodbye and good riddance” kind of attitude? I dunno.
“Also, his not running away. He cared what people thought of him.”
That refers to The Crito? It does anyhow. That’s a complicated bit of business too. Also tempered by Crito himself, and the other friends to be left behind either in death or in flight. And possibly another form of the noble lie.
Yes, Crito.
I’ve had a hunch about The Crito: that the unlocking key turns on the dream passages and the corresponding stuff in Homer, both in Iliad and Odyssey dealing with Achilles (Achilles in the Iliad, and Odysseus visit with Achilles in the underworld), Achilles’ claims to excellence in the one and Odysseus’ tale of Achilles’ renunciation of his heroism in the other. Socrates [Plato] is playing a game with that business.
Totally out of my depth there. As compared to earlier when I was only sorta out of my depth.
Also out of my depth, though I refreshed my recollection of The Republic with Levin’s Ameritopia. I’ll trust y’all to keep the philosophic underpinnings alive. At this point my approach is more lock and load.
RI, do you view Plato as a friend to Constitutional Republicanism, or as the enemy of it?
Here’s a little of that Fishian theology in action
It goes downhill from there.
heh
Least bizarre thing I’ve seen all campaign season sdferr.
Taranto and Ed Whelan both cudgel Greenhouse’s piece to death today, and all it took ’em was a wet noodle. Or maybe it was a puffy kugel.
I was on my way over to Taranto and got distracted by some bright shiny object and somehow ended up here.
It can’t be racist if your coordinated worldwide day of hate is directed against the Zionists, because Zionism is racism. The UN told me as much.
But remember, Obama is a friend to the Kikes. His Reverend? Well, not so much.
Which shouldn’t matter, because his Reverend was just some Reverend he knew from the neighborhood — and he never really listened to him for 20 years.
And how dare you suggest otherwise!
School daze.
This’ll give ya the willies Gene.
I got nothing. Of course the President’s Pastor is marching the Jews to the Sea, and the only Arabs living in a real democracy can’t wait to turn it into another 7th century paradise. The world of that fishy fish movie is becoming more appealing by the minute.
Of course the President’s Pastor is marching the Jews to the Sea, and the only Arabs living in a real democracy can’t wait to turn it into another 7th century paradise.
Tbf, the period between the 7th and 12th century was really fruitful for science in Islamic countries.
The Usual Apologists like to play this up as being a result of Islam that was wrecked by the horrible, terrible, no-good, obviously Christian-instituted Crusades (which led immediately to the Dark Ages) and then WHITE SCIENTISTS who (re-)discovered all this stuff later NEVER GAVE ANY CREDIT to earlier Islamic discoverers.
The fact that simultaneous discovery with neither discoverer being aware of the other was extremely common during Western Europe’s well-documented period of scientific discovery seems to have these people. As is the fact that many of the amazing principles that Muslim scientists supposedly “first” discovered were already known by preceding civilizations (cf. the Antikythera mechanism–which predates similar clockwork devices in Islamic civilizations by a thousand years and still outdoes them; to say little of the medical accomplishments of Galen, who was one of the first recorded physicians to perform ophthalmic surgery–again, several hundred years before Islamic surgeons did. In fact, Galen’s work ended up being a foundation for medical work in BOTH the West and the Near East, and it’s Syrian Christians that Islamic scholars have to thank for Arabic translations originally).
…I am not sure where I was even going.
OH YEAH. uh. tl;dr: people need to quit whitewashing Islam yo.
*seems to have missed these people, hurr
Plus there was no universal peer review system in place in the 7th century to make sure everyone was properly attributing Prior Art and getting their patents straight and whatnot. You found out about this swank new design from some old Greek scrolls that no one else can read? CLAIM YOU DREAMED THAT UP, GET YOUR NAME INTO HISTORY.