anarchristian

A Review of Griffin's "9/11 Ten Years Later"

2011-09-09T11:59:00.000-07:00

A Review by Thomas C. Fletcher

Posted first on Amazon

David Ray Griffin in his new book, 9/11 Ten Years Later: When State Crimes against Democracy Succeed, stock of what we know, after the passage of a decade of intensive grassroots research and analysis, about what really happened that day, and of the present state of the 9/11 truth movement - its strengths and its weaknesses, and how it can move forward most effectively. The book is a combination of important lectures given by Griffin in the last few years, revised and updated for publication, and of completely new essays on key topics, such as the strong evidence that the phone calls from the hijacked airliners must have been faked, and the powerful consensus about the Pentagon events that has been achieved by the movement.

The first four chapters highlight the strongest evidence that 9/11 was an inside job and the clearest implications of that evidence: the lack of evidence that Muslims attacked the US on that day (making clear that the ten-year-long series of wars on Muslim nations is morally and legally unjustified); the multiple occasions on which the laws of physics were miraculously inoperative in the destruction of the World Trade Center, if the official account so ferociously defended by erstwhile critics of government like Bill Moyers, Robert Parry, Alexander Cockburn and many others is to be believed; and the extraordinary case of WTC 7's classic demolition, which has been assiduously covered up by the mainstream media and government agencies (its collapse was never even mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report, and the final report on its destruction issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in November 2008 was fraudulent).

Chapter 5, "Phone Calls From The 9/11 Planes: Why They Are Not Authentic," examines all the evidence that has been discovered regarding phone calls from the hijacked airliners. The phone calls have been a crucial part of the official story of the day's events, purportedly establishing that the planes were hijacked by Arab Muslims and that Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. But after a careful, critical analysis Griffin is forced to conclude that the phone calls were not made from the planes. First he shows that there is no evidence that the alleged hijackers actually were ever onboard any of the planes, and further, that the failure of any of the eight pilots to "squawk" the hijack code into their transponders is "strong evidence that the official story about the 9/11 planes -- that the cabins were taken over by hijackers - is false." He then shows that the calls to Deena Burnett, which registered on her caller ID as calls from her husband Tom Burnett's cell phone (he was a passenger on board Flight 93), could not have been completed because cell phone technology in 2001 was not capable of completing calls from airliners at high elevation. Griffin concludes the calls had to have been faked, and suggests that they were faked by voice morphing, already a well-established technical capability at the time. After examining the claims made for many other calls, including those for Barbara Olson, wife of then Solicitor General Ted Olson, which were the basis for the claim that Flight 77 was still in the air and subsequently crashed into the Pentagon, Griffin concludes that "the evidence that the `calls from the planes' were faked is strong, ... far stronger than the evidence for the view that the calls were made by passengers and flight attendants, describing the activities of Middle-Eastern hijackers."

Chapter 6 discusses Vice President Dick Cheney's changing account of his whereabouts and activities at key times during the morning of 9/11. After admitting on national TV five days later that he had been present and in charge in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center in the basement of the White House before the Pentagon was attacked, he changed his story in November and claimed he did not reach the PEOC until after the Pentagon attack. Griffin shows that the 9/11 Commission Report upheld Cheney's otherwise unsupported second account, which absolved him of responsibility during two key incidents, the Pentagon attack and the destruction of Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. He shows further that much evidence, ignored by the Commission, contradicted Cheney's second story, including Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta's testimony before the Commission, Counterterrorism Czar Richard Clarke's published account of the morning, and reports from ABC News on the first anniversary of 9/11, all of which the Commission buried without mention.

The gem of the book is the seventh chapter, "The Pentagon: A Consensus Approach." In this very detailed analysis Griffin shows that the 9/11 truth movement has developed a complex, broad-based refutation of the official story of what happened at the Pentagon (that "the Pentagon was attacked by American Airlines Flight 77... under the control of al-Qaeda"). He examines fourteen facts which have been established by independent researchers, upon which there is universal agreement, and any one of which is enough to demolish the official account. Griffin argues that the movement should concentrate its Pentagon energies on further strengthening and advocacy of these points of agreement, and avoid dissipating time, energy and trust on a question which has taken up much of these resources in recent years, the question of "what hit the Pentagon?" He shows that this question is unanswerable with the evidence available; only a genuine investigation of the 9/11 attacks will enable it to be answered.

Chapter 8 illuminates the psychology of resistance to the truth about the 9/11 events which is so widespread, arguing that the real faith of the nominally-Christian US is "nationalist faith." The critique of the official story laid out by the 9/11 truth movement is literally unthinkable for many, even for devout Christians whose religion calls upon them to avoid all kinds of idolatry, including nationalism. Griffin concludes that "[w]hen Christian faith is subordinated to faith in American goodness ... it becomes a blinding faith, producing Christians with eyes wide shut."

The subtitle of the book indicates that the 9/11 attacks, in being a false-flag operation carried out by elements of the US government, were a "State Crime Against Democracy" or SCAD, with the primarily political purpose of imposing policies by force upon the country, and that the failure to carry out a genuine investigation, arrest the perpetrators and reverse the policies adopted by the government after 9/11 means that the operation has succeeded. But only to this point in time: the future is still open. Griffin provides in a powerful conclusion (Ch. 9, "When State Crimes Against Democracy Succeed") suggestions for how the 9/11 truth movement can continue to press forward to the necessary investigation of the 9/11 crimes and the reversal of the tragic course taken by the US while under the control of the criminals.

This superb book is written with the usual clarity, logic and argumentative power readers have come to expect from David Ray Griffin, which he has now employed in ten books on the 9/11 attacks. 9/11 Ten Years Later continues his advance at the cutting edge of 9/11 truth, and should be read by everyone who wants to take stock of what the movement has achieved and how to press on into a future in which illegal, immoral wars have been stopped and the country's democratic ideals reaffirmed.

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Read all of Mr. Fletcher's helpful, literate Amazon reviews of Dr. Griffin's 9/11 books here.

David Ray Griffin on 9/11: Ten Years, Ten Books

2011-08-31T08:22:00.000-07:00

In this, his tenth book on 9/11 and its consequences, David Ray Griffin continues to report the facts and marshal the evidence that the mainstream media continue to ignore. Having previously demolished the official 9/11 story, Griffin now explains how the government got away with its crime against democracy. - Paul Craig Roberts, formerly assistant secretary of the treasury and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has most recently written How the Economy Was Lost.
Anyone who has actually studied Griffin's writings on 9/11 knows that the evidence against the truth of the official account is overwhelming. It is not surprising that the mainstream response has been to ridicule and ignore rather than to engage in reasoned discussion. What is disappointing is that leading liberals and responsible journalists have joined in by affirming ideas that contradict basic science and condescendingly rejecting solid research without examining it. In this book, Griffin describes the behavior of these journalists and attempts, in a remarkably charitable spirit, to understand it. - John B. Cobb, Jr., author of The Earthist Challenge to Economism and (with Herman Daly) For the Common Good.
Publisher's Description: 9/11 Ten Years Later is David Ray Griffin's tenth book about 9/11. Asking in the first chapter whether 9/11 justified the war in Afghanistan, he explains why it did not.

In the following three chapters, devoted to the destruction of the World Trade Center, Griffin asks why otherwise rational journalists have endorsed miracles (understood as events that contradict laws of science).

Also, introducing the book's theme, Griffin points out that 9/11 has been categorized by some social scientists as a state crime against democracy.

Turning next to debates within the 9/11 Truth Movement, Griffin reinforces his claim that the reported phone calls from the airliners were faked, and argues that the intensely debated issue about the Pentagon - whether it was struck by a Boeing 757 - is quite unimportant.

Finally, Griffin suggests that the basic faith of Americans is not Christianity but "nationalist faith" - which most fundamentally prevents Americans from examining evidence that 9/11 was orchestrated by U.S. leaders - and argues that the success thus far of the 9/11 state crime against democracy need not be permanent.

Why yet another book on 9/11? Because, as David Ray Griffin points out clearly and persuasively, 9/11 continues to be not only the greatest crime in American history, but also the most strenuously covered up, and certainly the crime with the greatest political consequences. He shows how over a decade the events of 9/11 and the reports on them have been used to attack the American democratic system. Above all, he documents the success of this attack -- by the refusal of the media, the academy, and religious institutions to openly discuss these matters, and by the numbers of critics who at one extreme have made fools of themselves in echoing the Orwellian official version, and at the other extreme have been either fired or silenced after their dissent from it. - Peter Dale Scott, a poet, a former Canadian diplomat, and a professor at the University of California (Berkeley), whose most recent prose book is American War Machine.
Our civilization cannot survive if we do not confront the unanswered questions about 9/11. David Ray Griffin does that with the same clarity and meticulous documentation that characterized his preceding books. Frightening as the enormity of the truth about 9/11 may be, we should also bear in mind that it is a window of opportunity for addressing a whole range of problems threatening the lives of our children and grandchildren. I am sure those who follow will recognize David Ray Griffin's body of work as one of the most important contributions of the last decade. - Niels Harrit, Associate Professor Emeritus, Nano-science Center, Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen

David Ray Griffin is professor of philosophy of religion and theology, emeritus, at Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California, where he remains a co-director of the Center for Process Studies.

His previous 9/11 books include Cognitive Infiltration (2010), The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7 (2009), 9/11 Contradictions (2008), and The New Pearl Harbor Revisited (2008), which was a Publishers Weekly's "Pick of the Week."

In 2009, the New Statesman named Griffin one of "The 50 People Who Matter Today."

9/11 Ten Years Later: When State Crimes Against Democracy Succeed is not yet available on Amazon for $13.46. Those who cannot wait until it is may buy it from Interlink Books for $20 starting September 1, 2011.

For Rothbard's 85th: Long-Out-of-Print Essay on Vietnam, Ayn Rand, and "anarcho-capitalism"

2011-03-02T06:26:00.000-08:00

Murray Rothbard would have reached the age of 85 today. The promotion of liberty was the theme of his life, to which finis was written (all too soon) on January 7, 1995.

Murray Rothbard circa 1971

He believed the worst thing a state can do is not tax income, regulate business, or forbid peaceful transactions.

No, the worst thing one state can do is use its prestige and legitimacy (or, failing that, its monopoly of the means of coercion) to persuade its subjects to invade another state's territory to kill its subjects.

During the Vietnam War, Rothbard, a veteran of the non-interventionist Old Right, so wove his opposition to the war into his libertarian apologetics that some observers inferred that he had betrayed the Right and allied himself with the Left.

Of course, he hadn't moved a millimeter along the political spectrum. In his view, the traitors were to be found among the so-called "respectable" Right.

Bearing a publication date of forty years ago yesterday, in the year the Libertarian Party was founded, "Know Your Rights" shows off Murray's legendary ability to expound political strategy and narrate history for a mass audience. He knew many readers would probably be little interested in libertarianism for the intellectual stimulation it offered: they were facing the alternative of either allowing themselves to be put in kill-or-be-killed predicaments via "Selective Service" or becoming fugitives from the law (which spawns its own bleak alternatives: incarceration vs. exile). They were asking: were radical free market advocates on their side? Or the government's?

This issue of WIN also featured essays by Leonard Liggio (“Your Right to Be against War”) and Karl Hess (“What’s Left?”), who also figure in Rothbard’s narrative.

It is probable that Rothbard's neologism, “anarchocapitalism,” makes its first appearance in print here. This essay also notably offers the first libertarian critique of Objectivist politics. (Rothbard’s “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult,” which goes into its subject in greater detail, was written in 1972, privately circulated, and published in Liberty only in 1987.)

About the title, suggestive of a pamphlet offering legal advice: in a font smaller than that of “Know Your Rights,” and separated from that phrase by a "torch of liberty" image, appear the words “The Right Wing Libertarians.” They are not part of the title according to the table of contents (or Rothbard’s bibliography), but they reflect Rothbard’s subject better than does “Know Your Rights."

The text of this essay has been on my site since last December—the Libertarian Alliance [U.K.] copied and linked to it here—but the two anniversaries, the article's 40th and Murray's 85th, warrant another posting. I also wish to express gratitude to my brother Vince for digging this copy of WIN out of his files and bringing it to my attention.

anarchristian

Know Your Rights

Murray N. Rothbard

From WIN: Peace and Freedom through Nonviolent Action

Vol. 7, No. 4, March 1, 1971, 6-10.

Recently, a bewildering and seemingly new phenomenon has burst upon the public consciousness, “right-wing libertarianism.” While earlier forms of the movement received brief and scornful attention by professional “extremist” baiting Liberals, present attention is, almost miraculously for veterans of the movement, serious and respectful. The current implication is “maybe they’ve got something here. What, then, have they got?”

Whatever their numerous differences, all “right-wing libertarians” agree on the central core of their thought, briefly, that every individual has the absolute moral right to “self-ownership,” the ownership and control of his own body without aggressive interference by any other person or group. Secondly, libertarians believe that every individual has the right to claim the ownership of whatever goods he has created or found in a natural, unused state: this establishes an absolute property right, not only in his own person but also in the things which he finds or creates. Thirdly, if everyone has such an absolute right to private property, he therefore has the right to exchange such property titles for other titles to property: hence the right to give away such property to whomever he chooses (provided, of course, that the recipient is willing); hence the right of bequest—and the right of the recipient to inherit.

The emphasis on the rights of private property of course locates this libertarian creed as emphatically “right-wing,” as does the right of free contract implying absolute adherence to freedom of enterprise and the free-market economy. It also means, however, that the right-libertarian stands foursquare for the “civil liberty” of freedom of speech, press, and assembly. It means that he necessarily favors total freedom for abortion, pornography, prostitution, and all other forms of personal action that do not themselves aggress against the property of others. And, above all, he regards conscription as slavery pure and simple. All of these latter positions are of course now regarded as “leftist,” and so the right-libertarian is inevitably put in the position of being some form of “left-rightnik,” someone who agrees with conservatives on some issues and with leftists on others. While others therefore see him as curiously fluctuating and inconsistent, he regards his position as virtually the only one that is truly consistent, consistent on behalf of the liberty of every individual. For how can the leftist be against the violence of war and conscription and morality laws while yet favoring the violence of taxes and government controls? And how can the rightist trumpet his devotion to private property and free enterprise while favoring conscription and the outlawing of activities he deems immoral?

While of course opposing any private or group aggression against the rights of private property, the right-libertarian unerringly zeroes in on the central, the overriding aggressor upon such rights: the State apparatus. While the leftist tends to regard the State as an evil enforcer of private property rights, the right-libertarian, on the contrary, regards it as the prime aggressor on such rights. In contrast to believers in democracy or monarchy or dictatorship, the right-libertarian steadfastly refuses to regard the State as invested with any sort of divine or any other sanction setting it up above the general moral law. If it is criminal for one man or a group of men to aggress against a man’s person or property, then it is equally criminal for an outfit calling itself the “government” or “State” to do the same thing. Hence the right-libertarian regards “war” as mass murder, “conscription” as slavery, and—for most libertarians—“taxation” as robbery. From such past mentors as Herbert Spencer (Man vs. the State) and Albert Jay Nock (Our Enemy the State), the right-libertarian regards the State as the great enemy of the peaceful and productive pursuits of mankind.

With this as the central core of libertarian thought, we must now investigate the numerous facets of the right-libertarian spectrum; and, despite the numerous difficulties of such an analysis, it is still most convenient to align the various tendencies and factions of right-libertarianism on its own “left-right” continuum.

On the extreme-right fringe of the movement, there are those who simply believe in old-fashioned nineteenth-century laissez-faire; the major laissez-faire group is the Foundation for Economic Education, of Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, for which many of the middle-aged members of the right-libertarian movement have worked at one time or another.

The laissez-fairists believe that a central government must exist, and therefore that taxes must exist, but that taxation should be confined to the prime “governmental” function of defending life and property against attack. Any pressing of government beyond this function is considered illegitimate. The great bulk of libertarians, especially among the youth, have, however, gone beyond laissez-faire, for they have seen its basic inconsistency: for if taxation is robbery for building dams or steel plants, then it is also robbery when financing such supposedly “governmental” functions as police and the courts. If it is legitimate for the State to coerce the taxpayer into financing the police, then why is it not equally legitimate to coerce the taxpayer for myriad other activities, including building steel factories, subsidizing favored groups, etc? If taxation is robbery, surely then it is robbery regardless of the ends, benevolent or malevolent, for which the State proposes to employ these stolen funds.

Most libertarians also reject the laissez-fairist position that it is morally imperative to obey all laws, no matter how despotic, as well as the all-too-common laissez-fairist patriotic devotion to the American Constitution and the American State. They have also found current laissez-fairists (though this was not true of the nineteenth-century brand) to be conspicuously silent in mentioning the heavy responsibility of big business for the growth of statism in twentieth-century America, instead, the blame is almost always placed on unions, politicians, and leftish intellectuals. Moreover, almost never is there criticism of the greatest single force accelerating the Leviathan State in America: the military-industrial complex, and the American Empire fueled by that complex. For all these reasons, the old-fashioned laissez-faire position has lost credibility for the bulk of today’s right-libertarians.

Moving one degree leftward, we come to the Randian and neo-Randian movements, those who follow or have been influenced by the novelist Ayn Rand. From the publication of Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged in 1958, the Randian movement developed into what seemed to be destined as a mighty force. For the emotional impact of Rand’s powerfully-plotted novels attracted a vast following of young people into her “Objectivist” movement.

In addition to the emotional drawing-power of the novels, Randianism provided the eager acolyte with an integrated philosophical system, a system grounded on Aristotelian epistemology, and blending it with Nietszchean egosim and hero-worship, rationalist psychology, laissez-faire economics, and a natural-rights political philosophy, apolitical philosophy grounded on the libertarian axiom of never aggressing upon the person or property of another.

Even at its peak, however, the effectiveness of the Randian movement was severely limited by two important factors. One was its extreme and fanatical sectarianism; Randians refused to have anything to do with any person or group, no matter how close in outlook, who deviated by so much as an iota from the entire Randian canon—a canon, by the way, that has a rigid “line” on every conceivable question, from aesthetics to tactics.(An odd exception to this sectarianism, by the way, is the Republican Party and the Nixon Administration, which includes several highly-placed Randians as advisors.) Particularly hated by the Randians is any former colleague who has deviated from the total line; these people are reviled and personally blacklisted by the faithful. Indeed, Rand’s monthly magazine, The Objectivist, is probably the only magazine in the world that consistently cancels the subscription of anyone on their personal blacklist, including any subscribers who send in what they consider to be un-worshipful questions.

The second, associated factor is the totalitarian atmosphere, the cultic atmosphere, of the Randian movement. While the official Randian creed stresses the importance of individuality, self-reliance, and independent judgment, the unofficial but crucial axiom for the faithful is that “Ayn Rand is the greatest person who has ever lived” and, as a practical corollary, that “everything Ayn Rand says is right.” With this sort of ruling mentality, it is no wonder that the turnover in the Randian movement has been exceptionally high: attracted by the credo of individualism, an enormous number of young people were either purged or drifted away in disgust.

The collapse of the Randian movement as an organized force came in the summer of 1968, when an unbelievable bombshell struck the movement: an irrevocable split between Rand and her appointed heir, Nathaniel Branden.

Since then, the Randian movement has happily become polycentric; and Branden repaired to California to set up his own schismatic movement there. But the latter is still a movement confined to psychological theories and publications, and to book reviews in the occasionally appearing Academic Associates News. As an organized movement, Randianism, whatever variant, is a mere shadow of its former self.

But the Randian creed still remains as a vital influence on the thinking of libertarians, so many of whom were former adherents to the cult. Politically, Rand is to the left of the laissez-fairists in rejecting taxation as robbery, and therefore illegitimate. Rand saw through the illogicality, the inconsistency, of the laissez-faire view of taxation. Randian political theory wishes to preserve the existing unitary state, with its monopoly over coercion and ultimate decision-making; it wishes to define its “government” as a Utopian institution which retains its State monopoly but gains its revenue only by voluntary contributions from its citizens. Still worse, while Randians agree that taxation is robbery, they stubbornly refuse to regard the government—even the existing government which lives off taxation—as a band of robbers. Hence, Rand illogically infuses into the political outlook of herself and her charges an emotional devotion to the existing American government and to the American Constitution that totally negates her own libertarian axioms. While Rand opposes the war in Vietnam, for example, she does so on purely tactical reasons as a mistake not in our “national interest”; as a result, she is far more passionate in her hostility to the unpatriotic protestors against the war than she is against the war itself. She advocated the firing of Eugene Genovese from Rutgers, on the surprisingly anti-individualist grounds that “no man may support the victory of the enemies of his country.” And even though Rand passionately opposes the draft as slavery, she also believes, with Read and the laissez-fairists, that it is illegitimate to disobey the laws of the American State, no matter how unjust—so long as her freedom to protest the laws remains.

Finally, Ayn Rand is a conventional right-winger, as well, in her attitude toward the “international Communist conspiracy.” While Randians are not exactly champions of war, they are prevented by their simplistic diabolism from absorbing the revisionist view of American foreign policy—from realizing that the Cold War and American interventions overseas have been caused by the expanding aggressions of American imperialism rather than by a noble response to “Communist expansionism” by the “freest nation on earth.” Randians persist in the right-wing myth that the antipode of individualism is Communism, whereas the real antipode to liberty in America today is far different, the existing Corporate Monopoly Welfare-Warfare State.

Many neo-Randians, devoted as they are to logical analysis, have seen the logical clinker in Randian political theory; that if no man may aggress upon another, then neither may an outfit calling itself “government” presume to exert a coercive monopoly on force and on the making of ultimate judicial decision. Hence, they saw that no government may be coercively preserved, and they therefore took the next crucial step; while retaining devotion to the free market and private property, this legion of youthful neo-Randians have concluded that all services, including police and courts, must become freely marketable. It is morally illegitimate to set up a coercive monopoly of such functions, and then revere it as “government.” Hence, they have become “free-market anarchists,” or “anarcho-capitalists,” people who believe that defense, like any other service, should only be provided on the free market and not through monopoly or tax coercion.

Anarcho-capitalism is a creed new to the present age. Its closest historical links are with the “individualist anarchism” of Benjamin R. Tucker and Lysander Spooner of the late nineteenth century, and it shares with Tucker and Spooner a devotion to private property, individualism, and competition. Furthermore, and in contrast to Read and Rand, it shares with Spooner and Tucker their hostility to government officials as a criminal band of robbers and murderers. It is therefore no longer “patriotic.” It differs from the older anarchist in not believing that profits and interest would disappear in a fully free market, in holding the landlord-tenant relationship to be legitimate, and in holding that men can arrive through reason at objective law which does not have to be at the mercy of ad hoc juries. Lysander Spooner’s brilliantly hard-hitting No Treason, one of the masterpieces of anti-statism and reprinted by an anarcho-capitalist press, has had considerable influence in converting present-day youth to libertarianism.

It is safe to say that the great bulk of right-libertarians are anarcho-capitalists, particularly among the youth. Anarcho-capitalism, however, also contains within it a large spectrum of differing ideas and attitudes. For one thing, while they have all discarded any traits of devotion to the State and have become anarchists, many of them have retained the simplistic anti-Communism, devotion to Big Business, and even American patriotism of their former creeds. What we may call “anarcho-patriots,” for example, take this sort of line: “Yes, anarchy is the ideal solution. But, in the meanwhile, the American government is the freest on earth,” etc. Much of this sort of attitude permeated the Libertarian Caucus of the Young Americans for Freedom, which split off or were expelled from YAF at the embroiled YAF convention at St. Louis in August, 1969. This split—based on their libertarianism and their refusal to be devoted to such unjust laws as the draft—led to the splitting off from YAF of almost the entire California, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and New Jersey sections of that leading conservative youth organization. These groups then formed “Libertarian Alliances” in the various states.

A group of older anarcho-capitalists centered in New York founded the Libertarian Forum as a semi-monthly, in early 1969, and formed the Radical Libertarian Alliance, which had a considerable impact in fueling and sparking the 1969 YAF split in St. Louis. Its ideas were propagated among the youth with particular effect by Roy A. Childs, Jr. Childs had particular effect in converting Jarret Wollstein from Randianism to anarcho-capitalism and then to a realistic view of the American State. Wollstein, an energetic young Marylander, had been ejected from the Randian movement, and had formed his own Society for Rational Individualism, publishing the monthly National Individualist. Finally, at the end of 1969, Wollstein’s SRI merged with the bulk of the old Libertarian Alliance members of YAF to form the society of Individual Liberty, which has become by far the leading organization of libertarians in this country. SIL has thousands of members, and numerous campus chapters throughout the country, and is loosely affiliated with the California Libertarian Alliance, consisting largely of the ex-YAFers and which itself has over a thousand members within the state.

Meanwhile, as the SIL and the old Libertarian Alliance has flourished by moving from right to center within the spectrum, the New York-centered Radical Libertarian Alliance has fallen upon evil days. Murray Rothbard and Leonard Liggio had founded the journal Left and Right in early 1965 as a means of splitting finally from a conservative movement with which they had been allied but which had become a crusade against Communism and a celebrant of the American Consensus. In contrast, they saw in the New Left of those days many of the libertarian elements which they had, in earlier days, found on the Right: opposition to centralized bureaucracy and statism, hostility to the public school system, opposition to conscription, and a renaissance of the old “isolationist” hostility to war and American imperialism. Hence, they called upon the libertarians to find their allies on the New Left rather than on the Right. Leonard Liggio has been particularly energetic in working with the Left, having lectured on “American Imperialism” at the original Free University of New York, edited the magazine Leviathan, and having been associated with the American branch of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and its War Crimes Tribunal on Vietnam.

Under the inspiration of this search for the New Left, Becky Glaser led the transformation of the YAF chapter at the University of Kansas into an SDS chapter, and such youth leaders as Alan Milchman, then head of YAF at Brooklyn College, and Wilson Clark, Jr., head of the Conservative Club at the University of North Carolina, abandoned these organizations to plunge into radical left activity.

Rapid growth in the New York movement in 1968-69 led Rothbard and his associates to found the Libertarian Forum, as well as an ever-growing series of dinners, culminating in a conference attracting several hundred libertarians from the East Coast and Middle West, held in New York City on Columbus Day, 1969. Increasingly, however, a split grew within the Radical Libertarian Alliance, which had branches in Washington, D.C., Connecticut, and Boston. The factional differences centered on the problems of revolution, relations with the Left, and communalism vs. individualism. For as the RLA youth took the concept of alliance with the New Left to heart, they increasingly and to varying degrees became “leftists,” thus setting up an extreme-left tendency within the anarcho-capitalist movement. Leading this tendency was former Goldwater speech-writer Karl Hess, who had been one of the most spectacular converts to right-libertarianism during 1968. Going through a Randian phase—reflected in his famous Playboy article “Death of Politics” in mid-1969—Hess had passed through the center and on to lead the extreme left by mid-1969.

Responsive to the call for alliance with the New Left, the Left tendency began to oppose any criticisms of their newfound allies, leading to an uncritical adulation of the Black Panthers and other groups on the Left, including the anarcho-communists headed by Murray Bookchin. As in the history of many ideological movements, tactics began to merge into principle, so that many of the extreme left began to become anarcho-syndicalists or anarcho-communists, or, failing that, to see little or no difference between the various branches of anarchism. On revolution, in contrast to the Right, which opposes revolution on principle, and the Center, which holds revolution to be morally defensible as armed self-defense against State aggression but tactically and strategically absurd for present-day America, the RLA-Left began to favor any and all revolutionary tactics, including street-fighting, “trashing,” etc. This strategy has become increasingly unviable with the general collapse of the New Left and its drift back to Stalinism.

The final split between these various factions occurred after the Columbus Day, 1969 conference held by RLA in New York City, which degenerated into a screaming match between Left, Center, and Right factions, and featured a Left-exodus from the Conference to join a march on Fort Dix. Shortly afterward, the over-30 group severed all connections with RLA, and soon New York saw two, separate right-libertarian organizations, each wary if not hostile to each other: RLA; and the New York Libertarian Alliance, which was headed by Long Island lawyer Gary Greenberg, and which became affiliated with SIL. Since then, RLA has fragmented into various splintered affinity groupings, the only viable remnants being Ralph Fucetola’s New Jersey Libertarian Alliance, which publishes The Abolitionist, and a group led by Charles Hamilton, which publishes the newly-established quarterly Libertarian Analysis.

In many ways, California, with the largest right-libertarian population, differs from the movement in the rest of the country. The movement there is led by the California Libertarian Alliance, of over a thousand members. Led by youthful former YAFers, the CLA is rightist and neo-Randian in tendency, although over the last year and a half it too has moved leftward and abandoned many of its Randian tenets. CLA has held several highly successful conferences based on the idea of a Left-Right libertarian dialogue. The last conference, held on the campus of the University of Southern California last November and attracting over 700 attendees, featured Paul Goodman as well as more orthodox right-libertarian speakers. It also featured the libertarian psychoanalyst Dr. Thomas Szasz, who, influenced by such laissez-faire libertarians as Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, has also become a favorite of the New Left for his crusade against the coercion involved in the “mental health” program.

At the center of the flourishing movement in southern California is Robert LeFevre, head of the anarcho-pacifist tendency within the movement. LeFevre had founded and run for many years the Freedom School near Colorado Springs, a school which ran two-week summer seminars and was very successful in converting students and members of the public throughout the country. After transforming the school into Rampart College, LeFevre moved the operation to the Los Angeles area, where it has formed the nucleus for the libertarian movement there. LeFevre believes in absolute pacifism, holding it immoral not only to aggress against the person or property of anyone else, but also to defend that person or property by means of violence. Since he opposes all use of violence anywhere, he is far more consistent than socialist-pacifists in his opposition to force, and ranks as a kind of right-wing Tolstoyan. He himself rejects the label “anarchist” and prefers to call his pacifist libertarianism “autarchism.”

Another split within the libertarian movement centers on “youth culture”: drugs, rock, dress, etc. Almost exclusively, the split is generational, with the over-30’s (with the exception of Hess) lined up against the youth culture, and the under-30’s (with the exception of dyed-in-the wool Randians) strongly in favor. However, the California youth lead their generation in pushing youth culture as a supposedly mandatory part of the libertarian struggle; a similar but less important split centers on Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation, both of which are pushed strongly by the CLA youth. California is also the home of such bizarre variants as “retreatism”—the dream of small groups for eluding the State by buying (or even making!) their own island, or even moving into caves underground.

Necessarily little-known in the rest of the country, but probably with relatively the greatest influence within its own is the right-libertarian movement in Hawaii. Led by Bill Danks, a graduate student in American history at the University of Hawaii, the movement there managed to gain control of a major radio station, KTRG. For two years, KTRG beamed libertarian programs at their many thousands of listeners for many hours each night. However, the FCC, in a flagrant though unknown example of political repression, has cracked down and taken away the license of the station, and Danks as well as the heads of KTRG have been indicted for violation of the 1970 census! These are the only indictments so far for the high crime of refusing to answer questions on the census. Danks, affiliated with SIL, was head of SIL’s Census Resistance ‘70 in the state of Hawaii.

Another emerging activity in the movement is the National Taxpayers’ Union, headquartered in Washington, D.C. Headed by James Davidson, publisher of SIL’s The Individualist, and Wainwright Dawson, Jr., a former conservative who has merged his United Republicans of America into the NTU, the organization includes among its officers and advisors Murray Rothbard, A. Ernest Fitzgerald, and the distinguished socialist-anarchist Noam Chomsky.

As “left” and “right” categories dissolve and become increasingly meaningless on the American ideological scene, as young people, with the collapse of both the SDS-Left and the liberal “consensus,” grope toward a new philosophy and a new orientation, the emerging phenomenon of right-libertarianism may be destined for an important role in American life. If that happens, left-pacifists should not be very distressed, for this would mean an important thrust toward the dismantling of the war machine, the imperial expansion, and the domestic Leviathan of the giant American State.

Alfred North Whitehead: An Ignored Sesquicentennial

2011-02-15T07:12:00.000-08:00

Inexplicably, if not also shamefully, there is virtually no public notice of the 150th anniversary of the birth of the great metaphysician, philosopher of science, and mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead, who was born on this date in 1861 in Ramsgate, Kent, England. Known more on this side of the Atlantic, he proposed a revision to Western theism that continues to inspire, challenge, and influence millions worldwide. On my website I have posted a number of texts of Whitehead and Whiteheadians, and from it I have transferred to this blog the text of his "God and the World," which forms the second chapter of the fifth part of his signal work in cosmology, Process and Reality (1929; from the corrected edition prepared by David Ray Griffin and Donald Sherburne and published in 1978). Across its seven sections, which together constitute one of the more accessible, even poetic, parts of that otherwise forbidding tome, Whitehead outlined a "new"/old concept of God. After penning its last sentence, Whitehead left it to his readers to argue over whether the details of his system support it, and even over whether it is worth supporting. Classical theism, with its (in my opinion) intractable problem of evil, continues to attract and retain adherents, but not without interacting with its "process" critics, who are also better philosophers because of this dialectical development. (I especially have in mind the thought of W. Norris Clarke, S.J.) I wish I could do more to honor a man who so changed my thinking, but perhaps putting his thought in the path of others is the best anyone could do. -- Anthony Flood

God and the World

Alfred North Whitehead

1861-1947

One most obvious problem is how to save the intermediate imaginative representations of spiritual truths from loss of effectiveness, if the possibility of modifications of dogma are admitted. The religious spirit is not identical with dialectical acuteness. Thus these intermediate representations play a great part in religious life. They are enshrined in modes of worship, in popular religious literature, and in art. Religions cannot do without them; but if they are allowed to dominate, uncriticised by dogma or by recurrence to the primary sources of religious inspiration, they are properly to be termed idols. In Christian history, the charge of idolatry has been bandied to and fro among rival theologians. Probably, if taken in its wide sense, it rests with equal truth on all the main churches, Protestant, and Catholic. Idolatry is the necessary product of static dogmas.

Section I

So long as the temporal world is conceived as a self-sufficient completion of the creative act, explicable by its derivation from an ultimate principle which is at once eminently real and the unmoved mover, from this conclusion there is no escape: the best that we can say of the turmoil is, “For so he giveth his beloved—sleep.” This is the message of religions of the Buddhistic type, and in some sense it is true. In this final discussion we have to ask, whether metaphysical principles impose the belief that it is the whole truth. The complexity of the world must be reflected in the answer. It is childish to enter upon thought with the simpleminded question, What is the world made of? The task of reason is to fathom the deeper depths of the many-sidedness of things. We must not expect simple answers to far-reaching questions. However far our gaze penetrates, there are always heights beyond which block our vision.

The notion of God as the “unmoved mover” is derived from Aristotle, at least so far as Western thought is concerned. The notion of God as “eminently real” is a favourite doctrine of Christian theology. The combination of the two into the doctrine of an aboriginal, eminently real, transcendent creator, at whose fiat the world came into being, and whose imposed will it obeys, is the fallacy which has infused tragedy into the histories of Christianity and of Mahometanism.

When the Western world accepted Christianity, Caesar conquered; and the received text of Western theology was edited by his lawyers. The code of Justinian and the theology of Justinian are two volumes expressing one movement of the human spirit. The brief Galilean vision of humility flickered throughout the ages, uncertainly. In the official formulation of the religion it has assumed the trivial form of the mere attribution to the Jews that they cherished a misconception about their Messiah. But the deeper idolatry, of the fashioning of God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian, and Roman imperial rulers, was retained. The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar.

In the great formative period of theistic philosophy, which ended with the rise of Mahometanism, after a continuance coeval with civilization, three strains of thought emerge which, amid many variations in detail, respectively fashion God in the image of an imperial ruler, God in the image of a personification of moral energy, God in the image of an ultimate philosophical principle. Hume’s Dialogues criticize unanswerably these modes of explaining the system of the world.

The three schools of thought can be associated respectively with the divine Caesars, the Hebrew prophets, and Aristotle. But Aristotle was antedated by Indian, and Buddhistic, thought; the Hebrew prophets can be paralleled in traces of earlier thought; Mahometanism and the divine Caesars merely represent the most natural, obvious, idolatrous theistic symbolism, at all epochs and places.

The history of theistic philosophy exhibits various stages of combination of these three diverse ways of entertaining the problem. There is, however, in the Galilean origin of Christianity yet another suggestion which does not fit very well with any of the three main strands of thought. It does not emphasize the ruling Caesar, or the ruthless moralist, or the unmoved mover. It dwells upon the tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operate by love; and it finds purpose in the present immediacy of a kingdom not of this world. Love neither rules, nor is it unmoved; also it is a little oblivious as to morals. It does not look to the future; for it finds its own reward in the immediate present.

Section II

Apart from any reference to existing religions as they are, or as they ought to be, we must investigate dispassionately what the metaphysical principles, here developed, require on these points, as to the nature of God. There is nothing here in the nature of proof. There is merely the confrontation of the theoretic system with a certain rendering of the facts. But the unsystematized report upon the facts is itself highly controversial, and the system is confessedly inadequate. The deductions from it in this particular sphere of thought cannot be looked upon as more than suggestions as to how the problem is transformed in the light of that system. What follows is merely an attempt to add another speaker to that masterpiece, Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Any cogency of argument entirely depends upon elucidation of somewhat exceptional elements in our conscious experience—those elements which may roughly be classed together as religious and moral intuitions.

In the first place, God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification.

Viewed as primordial, he is the unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality. In this aspect, he is not before all creation, but with all creation. But, as primordial, so far is he from “eminent reality,” that in this abstraction he is “deficiently actual”—and this in two ways. His feelings are only conceptual and so lack the fulness of actuality. Secondly, conceptual feelings, apart from complex integration with physical feelings, are devoid of consciousness in their subjective forms. Thus, when we make a distinction of reason, and consider God in the abstraction of a primordial actuality, we must ascribe to him neither fulness of feeling, nor consciousness. He is the unconditioned actuality of conceptual feeling at the base of things; so that, by reason of this primordial actuality, there is an order in the relevance of eternal objects to the process of creation. His unity of conceptual operations is a free creative act, untrammelled by reference to any particular course of things. It is deflected neither by love, nor by hatred, for what in fact comes to pass. The particularities of the actual world presuppose it; while it merely presupposes the general metaphysical character of creative advance, of which it is the primordial exemplification. The primordial nature of God is the acquirement by creativity of a primordial character.

His conceptual actuality at once exemplifies and establishes the categoreal conditions. The conceptual feelings, which compose his primordial nature, exemplify in their subjective forms their mutual sensitivity and their subjective unity of subjective aim. These subjective forms are valuations determining the relative relevance of eternal objects for each occasion of actuality.

He is the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire. His particular relevance to each creative act, as it arises from its own conditioned standpoint in the world, constitutes him the initial “object of desire” establishing the initial phase of each subjective aim. A quotation from Aristotle’s Metaphysics¹ expresses some analogies to, and some differences from, this line of thought:

And since that which is moved and moves is intermediate, there is something which moves without being moved, being eternal, substance, and actuality. And the object of desire and the object of thought move in this way; they move without being moved. The primary objects of desire and of thought are the same. For the apparent good is the object of appetite, and the real good is the primary object of rational wish. But desire is consequent on opinion rather than opinion on desire; for the thinking is the startingpoint. And thought is moved by the object of thought, and one of the two columns of opposites is in itself the object of thought; . . .

Aristotle had not made the distinction between conceptual feelings and the intellectual feelings which alone involve consciousness. But if “conceptual feeling,” with its subjective form of valuation, be substituted for “thought,” “thinking,” and “opinion,” in the above quotation, the agreement is exact.

Section III

There is another side to the nature of God which cannot be omitted. Throughout this exposition of the philosophy of organism we have been considering the primary action of God on the world. From this point of view, he is the principle of concretion—the principle whereby there is initiated a definite outcome from a situation otherwise riddled with ambiguity. Thus, so far, the primordial side of the nature of God has alone been relevant.

But God, as well as being primordial, is also consequent. He is the beginning and the end. He is not the beginning in the sense of being in the past of all members. He is the presupposed actuality of conceptual operation, in unison of becoming with every other creative act. Thus, by reason of the relativity of all things, there is a reaction of the world on God. The completion of God’s nature into a fulness of physical feeling is derived from the objectification of the world in God. He shares with every new creation its actual world; and the concrescent creature is objectified in God as a novel element in God’s objectification of that actual world. This prehension into God of each creature is directed with the subjective aim, and clothed with the subjective form, wholly derivative from his all-inclusive primordial valuation. God’s conceptual nature is unchanged, by reason of its final completeness. But his derivative nature is consequent upon the creative advance of the world.

Thus, analogously to all actual entities, the nature of God is dipolar. He has a primordial nature and a consequent nature. The consequent nature of God is conscious; and it is the realization of the actual world in the unity of his nature, and through the transformation of his wisdom. The primordial nature is conceptual, the consequent nature is the weaving of God’s physical feelings upon his primordial concepts.

One side of God’s nature is constituted by his conceptual experience. This experience is the primordial fact in the world, limited by no actuality which it presupposes. It is therefore infinite, devoid of all negative prehensions. This side of his nature is free, complete, primordial, eternal, actually deficient, and unconscious. The other side originates with physical experience derived from the temporal world, and then acquires integration with the primordial side. It is determined, incomplete, consequent, “everlasting,” fully actual, and conscious. His necessary goodness expresses the determination of his consequent nature.

Conceptual experience can be infinite, but it belongs to the nature of physical experience that it is finite. An actual entity in the temporal world is to be conceived as originated by physical experience with its process of completion motivated by consequent, conceptual experience initially derived from God. God is to be conceived as originated by conceptual experience with his process of completion motivated by consequent, physical experience, initially derived from the temporal world.

Section IV

The perfection of God’s subjective aim, derived from the completeness of his primordial nature, issues into the character of his consequent nature. In it there is no loss, no obstruction. The world is felt in a unison of immediacy. The property of combining creative advance with the retention of mutual immediacy is what in the previous section is meant by the term “everlasting.”

The wisdom of subjective aim prehends every actuality for what it can be in such a perfected system—its sufferings, its sorrows, its failures, its triumphs, its immediacies of joy—woven by rightness of feeling into the harmony of the universal feeling, which is always immediate, always many, always one, always with novel advance, moving onward and never perishing. The revolts of destructive evil, purely self-regarding, are dismissed into their triviality of merely individual facts; and yet the good they did achieve in individual joy, in individual sorrow, in the introduction of needed contrast, is yet saved by its relation to the completed whole. The image—and it is but an image—the image under which this operative growth of God’s nature is best conceived, is that of a tender care that nothing be lost.

The consequent nature of God is his judgment on the world. He saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgment of a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved. It is also the judgment of a wisdom which uses what in the temporal world is mere wreckage.

Another image which is also required to understand his consequent nature is that of his infinite patience. The universe includes a threefold creative act composed of (i) the one infinite conceptual realization, (ii) the multiple solidarity of free physical realizations in the temporal world, (iii) the ultimate unity of the multiplicity of actual fact with the primordial conceptual fact. If we conceive the first term and the last term in their unity over against the intermediate multiple freedom of physical realizations in the temporal world, we conceive of the patience of God, tenderly saving the turmoil of the intermediate world by the completion of his own nature. The sheer force of things lies in the intermediate physical process: this is the energy of physical production. God’s role is not the combat of productive force with productive force, of destructive force with destructive force; it lies in the patient operation of the overpowering rationality of his conceptual harmonization. He does not create the world, he saves it: or, more accurately, he is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.

Section V

The vicious separation of the flux from the permanence leads to the concept of an entirely static God, with eminent reality, in relation to an entirely fluent world, with deficient reality. But if the opposites, static and fluent, have once been so explained as separately to characterize diverse actualities, the interplay between the thing which is static and the things which are fluent involves contradiction at every step in its explanation. Such philosophies must include the notion of “illusion” as a fundamental principle—the notion of “mere appearance.” This is the final Platonic problem.

Undoubtedly, the intuitions of Greek, Hebrew, and Christian thought have alike embodied the notions of a static God condescending to the world, and of a world either thoroughly fluent, or accidentally static, but finally fluent—”heaven and earth shall pass away.” In some schools of thought, the fluency of the world is mitigated by the assumption that selected components in the world are exempt from this final fluency, and achieve a static survival. Such components are not separated by any decisive line from analogous components for which the assumption is not made. Further, the survival is construed in terms of a final pair of opposites, happiness for some, torture for others.

Such systems have the common character of starting with a fundamental intuition which we do mean to express, and of entangling themselves in verbal expressions, which carry consequences at variance with the initial intuition of permanence in fluency and of fluency in permanence.

But civilized intuition has always, although obscurely, grasped the problem as double and not as single. There is not the mere problem of fluency and permanence. There is the double problem: actuality with permanence, requiring fluency as its completion; and actuality with fluency, requiring permanence as its completion. The first half of the problem concerns the completion of God’s primordial nature by the derivation of his consequent nature from the temporal world. The second half of the problem concerns the completion of each fluent actual occasion by its function of objective immortality, devoid of “perpetual perishing,” that is to say, “everlasting.”

This double problem cannot be separated into two distinct problems. Either side can only be explained in terms of the other. The consequent nature of God is the fluent world become “everlasting” by its objective immortality in God. Also the objective immortality of actual occasions requires the primordial permanence of God, whereby the creative advance ever reestablishes itself endowed with initial subjective aim derived from the relevance of God to the evolving world.

But objective immortality within the temporal world does not solve the problem set by the penetration of the finer religious intuition. “Everlastingness” has been lost; and “everlastingness” is the content of that vision upon which the finer religions are built—the “many” absorbed everlastingly in the final unity. The problems of the fluency of God and of the everlastingness of passing experience are solved by the same factor in the universe. This factor is the temporal world perfected by its reception and its reformation, as a fulfilment of the primordial appetition which is the basis of all order. In this way God is completed by the individual, fluent satisfactions of finite fact, and the temporal occasions are completed by their everlasting union with their transformed selves, purged into conformation with the eternal order which is the final absolute “wisdom.” The final summary can only be expressed in terms of a group of antitheses, whose apparent self-contradictions depend on neglect of the diverse categories of existence. In each antithesis there is a shift of meaning which converts the opposition into a contrast.

It is as true to say that God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World is permanent and God is fluent.

It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God many.

It is as true to say that, in comparison with the World, God is actual eminently, as that, in comparison with God, the World is actual eminently.

It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World.

It is as true to say that God transcends the World, as that the World transcends God.

It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God.

God and the World are the contrasted opposites in terms of which Creativity achieves its supreme task of transforming disjoined multiplicity, with its diversities in opposition, into concrescent unity, with its diversities in contrast. In each actuality there are two concrescent poles of realization—”enjoyment” and “appetition,” that is, the “physical” and the “conceptual.” For God the conceptual is prior to the physical, for the World the physical poles are prior to the conceptual poles.

A physical pole is in its own nature exclusive, bounded by contradiction: a conceptual pole is in its own nature all-embracing, unbounded by contradiction. The former derives its share of infinity from the infinity of appetition; the latter derives its share of limitation from the exclusiveness of enjoyment. Thus, by reason of his priority of appetition, there can be but one primordial nature for God; and, by reason of their priority of enjoyment, there must be one history of many actualities in the physical world.

God and the World stand over against each other, expressing the final metaphysical truth that appetitive vision and physical enjoyment have equal claim to priority in creation. But no two actualities can be torn apart: each is all in all. Thus each temporal occasion embodies God, and is embodied in God. In God’s nature, permanence is primordial and flux is derivative from the World: in the World’s nature, flux is primordial and permanence is derivative from God. Also the World’s nature is a primordial datum for God; and God’s nature is a primordial datum for the World. Creation achieves the reconciliation of permanence and flux when it has reached its final term which is everlastingness—the Apotheosis of the World.

Opposed elements stand to each other in mutual requirement. In their unity, they inhibit or contrast. God and the World stand to each other in this opposed requirement. God is the infinite ground of all mentality, the unity of vision seeking physical multiplicity. The World is the multiplicity of finites, actualities seeking a perfected unity. Neither God, nor the World, reaches static completion. Both are in the grip of the ultimate metaphysical ground, the creative advance into novelty. Either of them, God and the World, is the instrument of novelty for the other.

In every respect God and the World move conversely to each other in respect to their process. God is primordially one, namely, he is the primordial unity of relevance of the many potential forms; in the process he acquires a consequent multiplicity, which the primordial character absorbs into its own unity. The World is primordially many, namely, the many actual occasions with their physical finitude; in the process it acquires a consequent unity, which is a novel occasion and is absorbed into the multiplicity of the primordial character. Thus God is to be conceived as one and as many in the converse sense in which the World is to be conceived as many and as one. The theme of Cosmology, which is the basis of all religions, is the story of the dynamic effort of the World passing into everlasting unity, and of the static majesty of God’s vision, accomplishing its purpose of completion by absorption of the World’s multiplicity of effort.

Section VI

The consequent nature of God is the fulfilment of his experience by his reception of the multiple freedom of actuality into the harmony of his own actualization. It is God as really actual, completing the deficiency of his mere conceptual actuality.

Every categoreal type of existence in the world presupposes the other types in terms of which it is explained. Thus the many eternal objects conceived in their bare isolated multiplicity lack any existent character. They require the transition to the conception of them as efficaciously existent by reason of God’s conceptual realization of them.

But God’s conceptual realization is nonsense if thought of under the guise of a barren, eternal hypothesis. It is God’s conceptual realization performing an efficacious rôle in multiple unifications of the universe, which are free creations of actualities arising out of decided situations. Again this discordant multiplicity of actual things, requiring each other and neglecting each other, utilizing and discarding, perishing and yet claiming life as obstinate matter of fact, requires an enlargement of the understanding to the comprehension of another phase in the nature of things. In this later phase, the many actualities are one actuality, and the one actuality is many actualities. Each actuality has its present life and its immediate passage into novelty; but its passage is not its death. This final phase of passage in God’s nature is ever enlarging itself. In it the complete adjustment of the immediacy of joy and suffering reaches the final end of creation. This end is existence in the perfect unity of adjustment as means, and in the perfect multiplicity of the attainment of individual types of self-existence. The function of being a means is not disjoined from the function of being an end. The sense of worth beyond itself is immediately enjoyed as an overpowering element in the individual self-attainment. It is in this way that the immediacy of sorrow and pain is transformed into an element of triumph. This is the notion of redemption through suffering which haunts the world. It is the generalization of its very minor exemplification as the aesthetic value of discords in art.

Thus the universe is to be conceived as attaining the active self-expression of its own variety of opposites—of its own freedom and its own necessity, of its own multiplicity and its own unity, of its own imperfection and its own perfection. All the “opposites” are elements in the nature of things, and are incorrigibly there. The concept of “God” is the way in which we understand this incredible fact—that what cannot be, yet is.

Section VII

Thus the consequent nature of God is composed of a multiplicity of elements with individual self-realization. It is just as much a multiplicity as it is a unity; it is just as much one immediate fact as it is an unresting advance beyond itself. Thus the actuality of God must also be understood as a multiplicity of actual components in process of creation. This is God in his function of the kingdom of heaven.

Each actuality in the temporal world has its reception into God’s nature. The corresponding element in God’s nature is not temporal actuality, but is the transmutation of that temporal actuality into a living, ever-present fact. An enduring personality in the temporal world is a route of occasions in which the successors with some peculiar completeness sum up their predecessors. The correlate fact in God’s nature is an even more complete unity of life in a chain of elements for which succession does not mean loss of immediate unison. This element in God’s nature inherits from the temporal counterpart according to the same principle as in the temporal world the future inherits from the past. Thus in the sense in which the present occasion is the person now, and yet with his own past, so the counterpart in God is that person in God.

But the principle of universal relativity is not to be stopped at the consequent nature of God. This nature itself passes into the temporal world according to its gradation of relevance to the various concrescent occasions. There are thus four creative phases in which the universe accomplishes its actuality. There is first the phase of conceptual origination, deficient in actuality, but infinite in its adjustment of valuation. Secondly, there is the temporal phase of physical origination, with its multiplicity of actualities. In this phase full actuality is attained; but there is deficiency in the solidarity of individuals with each other. This phase derives its determinate conditions from the first phase. Thirdly, there is the phase of perfected actuality, in which the many are one everlastingly, without the qualification of any loss either of individual identity or of completeness of unity. In everlastingness, immediacy is reconciled with objective immortality. This phase derives the conditions of its being from the two antecedent phases. In the fourth phase, the creative action completes itself. For the perfected actuality passes back into the temporal world, and qualifies this world so that each temporal actuality includes it as an immediate fact of relevant experience. For the kingdom of heaven is with us today. The action of the fourth phase is the love of God for the world. It is the particular providence for particular occasions. What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world. In this sense, God is the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands.

We find here the final application of the doctrine of objective immortality. Throughout the perishing occasions in the life of each temporal Creature, the inward source of distaste or of refreshment, the judge arising out of the very nature of things, redeemer or goddess of mischief, is the transformation of Itself, everlasting in the Being of God. In this way, the insistent craving is justified—the insistent craving that zest for existence be refreshed by the ever-present, unfading importance of our immediate actions, which perish and yet live for evermore.

¹ Metaphysics 1072a 2332, trans. by Professor W. D. Ross. My attention was called to the appositeness of this particular quotation by Mr. F. J. Carson. [Note by ANW.—A.F.]

Brand Blanshard on Wisdom -- on His Birthday

2010-08-27T08:19:00.000-07:00

Brand Blanshard (August 27, 1892-November 18, 1987), prepared the following entry on philosophy's object for The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by the late Paul Edwards and published by Macmillan in eight volumes in 1967. It occupies pages 322 to 324 of Volume 8.

Wisdom

Wisdom in its broadest and commonest sense denotes sound and serene judgment regarding the conduct of life. It may be accompanied by a broad range of knowledge, by intellectual acuteness, and by speculative depth, but it is not to be identified with any of these and may appear in their absence. It involves intellectual grasp or insight, but it is concerned not so much with the ascertainment of fact or the elaboration of theories as with the means and ends of practical life.

Wisdom literature. Concern with the art of living long preceded formal science or philosophy in human history. All ancient civilizations seem to have accumulated wisdom literatures, consisting largely of proverbs handed down from father to son as the crystallized results of experience. Perhaps the most ancient known collection of these sayings is the Egyptian “Wisdom of Ptah-hotep,” which comes down from 2500 B.C. The writings Confucius (sixth century B.C.) and Mencius (fourth century B.C.), though more sophisticated, are still concerned with the Tao, the good or normal human life. The early writers of India held views at once more speculative and more disillusioned than those of China; both Buddhists and Hindus found the greatest happiness of man in deliverance from the grinding round of suffering and death and in absorption into Atman or nirvana, where personality and struggle alike disappear. But large parts of the Bhagavad-Gita and the Dhammapada, two classics among the scriptures of India, are devoted to maxims and counsels for the conduct of life.

Of far greater influence in the West has been the Wisdom literature of the Hebrew people, which consists of the more philosophical parts of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha. Perhaps the most important of these are the books of Job, Proverbs, and Psalms and the apocryphal book called The Wisdom of Solomon. There is no certain knowledge of who wrote any of them; they are probably the work of many men, extending over centuries. They differ strikingly from the writings of Greek and Chinese moralists in the closeness with which morality is identified with religion. The Hebrew sages were all monotheists who held that God fashioned the world but remained outside it; he had made his will known in the law delivered to Moses. This law set the standard and pattern of goodness for all time; the good man will make it his study and seek to conform his life to it. At the same time these sages reduced the miraculous element in Jewish history; they made no claim to being inspired themselves, and inclining, indeed, to assume that the sole motive of conduct was self-advantage, they offered their prudential maxims as not only conforming to the divine law but also as the product of good sense and sound reason. There is very little evidence that they were affected by Greek thought, though Greek influence must have flowed around them after the conquests of Alexander. It is possible that in their cool and reasonable note, contrasting so sharply with the visionary fervor of the prophets, there is an echo of the reflective thought of Greece.

The Greeks had a wisdom literature of their own which long preceded the appearance of their great philosophers. Hesiod (eighth century B.C.) and Theognis (sixth century B.C.) summed up in poetic form the maxims of traditional morality. Pythgoras (sixth century B.C.), a curious combination of mathematician and religious seer, seems to have found in philosophy the guide of practical life. This view was further developed by the Sophists, who, at a time when libraries and universities were unknown, undertook to instruct young men in the arts, theoretical and practical, that were most likely to lead to success. In their emphasis on success, however, there was something skeptical and cynical; the art of life tended in their teaching to become the sort of craft that enable one by clever strategy to achieve place and power.

The Greek conception. The first full statement and embodiment of the classic Greek conception of wisdom came with Socrates (c. 470-399 B.C.), who insisted that virtue and knowledge were one, that if men failed to live well, it was through ignorance of what virtue really was. He had no doubt that if men know what virtue was, they would embody it in their conduct. Thus, he set himself to define the major virtues with precision. His method was to consider particular instances of them and bring to light the features they had in common; this would give the essence and true pattern of the virtue in question. He did not profess to be satisfied with the results of his inquiries, but his acuteness and thoroughness made him the first of the great theoretical moralists, and the courage with which he carried his principles into both life and death gave him a unique place in Western history.

The stress on wisdom was maintained by his disciple Plato. For Plato there are three departments of human nature, which may be described as the appetites, directed to such ends as food and drink; the distinctively human emotions, such as courage and honor; and reason. Of these reason is the most important, for only as impulse and feeling are governed by it will conduct be saved from chaos and excess; indeed, in such government practical wisdom consists. In one respect Aristotle carried the exaltation of reason farther than Plato; in addition to this practical wisdom, he recognized another and purely intellectual virtue, the wisdom that pursues truth for its own sake and without reference to practice. In this pursuit, which can be followed effectively only by the philosopher, lay the highest and happiest life.

It was among the Stoics, however, that guidance by reason was most seriously and widely attempted. In the thought of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121-180), both nature and human nature are determined by causal law, and the wrongs and insults that other men inflict on us are therefore as inevitable as the tides. The wise man will understand this inevitability and not waste his substance in futile indignation or fear. He will conform himself to nature’s laws, recognize that passion is a symptom of ignorance, free himself from emotional attachments and resentments, and live as far as he can the life of a “passionless sage.” The account given by Marcus Aurelius in his famous journal of his struggle to order his practice and temper by this ideal of austere rationality has made his little book a classic of pagan wisdom.

Modern philosophers. The opinions of modern philosophers on the meaning of wisdom are too various for review here. But it can be noted of these thinkers, as it was of Marcus Aurelius, that their standing as purveyors or exemplars of wisdom bears no fixed relation to their eminence as philosophers. If their chief work lies, as Kant’s does, in the theory of knowledge, or as McTaggart’s does, in technical metaphysics, it may have no obvious bearing on practical life. Furthermore, by reason of an unhappy temperament, some philosophers of name and influence, such as Rousseau, have been far from notable exemplars of wisdom in either controversy or conduct. On the other hand, there are thinkers who have shown in their writing, and sometimes also in their lives, so large a humanity and good sense that they have been held in especial esteem for their wisdom whether or not they have been of high philosophical rank. Montaigne and Emerson are examples on one level; John Locke, Bishop Butler, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick are examples from a more professional level. Among technical thinkers of the first rank, a figure who has left a deep impression for a wisdom serene and disinterested, though a little above the battle, is the famous philosopher of Amsterdam, Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677).

Components of wisdom. Are there any traits uniformly exhibited by the very diverse minds that by general agreement are wise? Two traits appear to stand out—reflectiveness and judgment.

Reflectiveness. By reflectiveness is meant the habit of considering events and beliefs in the light of their grounds and consequences. Conduct prompted merely by impulse or desire is notoriously likely to be misguided, and this holds true of both intellectual and practical conduct. Whether a belief is warranted must be decided by the evidence it rests on and the implications to which it leads, and one can become aware of these only by reflection. Similarly, whether an action is right or wrong depends, at least in part, on the results that it produces in the way of good an evil, and these results can be taken into account only by one who looks before he leaps. Common sense, with its rules and proverbs, no doubt helps, but it is too rough and general a guide to be relied on safely; and the reflective man will have at his command a broader view of grounds and consequences, causes and effects. He will more readily recognize the beliefs of superstition, charlatanism, and bigotry for what they are because he will question the evidence for them and note that when reflectively developed, they conflict with beliefs known to be true. In the same way he will be able to recognize some proposals for action as rash, partisan, or shortsighted because certain consequences have been ascribed to them falsely and others have been ignored. In some activities wisdom consists almost wholly of such foresight. A general, for example is accounted wise if he can foresee in detail how each of the courses open to him will affect the prospects of victory.

Judgment. There is a wisdom of ends as well as of means, which is here denoted by “judgment.” The goal of the general—namely, victory—is laid down for him, but the ordinary man needs the sort of wisdom that can appraise and choose his own ends. The highest wisdom of all, Plato contended, is that required by the statesman, who is called upon to fix both the goals toward which society strives and the complex methods by which it may most effectively move toward them. Unfortunately, at this crucial point where the ends of life are at issue, the sages have differed profoundly. Some, like Epicurus and Mill, have argued for happiness; others, like the Christian saints, for self-sacrificing love; others, like Nietzsche, for power. Many philosophers of the present [20th] century have come to hold that this conflict is beyond settlement by reason, on the ground that judgments of good and bad are not expressions of knowledge at all but only of desire and emotion. For these thinkers there is properly no such thing as wisdom regarding intrinsic goods; knowledge is confined to means.

Whatever the future of this view, common opinion is still at one with the main tradition of philosophy; it regards the judgment of values as a field in which wisdom may be pre-eminently displayed. It must admit, however, that this judgment is of a peculiar kind; it seems to be intuitive in the sense that it is not arrived at by argument nor easily defended by it. One may be certain that pleasure is better than pain and yet be at a loss to prove it; the insight seems to be immediate. And where immediate insights differ, as they sometimes do, the difference appears to be ultimate and beyond remedy. Must such wisdom end in dogmatic contradiction and skepticism?

That it need not do so will perhaps be evident from a few further considerations. First, differences about intrinsic goods may be due to mere lack of knowledge on one side or the other. The Puritans who condemned music and drama as worthless could hardly have excluded them if they had known what they were excluding; in these matters wider experience brings an amended judgment. Second, what appears to be intuitive insight may express nothing more than a confirmed habit or prejudice. Where deep-seated feelings are involved, as in matters of sex, race, or religion, the certainty that belongs to clear insight may be confused with the wholly different certainty of mere confidence or emotional conviction. Fortunately, Freud and others have shown that these irrational factors can be tracked down and largely neutralized. Third, man’s major goods are rooted in his major needs, and since the basic needs of human nature are everywhere the same, the basic goods are also the same. No philosophy of life that denied value to the satisfactions of food or drink or sex or friendship or knowledge could hope to commend itself in the long run.

It should be pointed out, finally, that the judgment of the wise man may carry a weight out of all proportion to that of anything explicit in his thought or argument. The decisions of a wise judge may be implicitly freighted with experience and reflection, even though neither may be consciously employed in the case before him. Experience, even when forgotten beyond recall, leaves its deposit, and where this is the deposit of long trial and error, of much reflection, and of wide exposure in fact or imagination to the human lot, the judgment based on it may be more significant than any or all of the reasons that the judge could adduce for it. This is why age is credited with wisdom; years supply a means to it whether or not the means is consciously used. Again, the individual may similarly profit from the increasing age of the race; since knowledge is cumulative, he can stand on the shoulders of his predecessors. Whether individual wisdom is on the average increasing is debatable, but clearly the opportunity for it is. As Francis Bacon, a philosopher whose wisdom was of the highest repute, remarked, “We are the true ancients.”

Bibliography

For proverbial wisdom see Archer Taylor, The Proverb (Cambridge, Mass., 1931), and—old but suggestive—R.C. Trench, Proverbs and Their Lessons (London and New York, 1858).

For the problems of determining right and wrong, see any first-rate work on ethics, such as Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (Chicago, 1962).

For an analysis of reflection, see, for example, John Dewey, How We Think (New York, 1910).

For the place of reason in valuation, se L. T. Hobhouse, The Rational Good (New York, 1921), or Brand Blanshard, Reason and Goodness (London and New York, 1962).

For some useful popular works see T. E. Jessop, Reasonable Living (London, 948); H. C. King, Rational Living (New York, 1912); and A. E. Murphy, The Uses of Reason (New York, 1943).

The Hope for Ultimate Meaningfulness

2010-08-19T12:26:00.000-07:00

That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

Bertrand Russell, A Free Man's Worship, 1903.

The question of the ultimate meaningfulness of our lives is a natural extrapolation of our reflection on proximate meaningfulness. Over the course of our lives we strive to achieve and preserve value. Even if we have no idea how our achievements will affect others in the future (after we're gone), we know that those effects will be received, however anonymously and remotely. The physically inevitable (at least according to current physics) and absolute termination of that chain of legacy-leaving (which is what the heat-death of the universe signifies), however, threatens to transmits its nullity to whatever preceded it.

Suicide is one way some despondent people demonstrate their conviction that their lives have no meaning, that the disutility of their mere biological continuance is greater than any prospective compensating utility they might enjoy. The heat-death of the universe is temporally remote enough for virtually all people to push the thought of it out of their consciousness and "get on with their lives." Evasion is just that, however, and if we frankly face the inevitable loss of all the meaning we create, we may not be able to face anything at all. Some philosophies, however, posit a repository of all value, co-existing with the physical cosmos, which would provide an alternative to dishonest evasion and to honest suicide. But ethical urgency alone cannot establish the existence of such a repository.

Earlier this year film critic Roger Ebert expressed appreciation when I used the famous Russell quotation in a comment on his blog. I deemed his appreciation an evasion of my critical point. One may judge for oneself by going to my home page, where I provide the text of our brief exchange and a link to his blog, where it first appeared.

God Is Not a "Consummated Infinity"

2010-08-19T06:34:00.000-07:00

Geoffrey Klempner, moderator of Ask a Philosopher, has just posted this answer of mine:

(11) Dave asked:

I have a question regarding the existence of actual infinities. I've heard theists argue that an actual infinity cannot exist, yet claim that God is infinite. Some then say that an actual infinity cannot exist in 'the physical world' or in 'spacetime,' but outside of the physical world (but still in reality) actual infinities can exist. Isn't this an arbitrary distinction? Or are they using a different notion of infinity for God? The existence of God is such an obvious counterexample to their argument that I feel like I'm missing something. Thanks.

============

The contexts of metaphysics and mathematics are, as Dave knows, different, and therefore their use of a common symbol, e.g., 'infinite,' does not entail equivocation. Metaphysics explores the intelligibility of self-subsistent being, which finite beings allegedly participate (or, as modern syntax has it, participate 'in'). In the Thomistic tradition that has influenced subsequent philosophical theology to the present day, the symbol of 'subsistent being' is equivalent to 'God.' Mathematical infinity, by contrast, refers to the possibility of adding a member to a series: if it is always possible to add one more, then the series is infinite. The series of natural numbers (or of even numbers, or of prime numbers) is infinite in that sense. It is a metaphysical claim that no series of existents can correspond in a one-to-one fashion to the series of natural numbers, because such an actual or 'consummated' infinity would lead to absurdities.

For example, suppose an infinity of persons stands in a line to your left and each person has one coin. A superhuman being with magnetic powers causes the coin belonging to the person on your immediate left to travel instantaneously from his or her pocket to yours (so that now you have two coins);simultaneously, coins from the third and fourth persons wind up in the second's pocket; coins from numbers five and six go to number three; from seven and eight to four, etc. What such a transfer accomplishes is a doubling of the number of coins by the mere change of the location of existing coins, that is, without the production of new coins. That is metaphysically absurd, and that is why there cannot be a consummated infinity: it bears within it the possibility of absurdity, which is no possibility at all.

In the future, Dave will go further under his own steam to resolve more quickly, if not dispel, a problem if he clarifies who said exactly what (i.e., not settle for 'I've heard...', 'Some then say...'). I wish to assure Dave that what was 'obvious' to him has also been obvious to the intelligent writers who, he seems to have thought, missed the obvious and then contradicted themselves. Which philosopher forgot that he had said that God was infinite after declaring consummated infinities to be impossible? One should document such a self-damning performance before presenting it as an interesting case for the consideration of others. Having said that, I also want to assure Dave that I enjoyed answering his question and hope he will pursue his metaphysical studies.

Anthony Flood

G.E.M. Anscombe's "Mr. Truman's Degree"

2010-08-06T06:03:00.000-07:00

On the anniversary of the first two, and so far only, civilian mass murders by nuclear bomb, I would like to call attention to the late Catholic analytical philosopher G. E. M. Anscombe's essay in criticism of Oxford's honoring the murders' prime mover. The text of her essay has been available on my site for four years. Today's post consists of my prefatory note.

Anthony Flood, August 6, 2010

In an effort to make clear that pacifism in no way inspired her condemnation of the mass murders in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and her consequent protest against Oxford's, i.e., her university's, awarding Two-Bomb Harry an honorary degree, the distinguished analytic philosopher G. E. M. Anscombe (1919-2001) irritated me in three ways.

(1) She overlooked non-statist approaches to the problem of “restraining malefactors.”

(2) She implicitly affirmed the justifiability of a military draft (although her underlying insight—“in an attenuated sense it can be said that something that belongs to, or concerns, one is attacked if anybody is unjustly attacked or maltreated”—is suggestive).

(3) She further believed the oppression of an ethnic group might be “a reasonable cause of war.” By "war" she almost certainly meant a state’s

(a) militarily extending its reach beyond the territory over which it asserts exclusive control over another state's similarly monopolized territory; and

(b) funding and manning that military undertaking through taxation and/or conscription.

By contrast, a libertarian would introduce, and insist upon, the distinction between a war of aggression and a war of self-defense. Individuals may act militarily and in concert to liberate oppressed people if systematic injustices (e.g., taxation and conscription) do not sustain that enterprise. There is no reason, however, to believe that when Miss Anscombe wrote that "the plight of the Jews under Hitler would have been a reasonable cause of war," she attributed its reasonableness to its having met libertarian standards.

Nevertheless, these defects (which many may not regard as such) neither diminish my enthusiasm for posting this classic essay nor dull the force of her argument, encapsulated in these excerpts:

The Censor of St. Catherine’s [the Oxford college where the President Truman would receive an honorary degree] had an odious task. He must make a speech which should pretend to show that a couple of massacres to a man’s credit are not exactly a reason for not showing him honour. . . . The defence, I think, would not have been well received at Nuremberg.

For men to choose to kill the innocent as a means to their ends is always murder . . . .

. . killing the innocent, even if you know as a matter of statistical certainty that the things you do involve it, is not necessarily murder. . . . On the other hand, unscrupulousness in considering the possibilities turns it into murder.

August 8, 2006

Updated August 7, 2008

Antony C. Sutton's "Conclusions"

2010-07-29T18:12:00.000-07:00

From time to time I will follow up my July 15, 2010 post on Antony C. Sutton. Today I provide you with his own summary of his three-volume detailed study of Western technology transfer to the Soviet Union in the days of Revolution, World War, and Cold War. It is the last chapter of the last volume, but encapsulates his trilogy's whole story.

Although the policies concerning trade and technical transfers appear vague and often confused, there is one fundamental observation to be made: throughout the period of 50 years from 1917 to 1970 there was a persistent, powerful, and not clearly identifiable force in the West making for continuance of the transfers. . . .

. . . whenever the Soviet economy has reached a crisis point, Western governments have come to its assistance. . . . All along, the survival of the Soviet Union has been in the hands of Western governments.

In this study's closing pages, Sutton would admit only that he “lean[ed] to the position that there is gross incompetence in the policymaking and research sections of the State Department.” He would spend the rest of his life attempting to clearly identify that force, thereby replacing this earlier verdict of incompetence with a more satisfying one.

Reflections on the Occasion of Ernst Cassirer's Birthday

2010-07-28T08:57:00.000-07:00

Over the years I have collected several short essays on the great morphologist of the human spirit, Ernst Cassirer (July 28, 1874 – April 13, 1945) by very different thinkers whom I also admire and posted them on my philosophical site. I hope my posting links to them, accompanied by excerpts, will stimulate interest in Cassirer and the problems he wrestled with.

(I wish to record that the day he died--suddenly collapsing after responding to student Arthur Pap's calling out to him near Columbia University's main gate--Murray Rothbard, who would one day influence my thinking considerably, but then all of nineteen years of age, was probably in class nearby, completing his requirements for his B.A.)

In his review of Cassirer's An Essay on Man, Blanshard sounds a note of disappointment:

It is hard not to think, as one reads a book so wealthy as this in historic and scientific erudition, but at the same time so oddly inconclusive, that Cassirer was rather a distinguished reflective scholar than a great speculative philosopher. The learning is not mobilized in the interest of any theory; the book is not so much an 'essay on man' as a series of essays, all suggestive and enlightening, which converge on—what? It is hard to say. Perhaps there is no end, or harmony of ends, toward which all these activities are moving. But then, on Cassirer’s own showing, no philosophy of man would seem to be practicable; there would only be a theory of art, a theory of religion, and so on. This is in fact what he gives us. And an admirable gift it is, for which I, at least, am thankful. Only it is not what he sets out to give, nor all that the reader hoped to gain.

William Schultz, in his Cassirer and Langer on Myth, commented directly on Blanshard's assessment:

Here is the assumption of a continental philosopher that a system must 'converge' on something or lead to an overall unity of experience, an ideal unity. To some extent, the criticism is correct, for the main arguments are not in An Essay on Man, yet Cassirer’s claims about the need for unity should have alerted Blanshard that they were in his previous books, as Cassirer himself said in the Preface to that work written almost twenty years after the three-volume masterpiece [The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms]. Ironically, both Blanshard and Cassirer share some of the same assumptions about what philosophy should do, but Blanshard did not study Cassirer’s work enough to recognize the revolutionary way in which Cassirer satisfies traditional expectations about what a philosophy is and does.

The other subject of Schultz's study, Susanne Langer, the German-American philosopher whose thought was shaped to a large degree by her early absorption of Cassirer's writings in the original as they were published, contributed an essay his theory of language and myth to the Library of Living Philosophers volume dedicated to him.

. . . myth and language appeared as genuine twin creatures, born of the same phase of human mentality, exhibiting analogous formal traits, despite their obvious diversities of content. Language, on the one hand, seems to have articulated and established mythological concepts, whereas, on the other hand, its own meanings are essentially images functioning mythically. The two modes of thought have grown up together, as conception and expression, respectively, of the primitive human world. . . .

The first dichotomy in the emotive or mythic phase of mentality is not, as for discursive reason, the opposition of 'yes' and 'no,' of 'a' and 'non-a,' or truth and falsity; the basic dichotomy here is between the sacred and the profane. Human beings actually apprehend values and expressions of values before they formulate and entertain facts.

Her preface to his Language and Myth serves as an excellent introduction to his thought: Language, "man’s prime instrument of reason, reflects his mythmaking tendency more than his rationalizing tendency."

Eric Voegelin, the philosopher of consciousness, had the highest regard for Cassirer the intellectual historian, but in his 1946 review of The Myth of the State, thought Cassirer had mishandled his chief topical concern:

In the present book there is no awareness that the myth is an indispensable forming element of social order though, curiously enough, in his earlier work on the philosophy of the myth Cassirer, under the influence of Schelling, had seen this problem quite clearly. The overcoming of the "darkness of myth" by reason is in itself a problematical victory because the new myth which inevitably will take the place of the old one may be highly unpleasant. The Myth of the State is written as if it had never occurred to the author that tampering with a myth, unless one has a better one to put in its place, is a dangerous pastime.

Perhaps. A good way to inspect that alleged "tampering" short of reading Cassirer's posthumously published 1946 book is to read his never-anthologized 1944 essay, "The Myth of the State," written for Fortune's mainly non-academic audience. In my prefatory paragraphs I give a brief account of how it came to be written.

What we have learned in the hard school of our modern political life [Cassirer writes] is the fact that human culture is by no means the firmly established thing that we once supposed it to be. Modern civilization is very unstable and fragile. It is not built upon sand; but it is built upon a volcanic soil. For its first origin and basis was not rational, but mythical. Rational thought is only the upper layer on a much older geological stratum that reaches down to a great depth. We must always be prepared for violent concussions that may shake our cultural world and our social order to its very foundations.

In 1945, that is, about a year after Cassirer's essay appeared, we meet with a slightly different use of the volcano metaphor. Just when Brand Blanshard's review of Cassirer appears, his reflections on his two terms as president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association are also published. As his terms of office had "coincided almost exactly with the chief period of" World War II, he offered for the consideration of his audience this question: "In the light of the last few years, is not reason best conceived as a film stretched across the mouth of a volcano?"

Blanshard's answer, elaborated upon in his address, was, of course, resoundingly negative. But his defense of reason was also limited, even "slender," and not incompatible with Cassirer's ostensibly severer judgment:

All I am concerned to deny is the conclusion often drawn from these researches [into human irrationality], that the mind is so controlled by pulls from within that it is never under the control of the objective pattern of things, or follows the thread of an impersonal logic. The remarks I have offered, slender as they admittedly are, do seem to me to settle that point in principle.

Cassirer was equally concerned to deny that conclusion. As Professor Schultz wisely noted, Blanshard simply "did not study Cassirer’s work enough" to see how close they were.

Why Does God Permit Evil?

2010-07-18T13:41:00.000-07:00

The following answer, a slightly modified version of the one posted in 2002 at Philosophos (originally "Ask a Philosopher") and later on my own site since 2004, summarizes my approach to this vexing problem. Links to my other efforts may be found here.

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The question was: If there is God and he is almighty, why then do we suffer evil in the world?

I accept the factual assumption. We do suffer evil in this world. (Perhaps some philosophers would argue that evil is an illusion. But their allegedly veridical grasp of that illusion—which, arguably, would itself be an evil—makes me wonder if their perception of other evil is illusory.)

To the factual assumption is linked a moral presupposition, which we can explicate as follows. All things being equal, a moral agent who is able to prevent excessive suffering from befalling another—suffering from which good is neither expected to come nor can conceivably come—is morally obligated to prevent it if he can.

The strength of this obligation varies with circumstances. They include the risk to himself, his loved ones, or his property that the prospective preventive act may expose them to. (This does not hold for those who profession it is to incur risk in order to rescue others in danger.) Generally, however, as risk rises, obligation weakens. (We regard as heroes those who perform their rescue obligations without regard to risk, especially when risk is significant.) Obligation is strongest where ability is great and risk is minimal.

In the case of God—at least the deity of classical theism (that of Eastern and Western Christian orthodox theology)—ability is infinite and risk is zero.

And thus the implicit problem. For the existence of great power alone does not by itself make the occurrence of excessive suffering a puzzle. Many powerful men have made people suffer greatly, but their victims never wondered how it could be so. What would have made them wonder, and curse, was that anyone would praise their tormentors for being morally good. The questioner omitted to mention God’s moral character.

Neither did he specify what he means by “almighty” or even by “God.” We may ascribe to God great creative power without ascribing to him a monopoly of power, as does classical theism. In the latter philosophy, beings other than God do have power, but only by his leave. They have no power independently of God’s decreeing that they have it, which power God can withdraw at will.

There is an alternative theism, however, wherein God exercises the power of persuasion. God “lures” (Whitehead’s term) other subjects of experience into arrangements that afford more intense experiences for them and for God. God does that, according to this alternative scheme, by providing each subordinate agent with an initial aim, which the agent may accept or replace with its own. In such an alternative theism, God is not unilaterally responsible for the metaphysical situation in which each agent (including God) finds himself. Neither is God unilaterally responsible for the actual cosmic order that results from the decisions and actions of all agents. God is a necessary, but by no means a sufficient factor in the actual world order.

In the alternative theism, whose ultimate coherence and adequacy to experience we cannot assess here, evil results from the collision of subjective aims. Collision is perfectly compatible with the existence of a universal end-coordinating God. Without God, there would not be any coordination of aims. There would, therefore, be no intelligible world with someone in it asking how evil is possible. Given a world that God can shape but not unilaterally determine, God cannot obliterate evil any time God wishes to. The classical theistic God can. But classical theism cannot satisfactorily explain why God apparently wishes to so rarely and selectively, especially when the demand for God to do so is so excruciatingly urgent.

Given our moral presupposition, then, the God of classical theism cannot be morally good. Yet classical theism affirms God to be precisely that. Classical theism is therefore incoherent. The reasonable person rules out the incoherent. One theism’s incoherence, however, does not necessarily rule out every other version. The God of the alternative theism we have been entertaining, in so far as this God is the universal lure to the better, does all within God’s power to promote the realizable good in every situation. This God is therefore morally good. What God cannot do, however, is push gross matter around, as we can. Such pushing is, however, often what preventing excessive and pointless evil requires. God cannot be morally blamed for that inability.

If some kind of being recognizable as God is necessary for there to be a world, then the occurrence of excessive, pointless suffering does not disconfirm the existence of that God. On the supposition of the latter, however, we see how there can be “excessive,” “pointless” beauty.

Genocide: A Catholic Dilemma

2010-07-18T13:04:00.000-07:00

I composed the following argument about a dozen years ago in response to the claim of a certain priest of my acquaintance, a philosopher whose analytical mind I had expected to make hash of my question, that he was going to deal with it in print, some day, somewhere. To my knowledge he never made good on that informal promissory note. I posted it on my site during 2004, its inaugural year. Perhaps a different forum will improve its chances of being paid the courtesy of a refutation. If anyone reading this would like a crack at solving this specific problem, or can cite someone else's having done so, I invite him or her to post a comment.

* * *

1. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 105, states that God is the author of Sacred Scripture and that the Church “accepts as sacred and canonical the books of the Old and the New Testaments, whole and entire, with all their parts” because they were “written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.”

2. Paragraph 106 states that God inspired the human authors of the sacred books and that “they consigned to writing whatever he [God] wanted written, and no more.”

3. Paragraph 107 states the inspired books teach the truth, and that “without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wish to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures.”

4. Paragraph 120 lists the Old Testament Book of Joshua among the sacred books.

5. Paragraph 121 states that the books of the Old Testament are divinely inspired and retain a permanent value.

6. Paragraph 311 states that “God is in no way, directly or indirectly, the cause of moral evil.”

7. Paragraph 2313 states that in war, non-combatants “must be respected and treated humanely” and that genocide is a grave moral evil: “the extermination of a people, nation, or ethnic minority must be condemned as a mortal sin. One is morally bound to resist orders that command genocide.”

8. The eleventh chapter of the Book of Joshua states that God commanded Moses to cause the genocide of various non-Israelite peoples.

In summary, the Catholic Church teaches that the Book of Joshua is divinely inspired, contains all and only what the human author of Joshua was inspired to write, and teaches truth for the sake of our salvation.

Presumably, then, even if a book of the Old Testament was in error about, say, the number of people killed in a given battle, it could not be in error where it speaks about God’s relationship to man: on this matter we can count on an Old Testament book to tell us only the truth.

But in Joshua 11, God specifically relates to man by telling one group of men to annihilate other groups, including their noncombatant women and children.

Did God give a command that “one is morally bound to resist”? Since the command was carried out, does not that make God at least an indirect cause of a moral evil? Can a coherent negative answer be given without giving up one or more of propositions 1-8?

Antony Sutton’s Inconvenient Research: A Neglected Libertarian Resource

2010-07-15T06:36:00.001-07:00

I'm not yet an expert on the works of Antony C. Sutton (1925-2002), but I hope to be one day, and this post will explain why.

Deep within the second volume of his magnum opus, Sutton posed the following alternative:

To subsidize and support a system that is the object of massive military expenditures is both illogical and irrational. . . . it calls into question not only the ability and the wisdom but indeed the basic common sense of the policymakers. The choice is therefore clear: either the West should abandon massive armaments expenditures because the Soviet Union is not an enemy of the West, or it should abandon the technical transfers that make it possible for the Soviet Union to pose the threat to the Free World which is the raison d'être for such a large share of Western expenditures. Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, 1945-1965, Stanford, Hoover Institution, 1968, p. 400.

When I chanced upon Sutton's trilogy at a public library in the early '70s, I was still viewing the world through Herbert Aptheker's red-tinted spectacles. The massive amount of evidence of technology transfer that Sutton had discovered, organized, and published—under the imprint of Stanford University's Hoover Institution—didn't cohere with either the Communist worldview I held then or my anti-Communist one of a few years later. For Sutton proved that for at least fifty years capitalists had sold their supposed mortal enemies helming the Soviet Union much more than the proverbial rope with which to hang them (thereby fulfilling a prediction apocryphally attributed to Lenin).

Sutton followed the logic of his previous research in another trilogy, written in a more popular vein for less prestigious publishers, but no less rigorously researched. In Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (hereafter WSBR), Wall Street and F.D.R. and Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, Sutton exposed the direct contribution of certain financial houses located on or near Wall Street to the success of the 20th Century's economically centralizing movements, including the New Deal. Sutton argued persuasively that the major struggle among the Wall Street corporate socialists, and the Marxian socialists, and the National Socialist was over personnel, not over socialism, certainly not over the insight that the royal road to riches is paved with governmentally backed monopolies.

To compress the import of these works almost to the point of distortion: but for the actions of these men, the Bolshevik revolution would have to do without certain leaders and critical infusions of cash, and the Soviet Union it spawned would have collapsed from industrial chaos and famine; America would have been spared F.D.R.'s phony "war on Wall Street" (whose creature and tool he was); and Hitler's electoral platform would have lacked not only a key plank (fear of Bolshevism), but also necessary funds.

After having passed briefly through social democracy and conservatism from the mid-'70s to the early '80s, I settled on libertarianism under the primary influence, literary and personal, of Murray N. Rothbard. The persuasiveness of Man, Economy and State and Power and Market was decisive, but he had also convinced me (and as a former William-F.-Buckleyite I needed convincing) that the Soviet Union had never posed any serious threat to the West: the Soviet economy, hobbled by the calculation problem, was doomed: it was a "basket case" that must in the long run lose any political competition with economies that enjoyed private markets for capital goods. In retrospect, however, I feel that Rothbard could, and should, have gone much further.

Ironically enough, before Murray Rothbard's name meant anything to me, I had seen it in WSBR:

Suppose . . . that American monopoly capitalists were able to reduce a planned socialist Russia to the status of a captive technical colony? Would not this be the logical twentieth-century internationalist extension of the Morgan railroad monopolies and the Rockefeller petroleum trust of the late nineteenth century? Apart from Gabriel Kolko, Murray Rothbard, and the revisionists, historians have not been alert for such a combination of events.

If this did not dovetail with Rothbard's own research program, nothing did.

During the years I read myself into libertarianism, however, although I had not entirely forgotten Sutton's thesis, nothing sustained my awareness of it. Rothbard's personal influence is the best explanation, in my opinion.

As his historical revisionism was inspired by his friend Harry Elmer Barnes, Rothbard's disciples consequently know of Barnes' work. But Rothbard was silent on Sutton; and so also have they been. After more than 27 years of reading Rothbard, I still cannot recall his ever having even cited the work of his fellow laborer in the same vineyards. (If any reader of this post can, I would be grateful for the citation.) He certainly never did so where one might have expected him to (e.g., The Case against the Fed or Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy).

Several passages from the memoirs of Herbert Hoover, courtesy of Sutton's WSBR, are most germane to our topic. In them Hoover recounted the circumstance that motivated certain financial interests, headquartered at 120 Broadway in lower Manhattan (the building which housed the law offices of Sargent Shriver’s law firm, where I happened to work – in the mailroom – when I first read WSBR), to withdraw their support from him and throw it promiscuously behind Roosevelt. "Hoover," Sutton wrote,

recognized the Swope Plan [inspiration for FDR’s National Recovery Act, written by General Electric’s Gerard Swope—anarchristian] as a fascist measure and recorded this in his memoirs, along with the melancholy information that Wall Street gave him a choice of buying the Swope plan—fascist or not—and having their money and influence support the Roosevelt candidacy.

This is how Herbert Hoover described the ultimatum from Wall Street under the heading of 'Fascism comes to business—with dire consequences':

Among the early Roosevelt fascist measures [Hoover wrote.—anarchristian] was the National Industry Recovery Act (NRA) of June 16, 1933. The origins of this scheme are worth repeating. These ideas were first suggested by Gerard Swope (of the General Electric Company) at a meeting of the electrical industry in the winter of 1932. Following this, they were adopted by the United States Chamber of Commerce. During the campaign of 1932, Henry I. Harriman, president of that body, urged that I agree to support these proposals, informing me that Mr. Roosevelt had agreed to do so. I tried to show him that this stuff was pure fascism; that it was merely a remaking of Mussolini's 'corporate state' and refused to agree to any of it. He informed me that in view of my attitude, the business world would support Roosevelt with money and influence. That for the most part, proved true.

Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Great Depression, 1929-1914 (London: 1952), p. 420.

Other words of Hoover's shatter the popular myth, enjoying currency as late as our Age of Obama, which casts Hoover as a head-in-the-sand apostle of laissez faire who lacked the guts to expand the government's role in the economy in order to "save capitalism from itself":

Those who contended that during the period of my administration our economic system was one of laissez faire have little knowledge of the extent of government regulation. The economic philosophy of laissez faire, or "dog eat dog," had died in the United States forty years before, when Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Sherman Anti-Trust Acts [1887 and 1890 respectively.—anarchristian].

Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Cabinet and the Presidency 1920-1923 (London: 1952), p. 300.

Sutton's comment on Hoover is gratifying for a Rothbardian to read:

Murray Rothbard points out that Herbert Hoover was a prominent supporter of Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive Party and, according to Rothbard, Hoover "challenged in a neo-Marxist manner, the orthodox laissez-faire view that labor is a commodity and that wages are to be governed by laws of supply and demand." As Secretary of Commerce Hoover pushed for government cartelization of business and for trade associations, and his "outstanding" contribution, according to Rothbard, "was to impose socialism on the radio industry," while the courts were working on a reasonable system of private property rights in radio frequencies. Rothbard explains these ventures into socialism on the grounds that Hoover "was . . . the victim of a terribly inadequate grasp of economics." Indeed, Rothbard argues that Herbert Hoover was the real creator of the Roosevelt New Deal.

Rothbard in turn must have known of Sutton, yet he declined to harness the polemical potential of the research of his near-contemporary. One could only imagine the effect of Rothbard's pen in service of the thesis that the Cold War was essentially a sham, a bloody farce for which tens of thousands died in wars and millions of civilians were deceived into supporting repressive policies against their fellows.

As for the disjunction Sutton posed in our opening quotation: it cannot be taken at face value. He knew that the men whose deeds he exposed were hardly lacking in common sense, let alone ability and wisdom. It doesn't take much reflection to see that all three attributes were needed to play at "fighting" the Soviet Union while rescuing it over and over again.

What the Machiavellian plotters of the "Cold War" lacked was a moral center. They had no qualms about selling to an "enemy" the know-how to produce weapons that would one day be used to kill men who were drafted into military service by their own government, just to "keep the game going."

Those who facilitated the technology transfers that materially benefited the Soviet Union were honored in their day as industrialists and statesmen, while myriads of writers, actors, and singers with pro-Soviet opinions would be hysterically reviled as "un-American" and lose their livelihoods.

Those convicted of selling nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union were disgraced and executed, but those who had supplied the Soviets with all they needed to become "nuclear-ready" died in bed with their good name intact. They were the real "enemies of the West," because they were the enemies of free markets.

So let us quickly dispel the mystery underlying Sutton's rhetorical alternative. In the minds of diverse captains of industry, "massive armaments expenditures" and "technical transfers" were lucrative enterprises for men without conscience. Through their money and influence, they set the range of permissible policy options in Washington and other Western capitals. There was nothing in the least "illogical" or "unsound" about it.

Those terms better describe the notion that Sutton himself believed that rank irrationality, rather than naked interest, dictated Washington's "save the Soviets" policy for more than a half-century through nine administrations. Sutton's later conjectures on the Order of Skull and Bones, essayed in books that I have not yet studied, suggest otherwise.

Sutton was a self-professed libertarian. He cited Rothbard and Mises frequently and approvingly, and—notwithstanding his employment of a norm of "inefficiency" in his critique of the Soviet economy in a way that would annoy an Austrian—his own economic viewpoint is squarely in the free market camp.

In his 1984 book Survival Is Not Enough: Soviet Realities and America's Future, distinguished Russian history specialist Richard Pipes stated that "Sutton comes to conclusions that are uncomfortable for many businessmen and economists. For this reason his work tends to be either dismissed out of hand as 'extreme' or, more often, simply ignored."

Unfortunately, it cannot be said that libertarians have treated him better.

Blanshard and Lonergan on Religion: An Unexpected Complementarity

2010-07-12T15:31:00.000-07:00

In Reason and Belief (1974), humanist philosopher Brand Blanshard (1892-1987) wrote:

Religion is an attempt to adjust one's nature as a whole to ultimate reality. In as sense all human life is that. But whereas the larger part of such life consists of an adjustment to what is immediately around us, religion seeks to go behind the appearance of things to what is self-subsistent, to something which, intellectually and causally, will explain everything else. And it must be conceived as a response of man's nature as a whole. . . . If we may take the old trio of cognition, feeling, and emotion, as covering the field of human faculty, we may say that religion employs all these activities at once and hence engages the whole man. On the cognitive side, the religious man is a philosopher ex officio, whether a competent one or not. Since he is trying to adjust himself to the government of the world, he will inevitably feel some interest in knowing the truth about it, and hence be carried on to form some conception of it. This conception, in turn, will evoke toward its object some attitude of reverence, love, indifference, or fear. Again, if he conceives the world to be governed by a personal being who is wise and good, as Christianity does, he will try to bring his practice into line with what he takes to be the divine will. His religion, then, will not be a function of thought or feeling or will; it will be the joint activity of all three; it will be the response of the man as a whole to what he takes as ultimate true and ultimately good. (434-435)

As though anticipating Blanshard, theistic philosopher Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984) wrote in Method in Theology (1972):

To deliberate about x is to ask whether x is worth while. To deliberate about deliberating is to ask whether any deliberating is worth while. Has "worth while" any ultimate meaning? Is moral enterprise consonant with this world? . . . . Does there or does there not necessarily exist a transcendent, intelligent ground of the universe? Is that ground or are we the primary instance of moral consciousness? Are cosmogenesis, biological evolution, historical process basically cognate to us as moral beings or are they indifferent and so alien to us? Such is the question of God. It is not a matter of image or feeling, of concept or judgment. They pertain to answers. It is a question. It rises out of our conscious intentionality, out of the a priori structured drive that promotes us from experiencing to the effort to understand, from understanding to the effort to judge truly, from judging to the effort to choose rightly. In the measure that we advert to our own questioning and proceed to question it, there arises the question of God. . . . [H]owever much religious or irreligious answers differ, however much there differ the questions they explicitly raise, still at their root there is the same transcendental tendency of the human spirit that questions, that questions without restriction, that questions the significance of its own questioning, and so comes to the question of God. The question of God, then, lies within man's horizon. Man's transcendental subjectivity is mutilated or abolished, unless he is stretching forth towards the intelligible, the unconditioned, the good of value. The reach, not of his attainment, but of his intending, is unrestricted. There lies within his horizon a region for the divine, a shrine for ultimate holiness. It cannot be ignored. The atheist may pronounce it empty. The agnostic may urge that he finds his investigation has been inconclusive. The contemporary humanist will refuse to allow the question to arise. But their negations presuppose the spark in our clod, our native orientation to the divine. (102-103)

Anarchristianity: A Personal Synthesis of Many Influences

2010-07-07T18:18:00.000-07:00

It's more important for me to resist the temptation to put off launching this blog another day than that its first post be memorable.

All right, then, to anticipate an obvious question: I've had the e-mail handle "anarchristian" since 1996. I have less reason than ever to disown it. My personalist theistic metaphysics and the anti-state libertarian ethics (I believe) it entails are encapsulated in this combination of two Greek roots, anarch- and christ-, whose juncture is the letter chi ("X").

It is my conviction that the theoretical dependency runs both ways: in the interest of achieving the deepest possible coherence (not merely logical consistency), a personalist theist ought to be a free-market anarchist and vice versa. The very thought of it will irritate some in both camps. I hope to provide a balm for them in future posts.

Murray Rothbard, among whose friends I was privileged to have been numbered for the last dozen years of his life, was the greatest libertarian theoretician of the 20th century. We must, however, not only continue to mine his work, but also to criticize it when necessary. One neglected area of criticism was his idiosyncratic use of the natural law tradition.

He had his reasons for uncoupling that tradition from the Christian personalist metaphysics that informed the mind of its classic writers, as though it were dispensable window-dressing. I have not, however, seen much interest on the part of Rothbardians in what those reasons were. It is one thing to say that one can rationally demonstrate a proposition without reference to God. It is quite another to be satisfied with a theoretical life that is agnostic about God at its foundations and in its superstructure and consign, however benignly and tolerantly, God-talk to the private sphere.

Rothbard was so satisfied, and that marked him as thoroughly modern. We are, however, living through "the fag-end of the Enlightenment," to employ the late Fr. Francis Canavan's charming phrase, and any theory that hopes to meet the issues of our day must either transcend modernity's dualisms or join the other flickering embers in history's ashtray.