The Lew Rockwell website is very good if you want to learn about economics:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/

But it cannot be trusted on any anything else, whether on Abraham Lincoln or foreign policy.  Here’s a critique of the anti-war libertarians that I might have worded differently, but I agree with the substance of the essay.

http://www.politicalbyline.com/2009/12/14/lew-rockwell-slanders-the-military%e2%80%a6-again/

Someone should take it upon themselves to write a comprehensive critique of purist, anarchist libertarians.  Someone needs to read them out of polite political conversation in this country in the way that Whittaker Chambers read Ayn Rand out of the conservative movement.

Vern

Evidence that “Ice Age” phenomena can develop quickly, in a matter of months….

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091130112421.htm

Vern

More evidence that “Ice Age” phenomena can result from volcanic winters.  In my view, worldwide vulcanism & meteorite impacts during the Flood, and some vulcanism after, contributed to global cooling during the Flood year, and also in the post-Flood Pleistocene era. 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091123142739.htm

Christopher Hitchens has no faith.  I haven’t read his god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, partly because of the (deliberate) typo, and partly because he once called Ronald Reagan a “lizard,” but also because he doesn’t understand criticism.

His critics have noticed that Hitchens makes plenty of moral evaluations of religion, but does not produce any objective grounds for moral evaluation, or at least fails to do so in a convincing way.  So how can he rationally look down his nose on religion when he himself, as an atheist, has no leg to stand on? 

Despite these criticisms, god is not Great turned out to be a bestseller.  Some have thought that its buyers are just people who don’t like public displays of religious emotion.  I’m not sure if this really explains it, though.  I’m a Christian and I’m usually uncomfortable around public displays of religious emotion — it would have been called “enthusiasm” in an earlier day.

Maybe the success of the book has more to do with Hitchens’ refreshing lack of political correctness, his entertaining if brutal rhetoric, and his writing ability.  At least that seems more likely than any dry “leave me alone” libertarianism.

I’ve been tempted to go out and read the book, but the lizard comment about our former Magnificent President left me angry with Hitchens.  I just haven’t found the heart to forgive him yet — or fork over a large sum of money for his book.

Maybe someday I’ll repent of thinking in my heart that Mr. Hitchens is a toad.  It is not a charitable sentiment, I know, and I’m sorry for it, I really am.  It’s just a failing in me that I think of him as a toad.  And it’s because of this that I’m required to humbly confess that I’m not great myself — at least on some particular occasions.

One of the criticisms of linguistic philosophy is that it smuggles nominalism in under the guise of analysis. The idea is that philosophical problems can only be solved by analysis of grammar and word meaning, how words and expressions are used in philosophical discourse. The emphasis then becomes clarification and puzzle solving, philosophical method as “therapy” for metaphysical ailments.

Much of this stems from the later Wittgenstein, who famously used the example of “game” to illustrate relativity in meaning. This was a denial of the idea of real definitions and resulted in a nominalistic conception of meaning. There are no substantial realities corresponding to our terms, but only the way we use language. Standards are now regarded as field-dependent. Clashes between worldviews are not substantive but based on inability to understand one another’s “language.” So now the task of philosophy is to engage in linguistic archaeology.

Multi-perspectivalism is a method of doing theology or philosophy and has been popularized by the theologian John Frame.  He is not as extreme as the general run-of-the-mill analytic philosopher, but one can still see the influence of this way of thinking on his theology.  “[A]ll of our perceptions of the world are influenced by our interpretations…” he says.  (Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, p. 100.)  According to Frame, Christians know there is an extra-interpretive world, but only by faith. We only have contact with this world through our interpretations. “[T]he world we live in is to some extent of our own making.”

The philosopher Immanuel Kant had also said: “[I]t still remains a scandal to philosophy and to human reason in general that the existence of things outside us (from which we derive the whole material of knowledge, even for our inner sense) must be accepted merely on faith, and that if anyone thinks good to doubt their existence, we are unable to counter his doubts by any satisfactory proof.”

Like Kant, Frame regards faith as the evidence of things seen rather than the evidence of things not seen.  Frame’s solution, like Kant’s, is to suggest that instead of discovering the world, we in some relevant sense, make the world.  Wittgenstein would have agreed with this, except that it would be through language that we create our world, not through ideas, as in Kant.  Frame would not go as far as Kant or Wittgenstein, to be sure, which is why he uses the phrase, “to some extent.”  It’s only to some extent that we are world-makers.

Now the whole idea of intra-personal justification, getting from ourselves to the world outside — or more precisely, justifying the out-there from the in-here — is the legacy of the Cartesian program in philosophy.  It involves an a priori separation of consciousness from the “external” world, and then tries to find a connecting bridge between the “inner” consciousness and the outside world.  Obviously, this makes the problem worse by using spatial metaphors suggestive of inner/outer, internal/external, and so on.  Kant and Wittgenstein’s solution was to give up trying to cross that bridge, and admit rather that we create our own world.

In theology, this leads to an overemphasis on interrelatedness, a move away from sharp distinctions.  This is seen in Frame’s claim, for instance, that any sin violates every commandment.  It’s seen in his dislike of theologian Charles Hodge’s view of systematic theology as exhibiting scripture in “proper” order.  Instead, Frame says that theology’s task is not to place Scripture in an “ideally perfect order” but to apply it to different situations. (Ibid., pp. 76, 79; 184.)

Thus we have a movement from the abstract to the concrete, from theory to application, from systematic order to “poetry, drama, exclamation, song, parable, symbol.” (Ibid., p. 85.)  It turns out that Frame’s multi-perspectival method is vapid in the sense that one can prove just about anything with it.  Law is gospel and gospel is law?  Heaven is hell and hell is heaven?  It all depends, I guess, upon one’s multi-perspective.

I can’t help quoting from Vern Poythress, a primary practitioner of Frame’s multi-perspectival method: “Thus, within Aristotle’s system, syllogisms can operate only with unitarian ontology.  Hence syllogistic reasoning is itself tacitly unitarian. Only so can one claim that the reasoning is mechanically valid.” (”Reforming Ontology and Logic in the Light of the Trinity: An Application of Van Til’s Idea of Analogy,” Westminster Theological Journal, 57/1, 1995.)

This is what multi-perspectivalism comes down to, a rejection of, or denigration of, logic.  My view is that our goal is not to be multi-perspectival in our thinking and scholarship, but to be accurate, and syllogistic reasoning is indispensible in that quest.

Vern

Was Thomas Kuhn right that reality changes in a massive way with a change in paradigms?  Philosopher of science Peter Munz appears to deny this.  He said:

“If there really were no meaning invariance it would have been impossible for Max Planck to invent the Quantum discontinuity.  When Planck started to consider the problem of Black-Body Radiation, he began by considering an experimentally determined distribution of this radiation expressed by the formula [omitted].  How, he began, was this distribution to be explained?  There had been several attempts at an explanation in terms of classical theories.  Planck, however, changed the paradigm by introducing the idea of what has become known as “Planck’s constant” and provided the now famous solution [omitted].  One will notice that in spite of the paradigm shift involved in the discovery of the constant, his solution is not a solution of a new observation, but a solution of the old observation [omitted] made long before the shift in fundamental concepts took place.”  (Our Knowledge of the Growth of Knowledge: Popper or Wittgenstein, 1985, p. 154.  Note: the omissions are technical formulas.)

Munz’s point is that the problem situation arising with Black Body radiation did not change.  That is to say, the observation of the physical reality captured by the (omitted) mathematical expression did not change.  What changed was a different way of looking at the observations, not the observations themselves.  Reality is thus invariant, but interpretations of it vary.

On the other hand, Munz went on to claim that Planck’s intial observation was theory-laden because it was made with the help of other theories—i.e., that third theories were involved in the introduction of the constant.  He believed theory-ladenness was all right as long as it is derived from theories that are not involved in the question of the moment.

It seems to me, however, that this is a needless admission.  Munz is depending on Karl Popper’s argument against the “myth of the framework.”  Popper had correctly stated that we are not trapped within frameworks, that if we choose, we could very well escape from our particular frameworks.

 But he undermined his position by saying we could only do so by entering into another framework, or into a wider framework.  (Karl Popper, “Normal Science and Its Dangers,” in Imre Lakotos and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, 1970, p. 56.  See also Popper, “The Myth of the Framework,” in Eugene Freeman, ed., Abdication of Philosophy: Philosophy and the Public Good, 1976.)

This expansionist concept of framework relativism, however, does not seem to be much of a gain over Kuhn.  Popper’s falsificationist theory of science cannot work if the means of escaping one framework leads us into a wider (possibly false) framework.  Does it not need a neutral observation pool that is theory-independent?  Otherwise, what would be the point of falsification?  Falsification would be irrelevant because any proposed falsification would itself be theory-laden.

The problem of self-referential incoherence infects all relativist schemes, whether Kuhnian or Popperian.  If Kuhn or Popper’s relativistic notions were true and applied to their own claims, then their own claims would be theory-laden, incommensurable, and forever trapped within wider intellectual prisons.

A better metaphor for the discovery of truth (though not original with me) might be this: The search for truth does not consist in breaking out of one intellectual prison into a larger, wider intellectual prison, but consists in following a straight and narrow course until the final destination is reached.

I don’t deny, of course, that bias and intellectual imprisonment occur, and are in fact quite widespread.  And true there are also many biased and prejudiced people who think, and claim loudly, that they are unbiased and free from prejudice when in fact they aren’t.

But that some people don’t live up to the ideal is no reason to give up.  It’s why responsible thinkers have recommended a scientific and logical methodology in the first place — to reduce the amount of bias.  While some bias might still creep back into the process — like a masked Jason from the Friday the 13^th horror movies — it’s just a risk one has to take, like suffering through another bad sequel.

It would not be possible to discover bias if there were no neutral observation framework.  In fact, the very idea of bias would no longer have any meaning if theory-ladenness could never be escaped.  For a defense of the autonomy of the observation pool, i.e., reality, see Thomas A. Russman, A Prospectus For the Triumph of Realism, 1987.

Vern

I have serious disagreements with Gary North, especially with respect to his view of the American Founding, but the following satire on academia is one of the reasons I used to like Gary’s writings so much:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north768.html

Vern

Purist libertarians are constantly barking at Abraham Lincoln, who was so evil as to liberate millions of people from slavery.  Now, they’re after biblical Joseph, whose great crime was in saving Egypt and the rest of the world from starvation and miserable death.  See:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/chodorov/chodorov16.1.html

It’s true that Joseph oversaw the process that saw the Egyptians giving up most of their money, personal property, and real property, as well as their service, to the king of Egypt, plus paying an excise of one-fifth of the produce from all Egypt.

But surely if the purist libertarians weren’t so caught up in fantasies of stateless, taxless, libertarian utopias, they’d see that the Egyptians had only two choices, either pay up or starve — a good example of the importance of subjective-marginal utility in making economic decisions.

In our opinion, Joseph served under 5th dynasty king Unas.  The following is from our essay, “Egyptian Chronology 3″:

_________

As noted before, if Courville is right that MB1 represents the Exodus & Conquest, and the end of MB2c represents the destruction of Shechem by Abimelech in the late Judges period, we should expect to see Deborah somewhere in the middle of these two periods.  Sure enough, we read in the Mari letters of the MB2b period mention of one Jabin, king of Hazor.  Therefore, on the other side of MB1, we should expect to see evidence of a famine a couple hundred years or so before MB1, a famine that took place in the late Old Kingdom of Egypt.  And of course, this is what we find.  A famine is recorded in the reign of the last 5th dynasty king, Unas. “[O]ne of the most curious, and at the same time, absolutely unique representations, is that of some wretched, famine-stricken men and women.  The curious scene, which was found in a trial sondage over the lower…part of the causeway [of Unas], is puzzling.  The persons represented seem to be foreigners, but nothing remains to afford us a clue as to their identity or the cause of their wretched plight.  Most of the figures are nude, but a few wear narrow girdles, and they are most arranged in groups; they are emaciated in the extreme.” (Nicholas Reeves, Ancient Egypt: The Great Discoveries, quoting Selim Hassan, p. 187; see also, Gardiner, Egypt of the Pharaohs, p. 87; Peter Clayton, Chronicle of the Pharaohs, p. 63; and Cambridge Ancient History 1:2, p. 189; emphasis added.)

If then we take this as our starting point for unraveling the chronology of the pre-MB1 period, we should then correlate this to Joseph and work out who the pharaohs of the Oppression and Exodus could be.  Joseph was 30 when he obtained ruler-ship in Egypt, and he was 110 at the time of his death, and thus ruled in Egypt for 80 years.  Moses was born 64 years later, and led the Israelites out of Egypt 80 years after that, and died after about 40 years in the wilderness, at the beginning of the Conquest of Canaan.  If we match up Joseph as one of Unas’s viziers, or vizier-like official, it is likely that Joseph came to his position after Unas had been on the throne for about three or four years, and thus Unas would have died shortly after the death of Jacob.  The following is a chart to express the possible relations between the biblical patriarchs and the Egyptian kings:

Vern

It is ironic that the Progressives appealed to Lincoln, as if their own political views were of a similar brand as his.  But in fact, Lincoln held to the natural rights philosophy of the founding fathers, the same natural rights philosophy despised by the Progressives.

Contrary to Progressive paternalism Lincoln would have offered the philosophy contained in the contemporary song, “Root Hog, or Die”—that is, take the risk of being free, overcome a paralyzing fear of the future, work hard to obtain one’s daily bread.

As against this view, Ronald Pestritto points out in his book Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism, 2005, the American Progressives thought they were “presenting a rationale for moving beyond the political thought of the American founding.”

In the twentieth century, Fascism and Nazism were extreme versions of European Progressivism.  It would be wrong to say that all Progressives were in effect Fascists or Nazis, but all Fascists or Nazis were Progressives.  The essential thing that Progressivism has in common with Fascism or Nazism is statism.

The origins of statism go back at least to Aristotle, who defined man as a political animal, but the modern origins of statism can be found in the German philosopher Georg Hegel, who argued that the state has a “supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the State” (Philosophy of Right).

The Progressives echoed this.  Mary Parker Follett redefined the traditional American concepts of natural rights, liberty, and equality in terms of statism:  “If my true self is the group-self,” she claimed, “then my only rights are those which membership in a group give me.  The old idea of natural rights postulated the particularist individual; we know now that no such person exists.”  (The New State, 1918.)

She further claimed that the state and the citizen are one, and that the “state is not the servant of the people.”  Moreover, the will of each individual should combine with wills of all others to produce what she called an “all-will.”

Follet justified her statism by saying it was a middle way between extremes: “Our old political dualism is now disappearing.  The state does not exist for the individual or the individual for the state.”

The Italian Fascist Benito Mussolini echoed these ideas:  “The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value.  Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State—a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values—interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people.”  (Doctrine of Fascism, 1932.)

Similarly, Nazi party member Carl Schmitt said: “The recognition of the plurality of autonomous life would, however, immediately lead back to a disastrous pluralism tearing the German people apart into discrete classes and religious, ethnic, social, and interest groups if it were not for a strong state which guarantees a totality of political unity transcending all diversity.  Every political unity needs a coherent inner logic underlying its institutions and norms.  It needs a unified concept which gives shape to every sphere of public life.  In this sense there is no normal State which is not a total State.”  (The Legal Basis of the Total State, 1935.)

Progressivism billed itself as a “third way” between the extremes of socialism and anarchy.  Later, Fascism and Nazism would also bill themselves as the middle way between Marxism and liberal democracy.

Lincoln would have recognized the real extremes as statism on the one hand and anarchism on the other.  The golden middle is individualism, the traditional American view of liberal democracy enunciated by Jefferson and Madison.

This is why Lincoln opposed both abolitionism and secessionism.  The abolitionists were disappointed with Lincoln for not using the Emancipation Proclamation to free the slaves in southern States that remained in the Union.  (In our day, Lincoln-bashers despise him for the same reason.)

However, Lincoln believed Federal dictation to the States without Constitutional authorization was a form of absolutism.  He thus would have rejected the modern “Leader” principle, the idea of rule by a strongman or charismatic dictator.

On the other hand, the secessionists believed that a minority could depart from the Union simply because they lost an election to the majority.  Lincoln, however, believed that majority rule, held in check by Constitutional limitations, was the only way to avoid anarchy and despotism.

In Lincoln’s view then, liberal democracy was the true middle way.  Far from being a proto-Progressive, Lincoln would have rejected its statist philosophy as forcefully as he rejected abolitionism and secessionism.

Vern

Abraham Lincoln explains why he could not extend the Emancipation Proclamation to all the southern states:

“The original Proclamation has no constitutional or legal justification except as a military measure. The exemptions were made because the military necessity did not apply to the exempted localities…If I take the step [as Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase had proposed] must I not do so, without the argument of military necessity, and so, with out any argument, except the one that I think the measure politically expedient and morally right? Would I thus not give up all footing upon constitution or law? Would I not thus be in the boundless field of absolutism? Could this pass unnoticed or unresisted? Could it fail to be perceived that without any further stretch, I might do the same in Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri; and even change any law in any state?”

Lincoln could free the slaves in the Confederate states out of military necessity, but to free the slaves in Union states would have required a constitutional amendment and also would have alienated pro-Union southern states — a foolish thing to do during war.

Lincoln believed he could not interfere with the domestic matters of states without Constitutional authorization, for to do so would amount to absolutism.  If he could act unilaterally in the case of slavery, why couldn’t he do it with any other domestic issue in the states?

For Lincoln, that was the essence of absolutism – dictating to the states on matters that were not under the jurisdiction of the federal government, as per its enumerated and limited powers under the Constitution.

It would be nice if our modern judges understood the Constitution as well as Lincoln did.  But with the doctrine of “incorporation” and the resultant judicial activism, modern judges are as anti-Lincoln as any neo-Confederate ever was.  They have no problem at all in wandering into the boundless field of absolutism.

Vern