Freedom

I am my liberty.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Surrounded 24/7 by unapologetic victims, it's easy for us to forget that freedom is everyone's birthright.

For celebrants, Christmas is the season of charity and compassion—or ought to be.

But both virtues assume victims require our philanthropic gestures, when, in fact, they're free: free to resist injustice; free to work for change; free to run away; free to cheat, rob and steal, if need be; free to rebel; free to displace you, or me, or whoever oppresses them.

Journalists, priests and fundraisers prey upon our compassion at Christmas, just as retailers prey upon our guilt and greed.

They can't help themselves.

But no one preys upon our connate freedom.

It takes an Existentialist to do that; to remind us we're born free and remain free every moment of our lives; to remind us no one is born a victim—or even becomes one unwillingly. 

We choose the mantles we wear.

"Compassion refers to the arising in the heart of the desire to relieve the suffering of all beings," the guru Ram Dass said.

"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you," the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said.

Remember compassion this Christmas; but remember freedom, too.  

Apologies

We are so busy winning we can't concede our mistakes.

— Aaron Lazare

To err is human.

But to apologize—?

“Never apologize, mister" John Wayne said. "It’s a sign of weakness.”

That seems to be the code of most men. (Women, on the other hand, "live lives of continual apology," as Germane Greer said.)

An apology, according to psychiatrist Aaron Lazare, is really a reparation: you've wronged someone, and you owe them your admission of guilt.

Apology is a 15th-century word borrowed from the Greek apologia, literally "sprung from divine speech" (apo + logia). An apology was the pronouncement of a god, channeled through an oracle. 

To the Ancient Greeks, an apology wasn't just manly; an apology was godly.  

The English word apology first meant a "defense" or "self-excuse." Samuel Johnson defined it as such in his dictionary, adding "Apology generally signifies excuse rather than vindication, and tends to extenuate the fault, rather than prove innocence."

It gradually came to mean an "an admission of error." In other words, a guilty plea.

Like John Wayne, a lot of Americans feel no urge to apologize.

And they're sick of other Americans apologizing: apologizing for genocide and slavery and imperialism; for witch trials and lynch mobs and McCarthyism; for redlining and segregation and the caging of immigrant children; for strip-mining and gas-guzzlers and deforestation.

Apologies aren't manly.

Apologies are for losers.

But one form of apology worth considering is the apologetic.

An apologetic was an early Christian's defense of his faith.

Apologetics—short essays—were published at a time when the Romans would execute a Christian merely for refusing to worship the pagan gods (a lot were executed, and often in grisly ways).

Of the hundreds of written apologetics, On the Testimony of the Soul, penned in 198 AD by Quintus Septimius Tertullian, stands out as an especially persuasive one (Tertullian was a lawyer).

In the apologetic, he argues that there's little difference between Christians and pagans, when you consider that both believe in God, demons and souls.

Both, Tertullian says, admit expressions like "God help us," "God bless you," and "God wills it." 

Both, moreover, admit that souls can become corrupt—that demons exist who can capture and bend souls to their will.

And both admit, finally, that souls experience an afterlife; some a pleasant one; some an unpleasant one.

Given these common beliefs, Tertullian says, it's easy to see that Christians and pagans are bound by their humanity, and that their differing faiths are inborn and don't derive from religious discourse, but from the "testimony of the soul."

"Every race has its own discourse, but the content is universal," Tertullian says.

"God is everywhere and the goodness of God is everywhere. The demons are everywhere and the curse of the demons is everywhere. The summons of God's judgment is everywhere. The awareness of death is everywhere and the testimony of the soul is everywhere."

The testimony of the soul provides the evidence clinching Tertullian's case: pagans shouldn't execute Christians; for, in doing so, they only snuff themselves.

We'd be wise to remember with Tertullian that we're all one people, united by the fact that we all have a soul; and that, sometimes, apologies are due.

"When you forgive, you free your soul," says the writer Donald Hicks. "But when you say 'I’m sorry,' you free two souls."

Pardon My French

When I see certain social science theories imported from the US, I say we must re-invest in the field of social science.

— Emmanuel Macron

Merde alors!

Something stinks. 

The French, believe it or not, are complaining about the "American" export they call wokisme.

 

President Macron complained last year that wokisme is undermining the whole nation. 

And now French grammarians are complaining that wokisme is corrupting the French language.

Putain!

The French rather conveniently forget that wokisme originated in—of all places—France!

French philosopher Michel Foucault concocted it. 

In the late 1970s, Foucault's radical beliefs vent viral, spreading in less than a decade from the cafes of Paris to the classrooms of America—doubtless making Foucault the single-most influential French export since Coco Chanel.

A disciple of the German Nihilist Friedrich Nietzsche and the French Marxist Louis Althusser, Foucault saw the world in the starkest of terms: as a endless warfare between the powerful and the powerless; between oppressors and the oppressed. 

Foucault interpreted culture—in the broadest sense of the word—to be the club the powerful wield to assure their power. 

And culture surrounds us. Turn over any rock, you'll find the same thing: the people in power subjugating everyone else.

Foucault's idea informs almost every aspect of the "American" woke movement.

And now the chickens have come home to roost.

Or, as we used to say in grammar school, he who smelt it, dealt it.

Gossip

He who never says anything cannot keep silent.

― Martin Heidegger

Facebook's outage this week—a form of compulsory digital minimalism—reminded me that the world's religions advise you to avoid gossip, "in the sight of God an awful thing."

Gossip is an awful thing, even if you're not god-fearing.

Philosopher Martin Heidegger explained why in his magnum opus, Being and Time.

Gossip tranquilizes—sparing us the job of discovering our life's purpose. Every minute spent engaged with it is one less minute spent in contemplation of our inevitable death.. And that escape from the thought of our own death Is comforting, even anesthetizing.

In Heidegger's view, gossip delivers us over to prepackaged ways of interpreting life's meaning. 

Like a cranky letter, gossip has already been "deposited" before ever reaching us, denying us the chance to decide for ourselves whether its malignant interpretation of life is really useful. 

Worse yet, gossip conforms us to the role of an average listener in a superficial conversation. Gossip dictates what's worth discussing—what's appropriate and intelligible talk—and what isn't.

By listening to gossip, "we already are listening only to what is said-in-the-talk." We already are allowing that we're unthinking, uncaring and unoriginal people. "Hearing and understanding," Heidegger says, "have attached themselves beforehand to what is said-in-the-talk."

Gossip in that sense is deafening: it doesn't communicate, but merely "passes the word along" ("shares," in Facebook-speak). "What is said-in-the-talk spreads in ever-wider circles and takes on an authoritative character." Things are so because one says so—even when what is said is groundless hearsay.

And gossip is irresponsible twaddle. 

"Gossip is the possibility of understanding everything without previously making the thing one's own," Heidegger says. Gossip is something anyone can rake up; you need not be an "influencer."

Gossip discourages fresh thinking, originality, and genuine attempts to understand the meaning of things, because it so dominates the public forum as to "prescribe one's state-of-mind."

By prescribing your state-of-mind, gossip also makes you rootless—cutting you off from reality, so that you "drift unattached" to life and the world around you.

That from a man who chose to spend most of his time in a secluded mountain hut in Bavaria warning the world of the dangers of technology.

This weekend, take a long, soulful break from Facebook. 

You'll be glad you did.

Above: The Wave by Corran Brownlee. Oil on canvas. 47 x 60 inches.

How to Be a Bad Tourist in Croatia

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

— Herbert Simon

It's easy to grab attention on social media, hard to hold it. 

Attention-grabbing headlines (like the one for this post) assault us moment by moment.

But the vast majority of the posts attached to such headlines fail to pay off.

Like a damp Chinese rocket, they fizzle upon launch, leaving us vexed and perplexed. (I read the whole post about touring Croatia and still haven't a clue how to be a good tourist there.)

Most social posts disappoint readers because their authors aren't rewarded for legwork, but only for eyeballs.

All you find when you read these posts, at best, are vapid opinions, impressions, clichés, and half-truths. 

Hard research and data are absent.

Economist Herbert Simon blamed readers, not writers, for the failure.

Humanity has a habit, Simon believed, of coasting through life without seeking data; in fact, shunning it.

We make all of most important decisions—about ourselves, our families, our businesses, our habitats, our government, and our planet—based on half-assed data-gathering.

He called our method of decision-making satisficing (satisfying + sufficing).

To satisfice is to settle on a course of action that's acceptable—that suffices despite your lack of data about causes, conditions, and consequences.

Usually, that mans we choose the very first option that presents itself, and never the "optimal" option.

Simon believed we are fundamentally—perhaps genetically—allergic to data and that most serious problems we face are "computationally intractable."

Only artificial intelligence, he believed, could save mankind from its penchant for bad decision-making.

I'm sure if I asked a supercomputer to advise me about being a good tourist in Croatia, the machine would tell me to stay home and read journalist Slavenka Drakulić's 250-page Cafe Europa Revisted and maybe leave Croatia to itself.

No Matter How You Slice It

No matter how thin you slice it, it’s still baloney.

— Al Smith

A series of interviews with literary agents about their pastimes in the current edition of Poets & Writers has convinced me college educators have stuffed everyone's head with baloney.

I arrived at this conclusion when one of the agents, self-described as "passionate about creating spaces for those from historically marginalized communities," mentioned she was using her free time to ponder whether or not "to cling to one's own marginalization."

Another, self-described as "queer," said she was using her free time to study the "rise of the feminist anachronistic costume drama."

A third, self-described as an avid foodie, mentioned that she was using her free time to "exchange tweets with a BIPOC travel blogger" while she studied "decolonizing veganism."

WTF?

These are bright, educated, well versed people.

Why do they think and speak in these patently silly terms, leftover scraps from French philosopher Michel Foucault's lunch?

Teachers are to blame—and what conservatives call the "absence of intellectual pluralism" in colleges. 

Teachers have allowed '70s-era jargon to substitute for thought, and identity for virtue.

Ask yourself: before you can "decolonize" veganism, you have to "colonize" it in the first place.

But how do you do that?

Do you sail a ship full of conquistadors to the New World and take over a vegan coop by storm? Do you loot and pillage the kale section and enslave all the stock boys? Do you seize all the kale, repackage it as Swanson's Cheesy Spinach, and ship it back to Spain? Do you cite divine rights to justify all this?

Possibly.

I had a logic teacher in college, a Brit, whose Cambridge training prohibited him from ever telling a student that his or her comment in class was inane. 

He'd just listen politely, smile, and reply, "Possibly."

After a couple of weeks in his course, you understood he was saying, "That's utter nonsense!"

While I have nothing but admiration for queers, feminists, vegans, BIPOC, and literary agents, I cringe whenever I hear one of them say she wants to "decolonize" something or "open a space for the marginalized" (lest we be "uncritical" and "non-inclusive").

A voice inside me—with a British accent—says, "Possibly."

Because, no matter how thin you slice it, it’s still baloney.

When I'm Sixty-ur

It's 64 AD and the Stoic philosopher Seneca, by coincidence, is 64. 

He's been retired from his job as Nero's chief of staff two full years now, and has time on his hands. 

He likes to sit by the waterside near his villa outside Rome and people-watch.

Seneca sees the sail of an incoming mailboat one day, and studies the sudden stirring of the "rabble" on the docks.

"While everybody was bustling and hurrying to the waterfront," he writes to his friend Lucilius, "I felt great pleasure in my laziness, because, although I was soon to receive letters from my friends, I was in no hurry to know how affairs were progressing abroad."

Seneca's bemusement stems from the thought that he has "more travelling-money than journey;" in other words, that he won't outlive the wealth he's accumulated, because his remaining life will likely be short.

He can travel as much as he wants—or not at all.

A journey is frustrating, he tells Lucilius, if you quit half way before reaching your destination; but, as a metaphor for life, a journey need not be completed to be rewarding. 

"Life is not incomplete if it is honorable," Seneca writes. 

"At whatever point you leave off living, provided you leave off nobly, your life is a whole."

Leaving "nobly," Seneca says, is leaving "bravely" and "resolutely;" "gliding from life," no matter the reasons. 

Those reasons—the reasons for your death—"need not be momentous," he says; "for neither are the reasons momentous which hold us here."

The rabble on the docks awaiting the news amuses Seneca, because it never stops to ask, what bearing does the news have on the journey?

Why should I care that Jeff Bezos will blast into space? That Britney Spears refuses to tour? That the Queen remains disappointed with Meghan Markle? That Trump now hates McConnell?

Like Seneca, I'm in no hurry to know how affairs are progressing abroad. 

So please don't ping me, text me, tweet me, or IM me.

I hit yet another sexagenarian birthday yesterday and, in Stoic fashion, am content just to sit and watch the rabble rush to the mailboat.

If you have news to share, please, as the expression goes, tell me something I don't know.

How to leave here nobly would be a great start.

NOTE: You can read Seneca's whole letter to Lucilius here. 

Against the Grain

He who goes about to reform the world must begin with himself.

― Ignatius of Loyola

I often hear people say they're proud troublemakers, eager to go "against the grain."

In our narcissistic age, we've gotten that Elizabethan idiom backwards.

In Shakespeare's day, to go "against the grain" meant to resist not the herd's instinct, but your own; to act in ways contrary to your own desires; to be a spartan, not a contrarian.  

If you've ever used a plane, you know that to go "against the grain" isn't just hard: it's impossible.

But try we must. 

The Catholic priest Ignatius of Loyola, who died only eight years before Shakespeare was born, urged his followers to try through the injunction agere contra, Latin for "act against."

Whatever it is you intend to do, Ignatius preached, resist your first instinct. 

Go against the grain.

We're advised today to "go with our gut," but in Ignatius' time that idea was thought dangerous. 

Your gut is too selfish. It leads you away from just acts. It leads you away, people thought, because human nature has been robbed of justice, thanks to Original Sin.

The source of this notion was the "universal teacher" and church doctor Thomas Aquinas. 

Aquinas taught that our "fallen nature" is in every regard still uncorrupted except in the area of justice. 

Left to our own devices—our gut instincts—we're always going to act unjustly, thanks to Adam and Eve. Because they defied God, the instinct for injustice is baked into human nature. It manifests in our worst habits and most insidious impulses.

Given our narcissistic bent, we could all use a little of Ignatius' advice to agere contra. 

Imagine how much better off we'd be if, rather than performing a "gut check," we checked our gut.

Addicts would get sober. 

Fat people would lose weight. 

Lazy people would contribute. 

Killers would lay down their handguns. 

The wealthy would pay taxes. 

Politicians would speak truths. 

Cynics would take heart. 

Mean people wouldn't suck.

I hope to go against the grain and put a little agere contra into daily practice myself.

You with me?

Death in the Afternoon

Anxiety is there. It's only sleeping.

— Martin Heidegger

I'm amazed people watch Hallmark Christmas movies in July—or any time of year.

Psychologists agree these sappy romances release dopamine, but that doesn't wash for me as an explanation.

Psychologists also agree our pattern-seeking brains savor the movies' carbon-copy plots. That sounds better, but doesn't go far enough.

Why do people watch Hallmark Christmas movies in July?

To keep death at bay.

As Sigmund Freud observed, death threatens us from three directions all the time: from our own bodies, doomed to dissolution; from the external world, rife with destruction; and from other people, prone to violence. 

On top of those things, we harbor an unconscious "death wish" that compels us to take foolish risks.

In the face of the threats, we're driven to escape, to experience Nirvana or what Freud calls the "oceanic sensation" of eternity.

And that, I believe, explains the appeal of Hallmark Christmas movies.

They all take place in a delusional fairytale land where no one suffers, no one dies, and nothing ever changes (except the casts, and they all look alike).

I recall from childhood devout Catholics who attended mass every day in hope of earning "life everlasting." 

In its unwavering consistency, the Catholic Order of Mass is like a Hallmark Christmas movie. But for the cast, nothing ever varies.

But old-fashioned exuberance for church-going has become quaint. 

In fact, church attendance in all denominations is cratering.

Now to keep death at bay we just turn on the Hallmark Channel. And we do so with urgency.

"If you think it through," Martin Heidegger said, "life can beautifully be called 'urgency.' But you must then agree that life's essence comprises desire, sorrow, and death—all at the same time."

When you acknowledge death is inevitable, your existence is torn in two, Heidegger believed. 

While you enjoy life's little pleasures, you can't help but be aware that time is finite and that your will has limits—even though your desires do not. 

So you waste time in flight from your awareness of death: you dissociate, daydream, drug, drink, overwork, overeat, overpost... or just dial up the Hallmark Channel. 

Then things aren't so dismal.

How Could They?

Have not other nations found great benefit from the use of slaves in repairing high roads, making rivers navigable, draining bogs, and erecting public buildings, bridges, and manufactures?

— George Berkeley

Happy Juneteenth! 

What better day than today to ask, how could White Christians have enslaved Blacks and still believe they were practicing Christians?

I think it's smart to look for answers in the writings of the most thoughtful Christians of the period.

One was the Irish philosopher George Berkeley.

A brilliant and outspoken Anglican bishop (and a slave-owner, as well), Berkeley shared the belief with many of his White contemporaries that obedience to God demanded you support slavery, because it was good for the slaves.

Berkeley was as conservative as they come, and not much different from today's conservatives in believing some people are bums. 

Skin color didn't much matter to Berkeley: bums in the 18th century were all the same. God made them that way.

Berkeley worried a lot about poverty and unrest in his native Ireland and in 1735 wrote The Querist, a book in which he asked, who's to blame for the fact that Ireland is poor?

His answer was clear: the bums are to blame.

Bums represented to Berkeley a dissolute, drunken, cynical, lazy and antisocial form of life. 

Forcing bums to participate in infrastructure projects was better than leaving them at liberty to wallow in their own filth. 

Forcing them to work would, in fact, give them dignity and guarantee their personal development.

If compulsory labor made them slaves, so be it. Slaves, as the Bible made clear, are just servants. Turning bums into servants served the public good, stimulated the economy, and was the "best cure for idleness and beggary." Forced labor, in fact, was a bum's way of demonstrating his or her "Christian charity."

Berkeley could justify an institution we find repugnant, because he valued an orderly Christian society—one that curbed some individuals' liberty, when that liberty hampered self-improvement.

We might call it charity under the lash, or self-help at the barrel of a gun. Whatever you call it, you know Berkeley's argument is weird and deeply flawed.

But it sounds hauntingly familiar.

But is It Scalable?

There are no accidents in life.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

I'm sick of algorithm-writers trying to manipulate me.

They suggest who I should follow (like Tomi Lahren, someone I loathe); what I should say (they autocorrect "You're my honey" to "You're my hiney"); when I should shop ("It's time to add more data"); and where I should go ("Belize awaits you!" So does Hell.).

It seems no matter where I turn, an anonymous algorithm-writer—likely to be wrong about my wants—has his grubby finger on the scale.

Even book-writers—some, anyway—are trying to manipulate me, by "click-farming" their way onto Amazon's best-seller lists.

Book-writers hire Chinese click-farms to fake Kindle downloads of their books, which Amazon counts as "sales."

A couple thousand Kindle downloads, which today would cost about $400, can put a book—even one with no previous real sales—on the top of Amazon's Top 10 charts.

The fake Kindle downloads also feed Amazon's "Books you may like," suggested purchases served by—what else?—algorithms.

Whatever became of scrupulous writers? Writers who trusted to the originality and incisiveness of their books to boost sales?

Writers of books like Being and Nothingness.

Written by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, 722-page book examines the experiences of individuals from the standpoint of radical subjectivity.

Weighing precisely one kilo when published in Paris in 1943, Being and Nothingness sprang to the top of the best-seller list, to the author's surprise.

Who were all these Parisians in the midst of the Occupation so eager to read a philosophical investigation of human existence?

They were grocers, it turned out. 

Grocers were using the book on their scales to replace the one-kilo lead weights that had been confiscated by the Nazis, to be melted down for bullets.

Resistance is Futile

Such argument is hardly worthy of serious refutal.

— John Harvey Kellogg

Like the Borg, "physicalist" philosophers are a hard-nosed bunch.

Physicalists hold that there's absolutely nothing that's supernatural: the only real substance is physical, and everything that's real is nothing more than its physical properties—the mind included.

By extension, one day the mind will be explained fully by neuroscience, according to physicalists.

For a century, physicalists have dominated debates about the 2,500-year-old "mind/body problem" in philosophy.

But—despite a century of vaulting advances in neuroscience—the tide of opinion is turning.

More and more philosophers today resemble Hegelians, the philosophers who dominated the mind/body debate in the 19th century. (Hegel believed that "All that is real is rational and all that is rational is real.")

One example is Galen Strawson. He believes everything is mind—that electrons are conscious.

Strawson is a new breed of physicalist, one who holds that, while everything is indeed physical, mind pervades it, a view known as panpsychism.

Strawson arrived at his opinion by realizing four truths:

1. Each of us knows for certain that he, she or they exists—that minds exist.

2. There's only one kind of substance—physical substance. 

3. Therefore, mind must be physical.

4. But there actually is no "substance," according to contemporary physics; there are only "vibratory patterns in fields." Mind must reside therein. It is latent in the energy that composes electrons—every electron, everywhere. Mind is everywhere.

Strawson's argument has merit because, like Hegel's, it's simple, positing neither all-natural nor supernatural substances. Everything is a unified one. 

And there's no longer any cause to debate where body ends and mind originates. Body ends nowhere. Mind originates everywhere. 

Debate over.

If panpsychism sounds whacky, it's not. It's mainstream.

Resistance is futile.

Who Owns the Earth?

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs,
but not every man's greed.

― Mahatma Gandhi

Republicans are often called "idealess," but that's unfair.

They have an idea: they want to own the earth.

But is it even possible? Can a party of people own the earth?

Our Founders' favorite philosopher, John Locke, answered the question in 1690 in his Second Treatise of Government, arguing "no."

While reason would suggest no one can own the earth, Locke says, the Bible proves that fact: "God has given the earth to mankind in common." 

But if that's true, why do we believe in ownership at all? How can anyone say he owns any piece of property? How can he say he owns something which "God gave to mankind in common?"

Locke answers the second question by examining an age-old farming practice: fencing.

Although nobody "originally" owns the earth's natural resources, Locke says, we can't make use of those resources until we "fence" them, as it were. 

"There must of necessity be a means to appropriate them some way or other, before they can be of any use, or at all beneficial to any particular man," Locke says. 

That means of appropriation is fencing.

And when someone fences—"removing" a resource from access by others—he adds value to it—the value of his labor. 

"The labor of his body, and the work of his hands, are properly his," Locke says. "Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property." 

A man's labor "annexes" and "encloses" a property, Locke says, excluding it from "the common right of other men.' 

In a phrase, workers keepers. "The condition of human life, which requires labor and materials to work on, necessarily introduces private possessions," Locke says.

Work, in effect, infuses any resource worked on with property rights, which allow that resource to be owned by the worker.

Appropriating resources you haven't worked on, on the other hand, Locke calls robbery—in his eyes, a sin.

"God has given us all things richly, but how far has he given it to us?" he asks.

"As much as any one can make use of life before it spoils, so much he may, by his labor, fix a property: whatever is beyond this, is more than his share, and belongs to others. Nothing was made by God for man to spoil."

So no one can own the earth, but any man can have his own little acre—provided he works to improve it, Locke says. 

If he does not improve what he grabs, he's letting it spoil. That's Locke's definition of robbery.

You can't defend robbery by claiming, "Well, all of us own the earth, as God commands," because God also commands that all men should labor. Those who don't have no "title," no right to "benefit of another's pains." Those who don't labor are—literally—robber barons. There's no place in the world for them.

There's also no place for their greed, Locke says. 

Greed urges you to take more than you can improve—or ever use. 

If the barley inside your fence goes to seed, the vegetables die, the fruits rot, and the sheep and goats get sick, it signals you have grabbed more than you can care for, more than you can use; and therefore that you're greedy. 

It's "useless" and "dishonest," Locke says, to grab more than you can tend to or consume.

Although he's been dead for three centuries, Locke would be the first to say the modern Republican Party is the party of despoilers, robber barons, and greedy sinners.

But you knew that.

Riders on the Storm

Justice is my being allowed to do whatever I like. 

Injustice is whatever prevents my doing so.

— Samuel Butler

We're about to see Joe Biden try to replace deprivation with comfort—or at least the opportunity to achieve comfort. And we're about to see Republicans try to block him.

I was raised to be a New Deal Democrat and cannot sympathize with anyone—except the rich—who supports the other party; and I can hardly sympathize with the rich. (My tender feelings fizzle fairly fast for households earning $300K+ a year.)

Biden's plan is bold because justice is at stake.

Justice is simple.

If you're a Republican, when it comes to defining justice you're on the wrong side of history—or two centuries behind the times, anyway. Your notions of rugged cowboys and laissez-faire capitalists are as outdated as frock-coats; so are your miserly notions of producers, moochers and looters. But you don't care. You're too busy dodging taxes and griping about socialism.

But if you're not a Republican, you know justice is about fairness, not self-interest, not ownership—and certainly not ownership of you (the gripe of Republicans is that taxes equate to Stalinist "forced labor"). Fairness means you don't trammel others' rights, including the right to a fair opportunity—a "fair shake," as Biden prefers to say. 

What's so complicated about that?

Now, Congressional gridlocking aside, the realist in me recognizes that giving everyone her fair shake won't be easy. 

First, some rich people will have to pay more taxes. Tough turkey. If you earn over $300K, I won't cry for you.

Second, some poor people will waste their opportunity. That'll be no one's fault but their own. I won't cry for them, either. Justice, after all, assures inalienable rights; even the right to screw up.

Dasein ist geworfener Entwurf, as Heidegger said: into this world we're thrown.

Thrownness is the human condition, our lot in life, the hand we're dealt. We're all born "situated," as Sartre said. Some are born haves, some have-nots; some White, some non-White; some abled, some disabled; some competent, some grossly not so. Justice seeks to throw off our thrownness.

We're all just riders on the storm. 

Why don't Republicans get that?

Some Things are Nonnegotiable

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.

― George Orwell

In The New York Times this week, conservative columnist David Brooks observes that the gospel of woke has already reached the remainder shelves, its freshness expired.

The proof, he says, lies in the fact that corporate America has co-opted it.

Corporations have the uncanny ability to productize progressive ideologies, Brooks says, "taking what was dangerous and aestheticizing it."

He cites the example of a nearly laughable pamphlet for math teachers, A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction.

The pamphlet urges teachers to shun "racism in mathematics."  

"White supremacy culture shows up in math classrooms when there is a greater focus on getting the 'right' answer than understanding concepts and reasoning," the pamphlet says.

"Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuates objectivity," and objectivity is racist.

Objectivity is racist, the pamphlet insists, because it's paternalistic, provoking fear and self-hatred among math students unaware of the correct answers.

Brooks might find this stuff silly and harmless; I don't. 

There are tens of thousands of teachers imbibing this swill.

Mathematical truth—what philosophers call realism—is apodictic, immutable and—as harsh as it sounds—nonnegotiable. 

Mathematical truth may be the last bastion of white supremacy, but I'll defend it to the end. 

Otherwise, truth is only that which is trouble-saving.

Do you want your grandkids crossing bridges engineered by snowflakes unable to add two plus two?

Not me.

God's Jury

When did you stop beating your wife?

— Unknown

True to the tenets of capitalism, anti-racism consultants are cashing in.

One New York-based consultancy, Pollyanna, charges $1,750 per hour to curriculum-wash, starting the process with a 360-degree review of a school’s faculty.

You know something's wrong when the $1,750-an-hour consultants turn into inquisitors.

During the 360, the Pollyanna's consultants ask faculty, for instance, to answer the question, "Do we talk about diversity and equity and inclusion too much at our school?"

This is an example of the infamous loaded question.

The loaded question seeks to change a person's mind by stealth. To answer it, the person must accept what the questioner merely presumes.

The favorite interrogation device of detectives, journalists, salespeople, extremists and witch hunters, the loaded question contains the seeds of the answerer's downfall:

"So where did you hide the gun?"

"Why are you content to bow to Iran?"

"Do you want a one- or two-year contract?"

"Why do you endorse the murder of unborn babies?"

"Why didn't you give up heresy when you knew it was sinful?"

Interrogators during the Inquisition were aware how unfair the loaded question was, but that didn't stop its use. They even encouraged widespread use of the loaded question in the handbook Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches).

According to philosophers, the loaded question (plurium interrogationum) is a trick question, a fallacy always to be avoided. 

It's a trick because the loaded question contains one or more question-begging presuppositions; for example, "So have you stopped grooming pretty eighth grade girls?" You can't answer the question without either lying or accepting statements you would deny.

The loaded question also lets the interrogator slip claims into his rhetoric without needing to prove them, or acknowledge their falsehood when unproven; for example, "Why does the media hate all conservatives?"

Like a loaded gun, a loaded question is a dangerous thing. 

In the hands of inquisitors, it's terrifying.