Worldwide pandemics and the culinary customs of Communist China

Perhaps the world’s nations should have a word with China concerning culinary customs which appear to repeatedly result in deadly worldwide pandemics.

1. “The Covid-19 outbreak, which has now led to 2,666 deaths and over 77,700 known infections, is thought to have originated in wildlife sold at a market in Wuhan.”

2. “At least two flu pandemics in the past century—in 1957 and 1968—originated … [from] millions of live birds … still kept, sold and slaughtered in crowded markets.”

3. “In late May 2003, [SARS] studies were conducted using samples of wild animals sold as food in the local market in Guangdong, China. … high probability that SARS coronavirus originated in bats and spread to humans either directly or through animals held in Chinese markets.”

/*****/

‘The Guardian’: “Peacocks, porcupines and pangolins among species bred on 20,000 farms closed in wake of virus. Freshly-slaughtered meat from wildlife and farm animals is preferred over meat that has been slaughtered before being shipped. Nearly 20,000 wildlife farms raising species including peacocks, civet cats, porcupines, ostriches, wild geese and boar have been shut down across China in the wake of the coronavirus, in a move that has exposed the hitherto unknown size of the industry.

Until a few weeks ago wildlife farming was still being promoted by government agencies as an easy way for rural Chinese people to get rich.

But the Covid-19 outbreak, which has now led to 2,666 deaths and over 77,700 known infections, is thought to have originated in wildlife sold at a market in Wuhan in early December, prompting a massive rethink by authorities on how to manage the trade.” — Michael Standaert in Shenzhen

/*****/

Melinda Liu in ’The Smithsonian’: “At least two flu pandemics in the past century—in 1957 and 1968—originated in the Middle Kingdom and were triggered by avian viruses that evolved to become easily transmissible between humans. Although health authorities have increasingly tried to ban the practice, millions of live birds are still kept, sold and slaughtered in crowded markets each year. In a study published in January, researchers in China concluded that these markets were a “main source of H7N9 transmission by way of human-poultry contact and avian-related environmental exposures.””

/*****/

Wikipedia: “In late May 2003, [SARS] studies were conducted using samples of wild animals sold as food in the local market in Guangdong, China. The results found that the SARS coronavirus could be isolated from masked palm civets (Paguma sp.), even if the animals did not show clinical signs of the virus. The preliminary conclusion was the SARS virus crossed the xenographic barrier from asian palm civet to humans, and more than 10,000 masked palm civets were killed in Guangdong Province. The virus was also later found in raccoon dogs (Nyctereuteus sp.), ferret badgers (Melogale spp.), and domestic cats. In 2005, two studies identified a number of SARS-like coronaviruses in Chinese bats.

Phylogenetic analysis of these viruses indicated a high probability that SARS coronavirus originated in bats and spread to humans either directly or through animals held in Chinese markets.”

“William Barr: is his defence of Trump paving the road to tyranny?”

Here’s AG of the United States Barr arguing that if a defendant “believed” he was falsely accused, the law cannot lay a hand on him:

Lauren Gambino:

Barr’s robust defense of a president’s executive authority to end an investigation into himself if he believed the inquiry was “based on false allegations”, alarmed critics of both parties.

“The president does not have to sit there constitutionally and allow it to run its course,” Barr told senators. “The president could terminate that proceeding and it would not be corrupt intent because he was being falsely accused.”

In other words, if someone is hauled into court for shooting a person “in the middle of Fifth Avenue,” he “could terminate that proceeding … because he [“believed” he] was being falsely accused.”

Fascinating. According to Attorney General Barr’s revolutionary new legal theory, America’s courts can no longer convict and punish any defendant who “believes” they are innocent.

Whether Barr’s defense of Trump is “paving the road to tyranny,” he’s emasculating the rule of law.

A high price to pay to exculpate a high official who’s at ten thousand lies and counting.

The values of the state's higher education system cannot be reconciled with the values of its justice system

I have written before that all democracy is liberal, all justice is liberal, all intellectuality is liberal, and all science is liberal.(1) If all justice is liberal, then the political orientation of any judge is the jurisprudential outlook of those who love justice above all else. It follows that there cannot be a "Republican judge" or a "Democratic judge." If a judge's highest loyalty is not to "the known rules of ancient liberty", to eternal justice, they could at best preside over a kangaroo court, at best practice a travesty of justice. (The current practice here in the United States where the Republican Party nominates judges and justices only from a list of candidates provided by the Federalist Society violates the principles of the legal profession, since its intent is to guarantee that only jurists who are activists committed to the doctrines of a partisan ideology rather than universal justice will be appointed. Edmund Burke, in a related case, argued against "instruction" whereby legislators were constrained to proceed only under designated foregone conclusions.)

I know a person who is a dean in the local state higher education system, and is also licensed to practice law in this state. If he were to praise "social justice" as widely understood in the current campus outlook, in writing, he could be in danger of having his law license revoked, since "social justice" lacks the elements of due process.(1) If he were to say, as a practicing legal professional, that "social justice" is, from the standpoint of the legal profession, an oxymoron, the same block of students who prevent speakers with the wrong viewpoint(2) from appearing on campus under the "no platforming" standard would likely hound him from campus (as, below, "a hobgoblin whose career needs to be ended").

Andrew Sullivan describes the illiberal campus intolerance:

And yes, I’m not talking about formal rules — but norms of liberal behavior. One of them is a robust public debate, free from intimidation. Liberals welcome dissent because it’s our surest way to avoid error. Cultural Marxists fear dissent because they believe it can do harm to others’ feelings and help sustain existing identity-based power structures. Yes, this is not about the First Amendment. The government is not preventing anyone from speaking. But it is about the spirit of the First Amendment. One of the reasons I defended Katie Roiphe against a campaign to preemptively suppress an essay of hers (even to the point of attempting to sabotage an entire issue of Harper’s) is because of this spirit. She may be wrong, but that does not make her a hobgoblin whose career needs to be ended. And the impulse to intimidate, vilify, ruin, and abuse a writer for her opinions chills open debate. This is a real-world echo of the campus habit of disrupting speakers, no-platforming conservatives, and shouting people down.

The tragic aspect of this is that it not only erodes the student's sense of justice, but is deeply and thoroughly anti-intellectual. Higher education is not about teaching only the right things, it is about learning how to determine what the right things are. It is not a platform, it is an arena where competing viewpoints are debated and compared. Anything that "chills open debate" is by definition anti-intellectual.

Why are the state's universities and colleges substituting indoctrination for education? Why are they teaching, and that most stridently, principles of intolerance and censorship which the state's own justice system explicitly forbids?

You can be expelled from one set of state institutions for refusing to endorse unconstitutional practices which another set of state institutions consider worthy of legal sanction. "Brethren, these things ought not to be so."


-*--
 
(1) Commitment to evidence and reason: Democracy (the informed consent of the governed); Justice (rules of evidence); Intellectuality (rejects false premises and invalid syllogisms); Science (testable predictions). Egalitarian and universalist: Lincoln, praising the Declaration's "All men are created equal," called it "an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times."

(2) First Amendment jurisprudence explicitly prohibits viewpoint discrimination and prior restraint.

The Liberal Founding (Reposted)

This is a repost of “The Liberal Founding,” originally posted here July 24, 2012. 

JohnMH127@gmail.com

“The spirit of liberalism suffused the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights” - (Below)

Professor Charles K. Rowley:

In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead. - What Is Living and What Is Dead in Classical Liberalism

To start, preliminary remarks on liberalism. The underlying propositions:

1. The liberal Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was an outgrowth of the scientific revolution of the latter half of the seventeenth century
2. In this blog the term ‘liberalism’ means Enlightenment liberalism. Liberalism is substantially different from the outlook of the left, and from Marxism, progressivism, libertarianism, and conservatism (as Historian Fritz Stern writes, “Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy.”)
3. The Declaration and Constitution, recognized by scholars as representative Enlightenment documents, embody liberal principles. As Stern’s and Ferris’s notes below suggest, the Founding was an expression of the new liberal values of the Enlightenment
4. The underlying assumptions and working principles of the United States are liberal. The present tendency to use ‘liberal’ as a derogatory epithet suggests a fundamental problem for the working of our society

Timothy Ferris, The Science of Liberty:

This book argues that the new ingredient was science. It maintains that the democratic revolution was sparked—caused is perhaps not too strong a word—by the scientific revolution. … Science arose to prominence immediately prior to the Enlightenment—as would be expected if, indeed, science was the one indisputably new ingredient in the social and intellectual ferment that produced the Enlightenment and the democratic revolutions that followed. (p. 2, p. 6)

Fritz Stern was born in Breslau, Germany in 1926, and moved with his family to the United States in 1938 in response to the rising anti-semitism of the Third Reich. As he wrote in The Failure of Illiberalism:

It may be that the accident of German birth gave me an added incentive to work in this extraordinary field. It certainly left me with strong memories. I was seven when Hitler came to power; for the next five years I lived under the two faces of Fascism. ... In school I saw the smiling face of Nazism, as fellow students reveled in their uniforms, sang their songs, and prattled their litany of love and hate. I sensed their exultation and felt their cruelty.

From Fritz Stern Op-Ed New York Times September 4, 1988 (in response to George H.W. Bush’s Ronald Reagan's derogatory use of ‘liberal’):

Liberalism—one of “America's noblest traditions,” I insisted, often defined as a state of mind—had “transformed the world . . . [I]ts greatest victory has been the American Revolution; its greatest pronouncement, the Declaration of Independence; its greatest bulwark, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.” It had “stood for freedom against tyranny. At its best . . . a force for change and progress, seeking the institutional defense of decency.” ... In America's liberal premises the world had seen “the best promise of the West.” - This, and the following, from Five Germanys I Have Known

 
New York Times ad purchased  October 26, 1988 by Fritz Stern and C. Vann Woodward:

A Reaffirmation of Principle

We speak as American citizens who wish to reaffirm America's liberal tradition. At our country's founding, the spirit of liberalism suffused the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These principles, thus embodied, have inspired the respect of much of the world.

We regret that the President of the United States has taken the lead in vilifying one of our oldest and noblest traditions. He made sport of “the dreaded L-word” and continues to make “liberal” and “liberalism” terms of opprobrium. We are deeply concerned about the erosion and debasement of American values and American traditions that our country has long cherished.

In the past and at its best, liberalism has sought the institutional defense of decency. Everywhere it has fought for the freedom of individuals to attain their fullest development. It has opposed tyranny in all forms, past and present. Liberal policies require constant scrutiny and sometimes revision. Liberal principles—freedom, tolerance, and the protection of the rights of every citizen—are timeless.

Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies have been crushed by such extremists. Against any encouragement of this tendency in our own country, intentional or not, we feel obliged to speak out. We hope that others will do so as well.

Imagine an uplifting presence in the Oval Office

[Note captured ten years ago]: A passage from Lee Smolin's Three Roads to Quantum Gravity illustrates the intellectual sensibility in action. He and his researchers had (because of failure to check the literature) appeared to claim credit for originating methods actually developed by others:

  One of our students, Bernd Bruegmann, had come to my office
  with a very disturbed look on his face. [...] There was no
  avoiding the fact that the method we had developed was quite
  close to the one that Gambini and Trias had already been
  using for several years in their work on QCD. [...]

  With a heavy heart we did the only thing we could, which was
  to sit down and write them a very apologetic letter. We
  heard nothing from them until one afternoon in Trento, when
  Carlo got a phone call from Barcelona. [...] They [...] asked
  if we would still be there tomorrow. The next morning they
  arrived, having driven most of the night across France and
  northern Italy. We spent a wonderful day showing each other
  our work, which was thankfully complementary. [Gambini ...]
  in the next few months [...] invented a new approach to doing
  calculations in loop quantum gravity.

This illustrates the liberal virtues of selflessness, candidness, love of knowledge, and passionate desire for optimum outcomes. This is the idealism implied in George Washington's concern for the "public good" (see his inaugural address and his farewell address).

It's related to what Olivia Judson wrote a year later:

The third reason to teach evolution is more philosophical. It concerns the development of an attitude toward evidence. In his book, “The Republican War on Science,” the journalist Chris Mooney argues persuasively that a contempt for scientific evidence — or indeed, evidence of any kind — has permeated the Bush administration’s policies, from climate change to sex education, from drilling for oil to the war in Iraq. A dismissal of evolution is an integral part of this general attitude.
Moreover, since the science classroom is where a contempt for evidence is often first encountered, it is also arguably where it first begins to be cultivated. A society where ideology is a substitute for evidence can go badly awry. [...]
But for me, the most important thing about studying evolution is something less tangible. It’s that the endeavor contains a profound optimism. It means that when we encounter something in nature that is complicated or mysterious, such as the flagellum of a bacteria or the light made by a firefly, we don’t have to shrug our shoulders in bewilderment.

"An attitude toward evidence" is liberating and can contain "a profound optimism." There were people in our culture who objected to "The Martian" because it was a narrative of the capacity of human intelligence to master nature through problem solving (much as Robinson Crusoe did). The politics of anti-science, which has antecedents in Plato's rejection of the empirical, and of treating truth as "problematic," is a failure of nerve regarding evidence, and its fruits are pessimism and, carried to an extreme, nihilism. "A society where ideology is a substitute for evidence can go badly awry." A society where the Chief Executive has a snowballing credibility problem can destabilize the public order and delegitimize its own government.

Also ten years ago, Stephen Pinker noted the tendency to regard propositional statements (such as "all people are created equal") as loyalty oaths: "People have a nasty habit of clustering in coalitions, professing certain beliefs as badges of their commitment to the coalition and treating rival coalitions as intellectually unfit and morally depraved."

Intellectual intimidation, whether by sword or by pen, inevitably shapes the ideas that are taken seriously in a given era, and the rear-view mirror of history presents us with a warning.
Time and again, people have invested factual claims with ethical implications that today look ludicrous. [...] The foisting of "intelligent design" on biology students is a contemporary one. These travesties should lead us to ask whether the contemporary intellectual mainstream might be entertaining similar moral delusions. Are we enraged by our own infidels and heretics whom history may some day vindicate? [...] When done right, science (together with other truth-seeking institutions, such as history and journalism) characterizes the world as it is, without regard to whose feelings get hurt. [...] the intellectual blinkers that humans tend to don when they split into factions. People have a nasty habit of clustering in coalitions, professing certain beliefs as badges of their commitment to the coalition and treating rival coalitions as intellectually unfit and morally depraved. Debates between members of the coalitions can make things even worse, because when the other side fails to capitulate to one's devastating arguments, it only proves they are immune to reason. In this regard, it's disconcerting to see the two institutions that ought to have the greatest stake in ascertaining the truth -- academia and government -- often blinkered by morally tinged ideologies. [...] It's hard to imagine any aspect of public life where ignorance or delusion is better than an awareness of the truth, even an unpleasant one. Only children and madmen engage in "magical thinking," the fallacy that good things can come true by believing in them or bad things will disappear by ignoring them or wishing them away. (Emphasis added)

When the Oval Office is under the Babylonian captivity of an incompetent pretender obsessively engaged in "magical thinking," where news articles are beginning to use "unhinged" as a reasonable description, the ability to rise to a reasonable response to real crises is increasingly in doubt. Imagine the vulgar disgusting person who now represents our nation to the world driving "most of the night across France and northern Italy" because of idealism and the love of knowledge. Imagine "a wonderful day" devoted to what is inspiring. Imagine that our government once again included someone who could say, "We choose [to do these] things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

The Defeat of Thought and the Crisis of Democracy

Slate's Mark Joseph Stern describes the way the American electorate has become an irrational factor making possible calamitous politics:

McConnell ... brought the Senate to a grinding halt, then blamed Obama and the Democrats for his handiwork. This gambit was wildly successful, sowing anger and [frustration] toward Democrats . . .

He adds:

A huge chunk of the electorate does not care whether politicians hold regular press conferences or release financial disclosures or refrain from saying horribly bigoted things on TV. It doesn’t matter if a presidential candidate mocks or vilifies disabled people and women and immigrants. It doesn’t matter if he releases coherent policy papers and adheres to clear positions on important issues.

M. J. Stern's analysis leaves out the underlying reason behind the symptoms he describes: the failure of the American electorate to think about the liberal principles without which democracy is a house of cards: universalism, egalitarianism, civility, altruism, public spiritedness, desire for optimum outcomes, pluralism, toleration, respect for each person's dignity and autonomy, commitment to representative deliberation rather than mob rule. As Obama said, We need a government of evidence and reason rather than ideology.

Historian Fritz Stern, describing the calamity his native Germany drew down on itself in the last century, called it "The Failure of Illiberalism." He cited the OED's definition of "illiberal": Not worthy of a [free citizen]; not generous in respect to the opinions, rights and liberties of others; narrow minded.

Dr. Stern also quoted the prophet Jeremiah 5:31: The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means, and my people love to have it so, and what will ye do in the end thereof?

Both camps of the electorate, left and right, subscribe to a vicious epistemic closure in which thought, as contrasted with rote repetition of dogma, is a sin. It breaks ranks. It offends the community. When, as in this case, any propositional assertion is treated as a de facto loyalty oath, we have lost our ability to use our minds to avoid catastrophic decisions, such as we Americans made in the last election. We have substituted ideology for evidence and reason, and ideology is the deformation of language and truth in the service of power.

Intellectual thought can never be ideological, because intellect always goes beyond foregone conclusions — that is its very reason for being — thus always in disagreement with dogma. As Orwell wrote, "If one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox."

The dogma that liberal and left are pretty much the same thing — tacitly assented to by both left and right in the recent election — prevented informed discussion of the way the illiberal choice made would drive a dagger in the heart of a civilized society. Thus we, to paraphrase Thomas Paine, sacrificed a world to folly and baseness.(1)

-*--

(1) Thomas Paine: "I have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world either to their folly or their baseness."

Democratic National Convention Speeches which Praise Liberalism

Liberalism wagers that civility, cooperation and altruism have greater survival value than aggression and the will to power.

Cory Booker's speech at the DNC 2016 was a full-throated praise of liberalism. Selections below, with some comparisons to President Clinton's speech to the DNC four years earlier:

• We must empower each other, ... [Clinton: You see, we believe that "we're all in this together" is a far better philosophy than "you're on your own."]
• We've watched [Donald Trump] cruelly mock a journalist's disability. ... [Clinton: When you stifle human potential, ... it hurts us all.]
• Americans, at our best, stand up to bullies and fight those who seek to demean and degrade others. ... [Spider Robinson:(1) John Wayne would never beat up a little guy.]
• Long before [Hillary Clinton] ever ran for office, in Massachusetts, she went door-to-door collecting stories of children with disabilities. ...
• We are not a zero-sum nation, it is not you or me, it is not one American against another. It is you and I, together, interdependent, interconnected with one single interwoven American destiny. ... [Clinton: It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics. Why? Because poverty, discrimination and ignorance restrict growth. When you stifle human potential, when you don’t invest in new ideas, it doesn’t just cut off the people who are affected; it hurts us all.]
• A neighbor with a beautiful special needs child ... [From a disability blog: A reciprocity principle - If a remark or an action or an attitude would be seen as discriminatory if directed toward a minority, it is discriminatory for the disabled. The disabled have exactly the same civil rights, even if the justice system does not act as if they do. ]
• Liberty is not secure for some until it's secure for all, ... [MLK: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."]
• Because still the only thing necessary for evil to be triumphant is for good people to do nothing. My fellow Americans, we cannot be seduced into cynicism about our politics, because cynicism is a refuge for cowards and this nation is and must always be the home of the brave. We are the United States of America. We will not falter or fail. We will not retreat or surrender – we will not surrender our values, we will not surrender our ideals, we will not surrender the moral high ground. ... [Clinton: Advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics.]
• Let us declare again that we will be a free people. Free from fear and intimidation. Let us declare that we are a nation of interdependence, and that in America love always trumps hate. ... [Clinton: What works in the real world is cooperation ... it passes the values test.]

Read the whole thing.

So was Bill Clinton's speech at the DNC four years earlier. Highlights:

• You see, we believe that "we're all in this together" is a far better philosophy than "you're on your own."
• It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics. Why? Because poverty, discrimination and ignorance restrict growth. When you stifle human potential, when you don’t invest in new ideas, it doesn’t just cut off the people who are affected; it hurts us all.
• What works in the real world is cooperation.
• In Tampa, the Republican argument against the president's re-election was actually pretty simple, pretty snappy: we left him a total mess, he hasn't cleaned it up fast enough, so fire him and put us back in.
• In order to look like an acceptable, reasonable, moderate alternative to President Obama, they just didn’t say very much about the ideas they have offered over the last two years. You see they couldn’t because they want to go back to the same old policies that got us into trouble in the first place.
• It takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did.
• I’m not making it up. That’s their position. See me about that after the election.
• Really. Think about this: President Obama's plan cuts the debt, honors our values, brightens the future of our children, our families and our nation. It’s a heck of a lot better. It passes the arithmetic test, and far more important, it passes the values test.

Again, read the whole thing.

See also: andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/09/the-duty-of-civility.html - "The relevant kind of respect ... has to do with the ways in which we acknowledge our fundamental equality as sharers in self-government".



(1) From Very Hard Choices:
All my life, if there was anything everyone in America knew for sure, without even thinking about it, it was that John Wayne would never beat up a little guy.

Fundamentals of Liberal Thought, Ctd.

Hypothesis: Every deduction is a concealed induction. (See below)

The previous post, Fundamentals of Liberal Thought, offered a beginning discussion of foundations—of the grounds of reason.

This post attempts elementary notes on the nature of fact and truth, from the Enlightenment liberal perspective. As before, the chief contestant for prevailing concept of truth is the archaic assumption implied by Plato's philosophic idealism. This is that entities have essences, that truth is a knowledge of essences, and thus that truth is absolute. A corollary is that what is true is necessarily so.

Liberalism's concept of truth is closely related to the perspective of empirical science: Truth is probabilistic. If a fact arrived at by induction is falsifiable—Karl Popper's famous proposition—it cannot be absolute.

Let's try a couple of definitions derived from the premise that truth is empirical and probabilistic:

1. Truth is a function of the current state of our knowledge; and
2. A truth is that conclusion, from the best available evidence that, when acted on, tends to produce the expected results.

(1) fits the Newton/Einstein case. At one time Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica was considered the ultimate revelation of the laws of nature. 'Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light,' exclaimed Alexander Pope. But a glitch was discovered:

A long-standing problem in the study of the Solar System was that the orbit of Mercury did not behave as required by Newton's equations.

The work of Albert Einstein revealed what had happened. Newton's conclusions were based on  observations of non-relativistic phenomena, and worked satisfactorily under those conditions. The Principia was a brilliant analysis of the knowledge of its time. Newton's formulae are still widely used in a wide number of practical cases, where velocity is not even close to the speed of light, and the sort of powerful close-to-a-star gravity well experienced by Mercury is not a factor. In such non-relativistic conditions, Newton's math is far simpler.

Newton's treatment of the regularities of nature is a subset of Einstein's treatment of the regularities of nature. Einstein's propositions and equations apply under a much wider set of conditions. (There was a debate in the USENET discussion group rec.arts.books, where humanities professors could not understand scientists' argument, that to say that Newton was "wrong" and Einstein was "right" is simplistic. Degrees of confidence does not fit an outlook derived essentially from Plato.)

It could be said that Plato's philosophical idealism was an attempt to solve the problem of induction* by deriving all knowledge from deduction, thereby achieving metaphysical certitude. (His model may have been theoretical mathematics, which some mathematicians see as a great structure of a priori truths existing before and outside of the "reality" we think we experience. The idea or Form is a similar a priori construction which is immaterial, eternal, perfect, unchanging, and imperceptible to the senses.)

The scientific/liberal response is that there are no absolutes, and metaphysical certitude is a will-o-the-wisp. The Forms, after all, are off in some invisible Platonic heaven (which only the Philosopher can see). By contrast, "The moderns [liberals] built on low but solid ground" (Leo Strauss quoted by Allan Bloom). Induction can give results which are certain for all practical purposes. Did you ever run across a street dodging cars? In doing so, you wagered your life on where moving cars would be (an ephemeral truth if there ever was one) when you went.

Hypothesis: Plato's effort was doomed from the start for the reason that it is impossible to start from deduction because every deduction is a concealed induction. A familiar universal principle, i.e. deduction, from theoretical mathematics such as "2 plus 2 equals 4" becomes, in applied mathematics,** an induction, such as "2 oranges plus 2 oranges equals 4 oranges." This induction is falsifiable. All it would require is a case where a grocery clerk put 2 oranges in a sack, then another 2 oranges, and the sack, upon inspection, contained any other quantity than 4 oranges.***

"2 plus 2 equals 4" is not necessarily true; if it were, it would be a prophecy about the future which we mortals are not permitted to make. (Nevertheless, most of us do not anticipate a disjuncture between integer mathematics and household purchases.)

For a more wide-ranging discussion of liberal modernity's objection to Plato, see Footnotes to Plato: Is Your Child's Humanities Professor Scornful of Your Values?



(*) The problem of induction is that it consists of conclusions derived from observation of physical reality (which Plato calls the realm of "appearances") and, according to Plato, produces "opinion" rather than "knowledge." A future observation could contradict those on which the induction is based—that is the problem.

(**) One can say that Plato engaged in equivocation, acting as if applied mathematics possessed the immutability of theoretical mathematics. (Equivocation: When a key term is used in two different senses in the same passage without acknowledgement. An example of legitimate equivocation (because the reader is aware of it) is Pascal's The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing.)

(***) Perhaps this would be an example of definition (2) above: A truth is that conclusion, from the best available evidence that, when acted on, tends to produce the expected results.

Fundamentals of Liberal Thought

As stated in The Liberal Founding, modern liberalism's immediate antecedent was the scientific revolution of the latter half of the seventeenth century. When Barack Obama remarked, back when he was a senator, We need a politics of evidence and reason rather than ideology, he was articulating what modern liberalism owes to the scientific outlook.

This is in fundamental conflict with another great influence on our thought, Plato's rejection of empiricism. As Carl Sagan wrote in Cosmos, "Plato urged astronomers to think about the heavens, but not to waste their time observing them."

Which is to say that liberalism will not substitute belief or ideology for evidence and reason where evidence and reason apply. This gave the Founders a rhetorical problem: How to speak of the ground of liberal principles? Reason works from foundations. A syllogism works from two premises, both held to be warranted. But what is a foundation founded on?

The Declaration of Independence, for example, begins

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

"Self-evident?" "Endowed by their Creator?"

Human beings must operate on working assumptions which at the most basic level do not have an antecedent (which would be a more basic level). These values are what, as the Founders wrote, we "hold." Their ground, if any, is not their precedent but their consequences. All that we can ask is that a value be well chosen.

That every person is to start out enjoying equality rather than subservience, and that a universal moral obligation exists to honor each person's right to life, freedom, and autonomy, for example, is not the only choice that could be made. In recent memory a nation declared that the world-historical mission of a master race (its own) should be the paradigm.

One can encounter a relativist argument that, absent proof concerning which is better, the choice is arbitrary, and therefore indefensible.

Liberals answer that they hold with what Fritz Stern* (who had seen the master race concept in action), called "the institutional defense of decency." And hold fast.



(*) as cited in The Liberal Founding

The Liberalism of George Orwell

In a preceding post, The Liberalism of Martin Luther King, I opened with

Charles K. Rowley: In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead. www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_01_1_rowley.pdf

MLK's sayings map rather well to “universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism.” Orwell was somewhat different. As a member of the academic left remarked, “rationalism is usually in the list.” Orwell, simply by hewing closely to honesty in observation, integrity in thought, and moral courage in presentation, became the Twentieth Century's most representative exemplar of liberal reason: fidelity to reality in service to the public good.

In “The Prevention of Literature” Orwell wrote, “Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.” Orwell represents the aspect of enlightenment liberalism which leverages humanity's working material, objective reality*, through faithful correspondence of language to what the language purports to be about. Christopher Hitchens wrote:

One cannot help but be struck by the degree to which [Orwell] became, in Henry James’s words, one of those upon whom nothing was lost. By declining to lie, even as far as possible to himself, and by his determination to seek elusive but verifiable truth, he showed how much can be accomplished by an individual who unites the qualities of intellectual honesty and moral courage. (Emphasis added)

As he observed, “To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”

Orwell worked out what this sort of cognitive integrity means (illustrating, along the way, the darker side of collectivist solidarity):

It is the peculiarity of our age that the rebels against the existing order, at any rate the most numerous and characteristic of them, are also rebelling against the idea of individual integrity. ‘Daring to stand alone’ is ideologically criminal as well as practically dangerous. ... Here I am not trying to deal with the familiar claim that freedom is an illusion, or with the claim that there is more freedom in totalitarian countries than in democratic ones, but with the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness. - “The Prevention of Literature”

Orwell liberalism, which amounts to nothing less than a new way of being, seems deceptively simple. Think about what you see (in front of your nose) until you get past the social tyranny of preconceptions. Have the moral courage to speak plainly about what you saw (because, it being unorthodox, it will be denounced as “anti-social selfishness.” This modern, new human type, is denied the comfort of euphemism. Denied the Noble Lie. Required to forge forward in the face of powerful taboo:

The imaginative writer is unfree when he has to falsify his subjective feelings, which from his point of view are facts. He may distort and caricature reality in order to make his meaning clearer, but he cannot misrepresent the scenery of his own mind; he cannot say with any conviction that he likes what he dislikes, or believes what he disbelieves. If he is forced to do so, the only result is that his creative faculties will dry up. ... Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought.
...
If one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox. - “The Prevention of Literature”

Historian Fritz Stern: “Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy.” - The Liberal Founding


-*--

(*) Note two of the Founders' emphasis on evidence and reason: “The Eighteenth Century, notwithstanding all its errors and vices, has been, of all that are past, the most honorable to human nature. Knowledge and virtues were increased and diffused, arts, sciences useful to men, ameliorating their condition, were improved, more than in any former equal period. - John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 1815”

Reparations: Americans Still Don't Recognize Attacks on Liberal Values Phrased as Left Ideology

Political articles in the United States are generally written from the perspective of the left, or of conservatism, or of liberalism. Left and conservative are belief systems or ideologies; that is, positions are often held because of values other than truth or correspondence-to-reality (such as conventional wisdom, orthodoxy, or political correctness). Liberalism, our earlier article The Liberal Founding posits, is an information system, somewhat in the model of its immediate predecessor, the scientific revolution of the latter half of the Seventeenth Century.

A defining characteristic of left thought is its groupy outlook. Politics is a matter of an oppressed group, seen as virtuous; and an oppressor group characterized as thoroughly evil. Thus what any given left attempts to do is to battle, punish, or eliminate an evil group. The Marxism-Leninism of the late Soviet Union, having complete control, exiled, imprisoned, or executed virtually the entire middle class in its territory within a few years of the revolution. Similarly, Maoist communism, in a bloodbath, eliminated the Chinese middle class.

This personalistic approach contrasts with the methodology of modern liberal societies, which seek to build good institutions, enact good laws, secure the civil liberties of the citizen, and discover policies which advance the public good.

From earlier post Liberal, Left:

1. The most famous three words in liberalism: “We the People.”
2. The left's most famous phrase: “Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!”
3. The left characterizes virtue as a property of a group (the oppressed). It takes a personalistic approach to evil, in the form of an implied out-group which chains the oppressed worker. The battle against evil, it is implied, will take the form of a war against a group of people who are, as a foregone conclusion, evil.
4. This is in contrast to liberalism, which tends to see evil—at least the evil which a political system may seek to remedy—as error resulting from ignorance. To personalize evil, and in the process demonize certain types of people and create conflict, is seen as a category mistake. It can lead to what Frederick C. Crews called a “reckless dispensation of guilt.”*
5. “We the People,” by contrast, suggests harmony, cooperation, and altruism.
6. In all of this, the left is thinking in terms of groups, oppressed groups versus oppressor groups, not in terms of the rights-bearing individual. This is a mind-set which does not place much emphasis on civil liberties. A person believed to be a member of a "reactionary" group tends to be treated as guilty of the sins ascribed to that group. 
7. This can lead to the person so identified to be punished for a wrong committed by another person, which is manifestly unjust.
8. The plight of the oppressed is taken to be more important than the interests and needs of individual members of the oppressed group. “Workers of the World, Unite” calls for solidarity rather than moral reflection and principled action.
9. This is collectivism, which Karl Popper, in The Open Society, described as a politics where the group is everything and the individual is nothing.**
10. The process of identifying certain people as members of oppressor groups is profiling. The process of targeting the person profiled is discrimination. The general modus operandi of the left is in practice inherently discriminatory.    

Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Case for Reparations is in many ways a classic example of anti-liberal, anti middle class left argument. The preceding article describes the groupy quality (3) of Coates' thinking:

An earlier post concerning Coates' fallacies argued that Coates does not see a society of equal, rights-bearing citizens, 

"caught in an inescapable network of mutuality," but a polity irrevocably divided between oppressed race and oppressor race. "Once that fact is acknowledged," Kevin D. Williamson suggests "then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism: My interests are inextricably linked to my own kin group and directly rivalrous with yours, i.e., the very racism that this program is in theory intended to redress." (Emphasis added)

There is also the simplistic thinking of (6) above, which attributes to everyone considered to be a member of the oppressor group the supposed characteristics of the group:

The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.

Coates gives us an example of the left theme, "an oppressor group characterized as thoroughly evil":

Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. ... What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. (Emphasis added)

Coates appears to be more interested in punishing the guilty (7) than in constructive reform:

Coates' intent is apparently to fix the blame rather than fix the problem. [J. D. Vance]: "There’s no talk, however, of what to do now, how reparations would help, or why we ought to focus on settling an old score instead of charting a new course. ... But it must be said: breaking hearts is far easier than healing them."

In a 2008 autopsy of the last campaign for reparations (roughly fifteen years ago), Walter Olson wrote:

To the extent the reparations movement had used its brief time on stage to encourage national introspection, Americans had reached a different conclusion from the one that the activists had hoped for—a rough consensus, in fact, that whatever the right approach to the nation’s perennial problem of race relations might be, ventures into anger-mongering and random expropriation weren’t it. (Emphasis added)

The final problem with Coates' modeling his argument on left ideology is that it is in the nature of ideology to be misleading or flat-out wrong, because ideology inherently rejects feedback from reality. Daphne Patai once said, "The whole point of being an ideologue is that new information doesn't disturb your worldview." In Coates' "white supremacy"/reparations articles there is a characteristic mixture of ad hominem, false equivalency, fallacies of distribution, withholding of exculpatory evidence, and vagueness:

Where one would expect specifics, Coates presents generalities. W. James Antle III:

But when it comes to what reparations would look like or how they would work, Coates has little to say beyond “we should support” John Conyers’ bill to study reparations. And while he insists the failure of this proposal to advance “suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential,” he doesn’t give us any reason to think he is talking about a workable policy that would tangibly improve people’s lives.

Coates waves away as irrelevant the most obvious questions: “Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay?” Many of us suspect these questions are ultimately unanswerable . . .

It appears that Coates' articles concerning "white supremacy" and reparations are meant to appear to be in the great tradition of American reform, like Martin Luther King's successful civil rights campaign. But as noted in these posts, Coates' language is strikingly different from that of MLK and other reformers. Liberal campaigns appeal to "the better angels of our nature." Coates, victim of the left theme of incorrigible evil groups, can't pull that off. "The process of identifying certain people as members of oppressor groups is profiling. The process of targeting the person profiled is discrimination. The general modus operandi of the left is in practice inherently discriminatory."

(*)From Tikkun:

What makes Crews's account so compelling, however, is his brilliant writing combined with his quite accurate condemnation of the way psychoanalysis came eventually to be practiced, especially in the United States: "its deliberate coldness, its cultivation of emotional regression, its depredation of the patient's self-perceptions as inauthentic...its reckless dispensation of guilt."

(**)C. R. Hallpike (hallpike.com/EvolutionOfMoralUnderstanding.pdf‎):

What Sir Karl Popper has called the ‘closed society’: ‘the magical or tribal or collectivist society would be called the closed society, and the society in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions,the open society.’ . . . For Popper, the closed society can be justly compared to an organism, in which ‘slavery, class and class-rule are “natural” in the sense of being unquestionable.’. . .

So, therefore, in a closed society ‘the tribe is everything and the individual nothing’