Ten Years After: A USENET Conversation Between Liberal and Libertarian Viewpoints

From http://adissentersnotes.blogspot.com/2012/07/conscience-and-language-orwell.html, "See Waring’s great blog post on libertarianism: delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/10/libertarian-ponies-what-still-may-be-the-best-weblog-post-ever.html"

"Michael S. Morris" <msmo...@netdirect.net> wrote:
>                            Friday, the 3rd of October, 2003

Mike wrote below:
>You don't understand Aristotle either. The idea is not that
>anybody has absolute knowledge of anything. The idea is that
>knowledge is possible, and therefore absolute knowledge is
>in the theoretical game.

You did not say absolute knowledge is possible. If it isn't, why
should it be in the theoretical game?

You have a greater difficulty than this, however. In order for there
to be a final truth, the fine detail of the universe would probably
have to be by definition finite. Even if finite (is that a provable
proposition?) it would also have to be within the grasp of human
understanding. It is for reasons such as this that I proposed, in
Liberalism Reviewed Part 1, "a suggested liberal definition of truth
as 'that conclusion from the currently available information which,
when acted on, tends to produce the expected result.'" Truth, or as
you say, knowledge, is a function of the current state of our best
observations and reasoning.

Your position, by contrast, is a concealed form of Platonism. "The
highest vocation of the soul in Platonism is to 'perceive the eternal
order of things'--to which the soul must passively adapt or conform."
(Richard Wolin, _The Terms of Cultural Criticism_ p. 37)

As Lee Smolin says in a chapter heading of _Three Roads to Quantum
Gravity_, reality consists of processes, not things. Knowledge--
truth--is a process. As such, your "absolute knowledge" is a
reification which should not be in the theoretical game. And as I have
suggested in previous articles, intellectual propositions of this sort
have unanticipated political consequences. Wolin: "As a species of
first philosophy, ontology posits an immutable order of being. Far
from there being anything intrinsically 'emancipatory' about this
ideal, it is a conception fully compatible with the most authoritarian
and rigid forms of political life." Wolin continues:

  With the transition from an "ontology" to "epistemology"
  inaugurated by Descartes, "reason" and "truth" need no longer
  be accepted on the basis of a spurious, supramundane claim to
  ontological primacy--for example, the claim that the "good"
  would be somehow a priori lodged in the "order of Being"; a
  claim to which human agents must simply submit. Instead, all
  truth claims and claims to right must be legitimated through
  the mediating agency of individual insight. The seventeenth-
  century shift from ontology to epistemology, therefore,
  displays profound affinities with the foundational values of
  political modernity: freedom, autonomy, and self-legislation.
   (p. 38)

Truth is not "out there" in the sense in which you argue. Truth is an
interaction between us and a non-subjective, extra-human "out there"
which constrains the range of legitimate propositions which we may
formulate about it but which does not, as such, determine those
propositions.

And that is the end-point of "absolute knowledge is in the theoretical
game": a determinism which is in remarkable contrast to your
libertarian wishes.

A second note: This clearly is not absolutism (I'm arguing against it)
but it is also not (moral) relativism, as you charge below. "Morality
is, roughly, what human beings owe to one another," Avishai Margalit
observed recently in the New York Review of Books. I've claimed
previously in the Liberalism Reviewed series that ethical positions
are roughly as described by Aristotle: something arrived at by the
analysis of cases.

Our ethics are a function of our growing understanding of the
right--of learning how not to do wrong to each other. This occurs by
our noting the consequences of our behavior and manners--our
consideration and restraint--towards each other.

What you wrote below contains a profound misunderstanding:
  The thing Nietzsche introduces is autonomy--the idea that there
  is no "moral code" and all there really are are possible "moral
  codes" which the victors make up at their convenience to pat
  themselves on the back for being "good", and [then] to kick the
  losers in the dirt for being "evil."

First, autonomy is independence, not imposition (nor sovereignty, a
word you overuse). "As I would not be a slave," Lincoln said, "so I
would not be a master." Therefore: As I would exercise autonomy, so I
would not constrain the autonomy of others (which would show that I do
not believe in autonomy).

Second, Nietzsche, and moral relativists generally, take an
intellectually trivial position. They do not consider the possibility
that ethical propositions may have functional value. Very strong
arguments can be formulated, for example, that murder is
dysfunctional: disruptive, destructive of human capital,
destabilizing, producing a climate of fear and inaction (or conversely
an internecine feud), etc. The relativists' argumentative inadequacy
in this regard signifies that moral relativism is not worthy of
critical inspection.

Mike wrote below:
>I do not wish to pretend to some agnostocism about whether,
>in some societies, it might be morally good to go and
>commit murder of those around one.

Nor do I. As Travis Porco wrote here some years back, the wrongness of
murder is "certain for all practical purposes." This is not, as
Platonists will tell you, an absolute position. It is merely, as
Gordon Fitch once noted, the "good enough." My point is that practical
certainty is adequate for a human ethics, and that it avoids the
cognitive and intellectual traps consequent on any claim of
metaphysical certitude, to wit: You can't prove that; and therefore
you must retreat to nihilism.

Mike wrote below:
>The whole point of Natural Law is precisely that it is that part of moral law
>which does not depend upon Revelation. It's what intelligent men anywhere
>and everywhere have understood to be ethically right in the absence of
>divine guidance.

Bravo! Unfortunately I cannot take seriously the claim that this is
your actual position. On October 22 you wrote:

  You really are willing to call
  liberalism anything that has gotten divorced from the doctrine 
  of the inalienable Rights of Man? Even in the face of the fact
  that the Declaration of Independence---the founding document of
  political liberalism if there ever was one---declares the Rights
  are the whole beginning and end of government in the first
  place?

You forgot that the passage in reference begins "We hold these truths
. . ." Before "these truths" the authors of the Declaration placed the
active human intelligence which is continuously formulating truths. A
reasonable observer will deduce from the tone of your statements about
"the doctrine" that when you think of "Rights" you are thinking of "an
immutable order of being [...] to which human agents must simply
submit."

You claim that Natural Law and Rights are "what intelligent men
anywhere and everywhere have understood to be ethically right" as if
it was not open-ended. But that can't be right. From everything we
know of what they said and did the greatest minds prior to the modern
era--Plato, Aristotle, Jesus of Nazareth, St. Paul--never clearly
formulated what seems morally obvious to us: the ethical status of
slavery.

Their position must have seemed to their contemporaries--if not to
they themselves--beyond discussion. So as to your charge: "You are
saying nothing is beyond argument" I repeat, That is exactly what I
mean. I do not fear argument or free thought or discussion. That is
how we got beyond the ancients on the question of slavery. Do we
know--indeed can we know--that our descendants will not better us in
some way which _we_ cannot now envision?

End-Stuff:

Unlike liberalism, with its fundamental belief in the long-range power
of ideas, conservatism is bound by the stock of ideas inherited at a
given time. And since it does not really believe in the power of
argument, its last resort is generally a claim to superior wisdom,
based on some self-arrogated superior quality.
 - F. A. Hayek, "Why I Am Not A Conservative" [PDF]

www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2003/oct/09/after-strange-gods/?pagination=false

 [Margalit cite above]

Write for the Public Good

Advice from a pair of writers:

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. - Thomas Merton, "Letter To A Young Activist"

The great Atlantic correspondent Jeffrey Tayler, a writer of nonfiction, recently meditated on the question of how one becomes a writer. He settled on a much more onerous approach:
The question for me was not, then, how does one read to write, but how does one read to live? I conceived early on the conviction that one should lead one’s life as if one were the protagonist of an epic novel, with the outcome predetermined and chapter after chapter of edifying, traumatic and exhilarating events to be suffered through. Since the end is known in advance, one must try to experience as much as possible in the brief time allotted.
The protagonist of “The Death of Ivan Il’ich” died moaning, in agony, overcome with the realization that he had wasted his days on earth following social conventions. He lacked l’esprit frondeur, and he paid for it. Conventions now are hardly less pervasive than they were in Tolstoy’s day; we’re pressured to start a career, build our résumé, earn a certain amount of money, and so forth. But remember: None of us gets out of here alive. So don’t fear risks. Rebel. Be bold, try hard, and embrace adversity; let both success and failure provide you with unique material for your writing, let them give you a life different enough to be worth writing about.

Akhmatova, in a translation by Martin Cruz Smith:

I drink to our ruined house, to the dolor of my life, to our loneliness together, and to you I raise my glass, to lying lips that have betrayed us, to dead-cold, pitiless eyes, and to the hard realities: that the world is brutal and coarse, that God in fact has not saved us.

For other examples of principled writing, see Fritz Stern and Timothy Ferris in The Liberal Founding.

Katharsis

Robert Silverberg's novella "Breckenridge and the Continuum" is the story of a conventional middle-aged man who sets off for exotic places and finds himself among companion wanderers on an aged planet:

The city was extraordinary . . . an ultimate urban glory, a supernal Babylon, a consummate Persepolis, the soul's own hymn in brick and stone.

Breckenridge tells garbled myths:

Then Breckenridge said, "I suppose I could tell you the story of Oedipus King of Thieves tonight." The late-afternoon sky was awful: gray, mottled, fierce. It resonated with a strange electricity. Breckenridge had never grown used to that sky. Day after day, as they crossed the desert, it transfixed him with the pain of incomprehensible loss. ...
The aurora flashed with redoubled frenzy, a coded beacon, crying out, SPACE AND TIME, SPACE AND TIME, SPACE AND TIME. ....

Messages come to those Breckenridge left:

The third cable said: GUESS WHAT STOP I'M REALLY IN TIMBUKTU STOP HAVE RENTED JEEP STOP I SET OUT INTO SAHARA TOMORROW STOP AM VERY HAPPY STOP YES STOP VERY HAPPY STOP VERY VERY HAPPY STOP STOP STOP It was the last message he sent. The night it arrived in New York there was a spectacular celestial display, an aurora that brought thousands of people out into Central Park. There was rain in the southeastern Sahara four days later, the first recorded precipitation there in eight years and seven months. An earthquake was reported in southern Sicily, but it did little damage. Things were much quieter after that for everybody.

The Moral Order in Popular Writing

You and I are what they used to call witnesses, vouching with our lives for something we never saw. - Peter S. Beagle, The Folk of the Air

[The manumitted slave] Thorby . . . answered, “If you are Captain Fjalar Krausa, I have a message for you, noble sir.” . . .
“To Captain Fjalar Krausa, master of Starship Sisu from Baslim the Cripple. Greetings, old friend! Greetings to your family, clan, and sib, and my humblest respects to your revered mother. I am speaking to you through the mouth of my adopted son. He does not understand Suomic; I address you privately. When you receive this message, I am already dead. My son is the only thing of value of which I die possessed; I entrust him to your care. I ask that you succor and admonish him as if you were I. When opportunity presents, I ask that you deliver him to the commander of any vessel of the Hegemonic Guard, saying that he is a distressed citizen of the Hegemony and entitled as such to their help in locating his family. If they will bestir themselves, they can establish his identity and restore him to his people. All the rest I leave to your good judgment. I have enjoined him to obey you and I believe that he will; he is a good lad, within the limits of his age and experience, and I entrust him to you with a serene heart. My life has been long and rich; I am content. Farewell.” - Citizen of the Galaxy, Simon and Schuster trade paperback edition, pp 63 ff [by the early Robert A. Heinlein]

Later, in the same work, crew-members of a ship of the Hegemony:

"Not me," Stancke said firmly.
"You. When you're a C.O. and comes time to do something unpleasant, there you'll be, trying to get your tummy in and your chest out, with your chubby little face set in hero lines." p. 181

And:

Colonel Baslim ... one of the toughest, sanest, most humane men ever to wear our uniform. p. 189
Did [Thorby] really have blood relatives somewhere?
"I suppose so," he answered slowly. "I don't know."
"Mmm . . ." Brisby wondered what it was like to have no frame to your picture. pp. 190-1

This spot-on send-up of academic jargon that "darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge":

[Thorby's grandfather, a professor:]
"I heard you use that term 'sold' once before. You must realize that it is not correct. After all, the serfdom practiced in the Sargony is not chattel slavery. It derives from the ancient Hindu gild [sic] or 'caste' system--a stabilized social order with mutual obligations up and down. You must not call it 'slavery.'" p. 236
"I don't know any other word to translate the Sargonese term."
"I could think of several, though I don't know Sargonese . . . it's not a useful term in scholarship. But, my dear Thor, you aren't a student of human histories and culture. Grant me a little authority in my own field." p. 236

my first affair with that older woman
she was ten years older
and mortally hurt by the past
and the present;
she treated me badly ...
 
yet we had our moments; and
our little soap opera ended
with her in a coma
in the hospital,
and I sat at her bed
for hours
talking to her,
and then she opened her eyes
and saw me:
"I knew it would be you,"

she said. - Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense

From Robert B. Parker's Spenser series of detective novels:

  [Spenser:] "Have Hawk for Thanksgiving dinner?"

  [Susan:] "Certainly . . ."
  "Suze," I said. "You just don't have Hawk for Thanksgiving dinner . . . You know how in medieval landscape painting the artists would often include an allegorical representation of death to remind us that it's always present and imminent?"
  She nodded.
  "That's like inviting Hawk to Thanksgiving dinner. He'd be the figure in the landscape, and that would compromise him. Hawk would not want you to invite him."
  "That doesn't make any sense," Susan said.
  "It would to Hawk." p. 126
  I said, "He and I are part of the same cold place." p. 127
  "One of the rules," she said. . . .
  "Doesn't matter," I said. "It's a way to live. Anything else is confusion." p. 134 [Robert B. Parker, Ceremony]

For my ivy league friends
you should have seen them back then: raggedy-ass, wild-eyed, raving
against the order
now
they have been ingested, digested, rested
they write reviews for the journals
they write well-worked, quiet, inoffensive poesy
they edit so many of the magazines that I have no idea where I should send this
poem
since they attack my work with alarming regularity
and
I can't read theirs

 - Bukowski, You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense

Peter S. Beagle - The Folk of the Air:

  [John Erne, the combat master:] "I never met a real musician who wasn't a miser with himself. They'll never come all the way with you anywhere." p. 150 
  Farrell: "You're like me." ...
  "Am I? I don't have room for more than the one seriousness, if that's what you mean. ... People invite me to their history classes, and I give demonstrations and talk about extinct attitudes. I talk about chivalry, honor, prouesse, and playing by the rules, and I watch their skins crawl." ...
  "This is Avicenna, they just like theoretical violence, rebels in Paraguay blowing up bad folks they don't know. They like the Middle Ages the same way, with the uncool stuff left out. But you scare them, you're like a pterodactyl flapping around the classroom, screaming and shitting. Too real." p. 151
  Erne: "A dead art form," he said, "like lute music. As unnatural to the animal as opera or ballet, and yet nobody who puts on even cardboard armor can quite escape it--any more than you can escape the fact that your music believes in God and hell and the King. You and I are what they used to call witnesses, vouching with our lives for something we never saw. The bitch of it is, all we ever wanted to be was experts." p. 152
  Ben [alter ego is Egil Eyvindsson]: "[This university tolerates] Blacks and Chicanos out of fear--and expect[s] to be praised for it." p. 161
  Ben/Egil: "Things taste so different there, Joe; the light's all different, the constellations, the facial expressions ..."
  The cape dogs danced hotly against the bars, whining with grim urgency. They smelled to Farrell of blood and horse dung and chocolate, and he wondered whether they could sense Egil, if only as a wrongness, a constant disquieting shiver in their wild logic. p. 195
  The gyrfalcon kept her eyes closed for a moment, then opened them so explosively that Farrell stepped back from the dark, living emptiness of her gaze.
  Frederik said, "Look at her. she balances between habit and what we'd call madness, and for her there's no such thing as the future. I don't think there's really any present, either--there's just the endless past going around and around her, over and through her. When I hold her on the glove--"He indicated the leather jesses that leashed the falcon's ankles, "--she's more or less tied to my present, but the moment I let her go, she circles up into her real time. Her real time, where I never existed and where nothing's extinct." p. 204

you get so alone at times that it just makes sense
when I was a starving writer I used to read the major writers in the
major magazines (in the library, of course) and it made me feel very bad because--being a student of the word and the way, I realized
that they were faking it: I could sense each false emotion, each utter pretense. - Bukowski

The Folk of the Air: The goddess Sia: "I like it here," she said softly. "Of all worlds, this one was made for me, with its silliness and its cruelty, and its fine trees." ...
"And still you desire one another ... I know gods who have come into existence only because two of you wanted there to be a reason for what they were about to do that afternoon. Listen, I tell you that on the stars they can smell your desire--there are ears of a shape you have no word for listening to your dreams and lies, tears and gruntings. There is nothing like you anywhere among all the stones in the sky, do you realize that?" p. 272
Ben: "Egil was my sanity. The real crazies go to meetings, teach what they love to people who don't love anything, and stand around at receptions for years with other crazy people who never do give a shit about them. And they don't know what anything is, just what everybody thinks it's like. [...] Egil knew what poetry is, and what God is, and what death is. [...] I'll never have a good time like that again. Just tenure." p. 283
"Um. Egil didn't think much of our civilization, the little he saw of it. He thought it was probably all right, for people who really didn't care a lot about anything."

help wanted
I was a crazed young man and then found this book written
        by a
crazed older man and I felt better because he was
able to write it down. - Bukowski

People Reluctant To Kill for an Abstraction

In "Be proud, do not apologize" this blog noted that Wafa Sultan said:

We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people. The Muslims have turned three Buddha statues into rubble. We have not seen a single Buddhist burn down a Mosque, kill a Muslim, or burn down an embassy. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people, and destroying embassies. (Emphasis added.)

The person or persons who set off the bombs at the beginning of this week may have had no more to do with a particular religion than those who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City eighteen years ago today. But it is evident which example was followed.
 
Two days ago Slate.com reprinted a 2004 George Saunders article, People Reluctant To Kill for an Abstraction:

Last Thursday, my organization, People Reluctant To Kill for an Abstraction, orchestrated an overwhelming show of force around the globe.
At precisely 9 in the morning, working with focus and stealth, our entire membership succeeded in simultaneously beheading no one. At 10, Phase II began, during which our entire membership did not force a single man to suck another man's penis. Also, none of us blew himself/herself up in a crowded public place. No civilians were literally turned inside out via our powerful explosives. In addition, at 11, in Phase III, zero (0) planes were flown into buildings.
During Phase IV, just after lunch, we were able to avoid bulldozing a single home. Furthermore, we set, on roads in every city, in every nation in the world, a total of zero (0) roadside bombs which, not being there, did not subsequently explode, killing/maiming a total of nobody. No bombs were dropped, during the lazy afternoon hours, on crowded civilian neighborhoods, from which, it was observed, no post-bomb momentary silences were then heard. These silences were, in all cases, followed by no unimaginable, grief-stricken bellows of rage, and/or frantic imprecations to a deity. No sleeping baby was awakened from an afternoon nap by the sudden collapse and/or bursting into flame of his/her domicile during Phase IV. (Emphasis added.)

And so forth.

Eventually this insanity will end. But to quote the scriptures of a religion which has itself all too often been fanatical, "How long, O Lord?"

How Fares The Republic: Movement Cruelty Ctd.

This embrace of cruelty is arguably the dominant feature of the present conservative movement. - Ta-Nehisi Coates, In Veritas Vino

Dissenter post How Fares The Republic: The Liberal View of The Market noted:

Atlantic columnist Molly Ball cites “a smart [GOP] party strategist” who wrote, “Bain was a critical part of the Romney image that just couldn't sell to enough voters in Ohio. He came off as the guy who got rich by buying your Dad's employer, firing your Dad, stripping down the business, and making hundreds of millions and buying jet-skis and houses with car elevators and dancing horses while your Dad visits the food bank and is forced onto unemployment. The Romney team should have known this was going to be a problem.” (Emphasis added)

Wednesday Tim Carmody of The Verge, in an article on Scott Prouty, the banquet staffer who photographed Mitt Romney's 47 percent remarks, revealed another aspect of conservative insensitivity to the working poor which was revealed in the recent presidential candidate's presentation:

One section in particular stuck with him: Romney excitedly describing touring an appliance manufacturing factory in China where girls in dormitories were "stacked three high." Romney's company paid these girls "a pittance," but barbed wire fences and guard towers were supposedly in place to keep outsiders from coming in to work.

Romney's lack of empathy, both for the Chinese workers and the Americans whose jobs he'd outsourced there, disgusted Prouty.

The remarks for which the candidate's presentation became famous were:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That's an entitlement. The government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean the president starts off with 48, 49...he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect. So he'll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. ... My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

Romney later disavowed these statements:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has described his disparaging remarks about the 47 percent of Americans who don't pay federal income taxes as "not elegantly stated." Now he's calling them "just completely wrong."

But as How Fares The Republic: Movement Conservatism Cruelty noted, after the election the candidate revealed that he hadn't really meant the disavowal:

"You can imagine for somebody making $25,000 or $30,000 or $35,000 a year, being told you’re now going to get free health care, particularly if you don’t have it, getting free health care worth, what, $10,000 per family, in perpetuity — I mean, this is huge," Mr. Romney said. "Likewise with Hispanic voters, free health care was a big plus. But in addition with regards to Hispanic voters, the amnesty for children of illegals, the so-called Dream Act kids, was a huge plus for that voting group."

And this is the cruelty of such a mind-set: expanding affordable health care to most Americans, alleviating unnecessary suffering from treatable illness and reducing premature death, is not a factor. Where decent people see a benefit to what Washington called "the public good," these miserable Social Darwinist elitists see only a cynical bribe of the poor.

As the Dissenter noted in The Condition of Equality Today:

[Conservatives] feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at leveling must lead, at best, to social stagnation.
 - Russell Kirk,  “Ten Conservative Principles” (Emphasis added)

Theoretical Mathematics vs Empirical Mathematics

In Intellectual Prudence: MetaIntellectual Analysis of Intellectual Subculture, I wrote that one of the problems of the intellectual tradition is:

Inattention to the cognitive problem posed by the difference between mathematics as an incorporeal conceptual order and mathematics as a predictor of the behavior of real physical systems (2 + 2 = 4 by the rules of the game mathematics, but 2 oranges + 2 oranges = 4 oranges is a falsifiable prediction about the future). Mathematics is not reality. It is a description of the possible relationships between real things.

Recently on the Scientific American website, Ted Grinthal wrote:

“Machines of the Infinite,” by John Pavlus, states that the “universe itself is beholden to the computational limits imposed by P versus NP,” the question of whether tough problems whose solutions can be quickly verified can also be quickly solved.
This is a common misunderstanding. Nothing in the real world (whatever that is) is constrained in any way by our mathematics, physical laws or anything else we invented. Mathematics is merely a useful tool created to describe the universe. When we find something that we can't calculate or describe with our math, it may be that we've found a limit or constraint on the universe; it could also be that we've found a limit or constraint to our mathematics. (Emphasis added)

The a priori concept of math—that math exists prior to the reality that we can see and touch—is first cousin to Plato's philosophical idealism, which was described in The Two Realms as follows:

To summarize, Plato taught that the [physical] table we think is real is an effect—in the parable of the cave a “shadow”—of a pre-existing immaterial template of the table. The template is usually referred to as a form (idea in Greek, producing the term philosophical idealism).

[Thomas] Cahill: In the Platonist model of knowledge, the real physical thing which you can see or touch is only an “appearance” generated by a hidden Form.

 Of philosophical idealism Aristotle said:
This form, which exists in the carpenter’s mind, is the formal cause of the table—but it can have no existence except in the carpenter’s mind and at length in his work. To speak otherwise—to say that there is an absolute Tableness floating somewhere that gives form to all particular tables—is “to speak abstractly and idly.” - Thomas Cahill, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter

Absent convincing evidence to the contrary, it is best to consider every deduction a concealed induction. The general principles of the theoretical approach (and of what was once called Theory) were arrived at by experience. They can in principle be falsified by a future experience.

The "problem of induction" is that what is demonstrated by experience can never provide metaphysical certitude. It can be certain for all practical purposes. We can even bet our lives on it (and we do, every day). But that perfect knowledge we would like to have is not attainable.

The error of Plato's abstract theory of reality is that it assumes that the real can start with deduction, escaping the provisional nature of the physical. This is an elemental intellectual error.

The First Six Months' Wrap

This might be subtitled "An Enlightenment Liberal Blog," and probably the most representative post would be The Liberal Founding, which said, among other things,

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.”)

The knotty problem of the definition of liberalism is addressed by various posts which attempt to suggest the dimensions of a political philosophy which underlies the modern world, and which may represent humankind's best effort so far to address the problem of achieving liberty and justice for all: Defining Liberalism: Randall Kennedy's 'My Race Problem—And Ours'; Defining Liberalism: Hayek, Habakkuk and More; Defining Liberalism: Published Arguments for Liberalism; Defining Liberalism: An Overview; and Defining Liberalism: "Passing".

An unfriendly definition related by Charles K. Rowley:

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

There has also been an ongoing concern with our intellectual heritage, and the state of the academic humanities, as expressed in The Two Realms, Intellectual Prudence, and Intellectual Prudence: MetaIntellectual Analysis of Intellectual Subculture.

A perhaps related post was a retelling of "Oedipus Rex," This Is The Son of Kings, which attempted a reinterpretation of classical literary criticism on the topic of the most famous play of the ancient world.

A germane concern was Conscience and Language: Orwell, which noted, “Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind. … If one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.”

There were a number of posts on the presidential election of 2012: How Fares The Republic: The Liberal View of The Market; How Fares The Republic: The Post Truth Candidate; and How Fares The Republic: Movement Conservatism Cruelty. Related were: Mendacious Debater Disgraces Self: Media Call Him Victor; and The Third Debate: Mendacious Candidate Disgraces Self Redux.

And a post by an honorable Republican: Mitt's Father Articulates Republican Principles Before Goldwater.

There were various perhaps memorable quotes, including: Snippets 7/27/12:

I drink to our ruined house, to the dolor of my life, to our loneliness together, and to you I raise my glass, to lying lips that have betrayed us, to dead-cold, pitiless eyes, and to the hard realities: that the world is brutal and coarse, that God in fact has not saved us.

- Anna Akhmatova, in Red Square by Martin Cruz Smith

Molly Ball, who wrote:

“A smart [GOP] party strategist” ... wrote, “Bain was a critical part of the Romney image that just couldn't sell to enough voters in Ohio. He came off as the guy who got rich by buying your Dad's employer, firing your Dad, stripping down the business, and making hundreds of millions and buying jet-skis and houses with car elevators and dancing horses while your Dad visits the food bank and is forced onto unemployment. The Romney team should have known this was going to be a problem.” (Emphasis added.)

There were two articles addressing a little-known aspect of the civil rights revolution of the mid-twentieth century: In Retrospect: The Supreme Court and The Disabled; and Followup: Courts and the Civil Rights of the Disabled. In the latter a prosecutor noted:

There's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But ... there's nothing out there regarding disabilities.

An early post wondered who now believes "that all men are created equal": The Condition of Equality Today, which cited, among others:

 [Conservatives] feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at leveling must lead, at best, to social stagnation.
 - Russell Kirk,  “Ten Conservative Principles” (Emphasis added)

"Passing" Ctd.

With respect to the previous post, Defining Liberalism: "Passing", a reader of Andrew Sullivan's weblog wrote:

How would Foster being out of the closet have helped [gay people]? . . . This is extremely silly, collectivist, identity politics. Jodie Foster is an autonomous individual with her own ambitions, her own thoughts, and her own desires, as we all are. Just because she happens to share your and your friends’ sexual orientation does not make her part of your "community" in any meaningful way, and it certainly does not make her obligated to take up the cause of this [community] . . .

As the post on passing argues, "a liberal democracy . . . means complete freedom to live a private life so long as doing so does not infringe the rights and liberties of others."
 
[I elided the end of the reader's comment because I disagree with it. The reader concluded, "it certainly does not make her obligated to take up the cause of this community’s self-inflicted health problems" (my emphasis). "They asked for it?" No more than a multitude of voluntary activities which have downsides as well as upsides. The liberal spirit is a spirit of toleration, of being, as a version of the OED said, "generous in respect to the opinions, rights, or liberties of others." There is no place for what Frederick C. Crews called the "reckless dispensation of guilt."]

Defining Liberalism: An Overview

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

An overview in this case consists of general statements and analogies, with demonstration and support, in most cases, to be developed later. (Bacon's remark, in the Novum Organum, that "Since we agree neither upon principles nor upon demonstrations there is no place for argument," may be apropos here.)

As asserted in The Liberal Founding, "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.”)" Liberalism and the outlook of the various flavors of the left are so fundamentally different that, in practical terms, there are no points of agreement between them, even though media discourse assumes that there are.

Public-spiritedness vs. class warfare:
For example, the most famous statement of the early left is the conclusion of the Communist Manifesto, “Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!” Contrast this with the way the Constitution, as a representative liberal document, begins: “We the People.” One addresses a class; the other, the whole. In political democracy, which necessarily is about the public, not a subset of it, class-think is social, not political. Liberalism is public and civil (following the example of the Roman Republic before it); the left, in all its flavors, is instead social. For liberalism, rights are human rights (in 18th century terms, the Rights of Man); the left speaks of group rights (that is, class rights).

The Manifesto addresses a class (workers), implies an enemy class (the "bourgeoisie"), and issues a call to war. Likewise the modern left thinks in terms of "my community," rather than "the public." In the terms used by Rowley, above, it is particularist rather than universalist. It applies social standards (community values) rather than universal ethical principles. Contrast the Preamble to the Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

This addresses an Everyman, a citizen, as Hayek said (PDF), who has “political principles which enable him to work with people whose moral values differ from his own for a political order in which both can obey their convictions.” This is the language of a universalism which is about civility, cooperation and altruism, far different from the left's implied class warfare.

Win-win vs. zero sum: 
Everyone wins in the democratic order envisioned by Hayek immediately above. Instead of a culture war over differing "moral values," there is the deeper moral value represented by a tolerant civil order which protects the single person from social tyranny. (John Stuart Mill's term. Mill spoke of “the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways.”)

An example is the liberal principle of freedom of speech, a civil right and thus an aspect of universal justice (Martin Luther King: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."). There is an enlightened self-interest aspect whenever anyone's rights are protected, even the rights of someone I may not like very much: When my neighbor's freedom of speech is upheld I am more confident that I, too, cannot be censored.

But I have heard people on the left say that whenever one person gets something, someone else loses something (classic zero-sum reasoning); and give as example the case of a minority group member who hears a remark thought to be critical of the group to which he or she belongs. As John A. Flower wrote, "The elimination of hostile environments by limiting the freedom of speech of oppressor groups is determined to be necessary to remedy the wrongs visited upon historically oppressed groups."

Notice what this reveals? The left, at least in this situation, is not in favor of civil rights. An iconic civil right, freedom of speech, is subordinated to a vested interest, the feelings of a protected class. Political freedom is deemed less important than "group rights." In this sense the left is literally unprincipled. Instead of an ethical principle, instead there is something low and base: a mere social standard.

Defining Liberalism: Published Arguments for Liberalism

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

Former President Clinton at the Democratic National Convention:

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.

The former president echoes what Fritz Stern, a historian driven from Germany by the rising antisemitism of the Third Reich, wrote:

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.

Contrast this with the implied social Darwinism of conservatives' so-called "tragic" view of reality:

5. [Conservatives] feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at leveling must lead, at best, to social stagnation. - Russell Kirk,  “Ten Conservative Principles” [Emphasis added]

 
Clinton also said:

You see, we believe that "we're all in this together" is a far better philosophy than "you're on your own."

Or as an anonymous post in a newsgroup said, "Liberalism wagers that civility, cooperation and altruism have greater survival value than aggression and the will to power." "What works in the real world," Clinton said, "is cooperation."

The epigraph to this post lists four principles of liberalism: Universalism; the importance of the single person; egalitarianism; and the passionate desire for optimum outcomes. It omits the cognitive emphasis of liberalism, the devotion to what the Roman Cicero called "right reason."* As Martin Luther King put it:

"How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, ... An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. ... Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality ..." - Martin Luther King Jr.

To sum up, liberalism's characteristic "politics of kindness" is not just morally right and pleasing to the conscience, it makes human lives better. It is also the best public policy, because it maximizes human resources. Liberalism is not only the politics of political freedom, it is the politics of prosperity.
 
(*)Cicero wrote:

"True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions. And it does not lay its commands or prohibitions upon good men in vain, though neither have any effect on the wicked. It is a sin to try to alter this law, nor is it allowable to attempt to repeal any part of it, and it is impossible to abolish it entirely. We cannot be freed from its obligations by senate or people, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it. ... Whoever is disobedient is fleeing from himself and denying his human nature, and by reason of this very fact he will suffer the worst penalties, even if he escapes what is commonly called punishment . . ."