Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

It is the essence of every physical object to be able to move and actually to move, because for every object there exists another object somewhere in the universe, relative to which it is moving. But if something is moving relative to something else, then it has relative to that object kinetic energy. So, every object by essence has energy.

Thus, any object is at the same time essentially matter and essentially energy.

Sometimes an object presents itself to us in its aspect of matter, in which case it behaves like a particle; and sometimes it presents itself in its aspect of energy, in which case it behaves like a wave. Hence the particle-wave duality of all physical objects.

I tell you, Aquinas is a gift that keeps on giving. Here I was thinking it it was a nice insight to write in my notes something like this, verbatim:

shame vs. guilt:
shame if your ideal is low or bad. e.g., if you felt that wallowing in filth like a pig (or drinking yourself into stupor) was a nice way to enjoy yourself, and then you realize that it is not, you feel shame at demeaning yourself this way
guilt if your ideal is good and you know it but you fail to conform to it.
thus,

an intemperate man will feel shame and
an incontinent man will feel guilt

but shame is more directly opposed to glory than guilt, hence intemperance is worse than incompetence.

And during an unrelated search on newadvent.org, I stumble on this very subtle and instructive discussion of incontinence vs intemperance: II-II, 156, 3. I say it again, the guy’s a miracle.

The Noble Red Man: Mark Twain on the Indians.

I wish I knew where I read this, but a long time ago there was a web page which posed to the readers a puzzle, something along the following lines. Imagine that a doctor suddenly received an apparently divine gift of healing, such that simply by touching another person, he would cure him of any illness. The author then pointed out that if this idea were to be picked up for a plot in a movie, there could be dozens of scripts written that incorporated this idea that ended tragically for all concerned. The movie would then “deliver a message” about evil, etc. For example, the doctor would feel it was his duty to heal as many people as possible. Then he’d work 20 hours a day and die from exhaustion. Or the American Medical Association would poison him in order to keep its customers. Or the Catholic Church would accuse him of consorting with the devil. Or a billionaire would kidnap him to keep him for himself hoping that he could live forever. Or the doctor would charge enormous amounts of money, catering only to the rich; then he’d get proud and somehow doom himself for his “greed.” Or… You get the point. Then the article challenged the reader to write a story in which everyone ended up happy. The puzzle was to come up with a technological solution for every potential problem. As far as I recall, a part of a proposed solution was to have the doctor sit near a moving conveyor belt which would carry a line of people to him. It would take 5 or so seconds for the doctor to touch each person that the belt or escalator would deliver to him. Then he could work 2 hours per day, seeing 1,440 people. If he charged on average a paltry $100 per person per illness, he would make at least $144,000 per day or over $50 million per year (yes, rationing would remain a problem, but still his productivity would be enormous; no one could accuse him of not using his gift). This would be enough to build a fortified mansion and hire guards to prevent anybody from kidnapping him and what have you. He could offer to cure the Pope of whatever ailed him and say, reasonably: “Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand. If Satan drives out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then can his kingdom stand?” and “By my fruit you will recognize me. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.” Stuff like that.

We see that numerous technical problems admit solutions. Where storytellers give us drama and tragedy, engineers and scientists grant us stuff that works and thus harmony and mutual profit. Avatar is, again, a movie made with utter disregard of the real world. It’s a ridiculous, if beautiful looking, fantasy, and there might have been a bunch of ways in which the war in it could have been avoided under more realistic circumstances.

As a Johnny-come-lately to Avatar, I must say that of course I was amazed by the effects and 3D and all that. But it was interesting to think of the problem posed in the movie, namely, whether a peaceful solution to the problems of both the humans and the Na’vi could be found. At first sight it seems not, because Pandora is obviously the Na’vi’s Garden of Eden. In a crucial scene which makes it clear, Jake Sully says: “They’re not going to give up their home. They’re not going to make a deal. Pff for what? A light beer and blue jeans? There’s nothing that we have that they want. Everything they sent me out here to do is a waste of time. They’re never going to leave hometree.” You see? It’s their paradise, and who’d want to leave that? And they are, unlike humans, portrayed as unfallen, uncorrupt, and incorruptible. Their bodies are powerful and beautiful and perfectly healthy. They enjoy the exhilaration of physical life and the mastery of their bodies and plants and beasts of the forest. They have the skills and prowess that a champion snowboarder would easily envy. Yet with all that primal grace and power, they are peaceful. They are blessed with direct communion with a benevolent deity and possess insight into each other’s souls. They are the paradigm of noble savages. They want nothing from the humans. In paradise, after all, there is no division of labor, social cooperation, no production or consumption, business negotiations, and all the rest of economic structures of the real world.

If they were anything like humans, they would welcome a relief from the misery of primitive existence. They’d jump at the chance to improve their well-being. They would need the humans far more than the humans would need them. That’s not to say that negotiations would always proceed smoothly, but there’d be a chance of making everyone involved better off. In particular, the spectacular technology of the humans should be presumed by 2154 surely to have advanced to such a degree that mining “unobtainium” could be accomplished without destroying the Na’vi’s property. And indeed the forest in which the Na’vi lived ought by right to be considered their natural property. The violent spoliation depicted in the movie is from the libertarian point of view outrageous. In other words, mix in a bunch of implausible difficulties, and you have yourself an irresolvable tragic conflict.

At the same time this movie should not be considered environmentalist propaganda or a statement about war. It has instead an odd religious theme of monsters invading paradise. The recent computer game Dragon Age: Origins has similar lore: the mages of a long-gone empire decided to invade the Golden City, the Maker’s heaven, and as punishment for their hubris they were cast out and turned into monsters. Quite frankly, I don’t know what to make of this theology; it does not seem to be an idea expressed either by the Christian or any other faith.

Update. It could be an early attempt to create a distinctively environmentalist theology. We are, after all, living in an interesting time in which we are seeing an emergence of a new “environmental” religion.

A sexual act in marriage between a man and a woman consists of three “levels.” The first is sensual pleasure, aesthetic pleasure. The second level is the intellectual love and friendship between the husband and wife. The third level are children and familial bliss. The Catholic Church describes the second level as the “unitive” function of sex, and the third level as its “procreative” function.

Now the most obvious point in homosexual sex is the lack of the procreative third level. I contend moreover that there can be no genuine friendship and love between two homosexuals as between spouses. Thus, the only first level of sensual delight exists in a homosexual act. In this it is similar to straight promiscuity. A man and a woman engaging in “casual sex” are with regard to the second and third levels really not that different from two gay men sucking each other’s dicks. In a sense they are actually worse, because the gay men feel no interest in loving each other, while the straight couple will want to bond beyond mere sensual pleasure and actually reject the beginnings of love in them. There will be heartbreak for them which there would not be for the homosexuals. In addition, there is always the specter of conceiving a child and choosing to abort it or be forced to marry because of it or not marrying and dealing with a bastard child, all of which are admittedly pretty awful. At least gay sex is “safer” for the souls of all involved than straight promiscuous sex.

So, for the gays there’s nothing in the “relationship” but lust. Unfortunately, the homosexual 1st-level sensuality is corrupted, as well. It is a debased sensuality. Homosexual sex is really, “objectively” ugly, filthy. Most straight men who imagine two men banging each other in the ass are nauseated, disgusted. It’s genuine perversion of aesthetic sensibilities. A man ought to find women beautiful and be attracted to them. And he ought to find no interest in anal sex, say. Such things are ennobling, while gay attraction is demeaning. And then there is the effeminacy of gay men. It’s like “Deliverance” or “Pulp Fiction” in which we are shown scenes of homosexual rape. Men ought to be holy warriors; they cannot submit to being sodomized without losing all dignity. Of course, there can be a number of types of loving relationships between men which are great-making, such as between master and student, father and son, or colleagues, or fellow fighters.

In short, homosexual sex is absurd.

Regarding the kalam argument. Craig has build a huge case for the existence of God based on it. The argument is:

(1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause for its coming into being.
(2) The universe began to exist.
(3) Therefore, the universe has a cause for its coming into being.

Craig needs to shore up the minor. He thinks it can be proven by reason alone; Aquinas rejects this view and holds that that the universe had a beginning is an article of faith. Who is right? Craig’s main argument is that you cannot traverse an actual infinite. If the universe had no beginning, than an infinite number of days or seconds must have elapsed in order to arrive at the present moment. And this is impossible. Hence the universe had a beginning.

Unfortunately for Craig, the situation is not as if there was a moment in time at which the universe began which is infinitely far away from the present moment. If there was such a moment, then indeed it would take an actually infinite number of days to get from it to the present moment. But there was no such moment! According to the objector, the universe never began to exist; hence there is no moment at which it did begin to exist which just happens to lie at an infinite distance from today in terms of time. Aquinas counters in a coup de grace in (ST, I, 46, 2, reply 6) that “Passage is always understood as being from term to term. Whatever bygone day we choose, from it to the present day there is a finite number of days which can be passed through.”

In this way there is no actual infinite but only a potential infinite, such that no matter how deeply we regress into the past, the distance between that point and now is finite. But that is not sufficient for kalam which is supposed to be natural and not revealed theology.

Look, the point is simple. I ask Craig, in order to accumulate the actual infinite, from what are we counting forward? I submit he can’t answer this quesion, and therefore, no actual infinite can be built. (He can’t say “from -∞,” because that symbol can indeed mean “actual infinity,” which begs the question. I mean, -∞ is not a date.)

We might define a beginingless universe as follows: for any moment in time there is or was a previous moment or there is time before it. Again, for any moment the distance from the moment previous to it to today is finite. This definition is of no help to Craig either.

The American right defines itself entirely in opposition to the left. They have no ideas of their own except protecting the status quo and the politically powerful and, of course, war. They merely hate the left. But being against something is not a positive program. Brown’s victory is a reaction to Obama’s policies, a good one perhaps but a reaction only. The regular job of the Republicans is faithfully to preserve whatever socialist policies are enacted by the Democrats.

The reason why the Democrats seek to destroy what remains of the free market in medicine and why the Republicans in their turn did not long ago propose what should be a radical reform to free an industry hopelessly tied up in red tape now becomes clear. The Democrats believe in socialism. The Republicans do not believe in anything, whether socialism or freedom; they are cynical to the core and believe in “conserving” the rule of the present power elite and looting the country to the max. If medical socialism comes to this country, the Republicans will very soon be counted on to protect those few people who will be benefiting from this monstrous “system.” We are caught between a rock and a hard place, and the fight for liberty must involve a real ideological change, such that the Democrats are rejected as foolish, and the Republicans are rejected as evil.

Have you noticed that the vast majority of so-called love songs are really nothing of the kind but are, in fact, sex songs? The funniest example is probably Sinatra’s “When I Was Seventeen.” I mean, here’s a guy who is at the end of his life bragging to everybody how much sex he’d has during his life. As far as he is concerned, he was God’s gift to women. His sex life is what he is most proud of in his life. Goodness gracious!

The federal government is going into the car business. Note how ridiculous this remark sounds: “This administration has no desire to run an auto company on a day-to-day basis.” Of course, it will have to keep tight control over the management, since the managers will have little incentive to generate profit, because any loss will be covered by taxes.

This is still more evidence that we are living in an interesting time when the USA is on the decline. I don’t believe the decline will be stopped.

In the days of Bill Clinton, when the freerepublic.com people were still sane, somebody mentioned the “shadow government.” This brought about a contest of hilarious pictures depicting whatever the shadow government seemed to mean. Here are some of them.

Consider the following rhymes, off the top of my head:

try and hide – cyanide
religion – pigeon
mind – try and
water – slaughter
along – strong – song
queen – seventeen
funeral – sooner-or-l… ater
society – impiety – propriety – variety
abdo’men – roman
church – perch
hears – grenadiers

Don’t you think these are, well, interesting? Have I been in the ivory tower so long that I stopped realizing that the masses find rhymes like be-me and you-too perfectly adequate for top-ranking songs? And for heaven’s sake, “come” does not rhyme with “home,” nor “time,” with “wine.”

“… many men believe that promiscuity does not suit women. They believe that a woman who has had many partners cannot bind emotionally with a husband. She is never his.” Article by Paul Craig Roberts.

In the first philosophy book I ever read, Philosophy for Dummies by Thomas Morris (which is a brilliant introduction to numerous philosophical ideas), Morris articulates the “principle of belief conservation.” First he argues that some of our beliefs are rational, or else the term “rational belief” would have neither referent nor meaning. The usefulness of this term comes from being able to separate rational beliefs from ir- or non-rational ones. Common sense supports the view that our belief acquisition faculties are at least sometimes reliable.

Here’s the principle. For any proposition, P: If

1. Taking a certain cognitive stance toward P (for example, believing it, rejecting it, or withholding judgment) would require rejecting or doubting a vast number of your current beliefs.
2. You have no independent positive reason to reject or doubt all those other beliefs, and
3. You have no compelling reason to take up that cognitive stance towards P,

then it is more rational for you not to take that cognitive stance toward P.

“Your current beliefs,” Morris goes on, “are like a raft or boat on which you are floating, sailing across the seas of life. You need to make repairs and additions during your voyage. But it can never be rational to destroy the boat totally while out on an open sea, hoping somehow to be able to rebuild it from scratch, or else to swim without it.” (72ff)

The principle passes its own test and is elevated into a basic belief.

I think this opinion is similar to what Victor Reppert has proposed, namely that one should keep believing what one already believes, unless one encounters a good reason to believe otherwise.

Guys, I’m becoming a Rastafarian. Christianity is a great religion, but, having conducted the Outsider Test, I am now convinced that Rastafari is the one true faith. I’m eager to discuss the merits of our religions in the future.

Here is this beautiful article. “Universities, like cathedrals, were sanctuaries from wars, political machinations, revolutions, and kingly belligerence… ‘even under the Russian czars the police were forbidden to enter the university’.”

Mises believed that private property is useful only insofar as it serves human ends:

Private property is a human device. It is not sacred. It came into existence in early ages of history, when people with their own power and by their own authority appropriated to themselves what had previously not been anybody’s property. Again and again proprietors were robbed of their property by expropriation. …

Ownership in the market economy is no longer linked up with the remote origin of private property. Those events in a far-distant past, hidden in the darkness of primitive mankind’s history, are no longer of any concern for our day. For in an unhampered market society the consumers daily decide anew who should own and how much he should own. The consumers allot control of the means of production to those who know how to use them best for the satisfaction of the most urgent wants of the consumers. …

The meaning of private property in the market society is radically different from what it is under a system of each household’s autarky. Where each household is economically self-sufficient, the privately owned means of production exclusively serve the proprietor. He alone reaps all the benefits derived from their employment. In the market society the proprietors of capital and land can enjoy their property only by employing it for the satisfaction of other people’s wants. They must serve the consumers in order to have any advantage from what is their own. The very fact that they own means of production forces them to submit to the wishes of the public. Ownership is an asset only for those who know how to employ it in the best possible way for the benefit of the consumers. It is a social function. (HA, 683ff)

For Mises society is not just a spontaneous order but a deliberate construction based on an explicit ideology. It is part of the liberal ideology that private property (in the factors of production) is a means to greatest happiness for the greatest number. In this sense it could be considered a “social contract” entered into by all people with the purpose of making social cooperation both possible (as contrasted with socialism) and most efficient (as contrasted with interventionism).

This is precisely the social contract that I would insist on making behind the veil of ignorance.

Rothbard posed the question: who are the greater villains with respect to liberty, the unwashed masses or the power elite? His answer was:

First, even granting for a moment that the masses are the worst possible, that they are perpetually Hell-bent on lynching anyone down the block, the mass of people simply don’t have the time for politics or political shenanigans. The average person must spend most of his time on the daily business of life, being with his family, seeing his friends, etc. He can only get interested in politics or engage in it sporadically.

The only people who have time for politics are the professionals: the bureaucrats, politicians, and special interest groups dependent on political rule. They make money out of politics, and so they are intensely interested, and lobby and are active twenty-four hours a day. Therefore, these special interest groups will tend to win out over the uninterested masses. This is the basic insight of the Public Choice school of economics.

There is a similar piece of wisdom awaiting us in the evaluation of the outsider test. The truth is, natural theology, philosophy of religion, proper interpretation of the Bible, the field of comparative religion are far beyond what the masses can do and judge for themselves. They are not professional philosophers and theologians with their noses in books and heads in the clouds. They are too busy living real lives.

Consequently, if this vast majority were to abandon their Christian faith, then they would no better be able to justify their atheism or deism than they had previously been able to justify their Christianity. They would be as helpless as newly minted atheists against a sophisticated defender of the Christian faith like Aquinas or William Lane Craig as they are now against a sophisticated defender of atheism like Loftus. So, what our author demands from people is unrealistic and futile. As a clarion call to some elite group of NTs to get to work, it’s fine. Otherwise, it’s of little consequence.

Another subtle point is that the Christian faith, at least according to St. Thomas, is an infused virtue. It’s created by grace as much as by natural study. It may be impossible to doubt the faith without losing it altogether. In other words, becoming genuinely skeptical of your faith is a dangerous project, because you’ll be defying the influence of grace.

Therefore, it may be advisable for a Christian to adopt the motto “faith seeking understanding.” If Islam and Judaism and so on have notions of grace, the same attitude is recommended. Then it may happen upon a thorough investigation that one eventually converts from one faith to another. Moreover, if trying to “understand” can move you from Christianity to Islam, then it can also move you from Christianity to, say, deism. But this won’t be a violent destructive transition, as Loftus’s radical skepticism must needs entail, but a much more gradual and smooth one.

So, even Loftus’s method is flawed.

In “The Outsider Test for Faith” John Loftus exhorts us to step outside our faith and examine it with the skeptical eyes of a foreigner. His argument is that an average person’s coming to have the particular faith that they have does not depend on the virtues of the faith itself but on factors that condition and brainwash the person. His culture, in effect, determines his faith: “if we were born in Saudi Arabia, we would be Sunni Muslims right now. If we were born in Iran, we’d be Shi’a Muslims. If we were born in India, we’d be a Hindus. If we were born in Japan, we’d be Shintoists. If we were born in Mongolia, we’d be Buddhists. If we were born in the first century BCE in Israel, we’d adhere to the Jewish faith at that time, and if we were born in Europe in 1000 CE, we’d be Roman Catholics.” Now I have to point out that Loftus was not the first to come up with the “outsider test”: I used it myself in a 2005 LRC article: “I contend that the support of the U.S. empire on the part of many conservatives is entirely arbitrary. If our average conservative happened to be an Iraqi, he would be a cheerleader for Saddam Hussein. If he had been born in the Soviet Union at the right time, he would have been a fanatical Stalinist. If in China, he would have lied and churned out propaganda for Mao. As things actually are, conservatives have ended up as apologists for the American leviathan. But it is merely an accident of birth, and it is because of them or rather their totalitarian counterparts that both socialism and fascism of the 20th century endured for as long as they did.” This is a bitter argument but reasonable as arguments go.

In developing his doctrine Loftus follows Richard Weaver who described himself as a “doctor of culture.” Such a person is “a member of a culture who has to some degree estranged himself from it through study and reflection. He is like the savant of society; though in it, he is not wholly of it; he has acquired knowledge and developed habits of thought which enable him to see it in perspective and to gauge it. … A temporary alienation from his culture may be followed by an intense preoccupation with it, but on a more reflective level than that of the typical member.” (Visions of Order, 7) And he reminds me of Chesterton who also wanted to undertake an exploration similar to the one Loftus has made, though Chesterton’s conclusion was quite different: “I shall try to show,” Chesterton wrote about Christianity, “that when we do make this imaginative effort to see the whole thing from the outside, we find that it really looks like what is traditionally said about it from the inside.” (The Everlasting Man, vi) It is healthy to regain “that simple and unspoiled realism that is a part of innocence.” (9)

Moreover, Loftus’s view that the masses do not create ideas of their own is entirely true. Mises has argued that “The masses, the hosts of common men, do not conceive any ideas, sound or unsound. They only choose between the ideologies developed by the intellectual leaders of mankind.” (Human Action, 864) This phenomenon is fully explained by the theory of human temperaments, as developed by a host of thinkers from Plato to David Keirsey, a theory which I regard as one of the most important achievements of psychology. The people with the inborn temperament to discover truth, called by Keirsey “NT Rationals” (this is just the name of the temperament, not a compliment) compose 5-10% of the population. Of them maybe 5% are sufficiently extraordinary to contribute to some science. (Just as very few of SP Artisans are great artists and entrepreneurs.) Even fewer NTs are truly independent thinkers, for whom both study and teaching are passions. The SJ Guardians, the temperament fully opposite to NTs, compose 40-50% of the population, and these folks are natural “conservatives,” the “pillars of society” who trust not in reason, as NTs do, but in authority. They indeed subscribe to the mainstream positions without giving them any thought. That’s OK; Guardians have other virtues. But they are not important in the battle of ideas. They are, indeed, spoils of war, prizes to be claimed by the victor. Their allegiance is what’s at stake in the contest of intellectuals.

I also have no quarrel with an admonition that we should build our faith on a strong foundation of natural theology and our supernatural holiness on natural virtue. Nor do I object to any project to purge the articles of faith of all inconsistencies. Nor, finally, do I find anything wrong with attempts to shed light on religious mysteries (1, 2).

So, I grant Loftus’s point that for the vast majority of the population their religion is a matter of chance. But what of it? For chance and luck are pervasive in human life. You are lucky if are born into a wealthy country and family; unlucky otherwise. You are lucky if you are born with a high IQ; unlucky if not. You are lucky if your parents bring you up well and give you a solid education; unlucky if your parents neglect you. What’s so special about religion? Why does it offend our author that for many people that, too, is partly randomly assigned by chance? Loftus does not answer this question in his essay, but perhaps he will argue that it is unjust of God to let so many people be mistaken about the ultimate things or even send them to hell for circumstances beyond their control. Well, suppose so. All this means is that the strict form of Christian particularism is false. Maybe we must clarify that salvation is through Christ not Christianity. Surely, Socrates and Abraham are not in hell. Moreover, it is not necessary for salvation to be a scholar in theology. And even scholars disagree widely on numerous theological issues. So what? Must it really matter that much to God if you have the correct opinion about Molinism or the simplicity of God? I think the doctrine of the Trinity is true for a number of reasons; whether I would have held a different view had I been born in Saudi Arabia, I scarcely know. But my salvation would not necessarily have been imperiled.

Thus, Loftus’s argument, while true, is toothless. It impels people to go to the beginning in justifying their faith, and in that it has merit. But it fails, if its purpose is to condemn all religions merely for the undisputed fact that “now we see through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor 13:12).

Suppose that a robber in a restaurant yells at the customers: “I am not going to argue with you; just give me all your money. Any of you fucking pricks move, and I’ll execute every motherfucking last one of ya!” Hoppe’s argument fails to convict the robber of irrationality.

Similarly, suppose that in some bar a bouncer is throwing out a rowdy drunk. The bouncer tells him in no uncertain terms: “Shut up and don’t argue with me, or I’ll call the cops on you!” Again, Hoppe’s argument does not establish whether the bouncer is right or wrong.

I have written that “Hoppe’s argument fails to establish the content of my property rights. Exactly what am I allowed to do with my property and what are you allowed to do so as not to infringe on my rights? How is the ‘bundle of rights’ to be distributed? The argument is sterile. At most, it shows that you are allowed to use your property for arguing, nothing more.” These examples confirm my judgment. As Murphy and Callahan argue, “Hoppe has shown that bashing someone on the head is an illogical form of argumentation. He has not shown that the fact that one has ever argued demonstrates that one may never bash anyone on the head, nor has he demonstrated that one may not validly argue that it would be a good thing to bash so-and-so on the head. We cannot convince you of anything by clubbing you, but we may quite logically try to convince you that we should have the right to club you.”

See also: Part I.