Civil Commotion

A piece at The New York Times notes that Aristotle would be out-of-step with contemporary “cancel culture.”

The Greek philosopher Aristotle did not merely condone slavery, he defended it; he did not merely defend it, but defended it as beneficial to the slave. His view was that some people are, by nature, unable to pursue their own good, and best suited to be “living tools” for use by other people: “The slave is a part of the master, a living but separated part of his bodily frame.”

Aristotle’s anti-liberalism does not stop there. He believed that women were incapable of authoritative decision making. And he decreed that manual laborers, despite being neither slaves nor women, were nonetheless prohibited from citizenship or education in his ideal city.

Two thoughts come immediately to mind.

First, the early Christians really did attempt to cancel Aristotle, and very nearly succeeded. Had a few brave scholars not smuggled Aristotle’s writings to Arabic scholars, all of Aristotle’s works would have been lost. As it is, his work was unknown in the West for more than 700-years. You can read all about it in The Darkening Age, by Catherine Nixey.

Second, much of the contemporary egalitarian outlook rests upon embarrassingly naive fantasy. The differences between men and women run deeper than plumbing. Some people really are idiots who need to be told what to do. And, as the election of Donald Trump shows, notions of the wisdom of “the people” is the sentimental mythology of fools.

On this date in 1969, at just about this time, I was in the backseat of my grandparents’ car, parked next to a cornfield near Gladwin, Michigan.

We were listening, like most of the world, to the first manned landing on the moon — still, the greatest stunt of all time and an achievement which should cause every American a thrill of pride.

Could anybody have imagined then that evangelical loonies would become the most influential force in American politics? That they would be enthralled by the most corrupt president in American history and that they would elect — and may re-elect — a president who adores a Russian dictator and is hostile to even rudimentary science, climatology and epidemiology?

The pious have succeeded in making it unseemly to doubt their claims — and I wonder why that is? We can question astrology, we can question Dr. Fauci, we can criticize the President — but we must never ridicule some pious buffoon who claims to be in regular touch with an Invisible Friend who vouches for the accuracy of an old book that claims everything went bad when a talking snake tricked a gullible woman into stealing a piece of fruit?

This is nuts. The Pious are the most ignorant people in society, they are affirmatively hostile to the Enlightenment ideals that America is founded upon, and they are insanely loyal to a corrupt executive whose incompetence kills people every day.

And they occupy some exalted space beyond criticism? It’s unseemly to doubt that they are the very best people?

Well … bullshit. I want to see churches failing, their buildings abandoned and in disrepair, their pastors standing in the unemployment line. I want it to be allright again to be smart in America, and I want to see astronauts on the moon again.

Think what you like of Hunter Thompson’s politics, he was — with the possible exceptions of H.L. Mencken or Gore Vidal — America’s best essayist. And the opening line of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is, going away, the best opening line in all of American letters.

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.

It sets the tone for the rest of the book, and commands you to keep reading; that is genius.

• When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.

• So much for Objective Journalism. Don’t bother to look for it here — not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of.

• I went to the Democratic Convention as a journalist, and returned a raving beast. For me, that week in Chicago was far worse than the worst bad acid trip I’d even heard rumors about. It permanently altered my brain chemistry.

• I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.

• Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!

• The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.

• Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.

• Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place.

• If you consider the great journalists in history, you don’t see too many objective journalists on that list. H. L. Mencken was not objective. Mike Royko, who just died. I. F. Stone was not objective. Mark Twain was not objective. I don’t quite understand this worship of objectivity in journalism. Now, just flat-out lying is different from being subjective.

• If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.

• I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.

• These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern — but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

• His body should have been burned in a trash bin. [On Richard Nixon’s funeral]

• You’d be surprised at the things people will do in order to get their names or pictures in the paper.

• I may sound a little black, but I’m really pretty well adjusted.

• Sacrificing good men to journalism is like sending William Faulkner to work for Time magazine.

• Most people who deal in words don’t have much faith in them and I am no exception — especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they are scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.

• I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right.

• What passed for society was a loud, giddy whirl of thieves and pretentious hustlers, a dull sideshow full of quacks and clowns and philistines with gimp mentalities.

• The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now — with somebody — and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.

• Paranoia is just another word for ignorance.

• At the top of the mountain we are all snow leopards.

Finally, we have become an old-school communist state!

Kevin Drum, Mother Jones

When you can’t control events, I guess you control dissemination of information.