Bork and the libertarians

Robert Bork was an American law school professor and jurist. He is perhaps the greatest American legal scholar who was never on the Supreme Court; that is the greatest crime of the Democratic Senate of 1987 and the greatest mistake of the Reagan Administration. If anyone should have been on the highest court in the land, it should have been Judge Bork.

He wrote a nifty little book back in the 1990s titled Slouching Towards Gomorrah. In it he opines on what has become wrong with America, and the book is chock full of good ideas and excellent ruminations on what has gone wrong with the US body politic as well as its legal system. We intend to explore a few of those ideas in the coming weeks. Today we will begin with this one: his view of libertarians.

If we understand the man correctly, he argues that libertarians lack a sense of social obligation. If we understand that correctly, we agree with him. Libertarians fail to grasp that there are more injuries possible to people than those which are physical or material. People can be harmed in ways beyond that, and we have an obligation to avoid that sort of harm as well.

Take illicit television or vile and despicable music, for example. All that is defended on the the First Amendment right to free speech. On that basis the libertarian says if you don't like the show or the song, simply change the channel or don't listen. Yet that argument is ultimately shallow and indeed insulting to the person who is trying to make themselves, their children, and their world better based on rational and objective standards of decency. One parent can turn off the radio, yes. But other parents might not, and it is a practical impossibility to keep our children away from every worldly influence. Society has the obligation and parents the right to expect the cooperation of society in raising their children well. This means making decisions on what ought and ought not be broadcast, and that society has the right to make such decisions. They do not involve physical or material harm, but they may well harm folks just the same in making them effectively less than human, again by rational and objective standards.

No man, it is said, is an island. What we do affects what other people do; what we think affects how other people think. Without a proper consideration of that we risk harming the people around us and damaging our own spirits as well. We are all role models whether we think so or not. Circumstance forces that upon us. We have no right to say, as the libertarian too often does, that I own myself and am therefore not responsible for anyone else. They forget that a very important part of ownership is stewardship, which demands that we do what is best for all involved and not merely for what suits our perceived immediate needs. Such needs may only be vile and contemptible. A rational, reflective, self aware being surely recognizes that. They must also know, in their hearts anyway, that ownership means not only self interest but also responsibility.

Mother's Day 2016

Happy Mother's Day to all the Moms out there. Happy Mother's Day too to all of you whose Mothers had you. They deserve the credit, and you owe them everything. Don't waste the chance they gave you. Start by thanking them.

Why I don't like Trump

So it's going to be Hillary versus the Donald in November. I can honestly say this is the first Presidential election where I've thought about sitting it out. I won't, because my conscience won't let me. I'll go to the polling place and vote for the Donald. But unless things change dramatically, I will not like it.

The man is the supreme egotist. While I realize that you have to have something of an ego to get into politics at all, I can't escape the feeling that this man is all ego. This is not good. Egotists tend to go the direction which their ego tells them will grant the greatest reward, and to them, the greatest reward is what gives them the greatest (apparent, to them) influence, the highest (apparent, to them) prestige. They will turn on a dime if it suits them. Trump strikes me as that type of individual.

That means that he cannot be trusted. All his pandering to conservatives has been because it plays in Peoria, and only because it plays in Peoria. Do you actually believe that he's going to be trapped by his own words? Has that stopped him until yet? Have you given a moment's thought that he may only be doing this because it gives him a platform, namely, the highest spot on the Republican ticket? This is a man who was chummy with the Clintons in the 1990s. Can we really believe what he says now?

I'm not an idiot. I know that the next President could dramatically alter the Supreme Court. Yet does that mean that the one elected this November will fill (or be able to fill) all those spots? Not necessarily. It is a bit of a crap shoot, yes, but a one term President may not get a chance to nominate anyone at all to our high court. It happened to Carter you know. We should consider too that, if the GOP loses the Senate, a very real possibility if the top of the ticket loses dramatically and takes the rest of the ballot with him, it won't matter that Hillary is in the White House. I can imagine a scenario where older, liberal or center left justices resign simply to give her the chance to put in place younger liberal or center left justices who may be on the Court until 2050. Has it occurred to you that that might over the long haul shift the Court as significantly as anything else? Granted, conservatives in power have not wielded power so forcefully as they should have. Is that a reason we should potentially give up the Senate to a Hillary inspired group of leftist clones? I think not.

The fact the Donald is a maverick appeals to many American conservatives. I get that. I also get that the bucking bronco could throw its rider in almost any direction. I simply don't care to trust my country to that kind of chance. And that is the risk we run with Donald Trump at the head of our ticket.

The bombastic iconoclast

Well, the deed, it seems, is done. Those Indiana Republicans who cared to vote have apparently sealed it. Donald Trump will be the Republican standard bearer for the November 2016 elections. I do hope that my friends who support him will properly revel in this. They should. It is all the comfort they might have come November 9th.

I fervently hope that things are not so bad as they tonight appear to be, to me. I genuinely fear that they are in fact more horrible than my worst nightmares.

My good and dear conservative family and friends, this is bad. Donald Trump is not our savior, despite his messianic bravado. Donald Trump is not by any stretch of the imagination Jesus Christ. He is not even Ronald Reagan, whom, I'm sure, could not by his own admission I am also sure tie Our Lord's sandal straps. Reagan was a principled idealist, a man who saw both the ideal and the real and sought to work in reality with an eye towards the ideal. A man who knew that a united people working on right principles could actually inch towards a Heaven on Earth. This man, the Donald, this hero of yours, is an egotist on the supreme ego trip. He wants to be the President of the United States as though it were a mere prize in a radio contest. That's essentially the same mentality which elected Barack Obama. And you see what that has wrought.

Donald Trump is not our savior. He is rather a bombast, hurling grenades at paper targets for his own ends. Perhaps he is regal, and I am misinterpreting him. Perhaps I am not understanding American themes and he reads history better than I, though I am not sure that is a positive. Perhaps he is the real deal, and I am a dinosaur. Perhaps.

Yet perhaps he is the iconoclast without direction. And where, I ask, might that lead us?

College sports really ought to be banned

I read in the Detroit Free Press this morning that most collegiate football programs, indeed most college athletics, are effectively underwritten by the schools through their general funds. That means tuition and fees pay for them. That means that too, at least for many, our taxes through our state governments pay for college sports. All this is fuel to a fire which has burning in my gut for years now. I think we ought to get rid of college athletics, or at least those which are not self supporting.

Be honest: athletics by and large are peripheral at best to the academic mission anyway. Why should our taxes pay for them? And please don't bother me about how they help kids get college education who otherwise might not, because that presumes two things both of which by and large are wrong. First, with all the money available for education these days those who really want to go to college will make it. Second, it assumes higher education has a value in any and all areas of life. It is not.

Granted, to that last point we need to destroy the mentality that you must have college to be successful. As with many other things, college can be good in some areas yet not in others. The to the question of sports: why must taxes however indirectly pay for someone's playtime? Indeed, why should taxes offer a springboard for someone else to command millions of dollars to play games?

Yes, yes, yes, some will argue that sports bring prestige to schools. Perhaps they do, to some degree. But I can't see that a serious researcher would believe that important. Someone looking for a cure for cancer surely isn't about to argue that a football program, especially when (as is true the bulk of the time) the game drains the school of funds, is really worthwhile compared to fighting disease. And I simply cannot imagine The University of Michigan or Michigan State losing image without sports. It doesn't seem to have affected Harvard or Yale, two universities not exactly well known for sports, but well known just the same.

I know this will never happen if for no other reason that too much money for too many folks is at stake; that's the same reason the tax codes will never be simplified. But we really ought to ban college athletics. They take money from the schools, taxpayers, and college loan students which they simply should not.

Love which celebrates fault is not love

We are often told that we are expected to love others unconditionally. Understood properly, it is a good and charitable approach to our relationships with God and man. But what does it really mean? How are we expected to use such a doctrine in our daily lives?

For starters, it surely means that we are to love everyone without reservation. We are called to love everyone as though they were ourselves, to paraphrase a great moral teacher. It is a difficult ideal; loving our enemies is not easy, and sometimes loving our friends and family is a challenge which can actually be much harder. Still, we are expected to overcome this obstacle, and find a way to open our hearts to all.

But there is a great misunderstanding about unconditional love, an error in its application which is at least arguably worse than failing to love generally everyone around us. Many people believe that unconditional love means loving others up to and including their faults. We are, according to this, meant to love others including their faults, and indeed often embracing those flaws.

This cannot be a good and true interpretation of the standard. It cannot be a useful approach towards dealing with others. We can accept that we must love racists and sexists and criminals; but to love their faults? This is insanity on its face. Do we not want to see people become better people? Do we not want to see our children grow into mature adults? Then we should be instructing and cajoling and beseeching those around us, as they should towards us, to do better than they do, and to be better than they are, no matter how they may happen to feel about this or that issue they find themselves battling.

When our children become drug addicts or alcoholics, we do what we can to change them. When our neighbors rob and injure others, we enforce laws to stop them. We can and should still love them, but that does not mean we are obliged to tolerate their errant thoughts and actions.

It is more correct to say that unconditional love calls us to love those around us despite their faults. Real love does not embrace error' it may embrace the person but it cannot embrace their faults. It understands it as a part of us which ought to be altered, and wants to see us move away from the lesser aspects of our being and into better men, women, and children. If it does not want that, it is not love. It is then something which facilitates bad behavior; it is in fact a cancer of character.

Science: the lowest level of knowledge

Note: this is in response to a You Tube video sent me by a friend. The video, featuring Carl Sagan, Bill Nye and others, purports that science and scientific knowledge is the end all be all of our existence. This is my reply.

-Charles Martin Cosgriff

Well, I agree that the beauty of the universe is not in the atoms which make things up. But I must point out that such an idea is not a scientific judgment. It is in fact a philosophic judgment.

Any time you claim something is beautiful you cannot rightly be said to be talking science, because your have made a value judgment in calling it beautiful. Value judgments, opinions expressed about the innate quality of any given thing, are based on reason, or what the classical philosophers called Right Reason, things so obviously correct that they are Truth Itself and over which no rational being could disagree.

Science as science ignores this. Indeed popular science (for that is basically what is espoused by the Carl Sagans of our history) isn't actually science at all: it is an expression of their philosophical beliefs about what ultimate truth is. Therefore, scientists who say they are making statements about science which are in all actuality laced with value are not themselves being scientific at all. They have stepped into the realm of philosophy.

There's nothing wrong with that, but call it what it is. The trouble is that science is all about empiricism: hard factual evidence easily reproducible and recognizable over and over again. Carl Sagan has in fact gone beyond what he claims as his expertise.

I can use the same evidence about the complexity of the universe and make a better philosophic claim that it signifies design, that it must have come about via a conscious act: an act of will. An Act of God. Complexity in and of itself is merely a complexity. When we begin to ask ourselves: Why is it complex? How did it become this way? we have begun to become truly human. We stop looking at the merely scientific explanation of an object, which is at the end of the day simply raw data. The meaning of it is philosophical, and then eventually religious.

In short, science answers the 'how' questions. That gives us much good and necessary knowledge. But it is only rote knowledge; no matter how important, it is the least valuable type of knowledge. How we interpret and apply it means so much more, and those issues are not addressed by science at all. The 'why' questions have more meaning because they explain how we ought to be and how we have came about being here. They are addressed by our philosophic and theological outlook, and necessarily imply a God of some sort.

Science is not spiritual. It is not philosophical. It is not religious. But it isn't supposed to be. When it pretends to speak for what it is not, it is wearing the Emperor's New Clothes. It is out of its league.