Archives: August 2004

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Anarchists and Terrorists

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Arthur Silber has joined the ranks of the anarchists! Welcome, Arthur! (He adds that his anarchism is only “provisional,” but we certainly don’t intend to let him leave ....)

In other news: check out this fascinating interview with internet-freedom activist and “suspected terrorist” John Gilmore.

Sand and Sun

You may have noticed a new item at the top of this page today (and again to the right here); this animated anti-draft pic comes from the Badnarik campaign. Cool, no?

(If the picture doesn’t change for you, your browser must be even more primitive than mine.)

When the Moon Hits Your Eye Like a Big Pizza Pie, Is It Allah?

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Apparently Pat Robertson is telling his followers that the God of Islam is actually a pagan moon god with no relation to the Judeo-Christian Biblical God. An internet search reveals that this silliness has become quite common on the Christian right.

Not being a Christian, Jew, or Muslim – nor a worshipper of a moon god, for that matter – I suppose I have no dog in this fight. (The one true god is of course Zeus, whom the Greek philosophers identified with reason or the logical structure of reality.) But c’mon!

The word “al-lah,” “al-ilah,” simply means “the god” in Arabic (thus mirroring the New Testament’s term for God – ho theos, “the god”). Christians and Jews writing in Arabic have always used the term “Allah” for the Judeo-Christian God; indeed, as the 6th-century Umm al-Jimal inscription in Jordan shows, Arabic Christians were using “Allah” as a term for God before Islam even arose. “Allah” means God the One and Only. Period.

Now it may well be true that the term “Allah” was also used in pre-Islamic times for a less impressive deity, a member of a polytheistic pantheon. But so what? As is well known, exactly the same is true of the Hebrew terms “Yahweh,” “El,” and “Elohim,” used in the Bible as names of God. Early Jewish tradition assigns Yahweh a wife, Asherah. The term “Yahweh” was used by the Moabites as another name for the Canaanite god Ba’al; indeed, “El,” “-ilah,” and “Ba’al” are all obvious cognates, and are recognised by Biblical scholars as having a common origin. And the word “Elohim” shows its polytheistic origins in its very structure: it is the result of adding a masculine plural ending to a feminine singular noun (thereby strangely deriving a masculine singular: “he is the goddess-men”). If Islam has pagan roots, so do Judaism and Christianity.

The fact that the Arabic term for God once referred merely to one god among many no more proves that Muslims today are worshipping a moon god than the fact that the Hebrew terms for God once referred merely to one god among many proves that Jews and Christians today are worshipping a tribal deity with many wives. Etymology is not theology. St. Paul had more sense than many of his modern followers when he accepted, as legitimate references to the Christian God, pagan Greek verses describing Zeus as an immaterial, monotheistic creator. What god one worships presumably has more to do with how one conceives of her than with what names one calls her. [For any Kripkeans who may be reading this: no, I’m not rejecting causal origin as irrelevant; I think it’s one, but only one, element in the disjunctive complex that determines a term’s meaning. But that’s a story for another day.]

So how does Islam conceive of God? Do Muslims in any interesting sense worship a “moon god”? The answer lies in the Qur’an, verses 6.75-79:

Thus did we show Abraham the kingdom of the heavens and the earth, that he might be among those possessing certainty:

When the night grew dark upon him, he beheld a star. He said: This is my Lord. But when it set, he said: I love not things that set.

And when he saw the moon rising in splendour, he said: This is my Lord. But when it set, he said: If my Lord had not guided me I should certainly be one of those who have gone astray.

And when he saw the sun rising in splendour, he said: This is my Lord! This is the greatest! But when it set he cried: O my people! Behold, I am no longer deceived by your false encumbrances.

For surely I have turned my face toward him who created the heavens and the earth, as one by nature upright, and I am not of the idolaters.

Beyond the Ballot

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

I have an article on Victor Hugo and democracy on LRC today.

The Second Empire Strikes Back

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

The years 1848-1852 were particularly interesting times (in the Chinese sense) for France; I’m currently reading through accounts of this period by such contemporary witnesses as Tocqueville, Dunoyer, Proudhon, Molinari, Marx, and Hugo. (This was also of course the period in which the “problem of the best régime” was finally solved – in theory though alas not in practice – by Molinari in his works The Production of Security and Soirées on the Rue Saint-Lazare.) Some of these writers favoured the revolution of 1848 and some of them opposed it, but they all agreed in condemning the establishment of the Second Empire in 1852.

Most recently I’ve been reading Hugo’s searing account (in Napoléon the Little and History of a Crime) of the December 1851 coup that brought Napoléon III to power, thus paving the way for the Second Empire. Hugo shared Acton’s and Rothbard’s conviction that the historian should be a hanging judge, and he levels unanswerable denunciations not only of the coup (and the mass detentions and mass murders attendant thereon), but also of the court intellectuals who whitewashed the crimes of the self-styled “Prince President” (a term I’m tempted to start using for Bush II) and glorified his oppressive and bloodthirsty modus operandi.

I was irresistibly reminded of Hugo’s account of the Empire by reading Jeff Tucker’s excellent critique of American conservatism on LRC today. As Tucker points out, today’s apologists for sanguinary statism, like Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity, are still “screaming for blood, exalting the imperial state, decrying the very basis of civilization (peace), and demanding the jailing of dissidents.” (Read it now.)

Hugo saw the Second Empire as an anachronism, a throwback to a less civilised era, and he felt confident that the peaceful and enlightened 20th century would see the end of such barbarism. On the contrary, of course (as Molinari among others predicted quite clearly), the 20th century mostly followed the model of the Second Empire – and the 21st so far seems to be following suit.


Unrelated P.S. - In addition to the MP3 and PDF versions of my anarchy talk to which I previously linked, there is now an HTML version.

More Anarchy Is Upon Us!

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Last week I linked to an audio file of my Mises Institute anarchism talk. There’s now a written transcript online as a PDF file here.

Anti-Gouging Idiocy

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized
discipline and one that most people consider to be a “dismal science.”
But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on
economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.

– Murray N. Rothbard

Anarchy Is Upon Us!

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

At the Mises University on the evening of August 6th, I was assigned to be the “mystery speaker.” Jeff Tucker asked me to pick a controversial subject, so I picked anarchism (though I’m not sure that counts as a controversial subject before that particular audience!).

Anyway, an MP3 audio file of my talk is now online here. I talk about some of the chief objections to anarchism and I offer counter-arguments. (One issue I don’t talk about is military defense under anarchy, but for that issue see my anarchist resources page.) I find the sound of my voice somewhat annoying, and the sound of my laugh incredibly annoying (it all sounds so much better in my head than it does from the outside), but hey, it’s what I’ve got.

Prisoners of the Helix?

I’ve argued previously (see my 25 September 2002 post Slip Out of Those Genes) that sociobiological theories to the effect that certain patterns of action are genetically determined are self-defeating because inconsistent with free will.

A number of readers have asked me whether my position is consistent with the genetic determination of preferences (as opposed to actions). Well, it depends. In the case of praxeological preferences – i.e., those preferences that are embodied in action – then obviously the answer must be no, since if actions are not determined, neither are their logical constituents.

But what about psychological or thymological preferences – i.e., those desires and impulses that may or may not be acted on? Here things get more complicated.

For Wittgensteinians like me, the connection between having such desires and acting on them, while less direct and necessary than in the case of praxeological preferences (Wittgenstein would call it a “loose joint”), is still conceptual rather than merely causal. In short, the possession of a given desire is not logically compatible with any and all patterns of action, but only with some. Hence we can influence what desires we count as having, to the extent that we freely determine which patterns of action we instantiate.

It follows that habituation – the fact that “use almost can change the stamp of nature” by making actions easier through repetition – is no mere empirical datum but a logically necessary feature of all free agency. It also follows that the extent to which genetic endowments constrain people’s destinies is severely limited. (For a defence of the claim that we have more control over our “innate impulses” than we might seem to, see Sartre’s classic monograph The Emotions: Outline of a Theory.)

But what about cases where identical twins, separated at birth, meet up years later and discover that they dress alike, have similar tastes, have chosen similar careers, etc.? Doesn’t this show that people’s preferences are genetically determined? (Of course no empirical data can literally disprove an a priori praxeological theorem – but such data can always legitimately prompt us to check whether we have reasoned correctly.)

In fact it’s no surprise that such cases occur. I’ve previously granted that our genes can determine what pattern of activity we’re likely to start with; if genetically similar agents often end up pursuing similar patterns of activity, all that shows is that most people follow the path of least resistance. And we already knew that! Genetic influences, like environmental influences, are just as powerful as we allow them to be – and most people are too lazy to resist. (By laziness I mean, of course, a chosen pattern of activity, not a genetic predisposition.)

I’ve been talking about preferences, not abilities. Nothing I’ve said rules out the possibility of a role for genetics in determining innate abilities. Even here, though, we must be careful, for many things that look like abilities have preference-based components. For example, much (though admittedly not all) of what we call “intelligence” is a matter of what we pay attention to, which in turn is partly a matter of ability but partly also a matter of desire and will.

Molinari Society Update

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

The first Molinari Symposium has been scheduled! The venue is the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Boston, December 28th. The topic is “Libertarianism and Feminism.” The participants include Elizabeth Brake, Charles Johnson, Jennifer McKitrick, Aeon Skoble, and your humble correspondent. More details here.

News from the Front

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

To Serve Man

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Two weeks ago I discussed what I called the “paradox of religious conservatism” – namely, the fact that those who are allegedly dedicated to the supremacy of spirit over matter are in practice committed to subordinating the spiritual aspects of human life to the merely biological aspects. The latest confirmation of this comes in the form of an anti-feminist screed from the Vatican titled On the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and the World.

While the insulting phrase “a woman is not a copy of a man” (insulting in its implication that feminists do regard woman as a “copy of a man”), which news reports have most often quoted from the document, does not in fact appear to occur in it, the rambling diatribe certainly does condemn the “human attempt to be freed from one’s biological conditioning,” and complains that among feminists “physical difference, termed sex, is minimized, while the purely cultural element, termed gender, is emphasized to the maximum and held to be primary.”

For the Vatican, by contrast, women’s biological role as mothers determines their spiritual destiny, which is – you guessed it – a “capacity for the other.” As I’ve noted before (see here and here), one of the strategies of patriarchy is to define the function of women as fundamentally other-directed. Of course the Vatican document is quick to assure us that “in the final analysis, every human being, man or woman, is destined to be ‘for the other’” (as if such a celebration of servility would be any more palatable if the servility were reciprocal) – but women, we are told, are “more immediately attuned to these values,” and it is their task to “live them with particular intensity and naturalness.” One of the chief function of women, the Vatican opines, is to serve as a “sign” of this doctrine of universal servility by exemplifying the distinctively feminine virtues of “listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting,” and thereby “recalling these dispositions to all the baptized.”

In short, although every human being is called to self-immolation, women are supposed to specialise in it – and all because of the reproductive role that nature happens to have assigned them. Isn’t this precisely the biology-worship I’ve been complaining of? (Needless to say, these men in dresses also have no patience for those who “call into question the family, in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father” and “make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent.” Here too, the spiritual must be subordinated to the biological rather than vice versa.)

The Vatican anticipates the charge of biology-worship and seeks to rebut it. Although “motherhood is a key element of women’s identity,” this “does not mean that women should be considered from the sole perspective of physical procreation”; on the contrary, the “Christian vocation of virginity” contradicts “any attempt to enclose women in mere biological destiny.” (Of course, for a religion that condemns birth control, virginity is the only alternative to motherhood on offer.) Still, virginity is described as a kind of metaphorical extension of biological motherhood:

Just as virginity receives from physical motherhood the insight that there is no Christian vocation except in the concrete gift of oneself to the other, so physical motherhood receives from virginity an insight into its fundamentally spiritual dimension: it is in not being content only to give physical life that the other truly comes into existence. This means that motherhood can find forms of full realization also where there is no physical procreation.

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