What About That Mean?

Every virtue, says Aristotle, brings things into good condition.  Therefore virtue is also "the state of character which makes a man good and which makes him do his own work well."

Does that mean that the harder you work at virtue, the better?  Not exactly, for virtue is not found in extremes, writes Aristotle, but at the mean between two extremes.  It is "an intermediate between excess and defect."   Thus the great Aristotelian notion of the mean.

But the mean is not a rigid thing, half way between the extremes of excess and defect.  If "ten pounds is too much for a particular person to eat and two too little, it does not follow that the trainer will order six pounds."  The mean is an individual thing for each person.

Thus, the mean for Milo the excellent wrestler in the eating department would not the the same as for "the beginner in athletic exercises".  Obviously, Milo would need to eat a lot more than you or me. He's a wrestler in training. Therefore the appropriate mean for him is a lot more than for the beginner.  Today, we would say that it is one thing for a Tour de France competitor to consume 5,000 calories per day, but quite another thing for a couch potato.

The point is that "the master of any art avoids excess and defect, but seeks the intermediate," the mean between the extremes. But the mean for each virtue is not the same for everyone; the mean is the intermediate that leads to virtue in each of us.  It is a "mean relative to us" according to a rational principle as a "man of practical wisdom" would determine.

Vice, of course, is different. There is no mean there for Aristotle. It is just bad. There is no such thing as "adultery with the right woman, at the right time, and in the right way". Of course that says nothing about adultery with a slave.

With the virtue of honor, according to Aristotle, the mean is "proper pride"; the excess being "empty vanity" and the defect "undue humility."  Aristotle understands honor here as aristocratic pride.  But in Honor: A History, the modern James Bowman defines honor rather differently.  It is the reputation that a hoplite infantryman would have for staying in line, or a GI for supporting the buddies in his unit.  It has nothing to do with aristocratic pride, but is rather the reputation for courage under fire.

Indeed aristocratic pride, so ubiquitous in The Iliad, is a corruption of honor.  It is the insistence that an aristocrat be treated as though he were courageous and unflinching in combat, whether or not he is.

You could call aristocratic honor a vice.

The Green "Fight Against Big Oil"

When actor Robert Redford writes that the Keystone XL decision is an historic victory against Big Oil.  He writes:

President Obama has just rejected a permit for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline -- a project that promised riches for the oil giants and an environmental disaster for the rest of us.



His decision represents a victory of historic proportions for people from throughout the pipeline path and all across America who have waged an uphill, years-long fight against one of the most nightmarish fossil fuel projects of our time.

Oh please, gag me with a spoon.  What about the 600,000 miles of pipeline in the US, mostly not as carefully designed as the Keystone XL?  And don't you realize, Mr. Redford, that the president is almost certainly planning to allow the pipeline to proceed, once he has got your money and your vote for opposing it?



As Joel Kotkin points out, the Keystone XL decision forced the president to side with "urbanista" America against the rest of America.



There is a word for this sort of issue.  It is called a "wedge" issue.  The idea is to unite your side while splitting the other chaps.  That's why the House Republicans put language in the two-month payroll tax cut that forced the president to make a decision on Keystone XL.  Considering that the Democrats had already planned to give up on the white working class this year, it's no surprise that they went with the bigger chunk of their base: the urbanista greens rather than the suburbanista working class.



I've been saying all along: Bring it on.  I'm a naturally conflict-averse chap, but I recognize that the great issues facing America have to be fought over.  The reason is that, in normal times, the "urbanista" agenda of the liberal educated class gets no pushback.  Mainstream media types run around boosting lefty issues, from wind and solar to "diversity" to "gay marriage," and attack anyone that disagrees with them and bigots or deniers, according to taste.



But a great election is a time when conservatives can contest in these ideological wars.  Thus the perfect storm of government debt, Great Recession, climate change,  ObamaCare, and energy prices create a crisis that will force the American people to confront the issues and make a choice.  In normal times, when there is not a crisis, it is very difficult to push back against the liberal agenda.



In normal times, liberals present their statist agenda as caring and compassion, pretending that they are conducting a national conversation in accordance with Habermas's discourse ethic.  In fact, of course, they are always playing political hardball and finding ways to silence their critics and turn the "discourse" into domination.  But in normal times they manage to persuade moderates that liberals are on the side of the angels.



In crisis times, like right now, conservatives get a chance to fight back against the liberal power plays.  We can argue that the "stimulus" spending and regulatory blizzard hurts ordinary Americans.  We can show that ObamaCare is a lie that will ration health care to America's grandmas.  And during an election conservatives can use paid media to balance the free media that supports liberal ideas.



What is really needed, of course, is for conservatives to make a Long March through the institutions so that the normal times discourse is balanced between liberal agenda and conservative agenda.  That is a huge challenge because it means, for a start, neutralizing the government education complex.  Then there is the liberal culture complex, the liberal foundation complex, and the liberal mainstream media.



At any rate, there's a good chance that an historic victory can be won in 2012 if President Obama is defeated and the US Senate goes Republican.  The mad statist government of 2009-2010 will have educated a whole new generation of Americans to mistrust government.



Meanwhile the liberal "victory" in the fight against Big Oil should remind Americans who is in favor of reducing the cost of filling their gas tanks.

How Many Divisions Has the Soul?

Stalin famously inquired in 1944 how many divisions the pope had.  Reportedly, Pope Pius XII replied that “You can tell my son Joseph that he will meet my divisions in heaven”.

Almost as confusing is Aristotle's explanation of the elements of the soul in Nicomachean Ethics I 13. OK, chaps, he says, there are, first of all, the rational and the irrational, although they are not quite as obviously discrete elements as "the parts of the body."

Never mind about the vegetative aspect of the irrational soul, he says, that operates even in nurslings and embryos, not to mention "full-grown creatures."  This irrational element seems to operate in a world of its own and is uninfluenced by reason.

However, there is another irrational element that seems partially connected with the rational element, and indeed can be influenced by it.  This element is an "appetitive" and "desiring element."  It might move a man "aright and towards the best objects".  But there seems to be another principle that "fights and resists" the rational principle.  Thus the appetitive element shares in the rational element only "in so far as it listens to and obeys it".

Now here is where things get tricky.  The appetitive irrational element seems to be subdivided into two parts, the one that does the right thing on its own, and the other capable of obeying the the rational principle as articulated, e.g., by one's father.

But what about the rational principle?  What about that?  Well, that seems to be divided into two sub-elements too.  For "some of the virtues are intellectual and other moral".  The man of good character we praise for being "good-tempered or temperate"; the wise man for "his state of mind".

So there we are.  For the Aristotelian soul we have a rational element and an irrational element.  We divide the rational element into the intellectual and moral, and the irrational into vegetative and appetitive.  But the appetitive we subdivide into a rational part, insofar as it is persuaded by or obeys the rational principle, and the irrational part, which just does what it does, in opposition to the rational principle.

How many divisions has the soul?  Counting only "leaf" elements, we have five.  Counting all nodes from the complete soul on down, we have a total of nine.  Who knows how many divisions there will be in heaven?

Remember, the point of all this is to understand that "activity of soul in accordance with perfect virtue" which is happiness or eudaimonia.

Who Gets to Judge?

If we say, as we did yesterday, that we in western society are dealing with the Two Great Crimes of Modernity, then what do we do about it?

The two great crimes are really quite simple.  Capitalism's great crime is plantation slavery, when business owners got to own the people that worked their sugar plantations, first in Cyprus, then in the West Indian sugar islands and Brazil.  And then there was a fabulously profitable cotton slave plantation play in the good old USA.

The solution to this crime was that the capitalists should not be the judge of their own cause.   A moral movement arose to critique plantation slavery, and plantation slavery is no more.  In the US, of course, it took a civil war to persuade the plantation capitalists to abandon their slave profits.

The crime of the educated class is the totalitarian state.  Any old tyrant can set up as a despot, but it takes an intellectual to come up with the totalitarian state where all aspects of human socialization are collapsed into government and politics, and anyone that uttered a peep of objection got carted off to a slave-labor camp.

Today the hard totalitarianism of the Stalins and the Maos is over and lives on in the twilight of Cuba, but our liberal friends are still keen on the authoritarian welfare state, in which society is half collapsed into the political sector, and liberals get lots of political and cultural power and, in their role as judges of the capitalists, a lot of power over the economic sector too.

How can we get out from under this soft totalitarianism?  It's not that hard.  We must just establish that the liberal educated class cannot continue as the judge of their own cause any more than the capitalists.  Liberals have to choose whether they want to run the welfare state or whether they want to judge it.  They can't do both.

Our liberal friends are rather like Bottom the weaver, the "mechanical" from Midsummer Night's Dream.  They want to play the starring role of Pyramus, and then they want to play all the other roles too.  On top of that they want to tell everyone else how to play their own roles.

I watched the South Carolina debate last night, and so I got to see the key moment, when Juan Williams lobbed the usual race-card question at Newt Gingrich about work and welfare.  Newt knocked it out of the park, both on content and style.  I particularly liked his asides on the taboo of upsetting liberals.  The crowd (becoming more and more an actor in these events) cheered Newt lustily and booed Juan lustily.  Why?  Because Americans (considered in the strict sense of people that do not hyphenate their identity) are fed up with liberals playing Bottom the weaver.

Liberals keep saying they want a national conversation, but you better not disagree with them, or you are a racist.  You had better not critique their welfare state programs, or they will call you a racist.  But then, if you have a political debate on Martin Luther King Day that is supposed to be racist.  If your campaign doesn't buy radio ads that target black radio that is supposed to be racist.  I'm sure that, to suggest that the best way to avoid poverty is to finish high school, get married, and don't have children until you are in your twenties, is also racist, but I haven't actually seen anyone make that accusation.

There is a word to describe something that is so sacred, so holy, that it cannot be mentioned.  It is called a taboo.  But liberals are above all that.

Our liberal friends have a closed system that justifies their soft tyranny as kindness and compassion, and they have erected a remarkable policing system to intimidate their opposition and to control and marginalize any criticism of their rule.  But sooner or later, someone will challenge the liberal culture of fear, someone will break the taboo, and the liberal police state will collapse.

Nobody will be surprised except the liberals.

Two Great Crimes of Modernity

Let's tell it like it is.

Instrumental reason, the Enlightenment, write Horkheimer and Adorno, is a dance of domination, domination over nature and domination over man. "What men want to learn from nature is how to dominate it and other men."

Oh, gee, we already did. in Modernity's Original Sin.   But let us do it again in a slightly different way.

The Original Sin of modernity, the application of instrumental reason to domination, resulted in two Great Crimes: capitalism's great crime and the educated elite's great crime.

The Great Crime of capitalism was the development of plantation slavery.  It was the utter domination of men for the purpose of profit; for the slave plantations, right from the start in the sugar plantations on Cyprus organized after the Crusades, were always business enterprises: production for profit, and if it meant using up a few Muslim slaves, well, the pope said it was OK because the slaves weren't Christians.

We may say that capitalism, like Buddhism, has its Hinayana, its contemptible lesser vehicle, in industrialization, the harrowing process by which a rural population of farmers is transformed into a competent wage-earning workforce.

The Great Crime of the educated elite was the development of the totalitarian state.  The totalitarian state of fond memory was the utter domination of men for the purpose of an idea, a vision of the perfect society, for the totalitarian state, right from its start in the Terror of the French Revolution, was always a soteriological secular religion, saving the world from exploitation and molding it into heaven on earth.  If it meant using up a few rich peasants or the whole bourgeoisie, well, you can't make omelettes without breaking eggs.

The French Revolution and its Terror represented the totalizing of the Age of Reason.  The fascist states represented the totalizing of Romanticism and its union with nature.  The communist states represented the totalizing of Marxism and it class-war ideology.  But the totalitarian idea has its Hinayana, its contemptible lesser vehicle, too.  We may call it, with Jürgen Habermas, the "authoritarian welfare state."

The educated class is like any group of men for "men like power and will seize it if they can," in the words of Nicholas Wade.  The educated class uses instrumental reason applied to the technology of state power to dominate other men.  Only its goal is not profit, like the capitalists, but to rule the world as the benevolent and beneficent Oz.  The problem is that instrumental reason is a tool for domination, and the means that the educated class uses for domination is the canonical tool for the domination of other men:  politics and government.

Government is force, and politics is threatening force.

Over the decades, we have found ways of taming capitalism.  Today's capitalists fight over market share, and when they succeed they benefit almost everyone.  Their products benefit the consumers, and they share their extraordinary profits with their supporters, who are their investors and employees.

There has also been a taming of totalitarian educated elites, but not by much.  If the full-on totalitarian state engulfed the whole of society into a soteriological political crusade and oceans of blood, the authoritarian welfare state, at least, only engulfs half of society, or at least its GDP, into the maw of the state and the projection of political power.  But we cannot say, when government dominates all our worthiest cooperative instincts--the care of the aged, the care of the sick, the raising up of children, and the relief of the poor--that we have really tamed the totalitarian urge.  The lesser Great Crime of the educated class still oppresses us as the industrial capitalists used to dominate the industrial working class.

Plantation slavery was ended by the rise of a great moral and religious movement that anathematized the exploitation of men and women as mere slavish cogs in a profitable production machine.  We have yet to see the full development of a moral and religious movement to end the Hinayana of totalitarianism: the authoritarian welfare state and its reduction of all cooperative and caring instincts to a mechanical nexus of blind political power.

In my view this moral and political movement, that I believe begins with Edmund Burke in the 18th century, has yet to come to fruition because it has failed to inspire the people who will most benefit and socialize a world free from totalizing educated elites:  women.  When we talk of the authoritarian welfare stat reducing the care of the aged, the care of the sick, the raising up of children and the relief of the poor to care-less, compassionless centralizing, compulsory government programs, we are talking about all the best instincts and concerns of women reduced to bureaucracy and mind-numbing rules.

You can reduce capitalism to rules; that makes sense because capitalism is about sublimating the aggressiveness of human males to a fierce battle over market share, and men are always asking us to draw the line for them.  But to reduce care of the most vulnerable to rules and regulations is insanity.  Every woman knows that her aging mother needs health care that adapts to her individual need.  Every child is unique, and it is ridiculous to fit armies of children onto the Procrustean bed of the government child custodial facility.  And every poor person needs the personal attention that will turn mere relief into reintegration into the larger society.

Come on girls.  You have a world to win, and nothing to fear except the chains--of suffocating government rules and regulations.

Happiness: Is Virtue Sufficient

Our good friend Aristotle defines happiness (eudaimonia, the good life, or human flourishing) as "activity in accordance with virtue."  But is virtue sufficient for happiness?

Obviously, we can say, it is not.  In the first place, he considers virtue as the springboard of happiness.  If you want to have a good life, your actions must be done in accordance with virtue.  But virtue is the accumulation of habits and education, not to mention contemplation.  They are the necessary means by which we can build the necessary facility, the aptitude, skills, and attitude necessary to a good life.

Happiness is not just a man living a life of virtue in isolation; it requires what Aristotle calls self-sufficiency.  He means, by this, living not just in solitary virtuous splendor, but in a family, responsible for women, children and slaves, and the community of the city-state, "for man is born for citizenship."

And Aristotle tells us that happiness must extend over the whole of life.  It is not just a moment.  We cannot call a man happy if he has been buried, like Job, in unspeakable miseries and has lost everything: wife, children, camels, goats, and sheep.  But we do not wait to call a man happy until we are sure that his descendants will also be happy.

Aristotle seems determined to confuse us when he suddenly turns from his assertion that the practice of political science in legislation is the highest good.  in NE X 8 he ups and tells us that, "perfect happiness is a contemplative activity.  This seems a rather unworthy descent into special pleading for his own function and profession.  Do not plumbers think that the world begins and ends under the kitchen sink?  Do not economists tell us that the world would be a better place if politicians listened more to economists?  If the best life is a life of contemplation, where then is "activity in accordance with virtue?"  He is getting close to the east Asians who tell us that the best is Nirvana, the absence of all striving and acting.  In this case, of course, happiness as virtue collapses precisely into a trance of philosophy, and activity of life reduces to mere intellectual irritability.

Charles Taylor speaks of the best life in two dimensions: a basic human flourishing, of course, but also an attempt to reach for something higher, something transcendent.  Perhaps Aristotle, in his bios theoretikos, his life of contemplation, is making his own reach for transcendence, for "the activity of God, which surpasses all others in blessedness, must be contemplative."

In that case happiness is just virtuousness, dissolved into blissfulness.

Barack Obama, "Vulture Capitalist"

What is Mitt Romney going to do to scotch the job-killer label?  His Republican rivals have been ramping up criticism of the doings of Bain Capital, some have labeled him a "vulture capitalist."  If that's how Republican candidates think, then who knows what the Chicago guys on Obama's team will come up with.



Hugh Hewitt has a clever little sound bite on this.  He says that blaming Mitt Romney for job losses is like blaming the lifeboats for arriving too late at the sinking of the Titanic.



My own view is to try a health-care metaphor.  Corporate turnaround outfits like Bain are like surgeons.  They try to cure companies diagnosed with cancer.  Usually, of course, they only come in when the cancer is well advanced, because like people with a pain in their abdomen, the patient is in denial.  That's a pity, because advanced cancer often needs radical surgery.  It's almost always best to get cancer  in its early stages.



That's the business that Mitt Romney was in.  Diagnosing sick companies, coming up with a treatment plan, and then executing on the treatment plan.  Often times, of course, the treatment plan doesn't save the patient, or only provides a temporary improvement.



The Romney team evidently thinks that a direct attack on the president is the answer. Here's Romney in an airplane aisle.

Well, I’d like to look at Barack Obama’s record, and so as we talk about my experience in the private sector, I’ll talk about his experience… he’s now been a venture capitalist in Solyndra, Fisker, the Tesla… and he’s been a private equity guy in General Motors and Chrysler, so I’ll be talking about his record when I’m facing him.

That just shows why I'm not a campaign manager.  It hadn't occurred to me that Solyndra was just waiting there to neutralize the "vulture capitalist" smear.  But the Human Events reporter is livid with Romney's sarcastic answer.

Barack Obama is not a “venture capitalist” with a “record in the private sector.” The compulsory extraction of funding from taxpayers by force, to fund massive expenditures on politically favored companies run by top Obama campaign contributors, is not “venture capitalism.” It’s not really capitalism at all, although the term “crony capitalism” has become popular for describing it.

Quite right, of course.  Actually, there is a bigger problem with Romney's comment.  Most Americans really don't know the different between a "venture capitalist" and a "private equity guy."  But maybe they will after the 2012 election.  And that would be a good thing!



Sure, Romney didn't go on to spell out what is wrong with Obama's jolly little foray into venture capitalism.  But no doubt he will develop the idea in his speeches, in exactly the way that the Human Events guy did.   When the government gets into "venture capitalism" it isn't venture, it isn't capitalism, it's force, pure and simple; it is government rewarding its supporters with our money.  And the same thing applies when the government plays at the private equity game and bails out GM, the unions, and the banks.  President Obama doesn't risk his money or the money of investors looking for a risky play.  He is risking our money.  And we don't want the government taking big risks with out retirement savings.



The point is that if Mitt Romney can't turn the "vulture capitalism" issue around and make it a liability for President Obama then he's not a good enough politician to be president.