Evaluating Abraham Lincoln from a libertarian's perspective
A good friend and mentor remarked not long ago to me that while Stephen Douglas was a good man, Abe Lincoln was great. Indeed, during the years immediately leading up to the Civil War, in stark contrast to the burning sun of Abraham Lincoln, the tapers light of Mr. Douglas disappeared into the outer darkness of Slave Power.
The tragedy applies to many other great characters of the time. John C. Calhoun, who had the most exquisite mind of any Southern politician; Daniel Webster, the great compromise-broker from Massachusetts, and Henry Clay, all came to mind. But they too have labored for nought. While the name of Abraham Lincoln, the theologian of American anguish (from Elton Trueblood), shall be remembered from the East to the West unto ages and ages, who the hell care who Henry Clay or John C. Calhoun were the stuff they stood for?
But what about Honest Abe? Was he really the great leader our history books have made him out to be? Or, does that even matter? Does it matter if he's an enemy of free speech or not?
Here's a brief article by Professor T. Machan, of Cato Institute, Hoover Institution, Chapman University and formerly of Auburn University, Alabama:
http://www.cato.org/dailys/06-01-02.html
Professor Machan made an excellent point that issues like habeas corpus and free speech cannot be discoursed in the abstract. Likewise, the rights of the Several State to secede must be viewed in light of the circumstances, namely, that these White Southern slave-holding aristocrats are trying to take with them HOSTAGES, i.e. their slaves, contrary to the latter's will, as they secede. While in the abstract Mr. Calhoun's South Carolina may have had the perfect right to withdraw from the "more perfect Union," in reality it has not the right so to do unless it first abolish slavery and allow the slaves the right to vote on their feet. Dred Scott is irrelevant here for any good libertarian, for laws are made for men, and not men for the laws.*
In this sense Professor Machan's position is much closer to the liberal contractarian tradition, than it is to the murky Burkean view which took cultural traditions (here slavery) as a given.
*courtesy to Jesus Christ and Alexander Mordecai Bickel, sometime Sterling Professor of Law, Yale University.
Excellent sermon from Kowloon
Here's an excellent sermon by the Rev. Ross Royden, Vicar of Christ Church, Kowloon, on the Da Vinci Code. I think it really hit the mark.
http://www.christchurch.com.hk/files/SermonAudio/TheDaVinciCodetheSermon.htm
The Nats are the best...
My friend Anil used to say the "Mets are the best" and I concede that that rhymes better. But these days in DC the Nationals are doing VERY well. Today I went with my boss and three other co-workers to a Nats v. Giants game from the RFK stadium (which isn't even a ballpark), and the Nationals beat our West Coast visitors rather effortlessly.
One side point: they actually serve smoked salmon in the "Diamond Club" of the Stadium? Can you believe that? Last time they served omlettes, and now they're havin' salmon in a baseball game. Why, are hot dogs not good enough for these Washingtonians??
The Folk scene
You wouldn't believe how much I'm into Folk music these hot humid days. Thanks to my good buddy Andy who introduced me to the acoustic guitarist John Fahey the world of the 1960s Folk scene has been opened to me. The funny thing about these 1960s Folk artists though was how Neo-Classical (and "scholastic") they really are. The earlier ones like Carolyn Hester were a little more traditional, though later ones like Joan Baez and non-vocalists like Fahey were definitely influenced by Classicals.
It's so morally uplifting
Just did the most morally uplifting thing yesterday with a friend at work and his roommates. After spending some 4 hours drinking beer at "Fado" (a pseudo-Irish public house) in Chinatown, we went to his house, cooked up some steaks and french fries, and watched "The Aristocrats," a documentary about the most disgusting, morally repugnant and unspeakably obscene improvised joke in human history (unrated of course, for otherwise the gentlemen censors at MPAA probably wouldn't know how many X's it should merit) It was sooooo good. It was such a morally uplifting thing to do...
Some graphic arts about Gen. Francois-Dominique Toussaint L'Ouverture
http://www.alitashkgallery.com/lawrencetl/
Toussaint wasn't the only black general of his time. Abram Petrovich Gannibal (Hannibal) (1696-1781), Aleksandr Pushkin's maternal great-grandfather, was General-in-Chief of the Russian Army from 1742 until his retirement in 1762.
There were different stories about his personal background. Some say he was an Abyssinian prince sold into slavery to the Turks. Other believe that he was really from Chad and was raised a "Mahometan." In any event, he was bought by the Russian Ambassador in Constantinople at that time and became the Tsar's pageboy, was baptized into the Russian Church and adopted as God-son by none other than Peter the Great, studied mathematics and engineering in Paris, fought in the Great Northern War, served as Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Reval (Tallinn) and finally Commanding General of the Russian Army Engineering Corps. As the grand old man (senior general in active service) of the Russian Army, he was also one of the generals who backed Catherine the Great in her coup d'etat against Peter III (Hannibal had always felt being personally betrayed by Peter III, who insisted that the Seven Year War come to an end, a stupid move according to Hannibal...)
Pushkin, being proud of his part-African heritage, had always been fascinated by Hannibal. His last novel (unfinished) was "The Negro of Peter the Great." Writing that book wasn't an easy job apparently, and Pushkin had to do quite a bit of paper chase. During the bad ole' days when rampant racism was the norm, it should not come as an surprise that both Hannibal himself and his family members made his background as mysterious as possible, to convince his fellow Russian aristocrats that he really wasn't born a slave. According to one of those myths, he was born an Abyssinian prince. According to another, he could trace his ancestry back to the Hannibal of Carthage. If they sound ridiculous, it's because they should. Nevertheless, Abram Hannibal did leave a hint with respect to his true identity. It is hidden in his coat-of-arms.
Here's a great article about this guy and his origins,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/07/31/bogannibal.xml
So perhaps he really was a prince, born Ibrahim son of Prince Bruha, ruler of the minor principality of Logone in central Cameroon, and kidnapped by Muslim invaders in the year 1703?
Either way, here's another author, who refuted the first article
http://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0510&L=nabokv-l&T=0&P=411
Apparently Nabokov was involved in this debate as well.
Chinese readings in Georgetown
I've been reading a lot of Chinese poetry (modern) and prose these days at the Georgetown library. They've got a neat little collection there in the basement. It has been like a fresh breeze for me, after not having read the language for some time.
Hsu Ti-Shan (1893-1941)
Hsu Ti-Shan is one of my favorite novelist and essayist who wrote in modern Chinese. A scholar who had written many profound studies in Buddhist and Taoist philosophies and logic, he was also a historian, a poet, an aesthete and a Christian minister.
Born 1893 in Tainan, Taiwan, into a well-do-do family of literati, he was brought up in the Province of Fukien, after Taiwan was ceded to Japan in the aftermath of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. After a stint on the faculties of the Hsia Men Normal School and the Chinese School in Rangoon, Burma, he enrolled the Yenching University in Beijing, then a missionary-run college. It was roughly about this time that he converted to Protestanism, although he had never quite become a fundamentalist, as most Chinese believers at that time tended to be.
It was also his dissatisfaction with the doctrinal precisionism of fundamentalist Christianity that led him to the study of theology and comparative religion. After graduating with degrees in arts and divinity, in 1923 he won a fellowship to study for a master's in comparative religion at Columbia. After some further studies at Oxford he returned to his alma mater Yenching, where he became Professor of History in 1926. His area of research during this period is mostly about the history of religious movements in China, with particular attention given to Buddhist philosophy. In 1935 he was forced to resign by the increasingly anti-Communist administration at Yenching, who suspected him of being a fellow-traveler. He gladly accepted an appointment as the Foundation Professor of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong later the same year, and spent the last phase of his life in Hong Kong. In 1941, shortly before the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong, Professor Hsu passed away.
I love his mastery of the Chinese language, and his mystical view of human existence. His grip of human psychology and observation of the subtlest of human emotional activities render his choice of words incisive, clean and a real pleasure to read.
Here's Professor Derk Bodde of the University of Pennsylvania's obituary for Professor Hsu. Prof. Bodde was a former student of his back in the bad old days of 1930s:
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3/4 (Feb., 1942) , pp. 403-404
Some thoughts
I've been thinking about whether I've been overly uncharitable towards my former professors and upper-class intellectuals I've been characterizing as latte-intellectuals. Maybe I have, and I don't think I ought to act like that.
The point though is, that someone has to speak up against them, now that they have monopolized institutions of higher education, and have been consistently hailed by the media as custodians of our civil rights, etc. all over the place.
More about Coffin
Some more about this terrible man:
http://www.newcriterion.com/weblog/2006/04/rancid-radicalism-of-william-sloane.html
Herbert Marcuse
I used to be a big fan of Herbert Marcuse as as well, when I was a student radical back in college, until I read fellow Critical Theorist Georg Lukacs' characterization of Adorno and Marcuse's brand of latte radicalism as "Big Hotel Abyss." It was then that I realized how much these professors were out of touch with the people they purport to sympathize, and how arrogant and stupid they are by building their fantastic world on ideological categories (but cf. Adam Schaff, "Marxism and the Human Individual," Ch. 2, 3).
I didn't link William Sloane Coffin to Marcuse since I didn't realize their connection. Marcuse was a German exile who came to this country in the 30s (ever wonder being a good Communist why he had not gone to the Soviet Union to build his Communist utopia, as his mentor Lukacs did??), and a Vulgar Marxist in the most V/vulgar variety. William Sloane Coffin, on the other hand, was a blue-blooded Yalie "Boneman" from a privileged New York WASP family. Not sure if he were a pinko or a fellow-traveler but his existence surely had been well-soaked in grande double-shot non-fat soy latte.
But now I realize their similarities. Both men were incredibly self-righteous and intolerant. As Marcuse put it, "Liberating tolerance would mean intolerance against movements from the right, and toleration of movements from the left."
But who is to decide what's "from the Right" and what's "from the Left"? Why, Mr. Marcuse and his fellow Politburo members of the Communist Party of America (Marxism-Latteism) of course! Here's where hireling preachers like William Sloane Coffin come in. As F.A. Hayek noted, second-rate intellectuals (rather than experts who generate original knowledge) are the ones who are gatekeepers of knowledge in the society. They are the ones who allow and disallow certain message to get through their "gates" and reach the young and impressionable. So if Mr. Coffin decide only to include Marcuse but not victims of Communism like Boris Pasternak in his sermons at Yale, he's functioning as an "intellectual." Not that there's anything wrong per se about that. Of course we're all biased, one way or another, except that the message he preached itself is one of intolerance and Establishment bigotry.
So here you go. You have a very narrow bottleneck for information to pass through (there's only one chaplain at Yale), and the information that indeed got passed on was that about thought-criminalization and thought-control. Ministry of Love, anyone??
