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??
The "Reverend" William Coffin, hireling preacher, Yale Corporation
William Sloane Coffin, son of wealthy Wall Street lawyer, and long-time "chaplain" (whatever that means) at Yale, died earlier this year. A typical self-righteous Eastern Establishment type of Doughface "Progressive," in my opinion.
Some time ago I saw in the bookstore William Law's book on a holy life, and it was none over than "Rev" Coffin who wrote the preface. Ha! Speaking of irony. A man who was divorced three times so that he could marry younger women, writing on "holiness." Are the editors high on somethin'??
Here's an unflattering post about him, about how he got his doctrines all wrong even by college freshman standard:
http://stromata.typepad.com/stromata_blog/2006/04/de_mortuis_nil_.html
For more about his past exploits and how as a former CIA agent (before his tenure at Yale) he sent numerous refugee agents into Soviet Russia who never returned, check rasmusen.org out:
http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2006/04/25/1150/
There're also reports that allege wife-beating habits:
http://neveryetmelted.com/?p=887
I just can't believe that the Yalie Doughfaces back in the 60s actually used this guy as their poster-boy. They really were out of their head apparently. There's a Chinese tradition which says one shouldn't dig up dirt about folks who recently died. But the mere fact that this guy even had the audacity to write the preface to William Law's book had turned my stomach so much that I just have to write about him.
Hmm. A blue-blooded Establishment Doughface with a wife-beating habit who has not been faithful to his wife, who apparently also had a soft-spot for collectivist philosophies. What? Sound more like some Oriental despot to me! But at least Xerxes didn't drink latte, and that made him less annoying...
We Quakers had our fair share of traitors. Alger Hiss being the most prominent of them. But at least Hiss wasn't a wife-beater or an adulterer.
Doughface
A Doughface was a Northern politician who had sympathies for the South and its slavery. Most Presidents under the Second Party System before Abe Lincoln who were not themselves Southerners were doughfaces one way or another. Franklin Pierce (D-N.H.), James Buchanan (D-Pa.) were good examples. James Buchanan in particular was a spineless fool at best and a traitor at worst. It was during the last days of his Presidency (between the 1860 Presidential election and Lincoln's swearing in) that seven Slave states seceded (South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas), the Confederacy was formed, all Federal forts and arsenals were lost to Rebel militia, and a fourth of all Federal troops defected to the State of Texas.
Here's Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s definition of the modern day "doughface progressive." Mr. Schlesinger, the great New Deal historian, speaks my mind:
http://combingthesphere.blogspot.com/2006/03/schlesinger-on-doughface-progressives.html
Nationals v. Marlins
We beat the Marlins. Hands down. Washington Nationals kicked their butt. They were actually leading us by one point through the 9th inning, until Ryan Zimmerman hit a home run after two outs and two strikes. Mind you, all these happened in the 9th inning, and I thought we were losin'.
Today was great. Me and two co-workers my age went to the RFK Stadium to watch the game, and the tickets were all paid for. Even the lunch was free. We had so much beer and omlettes and hot dogs and peanuts I'm not even sure how our stomachs' gonna handle it.
Happy 4th of July!!
C.S. Lewis the scholar
Turns out that Alastair Fowler, the editor of the authoritative edition of "Paradise Lost" I've got, was a former student of C.S. Lewis. Amazing, isn't it? Here's some interesting stuff he wrote about Jack:
http://www.solcon.nl/arendsmilde/cslewis/reflections/e-fowler.htm
Amazing stuff. Fowler apparent did natural sciences when he was at Edinburgh in the late 40s, and became a graduate student in English under Lewis in Oxford in 1952. My buddy Anil is a big fan of some of ths stuff members of the the Inking group wrote: J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings in particular. I'm considering looking into that.
His portrayal of C.S. Lewis somewhat reminds me of the popular portrayal of John Wesley. Ernest. Robust. Slightly bookish. Overwhelmingly intellectual. Big hearted. Principled. Men for all seasons.
Mr. Wesley on Africans
This stuff from John Wesley (1703-1791), founder of Methodism, is sweet:
"Upon the whole, therefore, the Negroes who inhabit the coast of Africa, from the river Senegal to the southern bounds of Angola, are so far from being the stupid, senseless, brutish, lazy barbarians, the fierce, cruel, perfidious savages they have been described, that, on the contrary, they are represented, by them who have no motive to flatter them, as remarkably sensible, considering the few advantages they have for improving their understanding; as industrious to the highest degree, perhaps more so than any other natives of so warm a climate; as fair, just, and honest in all their dealings, unless where white men have taught them to be otherwise; and as far more mild, friendly, and kind to strangers, than any of our forefathers were. Our forefathers! Where shall we find at this day, among the fair-faced natives of Europe, a nation generally practising the justice, mercy, and truth, which are found among these poor Africans? Suppose the preceding accounts are true, (which I see no reason or pretence to doubt of,) and we may leave England and France, to seek genuine honesty in Benin, Congo, or Angola."
This is from a man who died the year 1791, when our founders still considered it okay to own human chattel, and only 15 years after goood ole' South Carolina (who gave us such wonderful men as Preston "I cane people" Brooks, Strom "I love my colleagues' wives" Thurmond and Ernest Fritz "those Africans are cannibals" Hollings) threatened to aid the Brits had Thomas Jefferson included the ill-fated paragraph condemning slavery in the Declaration of Independence.
I wholeheartedly agree with Emerson that it was the "fair faced" Preston Brooks who was a "stupid, senseless, brutish, lazy barbarian and a fierce, cruel, perfidious" savage (Wesley's words); an "animal, given to pleasure, frivolous, irritable, spending his days in hunting and practising with deadly weapons to defend himself against his slaves and against his companions brought up in the same idle and dangerous way." (Emerson's words). You just have to love men from an earlier era. Even when they're ripping their opponents apart they're so courteous and their choice of words eloquent.
Excellent post on religious orthodoxy
An essay from "Chieftain of Seir" on Levi Coffin, the Quaker "President of the Underground Railroad" and John Brown the militant abolitionist, and the religious traditions they stood for.
http://chieftainofseir.blogspot.com/2006/03/dangers-of-historical-symbolism.html
I've never thought very highly of John Brown or Ralph Waldo Emerson or the "Progrssive" Hicksites, though the Chieftain of Seir really hit the mark when he noted how he wasn't aware of one single slave who owed his emancipation personally to John Brown.
On the other hand of course we have these biased religious historians trying to tell us how all orthodox Christians were pro-slavery and how the Christian leaders of the time turned a blind eye to it, while unitarians and transcentalists worked hard in the abolitionist movement. False. The fact that a five-point Calvinist like Jonathan Edwards would like to dodge the bullet of slavery didn't mean anything. John Wesley was staunchly abolitionist, and promised hell-fire to slave owners:
http://gbgm-umc.org/umw/wesley/thoughtsuponslavery.stm
Are you a man? Then you should have an human heart. But have you indeed? What is your heart made of? Is there no such principle as compassion there? Do you never feel another's pain? Have you no sympathy, no sense of human woe, no pity for the miserable? When you saw the flowing eyes, the heaving breasts, or the bleeding sides and tortured limbs of your fellow-creatures, was you a stone, or a brute? Did you look upon them with the eyes of a tiger? When you squeezed the agonizing creatures down in the ship, or when you threw their poor mangled remains into the sea, had you no relenting? Did not one tear drop from your eye, one sigh escape from your breast? Do you feel no relenting now? If you do not, you must go on, till the measure of your iniquities is full. Then will the great God deal with you as you have dealt with them, and require all their blood at your hands. And at "that day it shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah than for you!"No wonder he got fired as an Anglican priest in Georgia (that said, he also "sinned" by having a crush on a nice Southern girl in his parish), and was sent back to England.
You go, John, give 'em slave-owners fire and brimstone!
Baseball
I'll be going to a Washington Nationals vs. Florida Marlins baseball game on the 4th of July, with some of my fellow interns at the Motley Fool. This is so cool. In fact, we even get to dine at the Diamond Club dining room in the stadium, thanks to the generosity of our company. I think me and several Law School friends are also going to visit some of the old Civil War battlefields/memorials in the coming weekend(s). We're not sure which one to go to yet.
In the meantime, I've finished reading Soren Kierkegaard's "For Self Examination" (reflections to come), and two of Shen Congwen (T'song Wen in Wade-Giles?)'s novellas. Shen is without any doubt a master of the Chinese language, and a keen observer of human nature. Reading him is a pleasure. Not so with Kierkegaard. But hey that's the point. The point of reading S.K. is to make one anxious and tremble (to quote two of his book-titles...)
I've also started reading Milton's "Paradise Lost" during my commutes. Have finished reading 2/3 of the 1st book. Milton's English Heroic verses is very majestic in style , not unlike the Latin verses of old. As for his subject matter, let me just quote the beginning:
Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing heavenly Muse, on that secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed,
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of chaos, and Siloa's brook that flowed
Fast by the oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.
And chiefly thou O Spirit, that doest prefer
Before all temples the upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for thou know'st; thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like sat'st brooding on the vast abyss
And madest it pregnant: what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great argument
I may assert eternal providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.
Say first, for heaven hides nothing from they view
Nor the deep tract of hell, say first what cause
Moved our grand parents in that happy state,
Favoured of heaven so highly, to fall off
From their creator, and transgress his will
For one restraint, lords of the world besides?Oh my, this man is trying to cover everything. EVERYTHING. It's philosophy of history and ethics rolled into one epic poem. And everything fits together. At the beginning men were more or less beast-like, without any self-consciousness, until they disobeyed their Maker and consumed the forbidden fruit. It was then, oh then, that they were transformed by their own transgression into moral agents capable of being judged. It was at that very instance, when the Adversary succeeded in tempting our First Parents, that through the tension between one's obligation and inclination that Eve and Adam became truly moral beings. Therefore,
[Satan's] malice served but to bring forth
Infinite goodness, grace and mercy shown
On man by him seduced...No wonder some Christians refer to the fall as "the blessed fault." Now if we take S.K. seriously enough to read our own lives into the Scriptures, we also see that the guy who is called "Adam" in the Book of Genesis really is us. Without temptation and fall we cannot become truly moral beings, conformed to the image of Christ. As my (math) professor and dean Dennis DeTurck used to say, the grace of Adam before his fall is ignorance not innocence, whereas the innocence of Christ is "earned." In Bonhoeffer's words, it's the distinction between cheap grace and costly grace. George Fox, in his Journal, reported how the Spirit of God raised him and brought him to the state of Adam before the fall, and then through a flaming sword into the state of Christ, the paradise of God, wherefrom one cannot possible fall again.
