Hear me talking for eight minutes about Why Stoicism won't make you happy on the Catholic Culture Podcast.  (Interviewer Thomas V. Mirus.)

Allow me to update a post I wrote in 2020 about Donald Trump and social class, because the topic is broader than Trump.  Let me begin with what I said then. 

There is a lot to dislike about him.  Mr. Trump was a sneerer, mocker, boaster, and person of bad character -- and he still is.  But then-president Obama, and his then-vice president, Joe Biden, were are also sneerers, mockers, boasters, and persons of bad character.  “Why is the reaction to them so different?”  I asked.  The political classes adored Mr. Obama, liked Mr. Biden just fine, and still put up with Biden despite his obvious dementia, corruption, and incompetence.  By contrast, they despised Trump so intensely that they were willing to pull down the republic to get rid of him.  The instrumentalities of justice were weaponized against him.  Their entertainers openly made jokes about assassinating him.  The war shows no sign of ending; new assaults are launched daily.

Of course part of the difference in the reaction to these politicians is ideological.  Biden, like Obama before him, does things the political classes love, like promoting abortion, removing rules that protect the consciences of medical workers, distributing patronage to industries the political classes like, and expanding the regulatory apparatus.  By contrast, Trump appointed pro-life judges and did other things that they hate.

But that explains only part of it.  The political classes didn’t cast a hold-your-nose vote for Obama, or even for Biden; they didn’t put up with them despite their personality, vices, or bad manners.  They admired them for these qualities.  Biden has become embarrassing to them, but not because of his crudity.

I suggested in 2020 that “it’s a class thing.”   A certain kind of oafishness is considered lovable by the political classes, and not even recognized as oafish because it is their sort of oafishness.  Another kind of oafishness is considered lovable by those whom they disdain.  Obama was a smooth rich fellow who flattered the elites.  Biden is a coarse rich fellow who sneers at the common people in the same breath as he boasts of his humble origins.  The elites think this kind of talk is merely telling it like it is.

Trump is a coarse rich fellow who flatters the common people.  Since he sneers at the elites and adopts a popular tone in doing so, it enrages them.  Though all of these rulers claim to look out for the “little guy,” the difference is that Obama and Biden styled themselves as their patrons, and viewed the “little guys” as their clients.  Trump styles himself as their benefactor, and views them as his constituents.

Some people react viscerally to one kind of oafishness, some to the other.  Very little of the reaction is about the respective vices of these politicians, though much could be said about them.  Most of it is about the respective styles of their vices.  It is very hard to wipe the smear of class from the window of judgment to see clearly.

So much I wrote then.  But there is more to say, because the “class thing” is much bigger than Donald Trump.  Let’s put it in context.

The same people who used to love the Republican and despise the Democratic Party have now flipped, for the wealthy and professional classes used to be mostly Republicans; today they are mostly Democrats.  The biggest change is that “old money” doesn’t count for much any more, because the power has shifted to new money, high-tech money.  Progressivism, understood as the ideal of rule by managerial elites who “know better,” has doubled down.  Contempt for the blue collar and middle white collar classes, otherwise known as the “deplorables,” has intensified.  People can be arrested for peacefully complaining at school board meetings, or surveilled for being religious.

Several facts have obscured the reversal in the parties’ roles.  One is that although the Democratic Party is now the party of the privileged, it still positions itself rhetorically as the defender of the marginalized.  This, despite the fact that the actual effect of its policies is to increase economic dependence rather than reduce it, establishing all sorts of classes and underclasses of governmental clients.  The second is that it retains the support of the most powerful unions, although these are no longer trade or industrial unions.  The baton has now shifted to public employee unions – who strive to make their employer still bigger, and whose officers fully accept the managerial ethos.

There is no longer any place in the Democratic Party for the deplorables to go.  However, the Republican Party bosses adhere to a milder version of the same progressive ideology that the Democrats accept.  So the deplorables have no home there either.

No wonder the deplorables are resentful.  And no wonder so many of them still admire Mr. Trump.  It’s not that they like thugs.  But if they have to be ruled by them, they would rather be ruled by their own thugs.

For your perusal, a compilation of the latest tidbits from the newspaper of what’s happenin’ now.

Self:  Actually, it is all about me.

Reality:  Thinking and saying it make it so.

Truth:  See Reality.

Sex:  Okay if it doesn’t hurt anyone.  Never hurts anyone.

Existence of God:  Doesn’t matter anyway.

Good:  What I want.

Evil, meaning 1:  What I don’t want.  Must not be done.

Evil, meaning 2:  What you don’t want.  May be done for good.  See Good.

Rights:  I get to do what I want.

Duties:  You have to let me do what I want.

Wisdom:  Knowing how to get what I want.

Justice, meaning 1:  Abolishing police. 

Justice, meaning 2:  Punishing political opponents.

Justice, meaning 3:  See Duties.

Privilege:  What I should have and you shouldn’t.

Equity:  See Privilege.

Violence:  Mostly peaceful, when committed in my cause.

Racism:  Thinking every race should be treated the same.

Voting Rights:  What dead people have in elections.

Promises:  Meaningless words that sound meaningful.

Commitment:  Not being married.

Love:  Sexual desire.

Family:  Any group of people whatsoever.

Matrimony:  Any group of people whatsoever, but with sex.

Children:  Lifestyle additions, like flatscreen TVs.

Day Care:  The golden key to childhood development.

Mothers:  Ought to be working.

Fathers:  Are dispensable.

Parents:  Need supervision by villages.

Boys:  Ought to be more like girls.

Girls:  Better version of boys.

Gender:  Whatever I want you to call me.

Women:  Some have penises, some don’t.

Men:  See Women.

Respect:   Saying what I tell you to say.

Affirmation:  See Respect.

Virtue:  Signaling that you hold the currently approved opinions.

Extremist:  Someone not holding the currently approved opinions.

Disruptive:  See Extremist.

Intolerant:  See Disruptive.

Artificial intelligence:  Soon to be the only kind.

See also:

Newspeak Dictionary

Doubleplusgood Ducktalkers

Politics and Language, Revisited

Our (Non) Racist and (Non) Sexist Constitution

So Called Inclusive Language

Why can't a woman be more like a man?

Men are so honest, so thoroughly square;

Eternally noble, historically fair;

Who, when you win, will always give your back a pat.

Well, why can't a woman be like that?

Why does every one do what the others do?

Can't a woman learn to use her head?

Why do they do everything their mothers do?

Why don't they grow up -- well, like their father instead? *

We associate the deplorable idea that women need to be more like men with male chauvinists like Professor Higgins, who sings this song in My Fair Lady.

But the song is sung by women too – especially from women who compete in historically male fields.

Consider the strange remarks of a female scientist in her letter challenging a newspaper’s interpretation of some research she had published on women in science.  The Wall Street Journal had lauded her findings that that women who apply for grants, submit journal articles, and ask for recommendation letters do just as well as men, and that women who apply for tenure-track jobs have even greater success than men.  Opining that “Women in Science Are Doing All Right,” WSJ considered this good news.

The author whose findings were reported, however, replied in the Letters column that although all that was true, women are less proportionately likely to apply for tenure-track jobs in the sciences in the first place.  She complained,

“Some may conclude, ‘That’s their choice.’  But the literature says that the major reason women Ph.D.s don’t apply to tenure-track jobs is that they look ahead to the four or five years of postdocs required in many fields and the six-year deadline to amass a tenure dossier, compare it to their biological clocks ticking away, and instead choose industry, government or nontenure-track academic jobs.  That is not ‘all right’ if we want our best and brightest, men or women, to be the ones running university research labs and educating the next generation of Ph.D.s.”

Women, you have been warned.  Accept your discipline.  It isn’t all right for you to heed your biological clock.  It isn’t all right for you to prefer a career that doesn’t foreclose the possibility of becoming a mother.  Bright scientists are so much more important than bright mothers.  Educating the next generation is so much more important than bringing it into being.

The lady’s objection is to women thinking -- like women.  Why can’t they be -- more like men?

You didn’t think feminism was about respecting women, did you?

* “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?”, a.k.a. “A Hymn to Him,” music by Frederick Loewe, lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, My Fair Lady (1964).

Related:

“Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man?”

In a previous post I commented on the attack on Aristotle’s Law of Excluded Middle – that a meaningful statement is either true or false, with no in-between.  Today I’d like to comment on the related attack on his Law of Non-Contradiction, that no meaningful statement can be both true and false, in the same sense, at the same time.  At stake is whether reality can be inconsistent.

Some claim that the possibility of inconsistent realities is proven by Schrödinger’s cat.  I am referring to a famous thought experiment in physics, in which a cat is locked in a box with a tiny bit of radioactive matter, along with a vial of poison gas, connected via a relay with a Geiger counter.  If a radioactive nucleus decays, the vial of gas is shattered and the cat dies.  If it doesn’t decay, no gas is released and the cat lives.  The claim of the contradiction-mongers is that until the box is opened and the condition of the cat is observed, the cat is both dead and not dead.

No:  Until the box is opened and the condition of the cat is observed, we simply don’t know whether it is dead or not dead.  True, the possibility that the cat is dead coexists with the possibility that it is not dead, but this in no way suggests that the dead cat coexists with the live cat.  It turns out that this was Schrödinger’s own view too!   Although the predictions of quantum theory have proven highly accurate, the notion that they show that the principle of non-contradiction can be violated is nonsense.  Unfortunately, the more outré interpretations of what is going on with the cat receive more attention from science popularizers than the sensible interpretations do. 

If we understand truth as correspondence – if the thought expressed by the proposition “Snow is white” is true if, and only if, snow is white in reality – then it is difficult to imagine what anyone who says “Snow is white, and also snow is not white” thinks he is asserting.  In fact, the statement that propositions can be both true and false would itself be both true and false.  What is one to make of that?

Moreover, it has been known for centuries that from a contradiction, literally anything can be shown to follow.  For example, if snow is white, and also snow is not white, then it follows that God exists.  And that fairies like ice cream.  And that God doesn’t exist.  And that fairies don’t eat at all.  And that it isn’t true that snow is white.  All possible inferences can be made.  This calamitous result is sometimes called “explosion.”   Given the principle of explosion, it would seem that whenever there is an inconsistency in a system of propositions, the game is up.

But can we give up the game so easily?  Sometimes, when we are dealing with enormous systems of propositions, we know that there are probably some inconsistencies in there – and we will try to get rid of them when we discover them – but in the meantime, we don’t know what they are.

This being the case, it might be helpful to develop a way to insulate the rest of the system from so-far-undiscovered inconsistencies – to cautiously keep using the system while we are trying to find them and root them out.  This is something like what computer programmers do when they try to develop programs that won’t crash every time, even though the programs inevitably still contain some bugs.

Now some people who talk about such “paraconsistent” logics speak as though they thought a proposition really could be both true and false in the same sense at the same time – which requires believing that a thing can both be and not be in the same sense at the same time.  This is called dialetheism, and to call it “badly confused” seems generous.

But sometimes people who talk about paraconsistent logics speak more as though they are trying to develop coping strategies of the sort that I mentioned in computer programming.  Their thought is merely that we may have to tolerate contradictions provisionally, while we are trying to find out what they are.  This may not be insane, and may even be important -- although perhaps it is misleading to call the development of coping strategies “logic.”  It might be more accurate to say that the goal is to protect logic from the illogic we haven’t yet caught.

Copyright © 2023 J. Budziszewski