All this reinforces my point. There is endless, and ultimately meaningless debate about what constitutes paleo vs. any other flavor of Conservatism, or any political philosophy for that matter. The people who posted on Vanguard and American Renaissance and other self-proclaimed paleo sites are the same racists (the actual same people) who spouted their bilge in my previous posts defending their positions as “true conservative”, true “paleo” thought, etc.

I find this debate meaningless, particularly when the people making the claims insist that they represent a “pure” philosophy untainted by other impure thoughts. What I’d rather focus on is the practical policy implications of their actions. If their frame of reference is race or “noble blood” first and foremost, then they’re racists regrdless of what they call themselves, or how “pure” their philosophical reasoning is.

Yes, every society has these behaviors. Elevating them to a philosophy discussion only distorts what they are.

Dr. Jackson: You said, “…the Truth is the Truth independent of whatever categories or classification systems man creates.” This in effect says Truth is external to man. However, a great number have fallen for the Great Lie that “what’s true for you is not necessarily true for me.” Such a claim is so mind-numbingly stupid that it is mystifying how anyone with a functioning brain could fall for it even for a moment.

Keep up the good work.

I suggest you read the Wikipedia entry on paleoconservatism. It has been updated recently and is quite good. Esp. the top half which is the most recently updated part I believe. I would be interested in what part of it you object to.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoconservative

Vanguard is not paleo. They are white nationalist.

Eli,

I suspect paleos recognize that most assumptions are culturally based more so than most. That is why they reject universalistic schemes. But please point out to me any society that does not have expected behaviors and any society that does not recognize the mother child bond.

For all the ways to think, this is what you have carefully chosen.

And there’s nothing wrong with that, up front.

“Almost everyone recognizes that people have a greater obligation to those closest to them…” Culturally based assumption number one.

“An essential part of every civilized society is an expectation of certain behavior…” Culturally based assumption number two.

“…the one universal element of every human society is the mother/child bond…no one generally disputes this.” Culturally based assumption number three.

Please recognize that the human-populated world is an old place; many ideas and held beliefs have come and gone… Long before you and I existed, there were many others, and their ways of living were not the same. They were not more right or more wrong. Each of us is responsible for ourselves. We must carefully guard our tongues.

It never fails to amaze me that people are confident enough in their beliefs to justify assumptions such as these. Has it never occurred to them that perhaps it is inherently wrong to think that they are justified as such? Especially for the Christian or similar belief-holder, shouldn’t they say that they are only justified if it is God Who justifies them? In the Bible it warns against judgement of any kind, for that is the judgement you shall receive… Apparently no one takes this to heart, because we do so when we make such assumptions. I fear for us all.

Love,
Eli

When I said I didn’t care if I was called a Liberal, that was a rhetorical statement!

In all seriousness, I agree that words do matter insofar as they are used to communicate specific ideas. However what I find distracting is the co-mingling of man-made “truths” with objective Truths.

It is okay to debate whether an idea or concept fits into a particular political/philosophical tradition. This, though, has nothing to do with whether or not an objective Truth has been identified. Take the issue of slavery. You can be completely logical and 100% consistent in your reasoning as Aristotle was, but if you base your analysis on the belief that there are only 4 basic elements (earth, water, air, and fire), and see that family bloodlines are important because most people live and die within miles of where they were born (unless off on a military expedition), then your “logical conclusions” about the natural state of human slavery are flawed. You haven’t discovered an objective Truth. You’ve simply made sense of the world as best you can given your flawed understanding of it.

I’ve never been a fan of pure philosophy for this reason. It’s an exercise in mental masturbation, because it presumes that there is something objectively correct about what, in fact, are nothing more than human assumptions about reality. So what if the Declaration of Independence draws from Tradition A or Philosophy B? The key issue is, are Rights it talks about bestowed by God, or by man? That’s the fundamental question. Everything else is a side issue.

For example, if I answer that Rights are bestowed by God, and you or someone else says that makes me an “enlightened liberal”, so what? Because I’ve been tagged with that when I think I’m actually a traditional Conservative, does it mean that I have to now adopt other “enlightened liberal” philosophies to be consistent, or reject this notion because it may not precisely fit with the definition of a paleo-conservative (as some racist pseudo-intellectual defined it after selectively pulling out bits and pieces of Aristotelian logic?)

Have a look at the trilogy of essays I wrote a while ago dealing with Racism on the Right. Please know that I’m not applying any of this to you, but paleo-conservatism, as defined and allegedly practiced by these self-anointed Defenders of the Faith, is little more than thinly disguised racism. You said that “Paleos believe that part of the problem with modernity is that it suffers from an excess of elaborate theorizing.” I completely agree. The paleos who expressed themselves in the previous essays I spoke of reject any notion of intellectual debate. They couldn’t form a coherent, non-racist-driven thought in their heads to save their life. They use the mantle of past philosophers and pseudo science to justify an undisguised racism. Have a look at one of their websites http://www.vanguardnewsnetwork.com/?p=1090 where they commented on this debate. The Vanguard slogan, by the way, is “No Jews. Just Right.”

Again, please understand that I am not automatically disparaging you or anyone else who may identify with what is presumed to be “paleo-conservative” philosophy. But understand that the practical application of this so-called philosophy is a thinly masked effort to justify racism under the guise of “true conservative thought”. And people who take the bait and argue whether the Declaration of Independence, etc, is tainted by improper philosophical thought fall into the trap of assuming that if a philosophy can be shown to be “pure”, it is “true”, and if it is “tainted”, it must be “flawed”.

This is why I intuitively reject attempts to categorize people based on some purist notion of political philosophy. I routinely employ the term “Liberal” not to relate back to a coherent set of ideas (in fact, there aren’t any modern day Liberal philosophies — just emotions), but as a shorthand way to describe people I just wrote about in my “Random Thoughts” and “Loony Liberal Chronicles” essays. It’s their actions and conclusions about policy options that characterize them, not whether they invoke Locke, or Weaver, or Aristotle, or any other political philosopher or philosophy.

I’d rather look at the ideas that are being debated and apply them to a philosophical or strategic discussion that focuses on the substance of what is being proposed, not its relationship to other philosophical arguments. This means looking first and foremost at what is “True”, and then seeing how closely other philosophies come to expressing or protecting that Truth.

This is why the abortion debate is so screwed up in this country. Abortion opponents suffer from the past actions of well-meaning Christian activists whose actions gave abortion proponents the opening they needed to get rid of any moral constraints on political actions. The “liberalism” of the so-called mainstream Christian community you spoke about today is not a product of political philosophy. It’s part of a secular interest the Catholic Church has in becoming “more relevant” to the world today to keep from losing parishioners. Instead of becoming more relevant by doing the hard thing — i.e. avoiding mixing religious beliefs with universal moral beliefs (the two often coincide, but are not synonymous: praising Jesus is not the same thing as praising God), and stressing aspects of human behavior that lead to productive lives, they took the cheap way out. They got rid of organs and Latin and introduced guitars and English into the service … as if this means something important. These were stupid tactics designed to address a fundamental problem. It speaks volumes about the inanity of Church leaders, but contributes nothing to a debate about proper religious or political philosophy.

Conversely, since there is a universal moral code that can’t be argued away, abortion proponents must play with the language to define a 19 week 6 day old developing baby as a tissue mass, while accepting that a 20 week old bay is a proto-human, and not bestowing full humanity on the object in question until the umbilical cord is severed. More bilge disguised as rational thought.

I’d also suggest that “natural law” has nothing to do with religion. Keeping the Sabbath, for example, is not part of the universal moral code or any natural law. I haven’t been to Church in 30 years except to get married, see someone get married, or see someone get buried. Yet I am adamantly anti-abortion. John Kerry goes to Church every Sunday, and he thinks killing unborn babies is just fine. Do you know what this tells us about Jackson and Kerry in relation to who is better attuned to the “natural law”? Absolutely nothing. But it does speak volumes about who is better attuned to the universal moral code handed down by God.

All of this is a long way of saying that words do matter. But the words should be used to get to the objective Truth of a matter (as I’m trying to do here), rather than content ourselves with analyzing whether Thought A fits Tradition X, and therefore can be called “Y” instead of a spin-off of “Z” — as if any of this really matters.

Regards,

Phil

1. People create language, which they use to describe the world and themselves in it.

2. Eventually, they use the language they created to categorize and classify things according to some initial criteria they themselves developed.

3. This criteria is used to judge any subsequent analysis/classification in terms of how closely it conforms to a given “fundamental truth” as defined in #2.

4. “Truth” therefore becomes a simple calculation: how closely do all subsequent analysis and classifications conform to this initial man-made classification/analysis?

This is why people spend endless hours debating who and who isn’t a paleo-conservative, or a “true conservative”, or whether the Declaration of Independence was tainted by impure thoughts, or other similar meaningless bilge. I say meaningless, because it ties back to what man himself has decided a “fundamental truth” is, not what, objectively, that “fundamental truth” might actually be.

Discovering “truth” isn’t a strategic political debate, or a debate about semantics, or a debate about different theologies or secular philosophies. In fact, it requires us to look beyond man-made classifications when arguing whether Action “A” is proper/moral/correct — or “true”.

So I have a simple question. I don’t care whether the answer puts me into a Liberal, Conservative (Paleo or otherwise), Nihilist, Atavist, Anarcho-Syndicalist, Communist, or “name-your-classification” category, because the Truth is the Truth independent of whatever categories or classification systems man creates.

If, as a general principle, “The primary purpose of man is to worship and serve God”, then just how does aborting a developing human child serve this purpose?

If we start with this question and work from there to find the answer, it won’t make any difference what one self-identified philosophical camp thinks about the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence, or whether the answer follows a particular strain of Conservative thought. These are side issues that can help focus the debate — but they aren’t the debate.

So in the end, who cares whether the doctrine of “natural rights” is inherently liberal and extremely problematic. Just tell me why God thinks it’s okay, or even advisable, to worship Him by terminating a healthy, developing baby when the life of the mother isn’t at stake?

As a side note, regarding the strategy and tactics discussion of Dr. Phillip’s essay concerning the “minimal policy gains” of the pro-life movement, I dealt with this at length in my essay “What kind of car would Jesus drive to take his girlfriend to an abortion clinic?” It is a question of strategy and tactics, but not necessarily the way Dr. Phillips framed the debate. Briefly —

What has allowed elective abortion to supplant slavery as a national indignation is a combination of the factors I addressed above — self-interest, rationalization, hidden agendas — but something else too. Those who took the “moral high ground” in sparking this debate had their own set of vested interests and hidden agendas. Beginning with prayer in public schools and other public institutions, they took key provisions of the Declaration of Independence and substituted their own religious preferences for “God” so that paying homage to “Jesus,” not following a God-given moral code, became the focus of their efforts.

Because of this approach, moral Relativists were able to seize the debate and frame their core issues in a deceitful way. Since Religion A claims to speak for God, and the Constitution forbids the state to establish an official religion, then both Religion A and the God it speaks for must be completely removed from the secular world. This logic prevailed because the Constitution is not the Declaration of Independence, and drawing inspiration and support from God is not the same thing as making laws that reflect God’s rules as expressed by a particular religion. It didn’t matter if what Christians believed perfectly matched 95% of the beliefs of every other religion. The Constitution, though inspired by God-given rights, was still man’s law. And man’s law did not permit the establishment of an official state religion.

By hijacking God and linking Him to a battle to promote their values, not only did the Christian community lose their fight, it allowed the notion of “God” — the basis for their claim — to be wiped out with it. This then led to an even more determined fight to infuse “politics with religion.” Relativists became even more relative to prevent their opponent’s success, and as the Relativists carried the fight to its relativistic extreme, atrocities like abortion on demand became the law of the land.

This, ultimately, explains why a concept like abortion could take hold and flourish in a society that condemns human right abuses, and even passes laws against cruelty to animals, but it will allow a healthy 20-year old developing child to be killed without the same level of due process it demands for suspected mass murders and captured terrorists.

Education, not confrontation, is the way to expose the relativist thinking that goes against the common moral code to rationalize abortion. We need to return the definition of “harm” to a practical level that is universally true in every example. This means defining harm in a way that does not allow Relativist distractions to confuse preferences, opinions, or desires with other examples of true harm. If the example we give is indeed universally true, then working backwards we can re-engage a debate that falsely labels a developing fetus as anything other than an innocent human being.

For abortion, the fight begins by validating whether the Declaration of Independence ‘got it right’ when attributing its underlying morality to God, instead of man. The answer to this question carries great implications for not only America, but for all societies under every conceivable social, political, economic or religious system.

Answering it will also bring out the true nature of Islamo-fascism. Where abortionists draw their justification from man-made laws, not a God-based morality, Islamo-fascists accept the fact that God created a common moral code, but claim to have the exclusive right to interpret and enforce it.

The reason that Islamo-fascists view themselves as the ultimate arbiter of morality is obvious. What is less obvious is the insidious way replacing God with man-made “Rights” brings us to the same outcome. Instead of blowing up a school bus full of children and killing them all at once, abortion kills these innocent human beings one-by-one.

Phillip Ellis Jackson, Ph.D.

Actually J.D. said that.

I’m glad you piped in. I have been working on this article for a while, but one of the reasons I decided to submit it to IC is because I thought this perspective was sorely needed after I read your and Dr. Carmine’s debate on the existence of a universal moral code. While my article does not specifically address a universal moral code, your debate with Dr. Carmine is exactly the kind of thing I had in mind when I said that the current debate boils down to “two Enlightenment liberals” arguing with each other. Esp. Dr. Carmine who invoked the idea of a “contract” when discussing the parent/child relationship. The parent child bond is akin to a contract? Yeah right. If that is not an example of abstract theorizing disconnected from reality, I don’t know what is.

Paleos believe that part of the problem with modernity is that it suffers from an excess of elaborate theorizing. That is why conservatives look to tradition, history, culture, etc. for our guide. Perhaps all those old folks were on to something before a bunch of smarty pants philosophizers came along telling them how they were doing everything wrong, how their society was unjust, etc.

I have no objection to the concept of natural law natural such as two of the issues that I referred to, the mother child relationship and the incest taboo. But as a Christian I believe the natural law is limited. Due to the fallen nature of man, some law comes to us via revelation. Keep the Sabbath Holy, for example.

Re. language: language and words do matter. Not only is discussion of who is and is not a conservative not “meaningless bilge” it is essential. If a bunch of liberals have hijacked the “conservative movement” and started calling themselves and their program conservative, then setting the record strait is an essential precondition to reclaiming the authentic brand that has been hijacked. (And I am not just referring to neoconservatism per se. I am also referring to the whole post-War modern conservative movement that in the name of practicality and electability sacrificed all principle and became social democracy light.)

As far as tactics, I take it you believe that attaching the moral issues specifically to Christianity instead of to a more broadly understood universal moral code was a mistake. I would actually argue exactly the opposite. The problem is that traditional Christianity has been emasculated by its acquiescence to a more politically correct religious pluralism. (Religious pluralism is a liberal concept, by the way.) Liberalism is everywhere and always the enemy of traditional Christianity and traditional society in general. The two can not be reconciled, or perhaps it would be more accurate to state they can only be reconciled in a limited way.

I think you are forcing your perspective on the Scriptures. As I review the Bible I see a lot regarding the treatment of aliens and neighbors and aliens as well as laws governing family relationships. Many laws had a secular purpose, some had a spiritual significance, but all established the boundaries in interpersonal relationships that we now call rights.

I think you are a little premature in your assessment that I am proving your case, sir.

You said, “I am fairly certain that you will find no reference to “rights” in the Scriptures…” and I provided you one. Do you want to move the goal posts again?