A hopeful view of hope

With the election only days away, every blogger, now matter how unqualified, must record his or her thoughts on the candidates. Since an Obama victory seems likely, I would like to offer an optimistic take on what will happen if the candidate of change and hope takes the oval office.

My guess is that he will not lead effectively, because he has no record of leading effectively. In the past, he has been controlled by the far left edge of the Democratic agenda, and that will probably remain true. So he will boldly and prophetically enact any number of hair-raisingly bad laws and policies, aided and indeed directed by his democratic congress. The age of entitlement will begin.

As liberal as Americans are, we are not as a group ready for socialism quite yet, so too much too fast may cause the frog to jump out of the water. Voters will be horrified by the extremism of the far left, and we will get a "swing effect" at the next election, to the benefit--God willing--of someone more insightful than John McCain. This swing effect will be augmented by the fact that the Democrats will controll the entire federal government for four years, and so every problem that arises within the four years will be perceived by voters as the Democrats' fault, whether or not the accusation is fair.

But will damage done by four years of Obama outweight the good of Democratic implosion? That depends almost entirely on the republican candidate four years from now: if we get a dynamic and principled leader, then he will use the momentum of the swing to undo the wreckage and even improve the nation; if we get a politician-at-heart figurehead whose virtue is a lack of vice, then we will be one step further down the road to serfdom.

Prophecy and fulfilment

Look at this and then at that. Five minutes into the future, indeed.

If a car were assembled by chance....

Bunthorne posted some interesting thoughts about natural teleology. I posted a long response on his blog, but then realized that I had essentially written my own blog post about natural ordering towards an end. It surrounds the question of whether a car assembled by chance would have a natural ordering towards an end.

I would say not. If a car came to be by random processes, what it would have is an order, but not an order to an end; or perhaps I should say that it would have an order towards a motion, but not an order towards an end, if that makes any sense at all.

I have two reasons for saying this.

First, only a mind can intend the good, and so only a mind can make an ordering towards an end. This is the foundation of Thomas’s 5th way. If no mind made the car, it would have a foundation for order towards an end–namely order–but it would not have actual ordering towards an end.

Second, a car is not a single substance and so does not have a good. The motion towards which the car has an order is not a good for the car, and so someone else whose good it is has to enter into the equation before the car’s motion can be considered an end.

Folks like Searle thing of a plant as like a car, that is, as a multitude of substances rather than as a single substance. Because of this, they do not think of the plant as having a good. Because of this, they do not think of the plant’s order towards a motion as ordering towards a good. Because of this, they do not perceive that a mind must stand behind the plant. Because of this, they fail to perceive the existence of God.

(Perhaps that last paragraph was overly ambitious, but it was rhetorically pleasing, so I did it.)

The reason people think of plants as multiple substances is because of a trick of the imagination. Everything we think of a part–part of a plant, part of a human, part of anything else–we imagine it, and our imaginations necessarily present that part to us as though it were a whole. Then we think of the parts of the parts as though they were wholes, and the cycle never ends. There is no ultimate substance for the imagination.

I forgot the name....

OK, the figure in that last post was supposed to reside in the line "Nothing says nothing like nothing", i.e., in the use of the word "nothing" in more than one sense, but I forgot the name for the figure. That's what I get for taking so long to post again!

Much ado about nothing

Turning again to the American Heritage Dictionary, we learn that a noun is "The part of speech that is used to name a person, place, thing, quality, or action and can function as the subject or object of a verb, the object of a preposition, or an appositive."

This definition seems complete at first glance; everything fits under one of the categories "person, place, thing, quality, or action", and nothing falls outside of them. This is good. The problem is that nothing does fall outside of those categories, and the same dictionary classifies "nothing" as a noun! The whole point of a word like "nothing" is to name "no thing", to name no person, place, quality or action.

One final riddle for the dictionary people. Nothing says nothing like "no-thing". But if a word says nothing at all, how can it even be a word?

Cutting it short

To get directly to the point: the figure for last post was diacope, Greek for "cutting through", meaning repetition with only a word or two between: "nonsense, sheer, utter nonsense...."

My guest and I drained a bottle of wine over good conversation tonight. On the one hand, the wine was "The 7 Deadly Zins"; on the other hand, my guest was a priest, so it all balanced out. Between the wine and the priest, time has slipped away for writing even the briefest, the most useless and the briefest of posts.

Useless verbage

As I attempt to resurrect this blog and its project, I realize that I need to focus on what is (a) useless and (b) short. Otherwise I will not post at this season in my life, which is fall heading into winter but still recovering from summer with a touch of spring fever.

Today's utterly useless fact: according to the American Heritage Dictionary, a verb is "the part of speech that expresses existence, action, or occurrence in most languages."

This is nonsense, sheer, brazen nonsense. "Existence", "action", and "occurence" are all nouns! Clearly, words that express existence, action, or occurence are not thereby verbs.

Can you mix regulation with anti-regulation, captain?

It's a great time to know nothing about economics. Everyone who knows something about economics seems to lose sleep, sell all their stocks, and write long, grouchy blog posts about who is to blame.

What puzzles me most, in the abyss of my ignorance, are the accusations that John McCain is anti-regulatory and therefore represents what caused the current catastrophe. Setting aside the facts of the case, I wish one of my more intelligent readers could tell me what the accusation means. As far I can tell, the central lack of regulation behind the crisis (leaving aside the Fannie Mae and Fannie Mac issues as well as American's general lack of self-regulation) was that rating agencies were allowed to sign off on junk. I recently read an article explaining how the rating agencies would actually take fees in return for tips on how to artificially inflate the rating of a bad investment! (But I can't find the link now.)

Outlawing that kind of thing is surely a kind of regulation we could all agree on, right? That lying is always bad, that is, and especially so in financial transactions?

My question: What kind of regulation is John McCain against that makes him so bad? Research into his voting record doesn't seem to turn up an answer.