Category Archives: Rationalism

David Hume Tower in Edinburgh was always an insult to the philosopher. The great man of the Scottish Enlightenment would have been horrified to have seen the concrete monstrosity erected and named after him in the 1960s. Looking at the building you do not think of the Enlightenment. More common impressions left are the stench of urine and despair. Thus had the authorities of the University of Edinburgh already insulted one of their finest sons.

Then in 2020, all dead white males came into the crossfires of a cultural revolutionary wave. Politicians, tradesmen, philosophers and others were all found guilty of the crimes of being dead, white and male. Unforgivable crimes, naturally. As a result statues were torn down, plaques removed and more. All because people from the past were found guilty of not thinking exactly as we do in the 2020s.

What made it worse was that the adults kept giving in. And nowhere did they give in faster than at the University of Edinburgh. David Humes work was crucial in moving our society out of the realm of superstition and into that of reason and rationalism. But in one fatal footnote to one fatal essay Hume said something that is certainly by modern standards racist.

I doubt any of his critics had ever read any of Humes works. Or at least, my strong suspicion is that they did not stumble upon this footnote during a routine read-through of Humes collected works. Outrage culture does not work like that.

But soon, searching for victims, the mob was after Hume, deemed him a racist and insisted his name be removed from the University of Edinburgh building. So it came to pass that the university authorities changed the building name to 40 George Square. A name which is still far more poetic than the building in question.

And there it lay. Another victim of the latter-day culture war I described in my most recent book, The War on the West. But as I also pointed out there, these things can have unintended consequences. Weak, pusillanimous and ignorant officials, like those who lead most of our universities, thought it would be the easiest thing imaginable to spit on the memory of David Hume. Yet, as the Telegraph reported this week, there has in fact been a downside for them.

It turns out that in the wake of their auto-cancellation the University of Edinburgh saw a slump in donations. Indeed, the university lost almost 2million, including 24 donations and 12 legacy donations that have either been cancelled, amended or withdrawn since the cancellation of Hume.

Personally, I am delighted to see this. David Hume is a figure that the university should take immense pride in. Naturally, working 250 years ago, he held some views that we do not hold today. Just as we doubtless hold views today that our successors will not hold in another 250 years.

But the point of institutions is not to judge the past and act as judge, jury and executioner over it. Nor is it to erase the past. The job of institutions is to preserve the past, educate the young about it and then pass that education along. In that process continuity is vital, so that a student today might realise that they could achieve even a portion of the heights of those who went before them. Judge a man on one footnote and who should scape whipping (as Hamlet put it)?

So I am glad that the University of Edinburgh is getting a beating of its own because of its cowardly and ignorant cancellation. I hope other donors at other universities follow suit. Giving in to mobs, to mob pressure, or the insistences of the most ignorant in society are the precise things that universities should never do. Now at least another institution has learnt that the hard way.

If you are an institution and do not stand up for the past then there is no reason why anyone in the present should stand up for you.

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Edinburgh University is learning the hard way that there's a price to pay for going woke - The Telegraph

The Christian Structure of Politics: On the De Regno of Thomas Aquinas, by William McCormick, S.J. (The Catholic University of America Press, 2022), 272 pages.

Is there any contemporary relevance in De Regno, a thirteenth-century instructional manual on politics written by St. Thomas Aquinas for the young Norman prince of Cyprus? William McCormick thinks there is. Better known as On Kingship, it is the longest and only stand-alone practical treatment of politics by St. Thomas (12251274), yet it has attracted only sporadic interest from commentators over the centuries. More attention has been devoted to the better-known scholarly treatises of medieval Christendoms deepest thinker.

McCormick believes this neglect of De Regno is unjustified. The manual, he contends, offers a sustained rejection of civil religion and theocracy based on a theology of history not found anywhere else in Thomass corpus of writing. While it contains a desacralization of monarchy, the Christian ruler is characterized as a minister Dei under the church. Aristotelian political naturalism is affirmed while the differences between divine and human government are delineated. The familiar characteristics of tyranny listed here may remind readers of the perennial dangers of political despotism. How we are to deal with tyrants takes up only a small part of a text that covers many topics fundamental to the study of politics.

McCormicks scholarly study of De Regno argues that Thomas intended to provide a pedagogical toolnot a treatisefor the intellectual and moral edification of a head of state. The text, he notes, is an example of the practical application of theology. The author of The Christian Structure of Politics, a Jesuit priest and political scientist at St. Louis University, contends that the writing of De Regno was a political act by Thomas intended to win favor from the Cypriot king on behalf of his Dominican religious order whose missions were expanding into the Levant.

McCormick disputes the claim that Thomas wrote a book of political theology, since appeals to history far outnumber scriptural references to kingship. Scripture by no means uniformly praises monarchy, and Aristotle, upon whom Thomas relies heavily, recognized the legitimacy of alternative forms of government. The author singles out for praise Robert Kraynak, whose scholarship locates where Thomas approves of various regimes based on prudential considerations. In other words, all legitimate political systems have strengths and weaknesses. Why then does Thomas favor monarchy uncritically in De Regno? The author contends that he wants to predispose the king to take the duties of his royal office seriously. By exalting the kingly office, says McCormick, Thomas is deepening the kings obligations to justice. [H]is elevation of monarchy is a rhetorical strategy, not a philosophical blindspot.

Because politics is a natural activity, the king is not a minister of the church though he is a minster of God (Rom 13:1) and therefore subject to God. According to Thomas, just kings are minsters of God when they serve the common good. He follows Aristotle by elevating the nobility of politics beyond anything St. Augustine said in The City of God, in which the government is described as nothing more than a band of robbers. That being said, Thomass indictment of tyranny can be interpreted as a concession to Augustines darker vision of politics. Thomas knows that tyrants use fear and excessive force against their people to accumulate power and personal wealth. While the proper response is not tyrannicide, he admits that such unstable regimes are often overthrown. We should not expect perfection, however. Even the best regimes are flawed. An accurate understanding of human nature guards against political utopianism.

One of the achievements of Christianity was to secure the independence of the church from the state. The final spiritual end of manbeatitudeis the responsibility of the church, a distinct spiritual government, not the state. On matters of religion, writes Thomas, kings must be subject to priests. Thus we are to give Caesar the things that are Caesars and to God the things that are Gods (Mk 12:17). There is no explicit relationship between church and state prescribed in De Regno. This, says McCormick, allows Aquinas to valorize the integrity of politics for the king, but also to emphasize the superiority of the church regardless of the political conditions.

Gelasian dualismnamed after Pope Gelasius I (d. 496)distinguishes between the temporal and spiritual powers and gives primacy to the spiritual. The intellectual roots of dualism come from Aristotle, argues McCormick, while the superiority of the spiritual comes from Augustine. Thomas combined both into a coherent philosophy of politics but failed to satisfy objections from younger contemporaries such as John of Paris (12551306) and Giles of Rome (12431316). Lively debates like these debunk modern stereotypes that portray medieval Christendom as intellectually uniform. While Thomas does condemn civil religion and theocracy, elsewhere he does not oppose material assistance from the state on behalf of the spiritual mission of the church. McCormick gives these other writings of Thomas scant attention. Even in De Regno, he fails to draw obvious conclusions. For example, if De Regno really is a political document intended to curry favor from a Cypriot king, we might at least expect a request for armed security for the Dominican missions in the crusader-held territories of the Middle East. Practically speaking, what does it mean for the prince to defer to priests on matters of religion?

Gelasian dualism as advocated by Thomas was a direct challenge to civil religion that for millennia placed the responsibility of religion in the hands of temporal magistrates. McCormick rightly observed that civil religion is an enduring feature of human community, but he mischaracterizes as advocacy modern examples of Catholic resistance. Crown and Altar arrangements advanced by Joseph de Maistre (17531821) had nothing to do with divine-right-of-kings ideology famously advocated by Thomas Hobbes (15881679) on behalf of an Anglican Stuart monarch. De Maistre was a critic of the ancien regime and its Gallican articles as much as he was of the French revolutionaries of 1789. Those four articles imposed on the French church by Louis XIV in 1682 were, in De Maistres words, the most miserable rag in ecclesiastical history. McCormick rightly describes the medieval roots of modern Gallicanism as an early attempt by the French monarchy to found a Christian civil religion. He further reminds us that De Regno contains one of the most trenchant rejections of civil religion within Christianity. On this score, De Maistre, the father of ultramontanism, was more faithful to the Thomistic tradition than a string of pontiffs who had over centuries concede their spiritual sovereignty to the state.

To what extent do these early debates matter to contemporary political arrangements? McCormick believes, based on an analysis by Jacob Levy, that the dualism advanced by Thomas directly challenges the liberal rationalism that increasingly dominates modern political life. The rationalism that originates from modern contract theory is not pluralistic and therefore denies dualism. Institutions that assert their sovereignty from the state are not tolerated. The church, therefore, is just one of many private institutions that are subordinate to a kind of modern monism that mirrors pre-Christian political arrangements. Rationalism favors rights of conscience over institutional rights and applies liberal standards to intermediate groups to prevent them from becoming sources of resistance to liberal hegemony.

Two recent Supreme Court cases might help to illustrate the conflict between earlier twentieth-century precedent that sought to restrict religious liberty under an ahistorical and unconstitutional wall of separation doctrine justified by modern liberal rationalism and the current majoritys preference for religious pluralism embodied in the First Amendment. The Courts holding in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District allows voluntary religious expression on public property, while its holding in Carson v. Makin permits spending public money on parochial schools as long as the funds are distributed equitably.

McCormick argues that liberal pluralism is compatible with, though not identical to, the dualism advanced in De Regno. The medieval aspiration to social pluralism provides a basis for a Christian rapprochement with modern liberal pluralism. The liberty of the church in McCormicks view should be upheld by pluralists as a bulwark against overweening rationalism or statism. Religious freedom is always at risk as long as rationalism is an inherent characteristic of modern liberalism. Furthermore, a weak pluralism will not protect libertas ecclesiae from the danger of rationalism. Therefore, it is incumbent upon religious believers to defend liberal pluralism against its evil twin rationalism.

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The worlds centers of power, especially in the West, are increasingly hostile to organized religion in general and Christianity in particular. The only practical recourse for religious believers living under this threat is to uphold and protect the principle of religious liberty. It is the pluralistic element of modern liberalism that McCormack believes is compatible with the Catholic philosophical tradition given expression in De Regno. However, there are pitfalls and dangers associated with modern liberalism not fully explored in McCormicks study. A franker discussion of the intense debates among Catholic scholars over philosophical liberalism in the years leading up to the Second Vatican Council (19625) would have provided an opportunity to explore this subject in greater detail. The Councils declaration on religious liberty, Dignitatis Humanae, left many questions unanswered.

That being said, this debate over the danger posed to faith from secular liberalism is also an ecumenical concern by no means confined to the Catholic intellectual tradition. Despite these philosophical objections, religious believers have few options. The Western church has lost much of its political clout and cultural influence and must now work within the parameters drawn by its ideological foes. If liberal pluralism is the only recourse for religious believers, it must be preserved. Therefore, it is incumbent upon them to use all the intellectual resources at their disposal to ensure its continued longevity. William McCormicks study can help Christians in particular apply the insights of one of Christendoms greatest theologians to our contemporary political debates over how best to salvage what is valuable in liberal modernity.

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Aquinas and the State - The American Conservative

Its somewhat fashionable in conservative circles these days to decry the twin influence of French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. They are blamed for laying the intellectual foundations for the moral relativism, anti-rationalism, anti-Westernism and narcissistic identity politics that blight society today. The grievance politics of Black Lives Matter and the belligerent and weird otherworldliness of the transgender movement are supposedly their legacy the consequence of Foucaults philosophy that truths are mere masks for ubiquitous power, and of Derridas idea that the meaning of words and texts are fundamentally unstable. Both told us that reality is plastic and objectivity is an illusion, it is argued.

Jordan Peterson certainly believes this. Indeed, he is partly responsible for disseminating this idea. In an interview with the Telegraph earlier this month, we were reminded that Peterson thinks Derrida is a trickster whose postmodern and neo-Marxist theories now threaten not only free speech but also the very foundations of Western democracy. Meanwhile, Peterson reserves a special contempt for Foucault, in the words of the Telegraph interviewer.

But are these really the twin demons we should blame for our culture-war woes and wokery?

It may well be true that Foucaults beliefs in power being invisible and all-pervasive and in knowledge being merely the consequence of power (ie, might equals right) have had a baleful influence. Safe spaces, trigger warnings, systemic and institutional racism are arguably his legacy here as is the idea that white people are doing bad things without you or they realising it. But when it comes to identity politics, Foucault would be aghast at the certitudes of todays social-justice warriors.

Whereas the racial essentialists and transgender campaigners of today are intoxicated with the notion that their identities are fixed, immutable and sacrosanct, Foucault thought identities were malleable and essentially artificial.

Foucault saw the Western subject not as a timeless entity, but as a specific event. My objective, he said in 1982, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subject. Who we are is frequently determined by others. Throughout history, he argued, objectification has come in dividing practices, in which the state determines and classifies people as insane, criminal, sick, mad or homosexual.

Thus, not only did Foucault reject the idea of concrete identities and categories as a chimera he also resisted them, seeing them often as a means of oppression. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same, Foucault declared in 1969, leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order.

Even the identities we ostensibly assume by ourselves are determined by parameters created from outside. Foucault called this subjectification The way a human being turns him or herself into a subject. Here Foucault would recognise LGBT+ as a vestige of a previous era in which it was commonplace to divide, rationalise and classify people as normal or deviant according to their sexuality. Foucault would have seen no need to divide people between straight and other, or for LGBT+ people to have their own flag and month of celebration.

Foucaults antipathy towards the self, in both the political and the personal spheres, explains why he was politically tolerant and, strangely enough, classically liberal. Foucault venerated doubt, which opens the mind to new possibilities. Our culture worships righteousness, which closes down the mind. Our society is in thrall to ethnic box-ticking, bureaucratic managerialism and categorisation. Foucault regarded categories as cages.

Michel Foucault questioned the accepted truths and the power exerted by elites. In these times of suffocating wokery from above, Foucaults spirit of dissent is something we should embrace.

Jacques Derrida also had the virtue of teaching us to think differently, to question texts and cast a scrupulous eye on the words presented to us. When language is policed and manipulated with vigilance and censure, as it is at the moment, Derridas scepticism should also be the order of the day.

He is useful as an aid in detecting how ideologically motivated deception is employed in everyday discourse. So learn to know the difference between pregnant person and pregnant woman, white privilege and the privilege of rich white people, anti-European and anti-EU, institutional racism and no empirical evidence of racism.

Derridas project of deconstruction to explore and excavate the meaning of words and the context they are presented in was not undertaken to dismantle or bring down the Western canon, as many of his devotees and detractors believe, but to better understand it. I love very much everything that I deconstruct, he said in 1979. Platos signature is not yet finished nor is Nietzsches, nor is St Augustines. It is worth rereading these texts and others, he argued, because when you reread a book, it reads differently each time.

Derrida is correct here that the meanings of texts and words are unstable. Consider salutations, with which he had a special obsession. When you say How do you do? or Hows it going?, you arent asking after a friends health or wellbeing. You are just saying Hello, but in different words, without actually saying Hello.

Like Foucault, Derrida was opposed to certitudes. Both rejected Marxism as a political enterprise. Neither believed in reason, agency or the individual. So such talk of neo-Marxism or cultural Marxism is tosh. Foucault and Derrida were free thinkers beyond categorisation.

The brilliant and affable left-wing comedian Mark Steel tweeted last week: Thanks to all the people who send lovely messages on here It puts the angry shouty people into perspective, and confirms my view that 99 per cent of people are delightful, and only one per cent are steaming dingbats who could do with a slap.

This encapsulates both why I think hes great and why I think his politics are wrong. He sees the best in people. But if you always see the best in people, you let your guard down. This is why its better to be a pessimist. Its preferable to lock your door at night than to leave it wide open.

Pride was purportedly dedicated to June, but it is still going on this week. The television schedules are still filled with Pride documentaries and rainbow flags are still up on corporate social-media profiles.

Its a bit like those Soviet party conferences in which no one wanted to be the first to stop applauding Stalin for fear of the dreaded consequences. Who will be the first heretic to stop this mandatory gushing and fawning?

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, is published by Societas.

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Jordan Peterson is wrong about the postmodernists - Spiked

The Indian law enforcement authorities made a major breakthrough on July 1 this year after they apprehended the murderer of Hindu blogger Ananta Vijay Das.

Identified as Faisal Ahmed, he has been on the run from the law enforcement authorities since 2015. Following his arrest from the Bommanhalli area in Bengaluru, he was taken to Kolkata on July 3.

The arrest was made by the Kolkata police, which also obtained information about his radical activities in the country. Faisal will now be handed over to the Bangladesh police.

While speaking about the development, Bangladesh Anti-Terrorism Unit (ATU) DIG Moniruzzaman conceded that the authorities had information that Faisal was residing illegally in India.

He stated that the Indian law enforcement authorities were apprised about the matter and necessary documents were provided to confirm his identity, prior to Faisals arrest.

Reportedly, the Bangladeshi authorities provided Faisals mobile number to the Kolkata police. Using call records, it was found that he was staying in Bengaluru.

Once a medical student, Faisal was at the forefront of spreading jihadist ideology under the pretext of teaching in madrassas. He has also been involved with Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), affiliated with Islamist terror outfit Al-Qaeda.

During interrogation, it came to light that he was at the helm of organising the Al-Qaeda module in the Barak Valley of Assam. He admitted to fleeing to Silchar from Bangladesh in 2015 and making a fake voter ID card by the name of Shahid Majumdar.

He also acquired a passport, where his house address has been traced to Mizoram. Faisal was also successful in procuring a drivers licence from Bengaluru. The terrorist however cried foul and denied any involvement in the murder of Hindu blogger Ananta Vijay Das.

According to the Special Superintendent of Anti-Terrorism Unit Aslam Khan, Faisal Ahmed will be extradited to Bangladesh on completion of necessary procedures.

Faisal Khan is one of the accused in the brutal murder of Hindu blogger Ananta Vijay Das in Subidbazar in the Sylhet district of Bangladesh. A vocal critic of religious fanaticism, Das had received several death threats from Islamic extremists.

He was a banker and the Council for Science and Rationalism of Bangladeshs general secretary. He was an editor of a magazine named Jukti (Logic). On the fateful day of May 12, 2015, the Mukto-Mona (free thinkers) blogger was chased down by Islamists and slaughtered with machetes.

He was immediately rushed to the hospital but was declared dead on arrival. In March this year, a Bangladeshi court sentenced 4 people to death for the killing of Ananta Vijay Das. They included Abul Khayer Rashid Ahmed (25), Abul Hossain (25), Mamunur Rashid (25) and Faysal Ahmed (27).

Two of the accused are still at large. While delivering the verdict, Justice Nurul Amin Biplob remarked, If these accused are not given exemplary punishment, people of other terrorists, extremist ideologies will be encouraged to commit such killings.

He further added, The main purpose (of the killing) was to spread fear and apprehension among writers who wrote or spoke about liberalism, progressivism, science and prejudice prevalent in the society through the brutality and horror of the killing.

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Had been staying in India since 2015 with a fake passport, voter ID and driving license: Bangladeshi Faisal Ahmed arrested for the murder of Hindu...

After the Great War, Arab societies, like many others, for the first time came to know politics as a modern mass phenomenon in which modern communication technologies are used for mass political mobilization. For the first time, intellectuals, journalists, poets, and men of letters of all sorts replaced the old classes of religious scholars by becoming the source of moral knowledge and ethical education for the public. The new trend of inspiring people with a total philosophical vision, the conversion of artistic sensibilities into populist political symbols, and the pooling of mass support into a demand, symbol, or figure that could be converted to power became the mainstays of Levantine and Egyptian politics. At the heart of this new trend were the two most transformative revolutionary ideologies German philosophy has produced: romantic nationalism and Marxism, and their struggle against the common postwar enemy of Western imperialism.

Nationalism as a romanticist literary and artistic phenomenon could be discerned in late-19th-century Arabic writing and art, yet it was not until the interwar years that nationalism mattered as a mobilizing revolutionary impulse around which political movements could form and as a literary genre of romantic imagination. The revolutionary impulse that started to ferment during the Great War and accelerated after its end was a generally anti-imperialist fervor without ideological content or clear direction. It is best to imagine it as a primordial pool to which intellectual and political developments in Europe, such as Marxist-Leninism, fascism, Nazism, and antisemitism constantly flowed, and from which the political movements that shaped the region today emerged.

Arab nationalism was the first and earliest idea which articulated a cohesive ideology for the region in the works of its intellectual father, Sati Al-Husri (1880-1968). A former Ottoman officer, Husri became one of the first modern Arab educators for whom education meant the mission of preparing and producing nationalist youth and endowing it with a Prussian militant sense of historical mission. The idea that the Hegelian conception of the political community as a historical protagonist whose members form an organic unity with a transcendent salvific mission inside history could find its inevitable realization only in the establishment of a state. The outright rejection and delegitimation of current reality in favor of a supposedly historically inevitable future which is the only legitimate reality possible is a prerequisite of Hegelian revolutionary action. Those who defend the present naturally become an obstacle and enemies of history itself.

Constricting the idea of natural political legitimacy, in itself a modern philosophical concept, to a political reality that must be identical to an abstract and ideal notion of a great Arab or Islamic nation, embodying a certain mystical essence, naturally led to complete delegitimation of any political reality short of such ideal while establishing legitimacy, and not sovereignty, as the criterion of political truth. Actual, lesser nation-states were delegitimated as artificial products of European colonialism, a view enshrined in the fictitious and ideological treatment of historical episodes such as the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Such philosophical conception can be clearly grasped in all modern Middle Eastern political ideologies; it can be discerned, for instance, in the Baathist slogan, One Arab nation with an eternal mission, or in that of the Muslim Brotherhood, Islam is the solution, or in the propaganda of ISIS which named the video of its deceleration as The End of Sykes-Picot.

As Hegelianism and its ideologies were shaping Arab thought, a new generation of men of letters emerged, primarily in Egypt and the Levant, whose work valorized self-expression, the quest for authenticity, romantic ideals, and artistic subjectivity as a sense of mystical duty toward some absolute spirit. The sense of romantic struggle provided a literary fantastic view of a heroic self, encircled by a world of hostile forces; seeking to overcome such a world by unlocking the authenticity of ones most inner self naturally intersected with a new kind of political activism centered on deeply mystical notions of nature, blood, soil, liberation, death, regenerative violence, and armed struggle. European phenomena such as cultural salons, secret societies, and militant youth groups led by intellectuals, self-identifying as vanguards, with unique colored shirts and carrying slogans referring to death, iron, and fire proliferated.

It was therefore inevitable that such intellectual and psychological conditions would lead to consequences not too dissimilar from the consequences of such conditions in Europe; the appearance of popular political movements carrying devotional romantic symbols founded by self-styled fuehrers who embodied the potent Leninist mix of intellectual-politicians leading a vanguard in the final phase of a historical struggle toward an inevitable salvific future in which all contradictions will be resolved. In the interwar years in Egypt and the Levant, communist, Arabist, Egyptianist, Syrianist, and Islamist groups proliferated and created an ideologically competitive mimetic contagion. Together, those groups formed a common space where the abstract ideas of German philosophy, nationalism, socialism, unification and European revolutionary thought combined and recombined along with the local symbols of Islam and Arab culture and altered the entire substructure of Arab thought.

If the arrival of the Arabic printing press in the 19th century allowed literary nationalism and romanticist ideas to proliferate among the new educated classes, the shortwave radio brought a new phase of possibilities carrying on its waves the thunderous voices of mass mobilization. The new possibilities of the new technologies were first fully realized in the Middle East by the two protagonists of the global European revolution known as WWII, Italy and Germany. The former established its Arabic Radio Bari station in 1934 and the latter, the Voice of Berlin in Arabic, in 1939. Together, they filled the airwaves with Arabic propaganda of the most sensationalist kind mixing Islamic motifs and symbols with anti-Westernism, antisemitism, and incitement to mass violence. Radio Bari and the Voice of Berlin championed the national liberation of all the Arab and Muslim peoples and warned against the conspiracies of imperialist powers and the Jewish States of America, and called for a revolution against the West.

Many of the antisemitic catchphrases and conspiracy theories still found in Arabic culture today can indeed be traced to the legacy of the Voice of Berlin and its Iraqi anchor, Yunis Bahri. According to the British propaganda official, Nevill Barbour, The Nazis had the skill or luck to find and employ an Iraqi, Yunus al-Bahri, who had a remarkable talent for the sensational type of broadcasting which they favored. Berlin Radio was bound by no scruples and cared nothing for factual accuracy it, therefore, used every device to inflame Arab resentment against Britain for favoring Zionism, to exploit every conceivable suspicion regarding British actions, and to sneer at Arabs who publicly declared their support of the British connection. The Berlin Radio announcer, for instance, used regularly to refer to Prince Abdallah as Rabbi Abdallah.

Nazism and fascism served as an inspiration and a prototype to many aspiring movements such as the Syrian Socialist National Party and the Muslim Brotherhood. The excitement in the prospects of a German victory brought, along with Arab intellectual affections to German philosophy, can be clearly read in almost all the memoirs of those who came to political age during the period including Presidents Nasser and Sadat in Egypt and Antun Saadah in Syria. More significant than politicians, in my opinion, are those who would become the founders of Arab and Muslim modern thought, such as the Egyptian thinker Abdulrahman Badawi, the first modern Arab philosopher, a figure of utmost importance, whose memoirs show deep sympathies with Germany and Nazism and a near-pathological obsession with Jews. Or the most prominent Algerian thinker of the era of national liberation, Malek Bennabi, who was accused later by France of having been a Nazi collaborator.

During the war, the minority of Arab intellectuals and thinkers who firmly opposed Nazism and fascism belonged to either the older generations of the pro-British or else were young communists. Otherwise, it is not an exaggeration to say that the overwhelming majority sympathized with Germany and the Axis and encouraged the population to do so. The political fervor of the time was primarily anti-British, anti-French, and anti-Jewish, and in favor of revolutionary mobilization; the question of ideology was secondary at best. That is why qualifiers of ideological identity added to famous figures of the period, such as Haj Amin el-Husseini, often oscillate between describing him as an Arab nationalist and or as an Islamist.

By the end of the 1940s and as the Cold War started, the atmosphere of struggle had permeated the minds of the most modern Arab societies and they were ripe for the beginning of their revolution. In retrospect, it seems only fitting that the end of the colonial era in the Middle East was ushered by a sequence of events that was the culmination of the story outlined above and the foreshadowing of the decades to come; the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and the mass expulsion of Jews from Arab ruled lands, the coup detat in Syria in 1949, and the coup detat in Egypt in 1952.

The revolutionary wave which has been fermenting for decades in the primordial soup of revolutionary ideas burst forth as the sun was setting on European colonialism to carry the mission of national liberation and decolonization in Egypt, Syria, Algeria, and Iraq. The revolutionary milieu which oversaw the establishment of the Syrian Republic included Baathists, Syrian nationalists, proto-Islamists, and communists. Similarly, the 1952 coup in Egypt followed by the rise of Nasserism, was a collective project in which all revolutionaries supported and participated. In other words, the revolutionary wave was the practical embodiment of the primordial pool of ideas mentioned earlier. It formed, in the beginning, a unified revolutionary milieu from which a process of mitosis led to its later fragmentation into the distinct yet interconnected movements of Nasserism, Baathism, Islamism, the Arab new left, and Palestinian nationalism in which the potent mixture of revolutionary nationalism, revolutionary socialism, anti-Westernism, and antisemitism dominated.

One of the prominent members of the revolutionary milieu was none other than Sayyed Qutb, a literary critic who later came to be remembered as the ideological founder of Islamist jihadism. Qutb was part of this revolutionary milieu and an insider in the halls of revolutionary power. His later fallout with Nasser turned him into a kind of a Muslim Gramsci or Trotsky, with which a mixture of revolutionary existentialism, Leninism, and a literary romanticist conception of Islam came to be identified. One way to understand Qutbs work is to see it with the eyes of a literary critic turned revolutionary, an attempt to extrapolate the literary sensibility of Islam, i.e., divine subjectivity, and use it to existentially shape ones self in an environment of sensory isolation. Such a process would be followed by the creation of the vanguard which will proceed to realize the spirit of Islam in history.

The revolutions of national liberation led to the establishment of one-party populist states of which Egypt was the largest and most important. The period was that of the euphoric mass sentiment of absolute unity between the people, the state, the heroic leader, and the intellectuals, which was celebrated as true popular democracy. A large public sector, large state investments, and a state-led economy were the essence of Arab socialism. The holy trinity of unity, Arabness, and socialism, the invention of the Baath, became the creed of the new Arab secular political religion. The massive projects of postcolonial modernization, meant heavy investment in literacy programs, free education, and more extensive higher education to produce the needed administrative skills for the new massive state bureaucracies and security apparatus. The confiscation of foreign and Jewish property provided the needed capital for many such projects.

Decolonization and nationalization did not just target industrial assets and land ownership. They also naturally extended to all aspects of cultural life, as the urban cosmopolitanism of the colonial era was to be replaced by a centralized Arab urban culture. In Egypt, the state gradually took control of all educational institutions, secular and religious, all media, print, and radio, record companies, as well as the Egyptian movie industry, which at the time was one of the largest in the world. The progressive Arab left then proceeded to mass radicalize all of society and culture.

Above the reshaping of popular culture, and within the global context of the Cold War, sat a new high Arab culture that was changing its orientation from the fascism and the Nazism that inspired its roots toward Marxism, the Soviet orbit, and specifically the French left, which at the time was wallowing in postwar pessimism that lost hope of revolution in Europe and looked to the former colonies for salvation. By the early 1960s, Jean-Paul Sartre was the most widely read, in-vogue intellectual in the Arabic language, and Arab students and intellectuals found a second home in Parisian cafes. In 1955, Raymond Aron made note of this in his Opium of the Intellectuals and warned the French left against indoctrinating Arab and African young students into ideologies that were not suitable for their societies. Yet the Sartrean combination of valiant existentialism, Marxism, and decolonization along with the French conception of the public intellectual as the lodestar of sacred struggle continued to shape the culture of youth in Cairo, Alexandria, Damasus, Beirut, and Baghdad. His books sold like bread, wrote George Tarabishi, one of Sartres Arabic translators.

The new generation of revolutionary intellectuals started decolonizing intellectual life by replacing the older generation of men of letters who had dominated under the British and French influence such as Taha Hussein and Abbas Aqqad with politically committed authors. In this, the Arab revolutionary intellectuals were following the steps of the French left who sought to repudiate the spirit of seriousness of traditional European philosophy as well as of European bourgeois culture. The Sartrean concept of Commitment was widely enforced, meaning that anyone who wanted to participate in cultural production or public life had to be committed to revolutionary politics. Under the auspices of Commitment, Arabic culture became a culture of struggle. In the autobiographical formula of veteran Lebanese communist Fawaz Taraboulsi, everyone was, Communist poetically, Arabist politically, Socialist economically, and existentialist philosophically. If revolutionary romantic heroes were the mimetic contagion of the interwar year, the left-wing existentialist smoking in a cafe, holding a Sartre or a de Beauvoir book, and making pronouncements that are as deeply shallow as they are superficially profound was the mimetic contagion of the 50s and the 60s. Literary existentialist feminism, of unprecedented sexual expressionism, appeared in the writings of figures such as Laila Baalbaki and Nazik Al-Malaika.

Suhayl Idris is a case in point. Born in Lebanon in 1925 to a religious Sunni family, Idris proceeded to obtain classical Islamic education in religious law in Beirut. After graduation, he turned secular, obtained a Ph.D. from the French Sorbonne in literature in 1953, and returned to Lebanon to establish the leading Arabic literary periodical and publishing house of the time which translated the works of Sartre, Camus, Isaac Deutscher, Rosa Luxemburg, Gramsci, Marx, and others. Idris literary style was the furthest possible from the religious style. In 1956 he wrote, Today, the Arab writer cannot but put his feather pen in the fountain of the blood of martyrs and heroes so when he may lift his pen, it drips with the meaning of revolution against imperialism. And in 1958, objecting to the anti-Soviet, anti-Nasser Baghdad Pact he wrote, We Arab Nationalists are objecting to the policies of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan despite being Muslim countries if Islam indeed supported imperialism we would have fought against it!

Intellectuals with more sophisticated Marxist inclinations had to follow the Soviet line which gave predominance to the revolutionary intersection between the struggle of ruling nationalist petit bourgeois against Western imperialism and the Marxist struggle against capitalism. It encouraged Arab Marxists to focus their analytical works on Western imperialism and not on analyzing the class structure of their own societies. This influence kept Marxism constricted in two areas, polemics against wealthy classes, and a political view of international relations that complemented romantic nationalism.

Sayyed Qutb behind bars in 1966, afer he was convicted of plotting the assassination of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. He was hanged, and later came to be remembered as the ideological founder of Islamist jihadis.AFP/Getty Images

The Marxist inevitability of revolution and overthrow of Western capitalism created an Arab sense of inevitable triumph against the West and Israel which in turn led to unquestioning support of the revolutionary regimes despite their accumulating record of failures, excesses, abuses, and idiocies. Thus, Arab communists overwhelmingly supported the leadership of Nasser even as they were being tortured in his prisons. A rare exception was the Iraqi Marxist intellectual Ali Al-Wardi, whose sociological studies in Islamic history in the 1950s attempted to provide a historical materialist analysis emphasizing class warfare as the historically meaningful factor in the development of Islamic beliefs.

The ideological developments and transmutations of the periods can be seen in the lives of many figures of the period such as Fayez Sayegh, who was the first Arab intellectual to apply Sartres critique of racism and neocolonialism to Israel. He argued that what applies in Congo and Vietnam also applied to Israel, and he was also the principal author of the 1975 U.N. Zionism-is-racism resolution. Sayegh, born in Syria to a Presbyterian minister in 1920, started his active life in the 1940s by joining the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, a Syrian imitation of Nazism under the leadership of the Fuehrer Antun Saadeh. During the time Sayegh wrote and spoke for the SSNP about the danger of Zionism on civilization and the soul, as well as the dangers of the Jewish psyche. After the turn to the left, Sayegh became an Arab existentialist authority on Sartre and Fanon. In 1965, during his tenure at Stanford, he wrote the booklet Colonialism in Palestine which was published by the PLO and then translated to a dozen of languages and distributed globally by the Afro-Asian Peoples Solidarity Organization (AAPSO). His booklet was the birth document of the global cause for Palestine as it hit all the major notes played by the international leftracial supremacy, segregation, exclusion, civil rights, emancipation, anti-capitalism, self-defense, human rights, and resistanceinvoked Algeria, African Americans, Congo, and Vietnam, and used existentialist ideas of otherness. It was Sayegh who inserted Palestine into the anti-Western canon of the international left. The later anti-Zionist works by major figures of the French left such as Maxime Rodinson would only continue Sayeghs work.

The new textbooks, movies, magazines, songs, and literature produced in such an intellectual environment were all tasked with shaping the Arab masses and its new generations ideologically. This was the moment of birth of Arab modernity. Together, the committed new intellectuals and cultural figures produced an entirely committed revolutionary anti-Western and antisemitic reading of Islam. During such a foundational movement of modern Arab mass culture, movies, radio shows, plays, school textbooks, and more enforced and homogenized this new reading of Islamic history, which merged what is gnostic and religious in Hegelian revolutionary thought with what is religious and mystical in Islam. In this new reading, the possibility of transcendence outside history was reworked into the possibility of transcendence inside history through revolution. Salvation was secularized, and atheized, into temporal salvation brought on by a political collective will. That Islam is a philosophical totality to be achieved through national liberation and socialism, and progressive revolution against the forces of colonialism, Judaism (particularly as embodied in Israel), and reaction (embodied in conservative pro-Western Arab monarchies), became the generic message.

For a newly established Arab mass culture, the rewritten career of Muhammad as a revolutionary who came with a message of social justice clashing with a reactionary ruling elite of the Arab bourgeois merchant class and their misanthropic Jewish allies was the foundational historical treatment of Islamic history. Nassers minister of propaganda, Fathi Radwan, a former member of the quasi-fascist organization Young Egypt, wrote and distributed the book Muhammad the Great Revolutionary, extolling the supposed revolutionary merits of the prophet. The founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, Mustafa al-Sibai, wrote Socialism in Islam which was printed and mass-distributed by the United Arab Republic in an act of ideological balancing against communists. Historical Muslim figures were lionized and revolutionized in state-produced films with massive budgets. In 1961, the Egyptian state produced the blockbuster film Oh Islam, in which an Egyptian leader of the Arabs is looking for his lost beloved, named Jihad, with which he is able to defeat the Mongol invasion. Another historical epic of medieval Islamic decolonization jihad followed in 1963 in Saladin, a film with a massive budget portraying a proto-Nasser medieval sultan waging secular anti-imperialist jihad against blond and redheaded European colonizers in alliance with reactionary Arab forces.

The new cinematic and literary treatments of Muhammads career presented the prophet as a revolutionary leader leading a group of the downtrodden, the oppressed, and the enslaved to resist the capitalism of Meccas reactionary merchants and their evil Jewish allies. The pre-Islamic period is portrayed as that of maximum economic exploitation, social corruption, and political chaos. The wealthy, corrupt, and immoral infidel are a feudal class who commissions the local Jews, evil creatures of the night, to do their dark deeds.A dialectical struggle between the two parties, the believers and the infidels, climaxes into the triumph of the Muhammadan revolution and the resolution of all contradictions.

One consequential literary transfusion of such treatment was substituting piety with social justice, substituting religious transcendence with the historical transcendence of a historical stage, and substituting spiritual redemption with socioeconomic and political redemption. However, the most consequential of all substitutions, which will become an insurmountable conceptual foundation in modern Arab culture, is the displacement of the very concept of meaning itself from religion proper and placing it into history. A salvation which meant the total transformation of national political and economic conditions which are in turn assumed to be the human condition. The salvific goal of history substituted an otherworldly salvation that is the goal of God leading to a theological relationship with components of historical movement.

Muhammad, the Great Revolutionary, written by Fathi Radwan, a former member of an Egyptian fascist organization is an example of a flood of literary production offering a revolutionary treatment of MuhammadCourtesy the author

The union between Marxism and Arab nationalism against the enemies of imperialism, reaction, Zionism, and capitalism left its indelible mark on both. Marxism provided the intellectual cohesion and idiom required for any modern political endeavor to be respectable while Arab nationalism provided the medium in which Marxist ideas could be presented to the Arab masses. Arab Marxism also connected Arab nationalism to the dynamic world of Third Worldism but most importantly to the international left, especially in Western capitals and universities, giving it critical prestige, international legitimacy, and an aura of noble-savage romantic heroism. Arab national liberation, decolonization, and the violence that accompanied them, were the empirical verification of the writings of Sartre and Fanon. The gnostic sense of the historical inevitability of the overthrow of capitalism, and the dogmatic faith in holding the final moral truth emboldened an Arab culture with already weak ties to reality to mistake the predictions and prophecies of leftist intellectuals as historical promises, and to sail the ship of Arab dreams ever farther away from the shores of reality, into the ocean of phantasmic self-aggrandizement. A complete belief in the inevitable superiority of the USSR led to betting the future of entire societies on its radical triumph coupled with an adamant denial of Jewish historical reality, seeing Israel only as an ephemeral Zionist entity that would soon be blown away into oblivion by the battle cry of the awakened Arab giant.

Yet when the dust settled in 1967 after the sweeping defeat of the forces of Arab nationalism at the hands of Israel, it settled on a transformed landscape. The radical masses intoxicated by the tall and dark handsome Egyptian leader and the assured prophecies of intellectuals with superior knowledge had been robbed of their innocence. Narratives of the essential aggrandized self were inverted into narratives of essential victimhood, and the cult of the hero was inverted into a cult of the martyr. Even the direction of the prevalent antisemitism was inverted: Zionism, once seen as merely a ploy in the hands of Western imperialism came to be seen as the original superpower from which all evil flows. The work of the public intellectuals once focused on counting the virtues of the Arab nations and the vices of the West and Israel, turned into that of a professional mourner weeping over the ruins of a lost innocence. Arab culture fell into the self-made trap of solipsism.

The inversion was of such a severe magnitude that the unified culture of the Arab left, in which the state, the people, the culture, the intellectuals, and the leader were perceived as being in a state of ecstatic unity, shattered into fragments, with each going in a different direction. The unity between Arab nationalism and Marxism, which was once asserted by many intellectuals, was dissolved. Nasserism was discredited, Baathism split between Syria and Iraq. The Palestinians started their own revolution inside the revolution. Eventually, the Arab left split into three new circles: The old left, the new left, and the Islamic left leading a revolution against the revolution.

The intellectuals, journalists, and writers who still served the standing pro-Soviet progressive Arab republics came to be generally known as the old Arab left, of which the official intellectual of the Egyptian regime Mohamed Hassanein Heikel was the most famous. The only way this group was to defend the legitimacy of the humiliated states in front of radicalized Arab masses was through the almost endless inflation of their enemies to cosmic proportions that only increased the nobility of their victims. In 1968, Heikel published his first book after the defeat, titled We and America, which portrayed the 1967 war as an American conspiracy to assassinate the young Egyptian revolution. The victimhood escalator ultimately led to ever more pathological antisemitism, a wolfish view of an unforgiving and cruel world, as well as a mystification of victimhood into a sense of cosmic pain so vast as to dissolve any observable reality.

In 1969, the Egyptian states largest film production was, Al-Ard (The Land), in which the audience was treated to a final scene where the courageous Egyptian masculine hero, played by superstar Mahmoud Miligy, is standing alone in the middle of his cotton field after being abandoned and betrayed by everyone, sacrificing his life defending his land from a British-feudal conspiracy. He is seen being cut and slashed in slow motion, splashing his blood on the cotton flowers, while a chorus is dramatically chanting in the background, If the land is ever thirsty, I shall irrigate it with my blood. This was a major reversal of the pre-1967 production which typically ended in a resounding victory for the hero. If Arab mass culture had no ties to reality before the war, now it had declared war against it.

The Arab new left was made of former Arab nationalist intellectuals and cadres who decided to exit the old left and make a sharper turn to the left. We were determined to commit to Communism as a final break between ourselves and the nationalist past of the petit bourgeoises, wrote one intellectual. This coincided with the May 1968 student movements in Europe, the U.S. cultural revolution with its Marxist overtones, and the rise of the global new left which radicalized the global high culture. The first young intellectuals to make this turn were Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm, who in 1968 published his debut book, Self-Criticism After Defeat, and Yasin Al-Hafiz, who published The Defeat and the Defeated Ideology in the same year. Together, Azm and Hafiz would intellectually jump-start the new Arab left and in their new analytical works would imitate the positions of European postwar leftist thought. They rejected Baathism and Nasserism as petit bourgeois ideologies that were as a matter of fact backward-looking, reactionary, and fascist and must be replaced with scientific Marxism.

The post-1967 Arab intellectual life was that of collective neurosis, in the words of former Marxist intellectual George Tarabishi. The first self-object of neurotic obsession was Arab culture and Islam. Imitating the Frankfurt Schools analysis which exonerated revolutionary thought from the possibility that it produced Nazism and fascism and instead identified them as manifestations of the latent violence and mythological thinking in European and Christian culture, so did the intellectuals of the new Arab left identify Islam and Arab culture as the source of the regions own latent reaction and oppression. The 1967 defeat was blamed not on what is gnostic and religious in revolutionary thought, or the Fanonian valorization of brutal violence as a spiritually redemptive act, but on traditional culture. The new leftists doubled down on Marxism and revolutionary thought and placed the entire blame squarely on the irrationalism of traditional culture and religion.

The most important work of the genre, and by far the most influential Arab intellectual work of the 20th century, was the four-volume Critique of Arab Reason, an obvious play on Kant, by Moroccan thinker Mohamed Abed Al-Jabiri. In his work, Jabiri provided a systematic analysis of foundational Islamic texts showing that everything from Arabic grammar to Islamic law contained the nucleus of irrationalist and magical thinking. His work was a triumph for the calls for more Enlightenment-style rationalism, generally understood as a refined Marxism with clearer atheistic presuppositions. The second most prominent intellectual of the genre was Algerian French Sorbonne professor Mohamed Arkoun. If Jabiri wanted to follow the Frankfurt Schools lead and push revolutionary thought toward Marxisms roots in Enlightenment rationalism, Arkoun wanted to go the other way, following the lead of postmodernism, in rediscovering Marxisms other roots in Romanticism. Arkoun brought Derrida and Foucault, without ever saying so explicitly, to bear in excavating Islamic Arab epistemology to uncover its deep layers of power relations obscured by myth and Quranic semiotics. Jabiri and Arkoun still occupy the center of Arab high culture intellectual life.

Below the high culture and sophisticated analysis of the new left, a populist new left emerged, primarily centered in Lebanon, fueled by the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and Ali Ahmed Esber, known by his pagan pen name Adonis, and by the writings of Ghassan Kanfani. The rising Palestinian guerrilla groups, Fatah and the PFLP, a splinter Marxist group from the quasi-fascist Arab Nationalists Movement, managed to overthrow the old left from the leadership of the PLO and took its placea development which was seen as an inspiration to all the Arab new left forces dreaming of overthrowing and replacing the Arab old left. The Palestinian guerrilla groups, inspired by Rgis Debray, were making a revolution inside the revolution, a natural outcome of the urge to invert devastating defeat into a decisive victory.

This revolutionary subversion inside the Arab revolutionary movement managed to invert the conception of the Palestinian cause. Pre-1967, Arab nationalism held that Arab unity was the road to Palestine. Post-1967, the Palestinians inverted this Hegelian motto by turning the salvific dream of a destroyed Israel and a liberated Palestine into the essence of the revolutionary mission itself. Palestine is a revolution, became the new self-conception of the rising Palestinian factions, adding it to the ranks of a transnational anti-capitalist revolutionary movement that included Vietnam, Cuba, Black Power in the U.S., German Marxist terrorism, and others. After their expulsion from Jordan, Palestinian groups declared their plan was to turn Lebanon into an Arab Hanoi from which a popular liberation war and a total revolution would revolutionize the entire Middle East. This was the decade in which Palestinian groups laid the grounds for international terrorism of plane hijacking, assassinations, and bombings.

It is important to mention here that in all the ideological tracts and literature of the Palestinian groups, the works of French and communist intellectuals were continually quoted. The first Fatah newsletter after the Munich Olympic Village terrorist attack featured quotes from Fanon on its cover.

To the right of the new Arab left was the Islamic left, a group of committed Marxist intellectuals who decided to apply Maoist principles of popular mobilization and saw Islam as the most suitable vehicle to do so. It was not uncommon for Arab Marxist Christian intellectuals, such as Munir Shafiq, to convert to Islam and become Islamic Marxists. In Egypt, the strongest base of the Islamic left, this milieu of intellectuals was led by Abdul Wahab Al-Missiri, Hassan Hanafi, Mohamed Imara, Adel Hussein, and Nasr Abu Zayd. Missiri, a student of Nazi sympathizer Abdulrahman Badawi, focused entirely on synthesizing a Marxist-Islamic critical theory of Zionism and Judaism, depending on Lukacs, Marcuse, but above all Mannheims sociology of knowledge in producing a seven-volume critical deconstruction of all of Jewish history and culture, revealing its inherently colonialist, imperialist, and dehumanizing nature. When Missiri was once asked about what remained from the Marxism of his youth, he answered, Nothing and everything my Marxism dissolved into Islamic humanism. Others, such as the Islamic thinker Hassan Hanafi, who is the teacher of the current generation of Egyptian intellectuals, maintained that Marxism is identical to Islam.

By the time of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, in which Khomeini demanded dissolving all ideologies in Islam, there was enough public interest in a potent mixture of Islamic fundamentalism, existentialism, and Marxist revolutionary thought embodied in intellectuals like Ali Shariati for a wave of conversion to political Islam to overtake the ranks of Maoist and Marxist Lebanese and Palestinian militants and intellectuals, for whom Islam would become the gateway back into the embrace of the masses.

In Egypt, Nassers successor, Anwar Sadat, had the ambitious plan of ending Egypts leftist and pro-Soviet orientation and transforming Egyptian politics and culture to fit inside the Western camp. This ambition was centered around the achievement of recognition and peace with Israel, to which the population and the intellectuals were opposed. The fierce resistance Sadat met from the hegemonic establishment of Nasserist and leftist intellectuals led him to resort to two strategies: political repression of intellectual life, and a restoration of Islamic conservatism, and even fundamentalism, in order to maintain popular support for the state.

Unbeknownst to Sadat, by that point, religious thought had completely dissolved into revolutionary thought to an extent that made it impossible to provide a nonrevolutionary reading of Islam. In turn, the definition of intellectual life itself had been profoundly altered to exclusively mean leftism. Egyptian intellectuals, poets, and journalists filled Egyptian culture with anti-Sadat, anti-American, and antisemitic works. Folk poets wrote songs mocking Coca-Cola and the American lifestyle. Young novelists such as Sonallah Ibrahim wrote novels about a protagonist eating himself into annihilation because of the invasion of Coca-Cola capitalism. Amal Donqol, a talented poet, wrote his infamous poem No reconciliation, exalting the eternal worship of vengeance upon Israel.

Shortly before his assassination by Islamic revolutionaries, Sadat signed an order to arrest over a thousand Egyptian intellectuals. After his successor, Mubarak, came to power, and with the dangers of an Iranian-styled Islamo-Marxist revolution ever closer, he released the imprisoned intellectuals, made peace, and restored them to their various chairs heading the universities and media agencies. A division of labor was established where the state would deal with Israel and the U.S., while intellectuals were responsible for maintaining an anti-American and anti-Israel national culture, a situation recognized today in Egypt as the cold peace. Hamas, Hezbollah, 9/11, Baathist Iraq, the Arab Spring, and the Islamic State are all downstream from this intellectual story.

Leftist intellectuals such as Judith Butler and Noam Chomsky are therefore not wrong when they declare that Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran are part of the international left. A journey of philosophical inversions started from a Hegelian inversion of Christian theology, then a Marxist inversion of Hegelianism, a fascist-Nazi inversion of Leninism, the globalization of European thought, the conversion into Arab nationalism, its fragmentation into Arab Marxism and Palestinian radicalism, and their inversion back into theology, creating an ideological tornado with antisemitism as its vortex. The aggregate result was the gradual decivilization, and moral and social erosion, of entire Muslim and Arab societies, many of which collapsed unto themselves in spirals of self-destruction.

The dissolution of religious thought of otherworldly transcendence into a political transcendence inside history fundamentally transformed and restructured the identity of Islamic religious piety into the piety of struggle. Muslim identity was remolded into an eternal struggle that in its origin is not the jihad of classical texts, but the German dialectic world made by Marx. A religious doctrine of martyrdom and eternal life in the hereafter merged into a cult of the eternal revolutionary glory and hero worship of the Che Guevara type. This is the best explanation one could offer for the peculiar phenomenon of Muslim societies becoming more religious since the late 1970s in a way that only translated into more rage, more rebellion, less moral restraints on violence and sexuality, and conspicuous pagan worship of pain, blood, and misery. This is also the best explanation for why the societies of the Arab Gulf, which did not modernize during the 20th century, seem to have a much smoother transition away from antisemitism into social liberalization and peaceful worldviews.

Lets assume Im correct, and Islamists got this idea by way of a global revolutionary culture that got it from Lenin who got it from Marx who got it, not by way Plato as Popper assumed, but by way of rediscovery through inverting Hegels inversion of Christian theology. Doesnt this theory naturally fall right back into the religious dogmatism that is associated with Marxist intellectuals? Raymond Aron rightfully thought so in his Opium of the Intellectuals. Theory then reverts into a theology that becomes a political religion waging religious wars, schisms, ancestral worship, and textual fanaticism. Theology made philosophy by Hegel, philosophy made politics by Marx, and then politics was made into a religion. So naturally, Qutbs and Khomeinis conversion of the Marxist inversion reverted back into theology. But what does theology lose by this double inversion and what does it gain? Much. It becomes a religion of atheistic politics. It loses all its basis of religious justification and with it its entire moral structure and becomes an immanentist atheistic theology that leads to no redemption, no transcendence, and nowhere.

I want to emphasize what this article is not saying. Im not saying that any form of Islamic fundamentalism could be attributed to modern revolutionary thought. Indeed, all religions have their own forms of modern fundamentalism as a response to modern liberal social organization. But Islamic fundamentalism proper means a rigid and ultra-conservative social ethos that is resistant to social change, as best exemplified in the Salafism that until recently dominated the Arab Gulf.

What the union of imported European ideologies like Marxism, Nazism, and existentialism with Islam accomplished was to profoundly alter the entire conceptual scheme and epistemological foundations of Arab societies so that even Islamic fundamentalism, unbeknownst to itself, could no longer provide a pre-revolutionary reading of Islam. European moral philosophical traditions and their language managed to make a tectonic shift that resulted in the development of a modern Islamic political theology that is totalitarian, dystopian, and revolutionary. The Islam of Iran, ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaida is simply a regional variant of progressive Western revolutionary thought.

Yet I am not saying that the West is to blame for this development. For if this article seeks to affirm anything it is that the West-Islam dichotomy is not only meaningless but delusional. Cultural and moral relativism are meaningless when the foundation of all our modern moral and political thinking comes from the same place. Europe has managed to create a truly global human culture that no longer has ideational barriers and in which fashion, style, fads, and ideas form global mimetic contagions.

This is a story of a global nightmare constructed by intellectuals from all religious and national backgrounds. The Enlightenment and its aftermath are now just as solidly a part of Islamic intellectual makeup as they are in Western cultures, and if the Muslim world is to move forward it would be through the recognition and not the denial of this fact. If the moral and social destruction of the region resulted from incompetent Arab intellectuals sleepwalking in the orbit of a global culture, the solution is competence. The exploitation of the intellectual, social, and political energies of impoverished and pre-modern societies for use as cannon fodder in the great ideological battles of the Western left has had disastrous effects on the social, economic, and political development and progress of many Arab and Muslim societies. In this regard, the Western lefts theology of how the West destroyed other societies has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, from which it is now our duty and obligation to liberate ourselves.

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The Liberation of the Arabs From the Global Left - Tablet Magazine

Democrats havent been so mad since Lincoln freed their slaves. The US Supreme Court has finally put a stop to a veritable river of babies, over 61 million, going to the slaughterhouse, authorised by the illicit ruling in Roe v. Wade, (1973). Each year since, between one in three to one in five of all babies conceived in the US have perished.

Now, in Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, the Court has finally done what it should have done in its partial retreat in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992).

This reversal has yet again confirmed Donald Trumps place high in the pantheon of great presidents, another addition to his great achievements,domestic and foreign. With all his eventually successful judicial nominations forming part of the 6:3 majority in this case, nominations which the Democrats tried to thwart by unjustified lies and calumnies, he has fulfilled yet another of the several campaign promises he made in 2016. The outrage now is that by refusing proper security measures for the judges, the Democrats are obviously inviting their assassination.

The horror of what was being done under Roe v. Wade was brought home like a parable to Americans, and as well to the world a few years ago, when they saw the controllers of the abortion industry.

Executives of the peak abortionist, Planned Parenthood, were caught in undercover videos joking while negotiating contracts for the sale of intact baby body parts. In one, senior executive Dr Mary Gatter chortled, I want a Lamborghini, when haggling over per-specimen pricing for livers, lungs and brains.

These videos created enormous outrage across the country, reminding people that this was the work of seven delinquent judges who had acted without the shallowest legal justification whatsoever.

We should pause for a moment to ask why mass abortion, justified under spurious constitutional grounds, was given legal effect by judges? Why was it not done by politicians, who after all alone have the role of designing and introducing legislation? And why was this judicial approach then followed in some other countries?

The answer is simple. It could not have been done otherwise.

Any politician who went to the electorate then with Roe v. Wade-like legislation as policy would have lost the election and probably the primary, the American equivalent of an Australian preselection, but far more democratic, especially in the Republican party. (It sounds like another world, but unlike Australia, Americans are actually allowed to choose who they and not the faceless men want as candidates.)

What is crucial to appreciate, is that the America of the time of Roe v. Wade was a country of believers, essentially Judeo-Christian. Not of course the elites who would set the fashion of abandoning religion.

One of the greatest explanations of the madness which exists today in the West is contained in what G.K. Chesterton never actually wrote but which I suspect, is consistent with his thoughts.

My formulation, David Flint Truth Number One, is in the following terms: When a man stops believing in God, its not that he will believe in nothing. He will believe in anything.

I see this everywhere. It explains much of the modern world. I would say that even if you dont believe in God, or what I suspect is more likely you dont know, it is good practice to concede that God might well exist.

This is because the only real alternative to religious belief or faith is not rationalism. Rationlism involves what could be called a different gear-shift.

If you clear your belief area completely of religious faith, other beliefs will come in. And the strongest dogma in the West today is modern Marxism. This is where the proletariat, which refused to cooperate with the Marxists, has been replaced with a moving feast of racial, sexual and so-called gender victims.

The enemy of Marxism, whether classical or the modern variant, is still the same. This is any institution or person which can command greater loyalty or attraction than the Marxists. This clearly includes, in the forefront, the family and private property.

From Engels famous book, Marxists have always detested the family, which is why in communist states it is common to poison childrens minds about their parents. A long-term Marxist ambition has been to reduce the influence and longevity of families. Women in particular are encouraged to play down the role of motherhood as a mere occasional adjunct to their lives with much of the role of mother superficially taken over by the state. Only then, Marxists say, can women be free.

Hence the encouragement of abortion through the manipulation of the US Supreme Court, involving the killing of babies on a truly extraordinary industrial scale.

But the imposition of such an outrage as Roe v. Wade had another object, to take away or reduce the sense of decency the average American had in 1973 to any similar outrage.

If they were prepared to accept such a bloodletting of the innocents, more will be accepted. The sense of decency can become numb.

There are those who call for the introduction of infanticide as well as euthanasia without consent and/or for purposes other than terminal illness.

The delinquent judges not only presided over the slaughter of innocents on an industrial scale. They made accepting such outrage as a normal reaction. They turned people away from religion to accept evil. The damage has been enormous.

In the meantime there is a political and media determination to ensure first that Donald Trump cannot stand for the presidency and if he cannot, that no one else of his school of government can stand.

What is clear is that many right-thinking voters will see in this Supreme Court decision not only a correct application of the Constitution but more reason to hope for a Trumpian second term.

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Roe v. Wade in the dustbin of history - The Spectator Australia

Rationalism is the philosophical view or belief that reason is the best test of knowledge. As opposed to empiricism, which argues that all knowledge is created and accrued via experiences, rationalism posits that there is a collection of given truths in existence. All people, according to this mode of understanding, should be able to access and understand these given truths, without needing sensory experience to introduce or reinforce them. A natural intuition is attributed as the means by which this is possible.

Rationalism can be applied in areas such as psychology, metaphysics, language, linguistics, religion, and epistemology.

The term "rationalist" came into being in the 1620s. Rationalists were identified as people who did not follow authority, but reason, in their lives and decision making. But it is thought that the first proponents of the rationalist school of thought lived and worked between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE, in Ancient Greece and China (although it should be noted that there were likely many other thinkers before, during, and after this era who were scholars of different forms of rationalism). The Ancient Greek philosophers Pythagoras, Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle, and the Chinese philosophers Confucius and Lao-tzu (the latter being the attributed founder of Daoism), laid the groundwork for contemporary philosophies of rationalism. Each of these practitioners believed that there is an order to all things, and that there is a fundamental knowledge base informing everyday life.

Rationalism, as it is known today in the West, began to take shape under the work of St. Thomas Aquinas in the 12th century. It then came to the fore during the Enlightenment period, between the 16th and 18th centuries. Thinkers Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz elaborated on the basic concepts of rationalism as a framework of fundamental understandings, resulting in seminal theories that are still in play today. Descartes constructed his cogito ergo sum, 'I think, therefore I am,' during his studies of rationalism. He believed that there was an ultimate truth that a person might pursue understanding of, if they were willing to first doubt everything. He grounded his work in a priori thought, or the theory that all human beings carry a base of knowledge that is not dependent on life experience. Spinoza was more preoccupied with the existence of the universe than the existence of the self, as Descartes had been. Leibniz, meanwhile, proposed that all truths are true, but that humans are not necessarily able to understand and perceive those truths (a famous line from him being "snow is white; snow must be white.")

Philosophers Kant and Hegel followed in their predecessor's rationalism-focused footsteps. In the late 18th century, Kant argued that while a priori knowledge might exist in all human beings, it might not accurately reflect or engage with the real world. Hegel, in the early 19th century, believed that "unknowing" was impossible, given that the moment a human being thought of something previously unknown, it would become known to some degree. He also felt that the human mind was similar to the universe as a whole, in that both entities were, ideally, a series of interlocking elements working together in inclusive balance. Then in the 20th century, thinkers Hastings Rashdall and G.E. Moore argued that, as per rationalism, all actions can be ultimately good or evil, based on their original intents.

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Understanding Humes Fork

Humes fork describes how we refer to Kants critique of Hume, who separated knowledge into two types: facts based on ideasand facts based on experience.[1][2][3]

The general concept is that Hume asserts there are two distinct classes of knowledge, 1. rational (knowledge based on thoughts and ideas) and 2. empirical (knowledge based on experience in the material world), and that only the empirical can tell us useful things about the world (that we can only learn useful things about the world through experience). Meanwhile, Kant offers a rebuttal by attempting to prove that pure reason can tell us about the world (that we can learn useful things about the world based on ideasalone).

In other words, Hume says we can only know about the world through experiences in the physical world, and Kant says we can know about the world through ideas too.

Thus, Kant thinks both prongs of this two pronged fork of ideas and experience are useful, and Hume thinks only one prong is useful mostly everything else discussed below is a summary of Kants complex thoughts on Humes argument for experience-based empirical knowledge.

Before we explain everything in further detail, itll be helpful to introduce some more terms used by Kant and Hume when discussing this topic.

Humes Fork can be understood by comparing the following two prongs (dont worry if you dont understand the terms below yet; the point of this page is to explain them):

TIP: Humes fork = a two-pronged fork in which the two prongs (rationalism and empiricism) never touch; or a fork in the road that never crosses. Kant crosses Humes fork by combining terms from each prong (specifically by proving the existence of a synthetic, necessary, a priori judgement/statement). See the story of how Hume inspired Kant(for more background on Hume and Kant), or see our page that focuses onthe a priori/a posteriori, the analytic/synthetic, and the necessary/contingentspecifically.

To understand all the terms we just used, it helps to know that they can be described by the following distinctions (where in each case one term relates to the rational and the other the empirical):

What do a priori and a posteriori mean? a priori means prior to experience (pureformal imagination and reason; rationalization not based on experience), anda posteriori means after experience (concepts we get from observation via our senses; based on empirical experience).

An example of thedifferencebetween ideas andexperience: All bachelors are unmarried (idea) vs. the bachelor is sitting in the chair (experience). We know the bachelor is in the chair because we see him sitting there (we can verify this with our senses, we dont need to rationalize it). We only know allbachelors aremarried because they arebachelors (we cant go around confirming each of the worlds bachelors is unmarried via our senses, we must rationalize it). We know all bachelors are married islogicallytrue, because it is necessary for the sentence to be true, but it tells us nothing specifically about our world (it is a fact about an idea, not a fact about the world). It is redundant, what Hume calls atautology.

To get Kants Critique of Pure Reason (which is really a justification for using both empiricismand rationalism) it helps to understand a basic theory of knowledge(the general name for an epistemological theory of purereason, empiricism, ethics, metaphysics and such; what this theory is actually pointing at and the major focus of Hume and Kant).

In lieu of that, the following descriptions of Humes and Kants arguments will suffice:

Despite Kants rationaliststance, after being awoken from his dogmatic slumber by HumesEnquiry, Kant abandons pure reason only for a slightly more nuanced epistemological theory (which mashes up pure reason and empiricism to show how they relate).

In other words, Kantsuccessfully synthesizes Humes ideas with his own in his masterworka Critique of Pure Reason, thus crossing Humes fork, by saying (paraphrasing), although all knowledge begins with the senses, we can use our experiences to inform our reason, and vice versa; We cant rely on our senses alone, but nor can we rely on pure rationalization.

Thus we can say, Kant crosses Humes fork by provingthat we can create a confirmable [via testing] synthetic a priori, a propositionthat is necessarilytrue and not dependent on itself, yetcant be proven viadirect empirical evidence (it can only be proven indirectly).

An example of a synthetic a priori that is necessarily true, and is provable indirectly (and therefore is objective), isE=mc2.

E=mc2is a rationalized idea, that is necessarily and objectively true (for observable physical bodies in spacetime) and not dependent on itself, yet cant be confirmed with direct experience (we can only confirm it indirectly via experiment).

GENERAL NOTE: Not every example we use on this page was given by Kant. When Kants example is clear and makes sense for a modern reader, we use it. When it is complex, or not directly said in his work, we opt for other examples.

TIP: Kant proves that synthetic a priori judgements are possible early on in his Critique, pointing to mathematics (ex. 7 + 5 =12), geometry (a straight line between two points is the shortest), physics (F=ma), and metaphysics (God gave men free-will) as examples of synthetic a priori. The main question he then seeks to answer is, how are a priori synthetic judgements possible? Here we can note that since metaphysics, in its dealing with freedom, God, and the will, deals with the unknowable a priori, the key to figuring out the limits of our knowledge and the usefulness of rationalism is found not in metaphysical concepts like free-will but in more practical fields in which the physical and logical intersect like mathematics (including geometry) and physics. This is why Kant focuses on space and time as examples rather concepts such as free-will and morality. Still, make no mistake, Hume and Kant are both speaking to a bigger picture which includes pure metaphysics, ontology, theology, and other such areas of inquiry.

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. Humes Enquiry.

TIP: As noted above, in his critique, Kant uses space and time as examples of useful a priori (offering geometry as an example of applying rational ideas about objects extended in space to the empiricalworld). With this in mind, we might also consider the concept of spacetime as a useful synthetic a priori concept, even though it is not confirmable directly with the senses. Kants justifications are complex and examples are sparse, but generally we can say he is pointing to the idea that rational laws like Newtons laws of physics are examples of useful a priori that tell us about the world. In this respect, proving synthetic propositions a priori useful isnt just about proving the usefulness of volumes of divinity or school metaphysics (from the theological to the moral metaphysics) it is about proving the usefulness of theoretical physics equations like those of Newton.[4][5][6]

TIP: Hume and Kant are hardly the only ones having this debate. Locke is a famous empiricist. Plato and Aristotle have the argument indirectly. And liberalism vs. conservatism,realism vs. idealism, and the general left-right argumentis essentially this same general argument. Each philosopher simply presents different ways to understand the underlying truisms of logic and reason.

TIP: The title of the book Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austin (1811), is a reference to the argument over passionand reason. Metaphorically speaking,passion is historicallyassociated with the female, and reason with the male.

To understand Humes fork, as presented by Kant in hisaCritique of Pure Reason, and named later by scholars, we need to define some terms that Kant used and/or coined:

The three basic distinctions we are working with (as noted above) are:

The terms used in those distinctions can be defined in terms of propositions (logical statements) like this:

This gives us four possibilities:

Furthermore, to round out this Kantian theory of knowledge, we can also define:

With all of that in mind, the main point here is that we can create: A necessarysynthetic a priori proposition that is not contingent or tautologicallike F=ma (thus crossing Humes fork). This type of judgement has both empirical and logical qualities and is a type of transcendental aesthetic.

What does transcendental mean in Kantian terms?An important but complex concept of Kant is the transcendental. Essentially each part of our discussion gets a transcendental, which generally describes where one category (like a priori, the rational, the logic) transcends into another (like a posteriori, the physical, the aesthetic). Important for our conversation is the Transcendental Aesthetic, which describes the a priori of empirical things (like space, time, geometry) from a physical perspective. Meanwhile, to flesh out the picture, Transcendental Logic describes the aspect of logic that relates to the empirical (like the categorizing of relations between objects) from a pure formal a priori perspective. A synthetic a priori like F=ma speaks to the transcendental aesthetic when we focus on the actual forces in the empirical world, and to transcendental logic in the way we speak about the proposition and categorize it. Learn moreKants Transcendental.

Phenomena and noumena: Kant also considers other terms likephenomena and noumena. Phenomena are the appearances and properties of things; that which constitutes what we can experience and sense. Meanwhile, noumena are posited objects or events that exist without sense or perception (that which, in theory, constitutes reality). In other words, the properties and effects of a thing that we can sense directly are phenomena, and the rest is noumena. All synthetic a priori judgements that tell us about the world are rationalizations about phenomena (like F=ma which describes the phenomena of force, mass, and acceleration). Understood loosely, 1. noumena is of the rational and phenomena is of the empirical, and 2.noumena is the thing-in-itself and phenomena is the effects (the manifestations of those things that can be perceived via the physical senses). TIP: See Platos theory of the forms(a theory of a noumenal world; as a metaphor at least) for more on different ways to understand noumena. NOTE: Empirically speaking, an object is a collection of properties (ex. a photon isnt a widget with properties as far as we know; the only way to describe a photon is to describe its properties, its phenomena). From this perspective there is only phenomena in the physical world and noumena is just a metaphysical idea (at best describing a collection of properties; directly observable or not). With that said, loosely speaking, it helps to understand that we can have useful knowledge of an object beyond what we can sense about an object directly. Still, the takeaway is the noumenal world may exist, but it is completely unknowable through human sensation and therefore it is a purely metaphysical concept.[7][8]

TIP: As you can see a from the above, some terms are very similar, this is because all these terms speak to different aspects of what we can know. All of logic is a bit like that, sometimes we are talking about the process of thought, sometimes about the product. Sometimes about a judgement, sometimes about a term. A justification that relies on experience (a posteriori), and a statement that is true based on observation (synthetic) can use some of the same exact examples (as they are both speaking about an empirical judgement). Likewise, we can consider synthetic a priori terms, judgements, and categories (not just judgements/propositions/statements). Despite this, each term speaks to a different aspect of thought and has a slightly different meaning. In other words, many terms are similar, but they have specific meaning, and need to be considered on their own merit and in context.

NOTE: Humes fork is all about concepts pertaining to the validity of a single proposition. Meanwhile, propositional logic deals with the argument form which pertains to the validity of a argument consisting of multiple propositions. Logic can be thought of as a three step process, where first we consider terms/concepts, next we consider single logical propositions (what we are doing here), and then we move on to considering reasoned arguments consisting of multiple propositions. See a page on propositional logic and reasoning for the next step.

Below is a table that illustrates the above concepts and their relations.

Remember Kants goal was to prove Humes idea that pure rationalization tells us nothing about the world wrong, by proving the existence of anecessary synthetica priori (a statement not based on experience, that cant be shown to be true by its terms alone, but is necessarily true).

Ex. All bachelors are unmarried

Ex. The man is sitting in the chair

Ex. All bachelors are unmarried

Ex. All bachelors are unmarried. We cant personally ask every bachelor in the world if they are unmarried (does not rely on experience), but we know they are because a bachelor is by definition necessarily unmarried (the statement is tautological or redundant rationalized a priori).

TIP: Pure tautological reason. Logical.

F=ma

TIP: F=ma is necessarily true and not tautological, yet only indirect evidence can prove it (we cannot observe force, mass, and acceleration acting on bodies extended in space and time directly).

TIP: Although some statements can be contingent in this class. This class also contains statements that are necessarily true, but not tautological, andcant be proven by direct empirical evidence (they instead require testing and indirect evidence to prove). A sort of mix of pure reason and empiricism that crosses Humes fork and to which induction and deduction apply.

TIP: Transcendental(a mix of logic and empiricism).

Ex. the man is sitting in the chair

TIP: Produces a contradiction and can be ignored. There are noAnalytic a posteriori statements.

TIP: Some would argue that there are analytic a posteriori and they are needed forhypothetical judgements.

Ex. The man is sitting in a chair. I can confirm the man is sitting in the chair by looking (of course the truth of this statement is contingent on the man actually being in the chair in this case; it is conditional).

TIP: Pure empiricism. Empirical.

TIP:a priori anda posteriori are two key terms in Kantian philosophy. Kant coins their modern usage, but he borrowed them fromLatin translations of Euclids Elementsfrom about 300BC. In other words, Kant famously gave names to epistemological concepts, but he did so methodically (whether he borrowed the terms or coined them). The first step to understanding Kant is internalizingthe terms he introduces, after that one just needs to follow his arguments.[9]

HINT: a priori kind of sounds like pure, it is pure formal rationalism. A posteriori, is the other one.

With everything so far covered, lets now return to the two prong fork and discuss how to cross it.

First, for reference, here is an illustration of Humes Fork again for a visual:

To cross Humes fork is to show that we can make useful judgements that involve using a mix of terms from both categories.

The most useful mix is the one covered above, where we show that asynthetica priorithat is nottautological or contingent, but necessarilyand objectively true isnt just possible to create, but is actually useful.

However, other mixes like contingent synthetic a priori (a priori that depend on more information, like God gave man free-will, synthetic a priori terms are useful, or there are 11 dimensions of spacetime) are also useful.

The bottomline is that this whole practice shows us that using a mix of reason and empiricism tells us more about the world than empiricism alone.

To summarize, Kants crossing of Humes fork can be understood like this (my quotes below are meant for educational purposes, they never specifically said these things, their arguments are more complex and in different books):

For more reading, see:A Priori and A Posteriori.

TIP: As noted above, Kants analysis of the epistemologicalconcepts discussed on this page starts in his earlier works likeThe Groundwork of the Metaphysic of MoralsandThe Metaphysics of Moralswhere he first properly lays down hisKantian ethics.In these texts he is giving names to fundamental dualities and concepts in an effort to better shed light on human understanding, just like he does in Critique. A main theory of his earlier works isthat, in the realm of metaphysics and morals, pure reason can be used to know some truths (while other truthsrequire the crossing of reason and empirical evidence). Hume counters this (albeitnot talking directly to Kant), saying no human understanding can be gleaned from pure reason alone, and then Kant counters Hume in his Critique of Pure Reasonsaying yes it can. Thisconfirms forus two things 1. an earnest exploration of these concepts requires reading multiple works of Hume and Kant 2. While bothKant and Hume care about science and politics, both are moreinterested in metaphysics and morality than justifying or debunking Newtonian physics.

TIP: Kant, like the Greeks, embraced the idea of a threefold division of philosophy into logic, physics, and ethics in his Groundwork. Kant starts the text by acceptingthat physics and ethics require a crossing of reason and empirical evidence, but rejected the idea for metaphysical morals and logic. Hume rejected the idea that any knowledge that wasnt grounded in the empirical was knowledge at all. Kant ultimately tried to showthat the fork could be crossed in all these realms allowing us to accept NewtonsF=ma and hisCategorical Imperative. Generally we can say that Kant asserts that even pure metaphysical a priori can be useful knowledge, as long as it can trace a path back to the empirical (this being the concept of the transcendental).

Synthetic a priori examples (examples of crossing Humes fork):

As noted above, in his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant generally points to mathematics (ex. 7 + 5 =12), geometry (a straight line between two points is the shortest), physics (F=ma), and metaphysics (God gave men free-will) to show synthetic propositions a priori possible (again, some of these are my examples).

Specifically, Kant tells us we should focus on mathematics (including geometry) and physics. Thus, Kant zeroes in on the a priori concepts/terms of space and time to justify his ideas about synthetic propositions a priori.

While he spends a lot of time describing every aspect of the general concept, he does not spend a lot of time offering concrete examples of synthetic a priori statements (see: why some of these examples are mine).

With that in mind, good examples of crossing Humes fork (AKA of not only synthetic a priori statements, but necessary and objective synthetic a priori) can be found inNewtons laws(Kant gives a nod to the Laws of Motion as containing synthetic a priori and gives a similarexample of every event has a cause in hisbook).

Lets take the second law, the one we use an example above, which can be represented as F=ma(Force equals mass time acceleration in an inertialframe).

F=ma is synthetic, as the predicate concept is not contained in its subject concept (nothing about forceinherently equals mass time acceleration). But also,these concept are (by most measures) a priori because force, mass, and acceleration cant be experienced directly (they are relations and effects of physical bodies in spacetime, represented by values in an equation, but they are not themselves tangible things).

Or, if we want to make the case for the empirical qualities of mass, force, and acceleration (denoting their transcendental aesthetic or mixed qualities), we can still say at least that the general rule F=ma is nota posteriori. After-all, we cant confirm a Newtons second law on a far off planet, we have to use our reason to know it is true.

Newtons third law also works in this respect. His third law states: when one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body.

One cant set about testing every object, just asone cant confirm every bachelor, yet again we can use experiments to know this theory is true.

All this to say, pure ideas can tell us a lot about the empirical world, but only if we can find that place where facts about ideas transcends to world of ideas and begins to tell us facts about the world (a place that differs by subject).

Kants examples of space and time as synthetic a priori: Kant crosses forks by using space and time in his book. Considering spacetime (the theoretical construct which speaks to real phenomena) is most certainly of the synthetic a priori class, I would say he got it fairly right in his first attempt (although some will be skeptical of this). For Kant, according to the book Understanding Kant, First, time is not empirical as neither coexistence nor succession have ever come within human perception (1929, p. 74). Second, time is a pure intuition because it is a necessary component of all intuitions (1929, p. 74). Third, time has only one dimension and this knowledge is not gained through experience, therefore time is a priori (1929, p. 75). Finally, different times are all part of one and the same time there are no separate or individual times (1929, p. 75).The thing to get here is that space and time are pure a priori (they arent tangible things), but yet they can tell us useful things about the empirical a posteriori world (in this vein, other statements that contain objective synthetic a priori knowledge include mass and energy are equivalent and time is relative to frame of reference; both of these statements are examples that concern what Kant calls the transcendental aesthetic). Consider the following Kant quotes from Section II. Of Time below as well:

Thus our conception of time explains the possibility of so much synthetical knowledge a priori, as is exhibited in the general doctrine of motion, which is not a little fruitful.

Time and space are, therefore, two sources of knowledge, from which, a priori, various synthetical cognitions can be drawn. Of this we find a striking example in the cognitions of space and its relations, which form the foundation of pure mathematics. They are the two pure forms of all intuitions, and thereby make synthetical propositions a priori possible.

We have now completely before us one part of the solution of the grand general problem of transcendental philosophy, namely, the question: How are synthetical propositions a priori possible? That is to say, we have shown that we are in possession of pure a priori intuitions, namely, space and time, in which we find, when in a judgement a priori we pass out beyond the given conception, something which is not discoverable in that conception, but is certainly found a priori in the intuition which corresponds to the conception, and can be united synthetically with it. But the judgements which these pure intuitions enable us to make, never reach farther than to objects of the senses, and are valid only for objects of possible experience.

Kant onSECTION II. Of Time.

Using a Synthetic a priori to Cross forks:Equations like Newtons F=ma or EinsteinsE=mc2arePure Reason (Pure Logic; a Priori) despite being both necessarily true (valid statements / very strong theories) and not tautological (not purely analytic). Yet we cant confirm theytell us anything about the world until we test and confirm themvia experiment and actually physically cross forks (we have to not only create a Synthetic a priori, but prove it is true empirically via testing). Even though we cant reach out and touch their forms directly, we confirmthoseequations are true, as they canhelp usto predict what we will observe with perfect accuracy (and thus we can treat them as scientific theories). Thus equations like these are good examples ofa synthetic a priori. The complex part is dealing withSynthetic a priori that cant be proven, such as is the case with Moral Philosophy

Trying to Crosstheforks of MoralPhilosophy: On this page we are mainly dealing with crossing the forks of natural philosophy (AKA natural science), in other words,we are just showing you how the empirical and logical forks can cross. However, both Kant and Hume apply theirtheories to morality and ethics(they are, so to speak, also seeing if they can cross the more etherealforks of ethics and metaphysics). Hume says morality is purely informed by the senses (that ALL knowledge that can tell us useful facts is empirical period); Kant says we can have useful knowledge of the empirical, logical, ethical, and metaphysical, despite the more obvious benefits of the empirical. It stands to reason, ifwe can cross the forks of natural philosophy, why cant we cross the forks of moralphilosophy? A main goal of Kant is to figure out if we can create a confirmable metaphysical synthetic a priori. Long story short, Kantbelieves that we can have facts about pure philosophy, but that we cant create a provable metaphysic synthetic a priori. In other words, we can have true facts about metaphysics and they can be very useful, but we cant prove it empirically (as by its nature there is a sub-category of metaphysics that is a priori). Learn about crossing forks and human understanding in terms of the physical, logical, ethical, and metaphysical.[10]

TIP: Confused? The following article contains an excellent analysis of the synthetic a priori The Importance of the Synthetic A Priori in Kants First Critique.

The above summary of Kants argument was gleaned from theover 1,000 pagesof his work.

The gist is that Kantattempted to provethat we can use facts about ideas to prove facts about the world. That Pure Reason can be used toprove theexistence of asynthetic a priori, crossing the tongs ofHumes Fork, and thus saving Newtons laws and science itself in the process.[11]

Thus we can conclude, Kantrebutted Hume in an effort to show thatknowledge canbe foundinboththe necessaryandcontingent (concerning reality), the a priorianda posteriori (concerning knowledge), and the analyticandsynthetic(concerning language); In short, useful human knowledge can be foundin both reason and empirical sensory evidence, and each form of human understanding can tell us about the other.

TIP: Think about the scientific method.We have ideas and define experiments; we do experiments and come up with more ideas; rinse and repeat. Weformulate theories and we test a hypothesis based on theoretical mathematics or ideas. Modern science IS the crossing of Humes fork.

TIP: We credit Kant with saving science, but Hume also saved science. Before Hume (in the Age of Reason) empiricism was starting to be abandoned for Pure Reason(Newton doesnt always offer proofs for instance). Long story short, Hume and Kant are both sages and both important. KantsaCritique of Pure Reasonexemplifies akey moment in history (andit is largely a testament to Humes importance as well as Kants).

More:

Hume's Fork Explained - Fact / Myth

Ill never forget the first time the Bears caused me pain. It was a wet, Autumnal day in May 1994. I was eight, Norths were first. Newcastle, and Andrew Johns, then 19, beat us at home. I trudged in the rain with my Mum, Dad, and four uncles, back to the pub Percys across Miller Street. The loss was evidently too much for me, and I began to cry.

Norths were formidable in the 1990s, regularly bettering storied opponents like Canberra, Manly and Brisbane, upon whom the folklore of 90s rugby league has been built. But they never won that premiership, they strategically blundered with Super League, and they fizzled into insolvency, enduring the humiliation of what former president David Hill described as the sacrilegious merger with Manly before the expulsion of the Bears by the Forces of Darkness.

Rugby league historian Andrew Moore once suggested that the Northern Eagles joint venture may well have established a record for being the least loved football club in sporting history. He also pointed out, that only a few years earlier, outside the one-city teams then only Newcastle and Brisbane in 1991 and 1994 Norths were the competitions largest-drawing team. Poker machine money enabled the first-grade roster some glitz, and though the Curse of the Cammeraygal continued to thwart their premiership hopes, the Bears were nevertheless one of the heavyweight teams of that decade. Their subsequent, rapid demise was not organic, and hundreds of thousands of Bears people are still out there, wandering.

Some fans will tell you the Bears are a relic of the past. But it looks like Australian Rugby League Commission chairman Peter Vlandys disagrees. He recently told The Daily Telegraph: Wherever I go every third person asks me when are you bringing back the Bears?.

Speaking specifically about the proposed 18th team in the NRL, Vlandys went on to say: One thing Ive learned in rugby league is that the Bears have an extremely popular brand. However, theres already enough Sydney teams so doing it with an area like Perth makes sense. Youre getting the best of both. A great brand and a new supporter base.

For those who wish to see the Bears return to the top grade, it is hard to conceive of a comment more inviting. For two wilderness-riven decades, Bears hopefuls have been scoffed at, cast as hopeless, foolish tragics, and blind to the realities of economic rationalism in the 21st century. At a private event some years ago, a former senior administrator in the NRL laughed in the face of a Bears official explicating the case for a return on the Central Coast in a ground the club built, underwritten by John Singleton, coached by Wayne Bennett. It didnt matter: the Bears were done, their cards were marked.

And yet the Bears dont seem to go away.

This is the point where opponents will suggest that the partner should go it alone. Forge their own identity. However, no such sentiment appears to exist in Perth. Twice the Bears have adorned the back page of the West Australian, and ahead of Perths hosting of the State of Origin on Sunday, Bears chairman Daniel Dickson will be in the city to meet a West Australian government group to further explore the partnership.

Dickson will later be joined in a box by Australian comedian Jim Jeffries, an avid Bears man, who once said my big dream in life is that Ill make enough money that Ill buy the Bears back into the NRL. Ill do a Russell Crowe and bring them back Though daddy-money would be nice, Dickson says that should the Bears be green-lit for the 18th licence, the money is good. There are three individual investors lined up, he says, Vlandys knows who they are, hes met them, and theyre ready to step up to the block.

Commercial viability. NRL support. West Australian desire. Unprecedented goodwill. Is it time to dream? The only comments appearing to temper matters are those from Dickson himself. The Bears are not in agreement with anyone, Dickson told SENZ Breakfast Radio recently. We just want to make sure that geographically we feel we are the team of the people, and we can take that to the people where the game needs to go. Whether wise brinkmanship, 4D chess, or just playing hard to get, it is fair to say that Dickson thinks in the abstract about location, and is keeping his options open.

Its never easy, is it? Victory may be close, but the Bears do know how to make it hard. It reminds me of my dads response to my tears after that loss to Newcastle in 1994.

Dont worry mate, he consoled me, gently putting a fatherly arm around me as I tried to hide my flood of tears from my uncles. We used to cry when the Bears won a game! Guttural laughter from my uncles. A historic quote for the family. He was introducing me to the dry, gallows humour that accompanied any seasoned observer of the Bears. A coping mechanism, probably.

These are the ties that bind. There are hundreds of thousands of Bears people, just like me, who will invoke the same, mechanised caution at the prospect of a miracle: a return to first grade, footy at Bear Park, even just once a year, in the red and black. Weve been burnt before, but were still here, and still hoping.

Original post:

Is it time for the dream of North Sydney Bears' long-awaited return to finally become a reality? | Sam Perry - The Guardian

Quite the wreckage, huh?

17 seats down, a host of future stars put to the sword, and the Prime Minister who cant remember the cash rate sent off to Japan to meet the President who couldnt remember his predecessors name.

Most chillingly for the Liberal Party, seven of its heartland seats are now in the supercilious clutches of the Teal mafia. They are rich, they are righteous, and as Zali Steggalls effortless return in Warringah shows they are here to stay.

Fools have rushed to propose that the Liberals respond with a commensurate lurch to the left. Wiser heads have rightly pointed out that with 44.6 per cent of the National vote still lodged firmly on the Right, the Liberal ship might benefit from a conservative course-correction.

Whatever heading HMAS Liberal Party takes from here, we must be absolutely clear about the nature of the storm from which she emerges. This tempest is the long-threatening, but spectacularly sudden divorce of economic interest groups within the Australian body politic.

The Simon Holmes Court MPs represent some of the most existentially-secure communities on the planet. Their use of Teal branding heralds an abstracted political Utopia, reflecting the very real hybrid paradise in which they live: Blue is for Sydneys harbour, postcode wealth, financial and legal literacy, and an accompanying propensity for technocratic managerialism. Green is for Melbournes gardens and an idealised environmental romanticism this is not a genuine neighbourly care for our lived environment (Mosman and Toorak still love their Range Rovers), but rather the blind ambition to save humanity from itself.

Yet, of the supposed Blue (read: Liberal Party) virtues listed above, which can we honestly say is a true benchmark of an authentic Conservative ethos?

Precisely none.

In fact, these things arent virtues at all. They are identity characteristics. They are brandings accumulated by the Liberal Party thanks to exceptionally strong executive functioning during the Howard Years and the prevailing post-Thatcher-Reagan global orthodoxy.

Thatcher, Reagan, and Howard all had good reason to lean heavily on this mode of popular financialism. In their eras, economic rationalism wasuseful as an implement of practical policy, downstream from a core conservative philosophy. In the 80s and 90s, free enterprise, tax, and labour market reform, along with the democratisation of the financial system were essential to the flourishing of the family, the coherence of the community, and the strength of the nation-state. Essential you might say, to conserving the greater good.

In Australia, The Liberal Party, absent any meaningful buttressing of its philosophical underpinnings post-Howard, still relied predominantly on convincing the well-off to stick with the party of economic management well into the 21st Century.

This prolonged the growth and sustenance of a distinct metropolitan voter-class who preferenced the Liberal Party in protection of their economic wellbeing, but would not claim to be authentically conservative or in some cases even classical Liberal

These are good people. They work hard and want the best for their children. They vote intentionally, and have been artfully seduced by the magical solution the Teals offer: that is, the chance to heal the world without any meaningfulpersonal sacrifice. It is a wholly dishonest, imaginary political proposition, but one that is made possible by a misplaced obsession with financial management as a key tenet of Conservative branding.

The Teals have exploited this geo-specific concern for material well-being, and presented themselves as like-cultured economic managerialists, but with bigger better hearts. The 2022 election then, is the coming home to roost of the economic rationalists chickens.

Until now, only Australia, of all the Western nations, has remained attached to economic rationalism asthedefining article of modern Conservatism. Accordingly, only in Australia, is (or was) the nominally Conservative Party still so strongly considered to be the Party of the wealthy.

To be sure, the rich and the environmentally-conscious should still have voted for the Liberal Party. The Teals advertise a false agency and will deliver nothing that Albanese Labor doesnt already have designs on. They may well just bring chaos to Canberra, as the new, extraordinary parliamentary dynamic takes hold.

Mercifully for the battered Liberal Party, that chaos will not be their concern. What should be, is the realisation that the economic rationalists brand of politics will not provide a path back to power, nor will it recreate a constituency capable of reviving the partys electoral viability.

This is a good thing. The Liberal Party now has the privilege of perhaps two full terms to develop a full suite of authentic policies which respond to the real needs of aspirational, entrepreneurial, family-focused Australians. Though this process must begin outside the glamour seats, this doesnt mean the burghers of Warringah, Wentworth, and Kooyong wont return to the party one day. They surely will.

When they do, however, they should rejoin the Liberal fold convinced that the partys policy substance runs deeper than a sales pitch. They will not, and should not return merely because they feel the Blue team is best qualified to mind their money.

When Clinton strategist James Carville coined his famous phrase, Its the Economy, Stupid! in 1992, it resonated not just because the economy is a universal concern, but because it highlighted the political folly of ignoring the bleeding obvious.

The Australian Liberal Party must not make that mistake.

Ben Crocker is a Constitutional Fellow at The American Conservative and Centre for the Study of Statesmanship in Washington DC. Twitter: @RealBenCrocker

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It's the economy, stupid - The Spectator Australia