RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.
Countrymen,
I like John Hinderaker, I really do, even though, repeatedly, I find him counter-illustrating some great truth. His intellectual clarity is formidable, as his court-and conference-room history must attest. Especially when this quality of John’s vividly counter-illustrates a vital conceptual nuance am I grateful for his presence and perspicacity. And here he illustrates the discrete pusillanimity of his guild with respect to the distinction between, as Orly puts it, what is legal and what is fair.
John sees the problem and sits on his hands. A family relies upon him and a family is a power of being, not a construct. But so is fairness a power of being whereas law is a construct (to be sure with a power of being inside and driving it). Indeed, as a playground for practitioners (attorneys) law is seen (by attorneys) rather than as a service by practitioners to its owners (everyone, including attorneys).
(The people at The Volokh Conspiracy whose families have direct experience of law as violence are less inclined to hand-sitting than those at Power Line, whose families have not. Which is not to disparage those at Power Line. I read them daily with appreciation. Some of my best friends are attorneys.)
Law which is unjust/unfair, Aquinas said, is not law at all but a species of violence. The phenomenon is widely known and just as widely sweated over. For, law has punitive power behind it whereas fairness does not, at least not patently or swiftly. Law conduces to fairness or it has zero legitimacy, and that regardless of the punitive power enforcing or the creative power constructing it. This truth crawls the skin of attorneys. It also, slowly but surely, grinds the purveyors and onlookers of legal violence into meat for dogs.
The fact nominalist/positivist society can not and will not grasp is the distinction between a power of being and a construct. Nominalist/positivist society can not and will not engage the phenomenon of powers of being. Every reality in nominalist/positivist society is a construct — so it is thought. Even individuals are constructs, things, technologies, to be flipped on and off as needed by construct makers and managers (see Lobel, above). The powers of being bursting about one’s vision nominalist/positivist acolytes try to see around, want to see past. Powers of being upturn the nominalist/positivist trading tables inside their temples of academe, economos and polis.
Our intelligentsia (derived by Fabian Communists early in the 20th Century from the Russian intelligentsiya) describe religion in terms of meaningless imagination or subjective psychological projection. They announce the actualization of human potential through education as the intelligent alternative to religion.
Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) described religion in terms of powers of being which grasp the human mind itself, going through man’s psyche, his conscious and unconscious mind – what Plato calls man’s soul – but not deriving from it. They come from the roots man has in the depth of reality itself.
The several religions of man illustrate different powers of being by which men are grasped. The sacrifices, the seriousness, the glory and the cruelty of man’s history of religion are understandable only in view of powers of being man encounters and responds to, not as wishful thinking that education remediates.
Attorneys are advised to do their duty: make law fair!
Update 1: Kevin Williamson treats of this matter.
Update 2: Paul Mirengoff at Power Line averts eyes from the matter.
Update 3: Bob Belvedere treats wisely of this matter here.
Update 4: Waller R. Newell: Understanding Tyranny And Terror: From The French Revolution To Modern Islamism.
Update 5: That Bruce Jenner is a female is not a self-evident truth. It is a pose.
Update 6: Peggy Noonan: Mr. Trump goes to Washington: No one at this point needs your snotty potshots and your supposedly withering one-liners.
Update 7: The Ghost Of Heidegger And The Sex Lives Of The New York Intellectuals
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
