Motus Mentis

Over at Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella links to two contrasting articles. The first, by Binyamin Applebaum, an editor at the New York Times, is a panegyric on the presidency of Joe Biden. The second, by Peter van Buren at American Conservative, is a jeremiad called “Evening in America”. It’s a stark and fascinating juxtaposition.

In the first article, the author speaks of nothing but the economy — as if we are nothing more than walking stomachs, and nothing matters at all but how much money we have — and assumes that the government knows best how to maximize this (with the axiom that equal distribution of money is the greatest good, even if it comes at an absolute cost even for the poorest, and requires increasing suffocation of our liberties).

To evaluate the quality of life only in terms of economics is the chief feature of Marxism — but even with that narrow focus, the author neglects to mention (with good reason, considering his aim) the single economic factor uppermost on everyone’s mind: inflation. Reading the article, one might assume that we can just forget about everything else — mass illegal immigration, crime, lethal drugs pouring over the border, vanishing moral principles, sexualization of children, sacralization of everything perverse and grotesque, endless futile wars, the hegemony of identity politics and institutionalized race hatred, the erasure of history, the mass insanity that obliterates all natural categories, the wholesale abandonment of any sense of the transcendent, the lowering of all culture to the titillation and gratification of our basest appetites, the bleak despair that claims so many of our young peoples’ lives, the approach of civil war as our factional antipathies widen and deepen, etc., etc. (And never mind Joe Biden’s transparently obvious corruption, and his accelerating descent into caducity and stupefaction.)

In other words: Four More Years!

The second article certainly “gets it” (as for what “it” is, see above) more than the first, although, as Bill points out in his post, it’s surprising that it mentions only in passing what is by far the most dangerous and time-sensitive threat we face: the invasion across our southern border.

I wonder, as I have so often before: how is it that two (presumably) intelligent people could look at the state of the nation and see it so differently? I will leave this as “an exercise for the reader”. A good place to start, however, might be to think about who the authors are. According to Wikipedia:

Binyamin Applebaum, an Ivy League graduate, is, as noted above, a member of the editorial board of the New York Times, where he is “the lead writer on business and economics”.

Peter van Buren “…served in the U.S. Department of State for 24 years, including a year in Iraq as a team leader for two Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs).

After his book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, was published in 2012 Van Buren claims to have experienced a series of escalating, adverse actions.”

Meanwhile, also over at Bill’s place, the question has arisen as to whether those who seem intentionally to be destroying the American nation are willfully choosing evil. I doubt, for the most part, that they are: as Socrates argued, nobody in his right mind does that, and my assumption (reinforced by knowing lots of lefties personally) is that they believe they are morally justified, somehow, in wrecking the place, or at least that the end justifies the means. But I’ll leave that for another post.