SALON

Tuesday, Jul 24, 2012 07:45 AM EDT

NRA’s doomsaying sham

Do NRA leaders, like CEO Wayne LaPierre, believe their own dire prophecies? Their political donations suggest not

By Alan Berlow
 

Topics: Editor's Picks, Gun Control, Guns, NRA, Wayne LaPierre

 

 
(Credit: Wikipedia/Gage Skidmore/Shutterstock/Salon)
 

This is Part 2 in a three-part series on the NRA's influence in the United States. Read Part 1 here. 

 

 

If Americans wake up one day to find out that they’re living in a Stalinist police state and that government agents have confiscated all their guns leaving them utterly defenseless, it won’t be because Wayne LaPierre didn’t warn us. LaPierre, the CEO of the National Rifle Association, has been issuing warnings along these lines for most of his 20 years as the public face of what is regularly described as the nation’s most powerful lobbying organization.

LaPierre is, of course, a perennial doomsayer with a nearly unblemished record of wrongful predictions, a record so reliably unreliable that, were it possible to bet against it, one could easily amass a sizable fortune. During the Clinton administration he claimed that a document “secretly delivered” to him revealed that “the full-scale war [to] eliminate private firearms ownership completely and forever” was “well underway.” Yet a decade later Second Amendment rights are stronger than at any time in modern history, and law-abiding Americans are in about as much danger of having their 300 million guns seized by the federal government as by Lord Voldemort.

Four years ago LaPierre dusted off and embellished his Clinton-era prediction, arguing that if Barack Obama were elected, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity would be silenced, and “civil disarmament” would be implemented through a United Nations gun-ban treaty. Needless to say, that didn’t happen, but LaPierre now says it’s only because Obama and his advisers decided prior to his election to forgo implementation of the dastardly plan and instead “hatched a conspiracy of public deception to guarantee his re-election in 2012.” According to LaPierre, Obama still plans to “erase the Second Amendment from the Bill of Rights and exorcise it from the U.S. Constitution” in a second term, when he will turn “American’s guns into international soup cans and park benches.” Exactly when that will transpire, and whether Obama will repeal the Second Amendment with a two-thirds vote of the Senate or simply forgo that constitutional formality and resort to extralegal means, remains unclear. LaPierre only says that Obama is “just waiting for the moment to strike.”

The only way to avert this calamity, the NRA’s 4 million members are told in daily email alerts, the organization’s various magazines and regular fundraising appeals, is if they all dig deep into their pockets and send money to the NRA. “This is the most dangerous election of our lifetime,” screams the April cover of America’s First Freedom, the NRA’s flagship publication, showing a stern, pinch-lipped LaPierre. The battle cry for this year’s campaign to defeat Obama is “All In,” a poker metaphor designed to convey the idea that the stakes couldn’t be higher. This election, LaPierre wrote in First Freedom, “will decide whether Americans remain free” and, “That’s why NRA is ‘All In’ for the 2012 election, and why you must be ‘All In’ with the NRA.”

But the “all” in “all in” apparently doesn’t include LaPierre or any of the NRA’s other top executives. In fact, when it comes to putting his money “in,” LaPierre, who earns nearly $1 million a year at the NRA, invariably folds his cards. During his 20 years as NRA CEO, LaPierre’s name hasn’t shown up once in government reports of  contributors to NRA political action committees. (The Federal Election Commission requires public reporting of all contributions of $200 or more.) In 2003, when the organization was $100 million in the red and LaPierre was pleading with members to donate to a “war chest” to deal with a “full-blown legislative assault” by “gun banners,” he himself donated nothing to the NRA’s Political Victory Fund, the group’s political action committee. He again gave nothing to the PAC in the 2008 election, despite  his claim that Obama would confiscate hunting rifles and “ban use of firearms for home defense” (a charge Politifact.com labeled “intentionally dishonest”).  LaPierre, who has signed off on scores of fundraising appeals to NRA members to help defeat “gun-hating politicians” and elect lawmakers endorsed by the NRA, has also elected not to contribute to those campaigns. His last contribution to an NRA-backed candidate was a whopping $500 back in 2002.

The current election may, in LaPierre’s words, “literally be a struggle for the survival of freedom in America,” but he’d apparently rather take that risk than cut a check. And he’s not alone. Other top NRA executives have also chosen not to put their money in, according to Federal Election Commission records going back to 1990 available at OpenSecrets.org. Executive director for general operations Kayne Robinson, another million-dollar-a-year man and a former NRA president, has never contributed to the Political Victory Fund — or not enough to register with the FEC in the past 22 years. Others who have no chips on the table in this supposedly critical election year for gun owners — and have never given to the PVF  – include NRA president David Keene, the NRA’s first vice-president, second vice-president, secretary, treasurer, chief of staff, managing director and membership director. In fact, among the NRA’s current top officers, the only one who has ever contributed to the PVF is the PAC’s own chairman, Chris Cox. Cox has made two contributions totaling $2,000 since joining the NRA in 2002, both in 2008.

The lack of enthusiasm for the NRA PAC also extends to its 76 current directors, and 29 lobbyists, only one of whom, other than Cox, donated to the PVF. Among the directors, only two ever donated. The most recent gift, $500, was in 2006.

Most notable are the NRA directors who have never contributed to the PVF, among them three former NRA presidents, Ronald Schmeits, Harlon Carter and Marion Hammer; Fox News analyst Oliver North; executives with some of the country’s leading firearms manufacturers; and loudmouth rock star and NRA darling Ted Nugent, who has called President Obama “a piece of shit,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a “worthless bitch,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein a “worthless whore” and Nancy Pelosi “a sub-human scoundrel.”

Now, it is theoretically possible that LaPierre and other NRA executives all make fat contributions to the lobby’s general fund so they can remain anonymous. But it would be hard to understand why they would all want to hide their association with the NRA rather than boast about it — and that they would have done this with such unanimity and consistency over the past two decades. Furthermore, given that NRA directors have written dozens, in some cases hundreds of checks to other reportable political causes, the idea that they would be hiding only their gifts to the NRA seems highly implausible.

From all of the empirical evidence, it seems fair to conclude that the NRA’s big thinkers and chief proselytizers have instead concluded that the existential task of financing the NRA’s political and legislative agenda  – to say nothing of literally saving civilization as we know it — is strictly for the squares, that these missions are best left to the little guys among NRA members who actually believe LaPierre’s alarmist forecasts.

Former NRA lobbyist Richard Feldman has suggested one reason NRA big shots are happy to sit on their wallets. In his book “Richochet: Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist,” Feldman calls the NRA a “cynical, mercenary political cult … obsessed with wielding power while relentlessly squeezing contributions from its members.” According to Feldman, NRA leaders “weren’t interested in actually solving problems, only in fueling perpetual crisis and controversy” because “that was how they made their money.”

Its executives, directors and lobbyists may not be interested in personally financing the lobby, but they like the perks and the bills have to be paid. Their job is to keep the fear pedal pressed firmly to the floor at all times and make sure the dollars roll in.

Lucky for them, along came Obama who, tarred and feathered in the cloak of Armageddon, has proved an invaluable asset, not just for the NRA but for the firearms industry at large. Today gun show advertisements regularly parrot LaPierre’s claim that Obama wants to confiscate everybody’s guns, warning Americans to “GET THEM WHILE YOU CAN!” According to the FBI, 2.9 million firearms were sold in the United States during the two months following Obama’s election. In 2009, 14 million guns were sold in the U.S., an all-time annual record. “To put it in perspective,” a euphoric Ammoland Shooting Sports News crowed, “that is more guns than the combined active armies of the top 21 countries in the world.” Ammoland estimated that at least 14 billion rounds of ammunition had been sold the same year, and ammunition shortages were widely reported. Outdoor Wire, a gun industry website, named Obama its “Gun Salesman of the Year.”  ”For me,” editor Jim Shepherd told the Washington Times, “it was a simple fact of recognizing that without [Obama] frightening consumers into action, the firearms industry might be suffering the same sort of business slumps that have befallen the automotive and housing industries.” In February, Ammo.net, an online ammunition retailer, called Obama “the greatest gun salesman in America,” and posted a series of charts showing increases in gun and ammunition sales, concealed carry permits, hunting licenses and background checks since he took office. “Ironically, the perceived hostility toward gun owners by President Obama has actually helped the firearms industry tremendously,” the gun seller concluded, suggesting that the industry might consider supporting Obama for a second term.

There is, however, another equally plausible reason the NRA’s top leadership fails to put its money where its mouth is, which is simply that the keepers of the faith know better than anyone that the premonitions of doom, and all the claims about the precarious state of the Second Amendment and the fragile state of American democracy are unreconstructed nonsense.

As I’ll discuss in Part 3 of this series, the evidence that these executives don’t believe their own carefully honed propaganda is nothing less than overwhelming.

Alan Berlow is the author of "Dead Season: A Story of Murder and Revenge." His writing has appeared in the The New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly and Harper's. 

SALON

Monday, Jul 23, 2012 10:52 AM EDT

NRA: A lobby for criminals

The NRA is a twisted, paranoid organization whose main achievement is to have made law enforcement harder

By Alan Berlow

Topics: Aurora shooting, dark knight shooting, Editor's Picks, FBI, Gun Control, Guns, james holmes, NRA, Wayne LaPierre

 

 
(Credit: robcocquyt via Shutterstock/Salon/Benjamin Wheelock)

 

 

This is Part 1 in a three-part series on the NRA's influence in the United States.

We’ve read the sickening script before. Following virtually every mass shooting in the United States, the news media focuses briefly on the question of whether anything can be done to prevent such incidents in the future. Soon, a softly spoken “no” infiltrates the coverage, either out of sheer hopelessness or the certain knowledge that our elected officials are so firmly in the thrall of the gun lobby that they quiver in fear at the mere thought of contemplating even tepid measures advanced by gun control advocates in the wake of the latest atrocity. If the aftermath of Aurora (12 dead, 58 wounded) plays out as others of recent or fading memory —  Tuscaloosa, two weeks ago (18 wounded), Tucson in 2011 (six dead, 14 wounded), Binghamton in 2009 (13 dead, four wounded), Ft. Hood also in 2009 (13 dead, 29 wounded), Virginia Tech in 2007 (32 dead, 17 wounded), Northern Illinois University in 2008 (five dead, 21 wounded), Columbine in 1999 (12 dead, 21 wounded),  etc. — the role of the National Rifle Association will be lightly brushed over, then dismissed.

It shouldn’t be. Here’s why.

In a nation armed with more than a quarter of a billion privately owned firearms, the NRA is correct to assert that determined outlaws will often find a way to get their hands on guns. The problem is that the NRA is the foremost enabler of many of those outlaws.

We can’t link the NRA directly to the hideous acts of alleged Aurora gunman James Holmes, 24, or to any one of the nation’s 9,000 to 10,000 annual gun murders and 338,000 rapes, robberies and other non-fatal assaults, or to the actions of the “deranged madmen” whom the NRA loves to demonize.  What we can say with absolute certainty is that where there are loopholes in gun laws, laws that make it more difficult to get thugs off the streets and laws that endanger the lives of police and ordinary citizens alike, you will invariably find the fingerprints of the NRA. Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s CEO and public face, may call his group “one of the largest law enforcement organizations in the country,”  but under his leadership the NRA  – with a 2010 budget of more than $240 million — has become the nation’s de facto lobby for street criminals, criminal gun dealers and an industry that reaps a sizable percentage of its income from criminal gun use.  The NRA, says Pittsburgh police detective Joseph Bielevicz, “takes every chance it gets to stymie even reasonable efforts to combat gun violence.”

No one honestly doubts that the NRA is the reason there is no serious debate about guns in Congress. So today we live under a series of  laws written or advanced by the NRA. Today a state can impose a death sentence or life in prison on someone who commits murder with a firearm. But the “What, me worry?” gun dealer, who supplies multiple murderers with guns he claims were “stolen” from his inventory, guns he never recorded on his books, or guns he sold to straw buyers with a wink and a nod, can operate with virtual impunity, thanks to laws written by the NRA.

One of these, passed in 1986, drastically reduced penalties for dealers who violate record-keeping laws, making violations misdemeanors rather than felonies. Another established an absurdly high standard of proof to convict dealers who sell to criminals. In 2003, Congress, at the NRA’s urging, barred the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the much-maligned agency responsible for enforcing federal gun laws, from forcing dealers to conduct inventory inspections that would detect lost and stolen guns. Car dealers like to know when inventory goes missing. Gun dealers? Not so curious.

Most astonishingly, the same NRA-inspired law forces the FBI to destroy Brady background checks for gun purchases within 24 hours, which makes it harder for law enforcement to identify dealers who falsify their records and makes it impossible to cross-check purchases made by gun traffickers from multiple dealers. Although federal law requires a dealer who sells more than one handgun to a single individual in a five-day period to file a special report with the BATF, the agency is unable to cross-check purchases from multiple dealers, so gun traffickers can simply hop from one gun store to the next, buying a single handgun at each until they accumulate the arsenals they want. Put another way, the NRA and its backers in Congress created a law that forces the FBI to destroy evidence of crimes, evidence of illegal multiple gun purchases.

The FBI warned Congress that passage of this 24-hour law would allow 97 percent of criminal buyers to escape apprehension, and the Justice Department’s inspector general said the law’s principal beneficiaries would be criminal gun dealers. But this doesn’t bother the NRA. It even opposes common-sense local ordinances requiring that gun dealers and private citizens report lost or stolen firearms within 24 to 48 hours. Police support these laws because they want to move quickly when a gun is lost or stolen (a half-million are stolen each year), before someone gets shot.  They’re also supported by 78 percent of NRA members, who apparently recognize their value for public safety. They’re just not supported by the NRA leadership, which says they don’t work.

And why can’t the BATF cross-check purchases by gun traffickers? Because in 1979 — and every year since — the NRA, which is obsessed with federal record-keeping, has gotten the Congress to prohibit creation of a centralized database of gun purchases. Among the NRA’s leading evangelists, whose faith in the durability of American democracy hovers perennially just above zero, it is an incontrovertible article of faith that such a database would allow a totalitarian government, such as the one LaPierre predicts if Barack Obama is reelected, to identify gun owners and seize their guns.

At this point, it might be useful to pause and take a deep breath. We can probably all agree that confiscating 300 million guns held by fully a third of U.S. households would be one formidable and messy undertaking. Let’s ignore the fact that this would be illegal and unconstitutional, and that the vast majority of Americans would find this eventuality unlikely . Let’s also ignore the question of who, exactly, would do this. Marines? Police? The National Guard? Does anyone living in the 21st century really believe that a dictatorial government would need a centralized database if it wanted to snatch our guns?

In a world where U.S. intelligence agencies can pinpoint a person’s exact location using a cellphone’s GPS, where tens of thousands of video cameras are running 24/7 in public and private spaces, where a vast smorgasbord of computers contains the most intimate details of our lives, from the movies we watch to the brand of toilet paper we prefer, even LaPierre must realize that it is patently absurd to claim that figuring out who has a gun requires a national registry. Identifying the most strident gun-rights true believers would be easiest of all, since they’re constantly advertising themselves. Credit card records of gun purchases, lists of subscribers to gun aficionado and paramilitary magazines, not to mention Field and Stream, chat rooms, Facebook, websites, tweets and blogs — the LL Bean mailing list! — contain the names of tens of millions of hunters, sportsmen, grandmothers and other gun owners.

Amazon.com will suggest additional book titles I might enjoy after I buy LaPierre’s “Guns, Freedom and Terrorism,” “Guns, Crime and Freedom,” or “The Global War on Your Guns: Inside the U.N. Plan to Destroy the Bill of Rights.” Will records of LaPierre’s Internet book sales be used to “target” gun owners? The NRA helps fund its lobbying efforts by offering members a “platinum” NRA VISA card. Will cardholders be at risk of being rounded up should Obama win reelection? Is it time to take that “NRA Life Member” license plate off the SUV? Might a tyrannical regime hack into the NRA’s computers, or send someone in a taxi to NRA headquarters in Fairfax, Va., and seize the lobby’s membership list? If the “freedom haters,” as LaPierre likes to call them, are half as smart and well-organized as he would have us believe, they should have no trouble tracking down even the most hardened armed survivalists flown to remote corners of the fatherland in off-road vehicles stocked with high-powered weapons, crates of ammunition, dehydrated food and dog-eared copies of “The Turner Diaries.”

Of course, federal and state government agencies aren’t really interested in identifying every gun owner. In the real world, they’re only interested in figuring out who has used a gun illegally. And it is those people the NRA ultimately protects.

So, thanks to the NRA, there is no centralized database. Instead, gun sale records are “archived” by the nation’s 60,000 federally licensed firearms dealers at their places of business. Oh, and the BATF has estimated that 1 percent of those dealers are corrupt, which means there are about 600 dealers regularly funneling guns to criminals. But that 1 percent figure may be way off the mark.  When New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg sent undercover agents to gun stores making it clear to salespeople that they were illegal straw purchasers, 25 percent of dealers broke the law and sold them guns anyway. At gun shows — which sell about 30 percent of the guns identified in criminal trafficking cases — a staggering 94 percent of licensed dealers were willing to make such illegal sales. Meanwhile, the radical leadership of the NRA remains the leading impediment to closing the notorious gun show loophole — despite the fact that 69 percent of the NRA’s membership and 85 percent of the general public support background checks for gun show sales, according to a 2009 survey by Republican pollster Frank Luntz.

In “Wayne’s World,” the alternate universe tirelessly promoted by the NRA CEO, “gun shows are not a source of crime guns,” and the exhaustively documented gun show loophole is “a myth.” Of course, in Wayne’s World, even the existing Brady background checks for gun purchases are a total waste of time, because criminals are too smart to buy from licensed dealers and to fill out Brady forms. In the real world, where criminals are not as smart as LaPierre would have us believe, more than 2 million felons, domestic abusers and fugitives from justice have been turned away by gun dealers when they flunked Brady background checks since the law took effect in 1994.

In Wayne’s World, the solution to Aurora, Tucson and Columbine is more guns. In April 2011, LaPierre told the NRA’s national convention that “Every American wife and mother and daughter, every law-abiding adult woman should be trained, armed and encouraged to carry a firearm for personal protection.” In LaPierre’s American utopia, every citizen would be armed for self-defense and ready to play cop on the beat at a moment’s notice because, “The presence of a firearm makes us all safer.  It’s just that simple.”

Not surprisingly, he offers the same “simple” solution for Mexicans attempting to deal with their deadly drug cartels. The Mexican government, LaPierre says, “ought to give their own people a Second Amendment right to defend themselves, instead of coming here and trying to take away yours!” Here, one is led to believe that the only illegal guns that have ended up in the hands of the cartels were sent by agents of the BATF — with the full cooperation of the White House and Justice Department — as part of its ill-fated Operation Fast and Furious. In fact, as many as 2,000 guns may have ended up in Mexico as part of this gun-tracing effort, which has been the subject of multiple investigations.  However, in April the BATF reported that of 100,000 guns collected by the Mexican government, 68 percent could be traced to U.S. dealers. But never mind. LaPierre insists, the “great overwhelming bulk” of guns used by the Mexican cartels “come from non-American dealers.” He dismisses suggestions that U.S. dealers are a primary source of guns to Mexico as “absurd” and “a damned lie.”
 
Operation Fast and Furious may yet prove to be the scandal LaPierre clearly hopes it is. But NRA members might be interested in knowing that since 2006, the BATF has intercepted more than 10,000 guns and nearly a million rounds of ammunition destined for Mexico, and it has arrested 800 trafficking suspects. Between 2003 and 2010 the BATF was responsible for sending more than 66,000 violent criminals to prison for an average of 14 years each. In the same period, it recommended prosecution of  more than 26,000 defendants for firearms trafficking-related offenses involving an estimated 441,000 weapons.  If, as LaPierre claims, “government has failed in enforcing … our laws against violent criminals with guns,” he might tell his members which of those 66,000 criminals he’d rather the ATF hadn’t put away. And he might explain why the NRA opposes making gun-trafficking and straw purchases a crime.

If you visit Wayne’s World infrequently, it can be a bizarre and dazzling entertainment. Only there would the takeaway from the Tucson massacre be the head-wrenching claim that “government policies are getting us killed and imprisoning us in a society of terrifying violence.” Or would the lesson of 9/11 be that “guns can stop terrorists,” and that if terrorists succeed in detonating a nuclear device, “armed citizens would be critical in stabilizing a wounded society.” And only there would hardworking, modestly paid TSA employees who screen for bombs at airports be blamed for the “wand rape” of female fliers. “You see red-faced, teary-eyed, 15-year-old girls enduring security wands orbiting their breasts while electronic squeals detect the metal in their underwire bras,” LaPierre told the Conservative Political Action Committee. “You see women cringe as security men let their wands linger between their legs.”

Or at least that’s how LaPierre’s fevered mind sees it. And he’s the one calling the shots.

Alan Berlow is the author of "Dead Season: A Story of Murder and Revenge." His writing has appeared in the The New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly and Harper's. 

Why Christian Humanists?

That our name makes some readers uneasy at first blush demonstrates that words and phrases and ideas have histories just as much as nations and cities have histories. Our name would have been almost meaningless a thousand years ago, uncontroversial four hundred years ago, yet sets some people’s teeth on edge in the twenty-first century. For a brief discussion about what Christian Humanism means, we invite you to listen to episode one of The Christian Humanist Podcast at your leisure. Until that leisure materializes, we can say a few things about our brand of Christian Humanism here:

• We’re Humanists in the Renaissance sense. Borrowing the Latin word humanitas from Cicero and other classical writers, the Italian Renaissance humanists and later Erasmus of Rotterdam (whose picture is on the left on our site’s banner) borrowed that Roman idea of disciplined education as a program to reform and reinvigorate the Church and European culture, opposing what they perceived as the strict limits of Scholastic thought and the elitism that grew out of its schools and practices while most of Europe remained illiterate.  Embracing learning from the modern and postmodern secular academy and dedicating ourselves to teaching what we learn to any who will be taught, reserving judgment on this or that school of thought’s adequacy or inadequacy to reality as experienced and revealed, we twenty-first-century Christian Humanists proceed with the conviction that good ideas will resonate with the faithful intellect, bad ideas will prove their wretchedness in the fires of critical conversation, and those scholars and saints who have gone before us likely held up as important the books and ideas they held up for some reason; it’s for us to taste and see, not throw ideas out before we taste.
• We’re friends in the Aristotelian sense. As you read this site and listen to our podcast (and we hope you do both), you’ll notice that each of us has certain scholarly interests, philosophical tendencies, and favorite topics of thought that differ from the others.  Read a while longer and you might suspect that each of us thinks that the other two get certain things very wrong.  That’s why we keep talking. We believe that one of the highest sorts of friendship is the sort that seeks excellence together, and one way that we do so is to pound on each other’s ideas until the weak ones break.  While we hope not to congratulate ourselves for being ecumenical or open-minded or any of those sorts of things, we do hope that, by listening to one another, we’re acting out an acknowledgment of our own limitations, and further we submit to the possibility that in the course of things we might learn something from the questions at hand and from one another.
• We’re intellectuals in the Dantean sense. In the Florentine poet’s great Comedy, what separates the saved from the damned is not merely circumstances of birth or desire to do good but properly oriented loves.  The souls in Limbo certainly suffer in some sense from being born out of season, and certain souls seem to have been despairing even before they ended up in Inferno, but what marks their fate and shapes their punishments is the way that they began to satisfy the desires of the flesh without the checks of duty and order, to seek power without responsibility to God, to exercise the wiles of the mind without a love for the truth.  And those in Paradiso come before the Pilgrim grouped according to the baptized desires that defined their lives, whether for the goods of scholarship as framed by revelation, the goods of justice as framed by God’s sovereignty, or the goods of contemplation as given to the faithful by a faithful God.  We believe that the intellect is a good gift from God, one inadequate to save the soul but nonetheless a good gift.  And our exercise of that intellect is itself an act of worship of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus.
• We’re Christians in the broadest sense. David and Michial are disciples of the Magesterial Reformation, and Nathan claims influences from the Anabaptists.  Michial is a Christian existentialist, and although Nathan is almost convinced, David isn’t quite as sure.  Every one of us loves Augustine for a very different reason.  Each of the three of us serves a local congregation in different ways and in different capacities, and none of us is convinced that the books the others most often cite are worth citing.  Yet our confession of Jesus as the Christ we hold in common, and our podcast conversations and blog posts begin from within the broad but intelligible tradition that we call Christianity.

Additionally, our introduction states that we aim to be “unapologetically confessional, unabashedly intellectual . . . taking the question at hand seriously and ourselves not at all.” We put a good amount of thought into that introduction and believe that it sums up our mission very well:

• Unapologetically confessional. We believe that denominations, creeds, and doctrine are important and that the differences between Christian groups are nearly as important as the beliefs that tie us all together. Additionally, we believe in the truth of the historical Christian message over and against the doctrines of other religions and philosophies.
• Unabashedly intellectual. We believe that Christianity has nothing to fear from sustained inquiry and that the truth will always survive whatever attacks it undergoes in the Marketplace of Ideas. (The metaphor, not the podcast.)
• Taking the question at hand seriously… The things we discuss on our podcast and in our blog entries are important to us, and we seek to treat the questions and the informed answers others have given with the utmost delicacy and respect.
• …and ourselves not at all. There is no room in the Christian life–not even the Christian academic life!–for ego, and we make an effort to use as much self-deprecating humor as we and our listeners can tolerate.

Though we know that CHP listeners are smart enough to know this already, we do want to make public that the views and opinions stated on the Christian Humanist Podcast are the hosts’ ideas and do not necessarily reflect the official positions of the University of Georgia, Emmanuel College, or any other institution with which the hosts participate, including but not limited to congregations, denominations, Modern Language Associations, or other affiliations.  We also might change our minds about certain things–we do believe that mortals are always learning, after all.

All prior episodes of the podcast are available in .mp3 format on the “Episodes” page, but we’d prefer if folks would subscribe via iTunes or by copying and pasting our RSS address in the right margins.  Likewise with the blog, except click the “Blog” or “Subscribe to Blog” links.  Links to show notes and to discussions of the post elsewhere on the Internet will also appear in each episode’s archive entry.

Six Reasons We Can't Change The Future Without Progressive Religion

AlterNet.org

AlterNet / By Sara Robinson

Six Reasons We Can't Change The Future Without Progressive Religion

Often, religion offers much that progressives need to build movements for change.

July 8, 2012  |  

One of the great historical strengths of the progressive movement has been its resolute commitment to the separation of church and state. As progressives, we don't want our government influenced by anybody's religious laws. Instead of superstition and mob id, we prefer to have real science, based in real data and real evidence, guiding public policy. Instead of holy wars, othering, and social repression -- the inevitable by-products of theocracy -- we think that drawing from the widest possible range of philosophical traditions makes America smarter, stronger, and more durable over time.

That said: while we all want a government free of religion, there are good reasons that we may not want our own progressive movement to be shorn of every last spiritual impulse. In fact, the history of the progressive movement has shown us, over and over, that there are things that the spiritual community brings to political movements that are essential for success, and can't easily be replaced with anything else.

Religion has been central to the formation of human communities -- and to how we approach the future -- for as long as homo sapiens has been around. Apart from God-belief (which varies widely between religions), all successful religions thrive and endure because they offer their adherents a variety of effective community-building, social activism, and change management tools that, taken together, make religion quite possibly the most powerful social change technology humans have ever developed.

What does religion offer that progressives need to make our movement work?

First: there's nothing like it if you want to bond a bunch of very diverse people into a tight community of shared meaning and value. A religious congregation brings together people of all ages, backgrounds, educational levels, professional rank, and life circumstances, and melds them into an enduring tribe that's centered around a shared commitment to mutual trust and care, and (most importantly) has a clear and vivid shared vision of the future they're trying to create.

There is simply no other organizational form that encourages people to share their time, energy, and resources so quickly, completely, or enduringly; or aligns so much conviction toward the same goal. (This is why the leaders of corporations, the marketers of sports teams, and the military all study religious cultures, and try to appropriate their tribe-building techniques for their own purposes.) The resulting tribes can last for many centuries -- and acquire a resounding moral voice that can reverberate throughout their larger communities, and well beyond. If you want to change the world, this is the kind of group -- deeply bound by faith, trust, love, history, and a commitment to each other and to the world they envision that transcends life and death -- that's most likely to get it done. Religion is the best way going to get people to consecrate themselves, body and soul, to a larger cause; and to take on the kind of all-or-nothing risks that are often required to really change the world.

Second, religious narratives center people in the long arc of history, telling them where they came from, who they are, what they are capable of, and what kind of future is possible. History does this, too; but religion does it at a deeper, mythic level that gives these stories extra emotional and cognitive resonance. For most of human history, in fact, the task of imagining a different future and giving people the inspiration and courage to reach for it has been the primary role of religious prophets. (So has the job of warning the people that they're wandering into grave error or betraying their own values, and must change their ways or face disaster.) Religion is the native home of the prophetic voice -- the voice that calls people to transformative change. Throughout America's history, our most evocative political prophets -- both Roosevelts, all the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, Van Jones, Barack Obama -- have invariably been people who spent a lot of time in the pews, learning to speak the kind of language that calls us to a better place.

Third, over the course of American history, liberal religious faiths have been the primary promoter of progressive values throughout the culture -- and also the leading institution when it came time to inculcate our progressive sensibilities into the next generation. Many, if not most, progressives in America are progressive specifically because they believe that this is what their faith demands of them. They're raising their kids in churches and temples because they believe, as the Bible says, that "if you train up a child in the way that he should go, when he is old, he will not depart from it."

Liberal congregations have etched our values onto the young souls of tens of millions of American progressives, over three centuries and dozens of generations. Do we really want to try to do without them now?

Fourth, progressive religion has always been America's most credible and aggressive front-line defender of non-market-based values against the onslaught of capitalism and greed. In recent years, as the “free-market” fetishists took over (and gulled American Evangelicals into shilling for their hellish utilitarianism), our liberal faith communities -- mainline Protestants and liberal Catholics, Jews and Quakers, Unitarian Universalists and the rising wave of reformist Muslims -- are the strongest remaining cultural forces left with the moral authority to insist that we have a duty to the poor, that democracy cannot survive without a commitment to justice, and that compassion is always a better survival strategy than competition.

The market says: Everything and everybody has a price, and is for sale. Faith says: The most valuable things in our lives -- good health, safe food, strong families, a clean environment, a just economy, meaningful work, access to opportunity -- are beyond price, and should by right be available to us all. Our faith communities (especially, but not always exclusively, the progressive ones) have always held this light up within our culture, and it's never been needed more than it's needed right now.

Fifth, in a nation where over 90% of everybody has some kind of God-belief -- and the overwhelming majority of them ground their political decisions in that belief -- abandoning the entire landscape of faith to the right wing amounts to political malpractice. For most Americans, our religious worldviews are the epistemological soil in which every other decision we make is rooted -- the basic model of reality that we use to navigate the world. When we stopped engaging people's basic model of moral order, we effectively ceded the entire moral landscape of the nation to our enemies. It was, in retrospect, perhaps the most self-destructive error we've made over the past 40 years (and that's saying something).

To our credit, a lot of our best organizers and activists are starting to realize the magnitude of this mistake. We're paying a lot more attention these days to learning to clearly articulate progressive values, to express ourselves in explicitly moral language, and to put forward more strongly progressive frames, narratives, and future visions to counter the bankrupt conservative worldview that's brought us to this sorry place in history.

But while we're working toward some new understandings here, let's also remember that the right wing's success on taking this field was rooted directly in their ability to mobilize conservative churches to carry the moral banner forward into the culture for them. If we're going to overwrite their brutal and anti-democratic story of how the world works, the most important step we can take is to tap into the vast reach and deep moral authority of our remaining progressive faith communities, and amplify their voices every way we can.
Churches and temples have always been the first and most natural places Americans turn when it's time to have serious cultural conversations about value and meaning and the future they desire. If we're serious about changing the national story and bending the future in our preferred direction, then that's where we need to be.

Sixth: Progressive faiths, across the board, promote the essential belief that human communities are, in themselves, inherently and intrinsically sacred. In fact, progressive atheists may be surprised to learn that among their more religious brothers and sisters, there's very little agreement about the nature of God -- but a very strong consensus that the act of radical community-making is the most intensely holy and essential work that they do.

If there is a God (and progressives of faith debate that question endlessly), then we might most reliably see the face of that divinity in that permanent circle of friends with whom we celebrate life's passages and joys, and wrestle with its hardest challenges -- the people whom we trust to stand with us no matter what comes, and who will work with us tirelessly toward our shared vision of a better world. It's this deep faith in the dream of the beloved community that also feeds our faith in the potential of good government, and our confidence in the unleashed potential of the American people. (And furthermore: I don't think I've ever met a progressive atheist who would disagree on this point.)

Across all the long centuries of the American progressive movement, we've never launched a successful change wave that didn't draw most of its leadership, its base, and its moral grounding from the country's deep liberal religious tradition.

Our churches and temples have been the fountain, the rock, the mother source of our movement from the very beginning. Progressives of faith have always played a central role in our political victories in the past. It's time to stop imagining that somehow, we're going to take the country back without them now.

Sara Robinson, MS, APF is a social futurist and the editor of AlterNet's Vision page. Follow her on Twitter, or subscribe to AlterNet's Vision newsletter for weekly updates.

AlterNet.org

BELIEF  

AlterNet / By James Rohrer

Are Progressives Harming the Cause by Attacking Organized Religion and People of Faith?

A loyal AlterNet reader raises key questions about the role of faith and religion in the battle for social change.

July 21, 2012  |  

Photo Credit: Jasmic

Editor's Note: ​A short time ago, AlterNet received a very thoughtful letter from one of our readers. Professor James Rohrer wrote that while he was a long-time loyal AlterNet reader, he was concerned about our coverage of faith and religion. His complaint was that AlterNet too frequently portrays religion as the domain of right-wing fundamentalism and carries an overall anti-religious editorial tilt. Rohrer argued this has the effect of alienating millions of our readers who are progressively inclined. He challenged us to consider whether this approach stands in the way of building the unity we need to achieve the broad social change that the vast majority of Americans want.

"One would never know from AlterNet that there are today significant numbers of evangelical Christians who work for peace and justice, such as the Christian Peacemaker Teams who embed themselves as witnesses for peace in the midst of war zones," Rohrer wrote to us. "One would never know that much of the history of socialism in America has been intertwined with religion.  One would never know that many brilliant philosophers, scientists, artists, and scholars in virtually every field of research are also people who have a deep personal faith in some traditional religion."

Rohrer's letter, which echoed concerns we receive from time to time from colleagues and readers, prompted an extensive internal conversation, and we concluded that something has to change. In that spirit, we asked Prof. Rohrer to write an article about his thoughts on the matter, published below. Over the coming weeks we will be relaunching our Belief section, and publishing a wider array of coverage on faith and religion and its role in daily life and politics. (We have already started down this path with Vision editor Sara Robinson's recent article, "Six Reasons We Can't Change the Future Without Progressive Religion.")

***

My brother and I took divergent spiritual paths at an early age. More than half a century ago my brother, now a high-school science teacher and a militant atheist, mortified my mother when he told a sweetly smiling Sunday School teacher that he planned to return the following week “to break every damned window in this place.” My mother was not shocked by his lack of piety—she was a feminist with Unitarian Universalist leanings and had left orthodox Christianity behind years earlier –but by his rudeness. In truth we rarely ever attended church because my mother refused to sanction patriarchal religion and my dad hated to worship alone. But mom was gracious, even to people that she disagreed with in matters of religion and politics.

While my brother over the years has steadfastly scorned all expressions of religious faith as irrational superstition, I have been drawn to a lively spirituality since my earliest recollections. As a child on our Appalachian farm I wandered the hills and forests and prayed to a God that I truly felt as a living presence. I did not acquire my beliefs by having them forced upon me by parents or any organized religion; they grew as naturally and effortlessly as my physical body.

Over the years I have participated in many faith communities, have studied religion professionally, and have taught history and religion at several colleges and universities in the United States and abroad, some of them public and some of them religious institutions. I know that the line between good and evil does not run between religions -- any more than it runs between nations or races (all three are social constructs after all); my colleagues and close friends represent many different faith traditions, and some, like my brother, embrace a wholly secular stance toward life. By choice, however, I identify myself as a Christian. After half a century, I could no more deny my religious convictions than I could deny any other part of my Self.

Lately the progressive blogosphere has been filled with pieces by humanists who apparently take for granted that religious faith is unhealthy for individuals and society, and something that the progressive community needs to combat with the same dedication it fights racial and economic inequality, militarism, and the rabid privatization of everything that even remotely smacks of a public good. Just as “liberal” and “socialist” are code words for “un-American radicals” in the weird world of Fox News, sometimes it seems that “religion” and (especially) “Christian” are code words for “twisted sociopaths” or “patriarchal fascists” in the otherwise generally saner world of progressive journalism. The problem is that in both cases the rhetoric conflicts with something that journalists of any ideological stamp should care a great deal about: truthfulness.

It is simply false that all (or even most) people of sincere faith—including those who are conservative in their religious commitments—are intrinsically irrational, anti-social, patriarchal, racist, or closed to meaningful dialogue. It is equally false that humanists necessarily see the light and embrace progressive politics. In my case, I am a Christian, a scholar, and for more than 30 years now a socialist who supports public healthcare, gender equality, separation of church and state, environmentalism, and pacifism. My humanist brother reads Ayn Rand, watches Fox News and is a dedicated member of the National Rifle Association. He opposes gun control, is a global warming skeptic and supports expanded use of fossil fuels, including fracking (he owns land in an area where you can scarcely hurl a stone without beaning one or two Chesapeake Energy employees). My brother and I do not conform to the stereotypes, and neither do countless other people.

That is, of course, always the case with stereotypes—they ignore flesh-and-blood human beings. We should know better by now than to engage in a politics of social typing, whether it is promulgated by xenophobic racial profilers on the Right or those of the secular Left who delight in demonizing folk who stubbornly choose to believe things that cannot be proven empirically.

Sara Robinson, who is one the most perceptive journalists in the biz today, recently posted a wonderful article on AlterNet that I hope all progressives will read and read over again. Robinson reminded readers that there is a long tradition of progressive religion, and rightly suggested that religious movements do a better job than secularists at building and sustaining authentic communities. If we are going to build a progressive community that has any hope of transforming the United States and the world, we are going to need religion or the equivalent moral force of religion to make it happen.

But we should be careful not to divide religion into artificial and inevitably arbitrary categories like “progressive” Christianity versus “conservative” or “traditional” Christianity, as though one is acceptable and the other beyond redemption. People are almost unimaginably creative, both individually and collectively, and they always defy easy categorization. The political behavior of religious traditionalists—Christian or otherwise—historically has been a moving target. We should not assume that theological conservatives think alike on every issue, or that they will inevitably vote as a block, or that they cannot be persuaded to join in support of progressive policies that affect the well-being of everybody’s children. There are today folk who identify as evangelicals -- even theological fundamentalists -- who work for racial equality, oppose U.S. military policy and hold economic views that might consistently be termed socialist. Sadly, one would never know this from reading recent progressive journalism.

The consequences of our myopia about American religion could be catastrophic, especially as we face an upcoming national election in which a swing of even a few votes could conceivably have a major impact upon the path our nation takes during the next critical years. For decades we have watched as Karl Rove and his cronies on the Right have repeatedly used volatile wedge issues to win the support of millions of religious conservatives who might otherwise have voted against their brand of radical individualism and greed. Contrary to what some talking heads of the Left and Right imagine, there is nothing in either the Bible or the Christian tradition that automatically pulls theological conservatives into alignment with antisocial political agendas.

Don’t believe me? Let me cite just one of many possible examples that underscore the malleability of conservative Christianity. Alton is a village in Sioux County, Iowa, which is statistically one of the most reliably Republican counties in the United States. It is a stronghold of evangelical Christianity, the sort of place where neighbors might scowl at you if you mow your lawn on the Sabbath. Every four years Republican presidential candidates swarm Sioux County during primary season the way bees hover over clover fields. Despite his Catholicism, Rick Santorum signs sprouted like dandelions across Sioux County this past year, as the overwhelmingly Protestant electorate set aside their theological views for the sake of political expediency. This is “red state America,” proudly dyed red, white and blue.

Most Sioux County voters are descendants of Dutch Protestant immigrants who settled the area more than a century ago. Their grandparents and great-grandparents were if anything even more theologically conservative, more pietistic, and more inclined to lace every conversation with biblical injunctions. But a century ago, the local folk opened their Bibles and found admonitions against rich rulers exploiting the poor. They found Jesus preaching that the "sinners” would enter the Kingdom of God before the Chamber of Commerce types, and understood that disciples must speak out against the Trusts and war profiteers. I just spent a week reading through the Alton Democrat for 1900, which routinely drew upon the Bible to editorialize against the imperialist ambitions of the United States --even dubbing its capitalist rulers “immoral” and “evil”-- and to denounce the moneyed aristocracy that unjustly controlled the destiny of the people.

The folk who now constitute the strongest base for the Republican Party have forgotten that they are descended from the Populists who once thundered their scripture-laced jeremiads against the railroads and the banks and who demanded radical democracy in the name of both God and the people. William Jennings Bryan, the “silver tongued orator of the Platte,” three times tapped into that moral fervor to make runs for the White House. Bryan, of course, hated the Trusts, hated militarism and waged holy war against the Gold Standard. (“You shall not crucify mankind upon this cross of gold.:) He was also a devout Presbyterian Sunday School teacher and fundamentalist who died shortly after leading the charge against evolution in the infamous “Monkey Trial.”

The Bible has not changed, and neither have the core theological beliefs of the people of Sioux County. But society has changed and the nature of political action has evolved almost beyond recognition since the turn of the 20th century. The Bible and the Christian tradition can be tapped as resources for an array of political agendas. That the “heartland” has in recent decades swung so far away from the populist tradition of Bryan is not because there is something intrinsically authoritarian or anti-democratic in the religious beliefs of the masses, but because Republican strategists in the last two generations have done a far better job than progressives at organizing, marketing and communicating their message in a way that appeals at a visceral level to the hopes and fears of many people. To change America, we must change this reality.

Although some progressive bloggers apparently think that organized Christianity is on the way to extinction, there is every reason to believe that religion is going to remain an important component of culture for as long as humanity survives. There is no conceivable progressive future—for America or the globe –that does not embrace people of diverse religious faiths. Within the American context any possible future will almost certainly include a Christian majority for many years to come. Militant secularists who care about building a better world for everybody need to accept this truth and start to learn how to communicate and build relationships more effectively with people of faith, including the evangelical Protestants and traditional Catholics they most frequently tilt against.

Posting blogs on progressive sites that engage in simplistic stereotypes or that employ derogatory language is a bad start. In a college course on American democracy I routinely send students to AlterNet in the hope that they will open themselves to new ways of thinking about racial politics, inequality and the public good. Sadly, the religion posts too often serve as static, distracting them from the urgent issues that I want them to engage.

Most of my students are hardworking middle-class folk from rural communities, who grew up in places where life revolves around family, the church and the local school. For the most part they are sincerely idealistic and intelligent people who recognize quickly when they have been insulted or patronized. It is difficult for them to hear and trust progressive analysis of healthcare, civil rights, militarism, and economics when it comes packaged with attacks upon their most deeply held spiritual convictions. Insulting intelligent voters is simply bad politics, whether it is done by dogmatists of the Right or the Left.

James Rohrer is a professor of history at University of Nebraska-Kearney.

Ban Penn State Football!

Penn State: Full Coverage

Buzz Bissinger: Ban Penn State Football!

by Buzz Bissinger Jul 13, 2012 8:52 AM EDT

And tear down that statue of Joe Paterno too. Buzz Bissinger on why yesterday’s report that the university ignored Jerry Sandusky’s crimes made him so sick—and his ideas for restitution.

I was in a foul and unforgiveable mood yesterday. I was late getting out of the house, cursing the vapors in an unhinged spew, forgetting to take the medication that keeps me tethered. I have been doing a radio gig for a while on WPHT-AM in Philadelphia; during a break I went off on my partner without rational reason or right, viciously attacking him verbally, wild-eyed in anger.

Part of it was lack of sleep. Part of it was the anxiety and stress that I can no longer control without those pharmaceutical props. But part of it was the detailed report by former FBI Director Louis Freeh on how the monster of former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was not only allowed to exist but to bloom at Penn State University. On at least two occasions, 1998 and 2001, there were clear indications that Sandusky was sexually abusing kids. Nothing was done and Sandusky went on to rape other kids. But he still got his lump sum pension payment of $168,000, unprecedented in school history, according to the Freeh report. He still got emeritus status, although I naively thought that such status was reserved for professors, not a man in the trivial pursuit of coaching linebackers. He still got keys to all the buildings. He still made nearly 60 trips at university expense even after retiring in 1999. He still got special VIP season tickets. A week before his arrest, even though he knew he was under investigation by a grand jury, he still used them. The only thing missing was a special plaque commemorating Sandusky’s fine years of service to the school as a sexual animal.

Like many of you, I have lived with this horror ever the since the report of a state grand jury in Pennsylvania was made public in November of 2011, detailing act after act of buttf--king by Sandusky on defenseless children, much of it taking place in the Lasch building on the Penn State campus, in spitting distance to where the eternally damned Joe Paterno had his office.

From my own experience writing about the insidious culture of sports in America for nearly 25 years, I knew instantly that the culture of football at Penn State lay at the horror of what happened. I knew that powerful men at the university, Paterno in particular, drunk with the ego and false immortality that big-time college football coaches incomprehensibly have in this country, were covering up. I knew that Paterno and other top officials at the school, given the choice between feeling any scent of emotion for young children who had allegedly been molested by Sandusky or worrying about Jerry Sandusky’s welfare because he was a member of the Happy Valley football family and an integral part of Penn State football in its heyday in the late 1990s, had picked Sandusky in a second.

I knew Paterno and his acolytes, because he ran the school, would stretch and strain and lie to themselves and obfuscate to make their buddy boy Jerry the victim, a man at most with a sickness who needed help. I knew they had given good ol’ Jerry every benefit of the doubt as a way of covering up for his obvious predatory behavior despite the obvious warning signs, which was also a way of covering up for the football program at Penn State and keeping the football culture at the forefront of the university, the core of the bicycle wheel from which every other spoke extended. I knew this had happened because Joe Paterno, not a good man but a bad one far more adept than he ever was coaching at creating his false narrative of being above the sinkhole of college football, wanted it to happen this way.

Students and those in the community visit the Joe Paterno statue after football head coach Joe Paterno was fired during the Penn State Board of Trustees Press Conference, at Beaver Field, November 9, 2011 in State College, Pennsylvania. (Patrick Smith / Getty Images)

College football, as admittedly exciting as it is, serves no academic purpose and in the end, can destroy a school’s reputation.

When Louis Freeh held a press conference yesterday and stated point blank, after interviewing nearly 400 individuals and spending $6.5 million, that “four of the most powerful people at the Pennsylvania State University—President Graham Spanier, Senior Vice President for Finance and Business Gary C. Schultz, Athletic Director Timothy M. Curley, and Head Football Coach Joseph V. Paterno—failed to protect against a child sexual predator harming children for over a decade,” I felt like I imagine many of you felt who were outraged from the beginning: no vindication.

To the contrary, I felt overwhelming sadness and agitation that the Freeh report is the end of the Penn State investigation into the football culture that permeated every pore of the university, the board of trustees sighing with palpable relief that the self-flagellation they allowed the university to take by commissioning the report was enough.

I felt sick to my stomach as I watched the board of trustees’ press conference after the release of the Freeh report, or at least watched as much as I could. They cared more about their carefully coiffed look than they did about actually doing anything proactive. Their carefully scripted words, examined beforehand no doubt by a phalanx of spinmeisters, were barely above a monotone.

When I heard the words “accountability” and “responsibility,” the words entitled people use to act as if they will do something when they won’t, I sank, once again like many of you, into a funk of deflation and disappointment. Writing about Penn State football has never been about me. It has been about the fact that college football, as admittedly exciting as it is, serves no academic purpose and in the end, can destroy a school’s reputation.

The board should have announced yesterday that the upcoming season of football at Penn State will be cancelled. It would have been a sincere and needed message to the world that the football culture will no longer be sustained. For the innocent players caught up in this monstrosity, the answer is easy—release them from their scholarship commitments to Penn State and let them go elsewhere without the normal period of having to sit out a year. That way they would not be punished for the sins of others.

But the board did nothing except blather in empty ring-around-the-rosy rhetoric. They should have said at a minimum that the statue of Joe Paterno, now a symbol of a man without moral standard, a man with the iron-clad agenda of protecting his football game at all costs, even if a sexual animal satisfied his cravings right under his nose, should be removed.

But they didn’t do any of those things, actions that are not only appropriate but also urgently immediate. The scathing report by Louis Freeh should be a beginning, not an end, but the board believes it is an end: we have allowed ourselves to be beaten bloody, our version of Fifty Shades of Grey, and what is more important in America today than a dramatic mea culpa. It is all part of the narrative, corporate damage control 101. The board is meeting today and perhaps a miracle will happen. If the board does the right thing, it should be commended.

It’s also in the hands of the National Collegiate Athletic Association now. They have said they are doing an investigation, so maybe there is something positive in that. If Southern Methodist University got the so-called death penalty from the NCAA for a widespread scheme of paying off recruits, banned from football for a year and only allowed to return in a severely reduced capacity, then Penn State should get a minimum five-year ban. Draconian? Yes. Brutal? Yes. But punishment is brutal and supposed to act as a deterrent to other schools who have not been involved in something as heinous as what Penn State officials did.

But the track record of the NCAA is atrocious. As Taylor Branch of pointed out in his brilliant piece for The Atlantic, the NCAA is a cartel that is there to protect the interests of the member schools that support it, not there as a body to enforce the excesses of sports in America and keep them clean and in perspective. The NCAA is about money, billions of it raised through tournaments and bowl games; Penn State has the second-highest profits of any football team in the country next to the University of Texas, about $50 million dollars. Excuse my English, but does the NCAA want to f--k with that? Does the school want to f--k with that?

So the report by Louis Freeh yesterday does what scathing reports always do—creates a blip of excitement where so-called experts, including myself, go on national television and give their invigorated two cents. There is actually meaning in those appearances, because they do keep the pressure on Penn State. The hue and cry for the banning of football has never been stronger. It is a good thing.

But America lives in blips of attention—focusing for a week here and a week there before moving onto something else. It is the 24-hour news cycle, a hysterical avalanche of stories before it’s time again to feed the insatiable beast.

I personally can’t imagine the Penn State football team taking the field this season. I can’t imagine the players running out of the tunnel pumped up like psychopathic creatures, slapping each other on the helmet, the ritualistic bounce of shoulder pad against shoulder pad.

But they will, because this is America and this is football. We are the only society in the world that looks to universities and colleges for primary sources of sports entertainment. I pray that I am wrong, but I am convinced that the Nittany Lions will take that field. There will no doubt be a moment of prayer before the game for the Sandusky victims, as if that means anything, lessens what happened to them. Then it will be time for the home opener. The 110,000 strong of Beaver Stadium, who like their university haven’t learned anything, will roar and bellow and get drunk. And the Freeh report will fade into the midst, like most reports do.

Speed Read

• Freeh Report's 7 Most Damaging Findings

Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.

Buzz Bissinger, a sports columnist for The Daily Beast, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of Friday Night Lights and Three Nights in August. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

Tags:

• football,
• Jerry Sandusky,
• Penn State University,
• U.S. News

The Thinking Person's Ass or Occam's Donkey

Occam's Donkey - thinking critically

Critical Thinking and Evidence Supported Practice: Are we there yet?

About Occam's Donkey

Combine Occam's razor, Buridan's ass and Shrek's Donkey - and you have Occam's Donkey, the thinking person's ass!

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Mind myths: The 10% myth

This is the first of a series of posts on mind myths. Mind myths typically arise as a result of hucksters' attempts to use the allure of neuroscience to sell New Age type self-improvement products. I would place such mind myths in one of four categories:

Representing the originator's fantasy and bearing no resemblance to any neuroscience findings. The 10% myth would be one of these.

Misinterpretation or misrepresentation of actual neuroscience findings. The whole-brain craze comes to mind.

The inappropriate or premature application of actual neuroscience findings, for example attempts to implement neuroscience findings before they have been well replicated.

Using neuroscience explanations redundantly for well-known cognitive processes in order to sound more scientific. Much of so-called brain based education and brain based management would fall into this category.

I'm starting the series with the most common of the myths, the claim that we only use 10% of our brain. Hucksters commonly claim that their products can activate the other 90% and that we all could then become Einsteins! Barry Beyerstein indicated that the myth was already common early in the 20th century. This myth is typically encountered as “… scientists say we use only 10% of our brains”. Who these "scientists" are and how they determined this fact is never indicated.

Beyerstein and others exposed the myth on a number of grounds:

The brain comprises 2% of body weight, but accounts for 20% of the body’s oxygen consumption. There would no evolutionary advantage in maintaining such an extravagant organ that is only 10% functional.

If we used only 10% of our brain, damage to large areas of the brain should have no effect. There is, however, virtually no area of the brain that does not result in some deficit when it is damaged.

The principle of "use it or lose it" also applies to the brain. If we used only 10%, the remaining 90% would deteriorate permanently. That has never been found in histological examinations of normal brains at autopsy.

Modern brain imaging research has completely refuted the idea that large areas of the brain are inactive most of the time.

What we and our brains could have looked like if we used only 10% of it! (Image from Internet, origin unknown)

The 10% myth, however, is good for business and the myth-makers are not about to let it go. Under the premise that if 10% is good for business, less will be even better; there has been claims that we may use as little as half a percent (0,5%) of our brain! This claim, incidentally, was in a magazine called Insight and was by who else but a Brain Gym practitioner!

See more on this myth in or at:

Beyerstein, B.L. 1999. Whence cometh the myth that we use only 10% of our brains? In S. Della Sala (Ed.), Mind myths: Exploring popular assumptions about the mind and brain. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

See Beyerstein online at Do we really use only 10 percent of our brains?

Jeremy Dean's PsyBlog:
Seriously, Would You Admit to Only Using 10% of Your Brain?

Also see Eric Chudler's excellect Neuroscience for Kids: Do we use only 10% of our brains?

The Myth of Occam's Razor

WIKISOURCE

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page

The Myth of Occam's Razor  (1918)  by William M. Thorburn

Published in Mind 27 (107): 345–353.; (scan index)

1. From the middle of the Nineteenth Century, nearly every modern book on Logic has contained the words: Entia non sunt multiplicanda, præter necessitatem: quoted as if they were the words of William of Ockham. But nobody gives a particular reference to any work of the Singular and Invincible Doctor: sometimes also, as on the title-page of his De Sacramento Altaris (1513), described as the Venerabilis Inceptor (of "Terminism" ?). We turn in vain even to Sir William Hamilton, facile princeps (among English writers) in philosophical learning; or to his nearest rival, his disciple Dean Mansel. And my own fruitless inquisition for the formula, in those works of Ockham which have been printed, has led me to disbelieve that he ever used it to express his Critique of Entities.

2. This disbelief is further justified by what I find, and cannot find, in laborious recent histories of Medieval philosophy. Haureau (in his Philosophie Scholastique, vol. ii, chap. xxviii., pp. 438, 443, 446): Erdmann (in his History of Philosophy, vol. i., §216); and De Wulf (in his Medieval Philosophy, §368); all concur in giving another set of words, as those usually employed by Ockham: "Pluralitas non est ponenda (or Non est ponenda pluralitas) sine necessitate". They do not even mention the common form of the Novaculum Nominalium. Nor does Prantl, in his large collection of citations (Geschichte der Logik, iii., pp. 327-420); though one of them (Note 758) contains: "Nunquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate". Nor does Stockl, in his very full Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, §§259-266, pp. 986-1021 in the second volume. He selects: "Frustra fit per plura, quod potest fieri per pauciora": as distinctive of Ockham in this connexion. So did the earlier historian Tenneman: Geschichte der Philosophie, p. 851 in band viii. (1810). In England this phrase even became a legal maxim: as we may see in Wingate's Maxims of Reason (1658), no. 177. And it was judicially applied by Lord Chancellor Ellesmere^[1] in 1610 and 1612. But it seems likely that Ockham's most famous phrase in his own day was the: "Sufficiunt singularia, et ita tales res universalia omnino frustra ponitur": from which he probably became known as the Singular Doctor. It must not, however, be supposed that Albertus Magnus was called the Universal Doctor, for a similar though opposite reason. He, like Aristotle and Francis Bacon, "took all knowledge to be his province".

3. Ueberweg indeed, whose History of Philosophy was first published in 1863 (ten years after the revised edition of Hamilton's Discussions in 1853), said in §16 of his second volume (§104 of the English translation by Morris and Porter): "William of Occam founds his rejection of Realism on the principle; Entia non sunt multplicanda præter necessitatem. He combats the realising and hypostatising of abstractions (Sufficiunt Singularia, etc.)": p. 462 in the first volume of the English translation by Morris (1872), and §36 page 307 of theil ii., in the new German edition of 1898. No reference is given; and Ueberweg cannot always be trusted, even when he does give a reference. On the previous page (461) of §104, he refers to the Scotis Petrus Aureolus (†1322, Archbishop of Aix): In SS., ii., D. 12, Q. 1, for an assertion that: "He (P.A.) enounced the principle subequently known as the Law of Parcimony: Non est Philosophicum, pluralitatem rerum ponere sine causa; frustra enim fit per plura, quod fieri potest per pauciora". But there are no such clauses in the locus indicated; and the Index gives no clue to their presence anywhere else. It is indeed possible that he has written them somewhere; because the words had previously been used by his master Duns Scotus: a fact, with which Ueberweg does not seem to have been acquainted. Aureolus actually says (In SS., i., D. 3, on p. 164 of vol. i.), referring to Aristotle's Physica (i.): "In principiis debet tanta paucitas, quanta sufficit ad salvandum ea, quæ sunt in natura necessaria".

4. My note of April, 1915, asking for references to Ockham from readers of Mind, had the same fate as Prof. W. R. Sorley's inquiry in July, 1904 (p. 456), for the source of T.H. Green's fictitious quotation from Kant^[2] (so long beloved of Oxford examiners): "Macht zwar der Verstand die Natur, aber er schafft sie nicht". There was no response; and, I venture to think, for the same reason. The earliest use of the popular phrase, which I had then lighted upon, occurs in an Inaugural Dissertation by Leibnitz in 1670: De Stylo Philosophico Marii Nizolii, §28 (De Secta Nominalium). He does not, however, profess to quote, but says in oratio obliqua: "Generalis autem Regula est, quo Nominales passim untuntur, Entia non esse multiplicanda præter necessitatem". The words do not appear in the only philosophical work of Mario Nizzoli: De veris principiis et vera ratione philosophandi: published at Parma in 1553. Another editition was published at Frankfurt in 1674, under the new title Anti-barbarus Philosophicus; with the dissertation by Leibnitz prefixed as in Introduction. In Hurter's Nomenclator (iii., 8), Nizolius is described as: "Philosophiæ scholasticæ acer adversarius, Occami Nominalismi assecla". But he is better known through the many editions of his Ciceronian Concordance (Thesaurus Ciceronis).

5. I have since found in Clauberg's Elementa Philosophiæ seu Ontosophia (Groningen, 1647), part ii., §169, p. 74: "Entia non sunt temere (sine necessitate) multiplicanda". And again on page 174 (part iii., §121): in both cases without quotation-marks, or any reference to Nominalism, to Ockham, or to any source whatever. Possibly he regarded the phrase as a proverb, needing no sponsor. But I cannot find any such proverb in those vast collections of mediæval and earlier phrases: the Adagia of Erasmus, and the Polyanthes of Mirabellius. The common formula is exactly given in Clauberg's Logica Vetus et Nova (1654), page 320, under Definition; but not as a quotation, nor with any reference.

6. De Wulf in §335 accuses Duns Scotus of: "creating fictitious, misleading, and superfluous beaconlights, - in defiance of a precept which he himself pretended to approve of: entia non sunt multiplicanda præter necessitatem". But he gives no reference, and I cannot find the formula anywhere in the text of the Subtle Doctor's writings. It appears substantially indeed in Wadding's edition (1639), tom. vii., p. 723 (27): but only in a new Franciscan Commentary on the Opus Oxon., iii., D. 34, Q. 1, Scholium 4. Wadding's chief collaborator, John Ponce of Cork, there mentions "illud axioma vulgare, quo tam frequenter utuntur Scholastici; non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate". He does not, however, name any of these Scholastici; and I can merely affirm (with almost mathematical certainty) that they do not include Ockham, Scotus, or Aquinas; and the axiom does not occur in the two most popular textbooks of the Middle Ages, the Sentences of Peter Lombard (Bishop of Paris, †1164), and the Summulæ Logicales of Petrus Hispanus (†1277, as Pope John XXI.). I may add, with sufficient moral certainty, Abelard, Hales, Albert, Bonaventura, and Durand. Ockham's disciples, Gabriel Biel of Tuebingen (†1495), and John Major of Haddington and St. Andrews (†1540), each of whom has been called, "The Last of the Schoolmen," are satisfied with their Master's Pluralitas or Frustra fit.^[3] Reference may be made for the German, to his In Sententias, iii., D. 3, Q. 2, N. 4 (Conclusio 1), or (for applications) to i., D. 26, Q. 1, A. 1 (Conclusio 3). And for the Scot, to his Logica (1516), Tractatus Primus Summularum, folio 28, col. 4.

7. On the other hand, De Wulf might have said with perfect accuracy, that Scotus, no less than Ockham, accepts and systematically applies the Law of Parcimony; whose origin he ascribes to Aristotle's Physica and De Anima, especially the first Book of the former (cc. 5 and 7). Two (if not more) equivalent phrases are common to Ockham and Scotus: Pluralitas, etc., and Frustra fit, etc.

(a) "Nunquam est ponenda pluralitas sine necessitate," appears in the Scotian Commentary In Metaphysica (Aristotelis): i., Q. 4, Scholium 3, p. 532 (10) of Wadding's tom. iv.

(b) "Pluralitas non est ponenda, nisi ubi est necessitas": Opus Oxon., i., D. 3, Q. 6, Scholium 5, p. 525 (12) of tom. v.

(c) "Ista opinio ponit pluralitatem sine necessitate, quod est contra doctrinam Philosophorum": Opus Oxon., iv., D.1, QQ. 4 and 5, Scholium 3, p. 84 (7) of tom. viii.

(d) And in the next Scholium (4) he declares: "Sicut sequenti rationem naturalem, non sunt ponenda plura, nisi quae ratio naturalis concludit, ita sequenti fidem non sunt ponenda plura quam veritas fidei requirat": p. 90 (9) of tom. viii.

(e) A peculiar variant occurs on page 737 (4) of tom. iv.: In Metaphysica, viii., Q. 1, Scholium 2: "Positio plurium semper debet dicere necessitatem manifestam".

(f) "Frustra fit per plura, quod potest fieri per pauciora:" is found on page 30 (3) of tom. ii.: In Physica (Aristotelis), i., Q. 8.

(g) This is expanded into: "Generale enim principium est, quod si aliquid potest aeque bene fieri per pauciora, sicut per plura, nullo modo talis pluralitas debet poni": De Rerum Principio, Q. 1, art. 2, Scholium on page 92 (9) of tom. iii.

(h) Another peculiar Scotian variant is given in the Reportata Parisiensia, ii., D. 15, Q. 1, Scholium 5, on page 348 of tom. xi.: "Paucitas est ponenda, ubi pluralitas non est necessaria".

8. The Metaphysical (or Methodological) Law of Parcimony (or Logical Frugality), indicated but not very distinctly expressed by Aristotle,^[4] was fully and finally established, not by Ockham (†1347), but by his teacher Duns Scotus (†1308): the greatest mind of the later Middle Ages, so unhappily cut off when he was only beginning to pass from the critical to the constructive stage. According to some biographers he died at thirty-four. Though unintelligently described by Leibnitz and others as an Extreme Realist, his Universal was only an Ens Rationis; a Brain-tool having a merely metaphorical entity. "Ens (Reale seu Naturale) est concretum," he said in his Tractatus de Modis Significandis, i., c. 25 (12): page 58b in tom. i. "Ens est duplex, naturae et rationis ... Ens Rationis ... cujusmodi sunt Genus, Species, Definitio:" in his [[In Elenchorum LL. , Q. 1, page 224 (2) in tom. i. "Est enim Species tenuis similitudo Singularium": in his Super Universalia Porphyrii, Q. 4, page 90 (4) in tom. i. The "Formalism" of the Most Subtle Doctor looks like the tentative and temporary device of a public teacher in Holy Orders; who did not wish to break openly with the dominant tradition of Realism; but was feeling his way to the "Terminism" boldly professed by his independent contemporary Bishop Durand of Meaux (†1332), and afterwards completely worked out by his pupil William of Ockham. It has lately been stigmatized by the modern semi-Scotist Professor Pohle of Breslau, as: "an inconceivable hybrid, which excludes every attempt of the mind to grasp it": p. 153 of The Essence and Attributes of God: vol. i. of his Dogmatic Theology, translated by Arthur Preuss. Both the Oxford Fransciscans (Ockham and Scotus) used indifferently the two formulas: "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate": and, "Frustra fit per plura, quod potest fieri per pauciora"; while a former very similar to the latter was used by the Most Resolute Doctor, the great Dominican Nominalist Durand; "Frustra ponuntur plura, ubi unum sufficit": In Sententias, ii., D. 3, Q. 5, N. 4. Occam's main contribution to the Doctrine was a special application to the Logic of Universals, in his characteristic formula: "Sufficiunt Singularia, et ita tales res universales omnino frustra ponuntur": In SS., i., D. 2, Q. 4 (top of col. 18). Few or no competent critics will question Mansel's judgment of Ockham, on page 40 of his Introduction to the Rudimenta of Aldrich: "The ablest writer on Logic whom the Schools have produced.... The Summa Totius Logicæ of Occam is the most valuable contribution of the Middle Ages to the Logica Docens. His editor, Mark of Beneventum, said that, if the Gods used Logic, it would be the Logic of Ockham."

9. The doctrine was first completely applied to Physics by Sir Isaac Newton in 1713. He quotes the very words of Scotus and Ockham in the brief annotation of his first Regula Philosophandi: ^[5] which is itself a very similar statement of the principle. In the Third Edition (1726) of the Principia Mathematica (De Mundi Systemate, lib. iii., p. 387, the Rule runs: "Causas rerum naturalium non plures admitti debere, quam quae et verae sint et earum phenomenis explicandis sufficient". Newton then subjoins: "Dicunt utique philosophi: Natura nihil agit frustra, et frustra fit per plura quod fieri potest per pauciora": a comment not found in the First Edition (1687). There is, however, no mention of Ockham or Nominalism in the Principia. The term Novaculum Nominalium was quite unknown in the seventeenth century, as the international learned translation of Condillac's Gallic wit: Rasoir des Nominaux, in a note on page 214 of his Origine des Connasissances Humaines (1746): Section V. (Des Abstractions), chap. i., §5. The English variant (Occam's Razor) is a century younger; having made its first appearance in Sir William Hamilton's Discussions (1852), page 590 (On Causality). In the second edition (1853) it is used on pages 616 and 629. In the latter place it is for the first time distinctly associated with the current form.

10. The following Conclusions I call Provisional, mainly because there is still a possibility that they may be upset by German investigators of Ockham's unpublished manuscripts. These have lain idle for nearly six centuries at Ingolstadt or Munich; still uncopied, and probably unread, by any Englishman; much to the discredit of Merton College and the University of Oxford. Many of his cardinal works have never been printed: including his Commentaries on the Second, Third, and Fourth Books of the Lombard Sentences. The Commentary on the First Book (printed in 1495) is very full; but the appended comments on the other Books are only slender bundles of selected Questions, occupying together only one-third of the volume.

Provisional Conclusions  A. "Occam's Razor" is a modern myth. There is nothing mediaeval in it, except the general sense of the post-mediaeval formula: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. This myth has come to full maturity and secured general assent, within the lifetime of many philosophers of the present day; though it is a matter of purely intellectual interest, without any impulse or reinforcement from commercial greed, family-pride, national vanity, sectarian zeal, or political party-spirit.

B. The age of the English title is not yet three-score years and ten: dating from the publication of Sir William Hamilton's Discussions (1852).

C. The Latin title, Novaculum Nominalium, is little (if at all) more than a century older: being a translation of the French title, Rasoir des Nominaux, bestowed upon the current formula by Condillac in 1746.

D. (1) The current formula was unknown to Ockham and the other Schoolmen.

(2) It was invented in 1639, substantially in its present wording, by the Scotist Commentator, John Ponce of Cork: a little-known man of great abilities and very independent disposition.

 

(3) It first appeared in its present exact order of words, in the Logica Vetus et Nova of John Clauberg of Groningen in 1654.

 

(4) It was first formally associated with Nominalism by Leibnitz in 1670; and this connexion seems to have been generally accepted from the beginning of the eighteenth century. The reason of the connexion was indicated in 1676, by Jakob Thomasius (father of the celebrated jurisprudent Christian T.), in his Oration De Doctoribus Scholasticus Latinis to the University of Leipzig: "Hoc principium: Non esse absque necessitate multiplicanda entia. Hinc enim ipsi (Nominales) Realibus ut prodigis rerum multiplicioribus invidiam fecerunt, suam vero philosophiam frugalitatis nomine extulerunt. Reales vicissim qui principium illud, mirum entium avaritiam quam tamen natura non amet, in Scholas importasse, simulque; multas interemisse veritates dictitarent, Nominalibus avaritiam probi loco objecerunt." It is possible that Leibnitz, who was only twenty-four in 1670, may have got the notion of connecting Parcimony (or Logical Frugality) with Nominalism, from some earlier expression of opinion by the elder Thomasius.^[6] Some of the very words of Thomasius appear in Morhof's Polyhistor (1688), Tom. II. (1), c. 13, p. 75: which is followed in Brucker's History of Philosophy (1766), Tom. III., p. 904, §27.

(5) Still, even then, nobody connected Ockham in particular, with the newly-accepted Scotist-Nominal formula. That connexion may be dated apparently from 1812; when Tennemann in his Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie (§271), wrote of Ockham as following the Rule: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem: without expressly ascribing to him the actual use of the very words. They had not been mentioned in his previous larger History (1810), which had quoted "Frustra fit" in a note on page 851 of band viii. Tennemann's loose anachronistic use of the post-mediaeval formula seems to have misled Ueberweg; and had previously caused misunderstanding in Britain. His

Manual had been translated in 1832 by Rev. Arthur Johnson, from the posthumous edition of 1829 as revised by Wendt. Hamilton never noticed the anachronism, though he reviewed Johnson's translation very severely in the Edinburgh Review of October, 1832. He indeed tacitly adopted it in 1853, after inventing the label Occam's Razor. That label was at first (in 1852) applied by him to the Law of Parcimony in general. Hamilton, moreover, seems to have previously devised that very title, Parcimony, in place of the older Frugality. So far as I can find, it first appeared in his edition of Reid's Works (1846), in a note to Reid's First Essay on the Intellectual Powers (chap. iii., p. 236), and in his Supplementary Note A, §2, p. 751. 

 

The unfortunate carelessness of Tennemann and Hamilton has engendered a very serious philosophic corruption. For, it has turned a sound rule of Methodology into a Metaphysical dogma. As J.S. Mill pointed out in his Examination of Hamilton (ch. 24, p. 542 in 4th edition): "The Law of Parcimony ... is a purely logical precept". It is folly, to complicate research by multiplying the objects of inquiry; but we know too little of the ultimate constitution of the Universe, to assume that it cannot be far more complex than it seems, or than we have any actual reason to suppose. The value of this warning has just now received signal illustration from the very recent discovery of Chemical Isotopes; which has proved (e.g.), that what had previously been simply called "lead" is infinitely complex in its composition.^[7] This discovery ought to operate as a salutary check upon dogmatism, and the tendency to turn logical rules into ontological principles.

Appendix Some readers of Mind, and other students of Philosophy, to whom the rare works of Ockham are not readily accessible, may be glad to have the following list of seventeen relevant quotations at hand for ready reference: -
A. "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate." (1) In Sententias (Petri Lombardi), lib. i., Distinctio i., QQ. 1 and 2. (2) In SS., i., D. 7, Q. 2. (3) Quodlibeta, i., Q. 3. (4) Do., iii., Q. 2. (5) Do., iv., Q. 15. (6) Do., v., Q. 5 (lines 3 and 4).

B. "Non est ponenda pluralitas sine necessitate." In SS., ii., Q. 15 (second column): Utrum Angelus superior intelligat per pauciores species quam inferior?
C. "Nunquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate." In SS., i., D. 27, Q. 2 (section K, not J as given by Prantl in his Note 758). The matter discussed is Species Intelligibilis.
D. "Talis species (intelligibus) non est ponenda propter superfluitatem." Expositio Aurea: Perierm., Proem. See Prantl, N. 757.
E. "Si duae res sufficiunt ad ejus veritatem, superfluum est ponere aliam (tertiam) rem": (1) Quodlibeta, iv., Q. 19; (Prantl, N. 768). (2) Do., iv., Q. 24; (Haureau, ii., 459).
F. "Sufficiunt singularia, et ita tales res universales omnino frustra ponuntur." In SS., i., D. 2, Q. 4 (top of column 18).
G. "Frustra fit per plura, quod potest fieri per pauciora."

(1) Summa Tot. Log., Pars. i., cap. 12, f. 6, r. A.: referring to Intentio prima and secunda.

(2) In SS., i., D. 31, Q. 1 (middle of first column): Utrum Identitas, Similitudo, et Equalitas in divinis sint relationes reales?

(3) In SS., ii., Q. 15, sections O and Q: referring to Species Intelligibilis.

(4) Philosophia Naturalis (Summulæ in Physicorum LL.), Quarta Pars, cap. 1, p. 86b of the Roman edition (1637). In this he denies the reality of an Instant of Time; showing some anticipation of the (New Herakleitean) doctrines associated with the names of Bergson and William James. See also page 85a (at the top). Ockham's doctrine of the Continuum (in regard to Space), as it appears in his Quodlibete, I., Q. 9: Utrum linea componatur ex punctis: has been set out and discussed by Mr. Delisle Burns in Mind of October, 1916 (pp. 506 ff.)

(5) De Sacramento Altaris, Q. 3 (Utrum corpus quod est quantitas set res absoluta, distincta realiter a substantia), page 41 of the Paris (Blackletter) edition of 1513. I am indebted for this last reference to Mr. C. Delisle Burns, in Mind, October, 1915. Mr. Burns has shown the philosophical incongruity, and consequent improbability of the commonly assumed use of "Entia, etc.," by Ockham. See also page 45. And compare with Scotus on the same subject (Quantity): In Physica, i., Q. 8: tom. ii., p. 30 (3). Refer to §7 (f.) supra. Aristotle's nearest approximations to the doctrine developed by Scotus will be found in cc. 4, 6, and 7 of the First Book of the Physica. "Beltion de elattō kai peperasmena labein, hoper poiei Empedokles: (Praestat autem pauciora et finita principia sumere: quod quidem Empedocles)": cap. 4, p. 188a, lines 17-18 (Bekker). See also c.6; p. 189a, lines 12-13, 20, 26-27; and p. 189b, lines 18-19. Likewise c. 7; p. 190b, lines 35-36; and p. 191a, lines 6-7.

W. M. Thorburn. 

 

 

 

---

1. ↑ Coke's Reports: I., 8, 167 (Earl of Cumberland's case): and I., 9 (Sir G. Reynal's case). See also Coke's Institutes, Part I. (on Littleton) for the application of this maxim to feudal tenure.
2. ↑ "The Understanding makes Nature, but does not create" (the material out of which it is made). See T.H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, §11, first published in Mind of January, 1882, p.9. It occurs also in his Lectures on Kant: Works, vol. ii., p.86 (§74).
3. ↑ Further, we may note, there is no mention of the common formula (or any other) in the Philosophia Nominalium Vindicata of Jean Salabert, published at Paris so late as 1651.
4. ↑ See end of Appendix.
5. ↑ Regula I. (in the Third and last of the author's editions), corresponds with Hypoth. I. on p. 402 of the First Edition (1687). The change of name from Hypothesis to Regula, and the words "Dicunt etc.," prefixed to the original comment: "Natura enim simplex est et rerum causis superfluis non luxuriat": first appeared on p. 357 of the Second Edition (1713). In the First, the paging leaps from 383 to 400: 386 thus becoming 402.
6. ↑ Thomasius says obscurely of "Entia non etc." (loc. cit.): "Quod a Ferrariensibus discimus, frequentissime Nominalea usurpasse". But I cannot find any mention of collaborate Ferrarienses (like the Salmanticenses and Conimbricenses) in any work of reference. Brucker (Hist. Phil., III., 866) classifies Hieronymus Fantonus (or Fontanus) de Ferrariis O.P. (+1532) as a Nominalis, but this Grand Inquisitor's Repertorium Scoti (or Loci Communes) contains no allusion to the Law of Parcimony in any form. Franciscus Sylvester Ferrariensis O.P. (+1526) cites 'Frustra fit etc.' (in substance), and ascribes its origin to Aristotle, in his Questions on the Physica: I., Q. 9, p. 35b. He says there: "Quod potest fieri per pauciora, superfluum est, si fiat por plura": and (a few lines lower), "Natura non agit per plura, quod fieri per pauciora potest". The latter seems to be borrowed from Averroes: Comment. de Physico Auditu (Aristotelis). N. 50, on p. 31b of the Latin translation by Jacob Mantinus (Venice, 1574). See also NN. 40 (27c) and 41 (26a).
7. ↑ Cf. Prof. F. Soddy in Nature, Nos. 2490 and 2491 (1917, 12th and 13th June).

This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1923. It may be copyrighted outside the U.S. (see Help:Public domain).