Absolutely. I was hoping somebody might notice that. Essay here. Flagg Taylor, some will know, includes it in his The Great Lie. Not such a non-sequiter if one looks at as Strauss's concern for what it really means to be political. 

Regarding your earlier reference to Blitz's book on Being and Time, I waited several years before I found a reasonable price at Amazon (a cool 40 bucks!). I've not tackled it yet -- I still have other things by Heidegger I want/need to read before doing so. But I know people who have read it and they say it's, well, no surprise, extremely difficult...

I'm pointing to an odd, discrete affinity -- hardly a conclusion unique to me. I've said elsewhere, I think libertarianism is basically true once one gets past the assumption of "spontaneous order."  

Read Douglas Jeffrey's rather brilliant article to which I've already pointed, try to attack/refute it or me, on the merits. Note especially the  crucial distinction between political emancipation and human emancipation.

(No, libertarians don't at all do this: Raise to a political level the question of humanity itself -- where the central question is what is a human being -- and ultimately you get Gulag or Auschwitz. Since we're speaking also of Heidegger on this thread, however much he was a bad man, Heidegger actually saw this crucial distinction, "Letter on Humanism" -- perhaps the most accessible thing he ever wrote).

I'll just say, on the merits, I was a card-carrying member of the Libertarian Party for over a decade. Encountering Harry Jaffa, thinking through the natural law foundations of the American polity -- the relationship of the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution -- I came to see abject libertarianism is a dead end. 

Midge- is what we understand as "morality" a passion? I don't think you think for a second that it is, which is why I would never confuse you with what I'm for convenience calling abject libertarianism.  For eg, you're not for open borders. If morality were simply a passion -- if thoroughgoing spontaneous order were really true -- then there would be no way to make sense of the various ways in which the character of nations vary. 

Strictly speaking the passions are not natural. They have no determinate end. They simply go in every direction. In other words, that's just matter in motion.

Put another way, there is no such thing as an atheist desire: man is defined by his erotic desire to know who he is and what is really good ("good" being a thoroughly non-scientific word) for himself...

People for whom their individuality/aestheticism trumps everything are beyond the "omnipotence" of speech. Hence I don't bother with anything that, say, Fred Cole has to say. He didn't attain to any of his sophomoric libertarianism by dint of anything approaching autonomy of insight or autonomous reason. On the contrary, he was actually taught this in various ways. IOW, law/politics_is_always_primary.

One ends up with something like Sartre when one passes Marx through Heidegger. But there's quite a lot about Heidegger that Sartre -- in company of various Heidegger epigones (Mark Blitz is excellent on this, here and here) -- misunderstood/distorted.

Heidegger's statement reflects his attempt to be political. He was a bad man, though his Nazism wasn't based on biologism (the meaning behind "troubled waters of values and totalities"). I chalk up his equivalence, USSR/USA, to his "soul of kitsch" (Strauss). 

How does one be political in postmodernity without coming across as a Nazi? That's the question.

Opposition to open borders strikes liberals and abject libertarians as Nazism.

And to be sure, I have in mind abject libertarians. Belief in thoroughgoing "spontaneous order" is magical thinking, and mesmerizes the mind.

All honor otherwise to people like Sowell whom I revere -- but the determinism is picked up even occasionally in his writings. 

As I've cited Jaffa before: "Karl Marx clearly saw that bourgeois immorality was only a half-way house to a 'utopian state' in which there would be no forbidden pleasures, nor any reason for pleasures to be forbidden. It seems that, judged by this standard, present day America is closer to the ultimate communist ideal than was ever imagined by Lenin or Stalin."  

(That word "reason" jumps out anew, having not read this in over a year. Human nature isn't anything about which man can reason. Human "nature" is man's capacity for freedom or capacity to will...)

Deep are the reasons why the Left prosecutes cultural issues with such monomaniacal abandon -- reasons lost on at least half of Ricochetti, certainly on most editors. Libertarianism's penchant for dismissing the rich "gray area" of human nature -- dismissing whatever can't fit into libertarians' deterministic, quantifiable conceptualization* -- simply complements and furthers the Left's trajectory.

Echoing Crowe's Nest, these reasons have less to do with conscious decision than with ideological commitment consonant with useful idiocy.

---

* Libertarians of course being essentially Marxists of the right -- and why Sowell so badly misreads Marx. 

Dear Pseud- I haven't watched Hittinger's speech yet, but very much look forward to doing so.  I can't get into all this stuff right now, or even this weekend, but I'm wondering if you've ever really sat down and gone through Jaffa's New Birth of Freedom, especially, most critically, the second chapter? Bottom line, I'm sorry but I just don't buy that you can have an Aristotelian regime in the modern era; or that, post Heidegger, we can simply take our dictates by doctrinal natural law, such that we can all become simple Aristotelians.  Again, these are not precisely metaphysical problems with Aristotle, but rather political -- this is what you're not seeing about Tom West and Lockerstotle.  See West also on Cicero. Note Heidegger at beginning and end of essay.

What would you like to see changed about our fundamental laws or the Constitution -- other than obvious ones we could all agree on (repeal 16/17th Amendments) -- to make it more "Catholic" or Aristotelian?  

Likewise, Indaba. 

Look, I accept all the data and phenomena you cite.  Except for the legalization of SSM, all the things you're citing are all around me already in tony westside LA, Santa Barbara, etc.;  lesbian mothers at my old Episcopal Church in Pacific Palisades.  I could go on.  

And of course very few homosexual men are getting married.  No surprise whatsoever.

That's because they're men -- male eroticism is all about dominance and passivity, and it's precisely why people, both men and women, are far more turned off by the sight of two men kissing or having sex than two women kissing/having sex -- and not because they're "gay."

What I'm getting at (would take a separate post): this is all about identity politics and what I say above about ends/purposes/will.  Being "gay" is not a person's "identity," as these are constructs of modern ideology.

In nutshell, a society that tries to domesticate homosexuality is a society that has reached exhaustion. The Canadian government is just an administrator of welfare.

I visit friends in Montreal frequently. A telling_adecdote_for_me:  Most hetero men_there_are_strikingly_unmanly_even_epicene. I point this_out_to_leftist_elitist_women__and_even_they__totally_agree!

So to answer your post's question: incest. I think it's almost undoubtable that we will see the first incest marriage -- fully legitimized by the state -- within our lifetime.  

Of course, people like Gay Freedom Fighter and Red Feline and others will  simply and tendentiously respond by saying that I'm trying to scare people in trying to get them to believe incest marriage will take over and propagate.  

No. The point is, what does it say about a society that approves such things, however infrequent they may take place?  

The question gets to the essence of the whole matter: do human beings have ends or purposes that aren't just projections of will or mere individuality? 

oh, slight correction. Incest. Nussbaum came out in support of sibling incest.

It's so despicable I somehow blot it out of my mind.

The whole larger, deeper point behind all of this, of course, being that the explosive social, cultural decay over the past 40-odd years can't possibly be explained by economics -- contrary to our libertarians -- because none of the pathologies that, say, Charles Murray describes in his latest book occurred at the lower income levels 50 and 60 years ago when America was not nearly as wealthy.

Murray isn't able to give a full account of the decay -- and it's no surprise that he's come out in favor of SSM -- because he does not really grasp the nature of the sexes (eros, thumos), etc.     

When I first heard a few years ago that Martha Nussbaum -- lionized by the Left for her extreme, cool, analytic rigor such that she must be just beneath the gods (no, that's not much of an exaggeration) -- gave her okay to polygamy and polyamory, I was aghast.  Here and here. 

I mean, hey, I've never cared for the woman -- she wrote perfectly dishonest, hatchet-job reviews of Allan Bloom's Closing and Mansfield's Manliness.

But that rather blew me away. 

The possibility for the human intellect to believe the most utterly insane things is practically endless. 

In some parts of the world people won't eat a cow. People today believe two men can be married.  

You're right. Where does it end? The essence of nihilism: there are no limits.

But, hey, what do I know?  According to Red Feline, things are just going swimmingly! Reduce marriage to just a matter of personal fulfillment of merely autonomous individuals, and -- nuh-uh, no way -- you don't end up with things like 42% illegitimacy, explosive rates of cohabitation and divorce all resulting in massive desire for statism.

Who would think such a thing? Stupid rubes.  

Yes differently, and you can certainly have women who are thumotic -- Margaret Thatcher, prime example.

But the differences point to the difference -- women simply are not nearly as political as men. Honor/thumos are at the center of politics. As one of my political philosophy profs used to say: "of all the various passions in the human soul, what is the defining political passion? Righteous indignation!"  

This certainly isn't to say women don't get as righteously indignant as men. Rather, men are more apt toward the public making of a claim and defending it both as the truth and one's own. Feminism is a certain permutation of manliness.  Note to Red Feline.

The political, thumotic woman is far more likely to culminate as a Hillary Clinton than a Thatcher.

Which is to say, apolitical politics. Politics putting an end to politics, the essence of liberalism itself. Mansfield again: "The Apolitical Politics of Progressivism."

Yes, "Manliness." Mansfield excogitates brilliantly about both the nature and implications of manliness, honor and thumos. 

And I'm not latching onto it simply because it's the thesis of some book. It's not a gross overgeneralization. A generalization? Certainly. But most men are oriented toward honor-seeking in a way women are not. I've described why it's not a gross overgeneralization here and here.

The huge phenomenon of men in the bottom half of income scale "dropping out" and becoming something akin to tribal chieftains, who basically do nothing (women becoming drudges and doing all the work) and who will not commit to marriage, etc., I say this is all ultimately a result of feminism and forcing women all into the workforce.    

From human nature itself. It's pretty obvious, actually, if you look around you. Harvey Mansfield has actually written a perfectly brilliant book about it. Men will seek honor in various ways, today veering mostly toward the vulgar.  

Red Feline:

I'm not at all one who thinks women are or should be thought of as baby making machines: all obligated to be pregnant, at home. There are exceptions to everything, but laws of a society should reflect what is both possible and desirable for most human beings.

Men want honor. They want recognition. 

Women want to be cherished. They want honorable husbands.

Translation: women want husbands for themselves (monogamy, exclusivity) who will be fathers to their children.

And most women do want children.

Jettison the idea that man predominates (think: honor, recognition) in some sense as head of household, and...

All of this unravels. 

Unpack the implications of recognition/honor-seeking and desire-to-be-cherished: the only way to make these happen for greatest number of people is through civilized patriarchy. 

You say a woman should likely be encouraged to divorce a man who isn't pulling his own weight (money?) in the family: I could write a whole separate post about how just this one statement utterly belies your notion that patriarchy (in whatever form, barbaric or civilized) can ever be banished.   

The "gender neutral_society" is_simply_creating_a_permutation_of tribalistic society_outside_the_top_quintile_of_income_earners_. 

And_regarding_female_unhappiness: Massive longitudinal_studies_covering_the_last_50_to 60_years_are_unquestionable, your_opinions_to_the contrary notwithstanding. 

Exactly.  Thank you, WC.  I was going to add: rather than ushering in a new era of a new civil right, SSM will be the end of any reasoned basis for civil rights.

And to Gary McVey: Pyrrhic victory, nothing  more .