Postmodern Calvinbrawlers

While preparing this morning's steaming restorative, a thought popped into my head. You know Churchill's famous line about America and England being two countries divided by a common language? Well, that wasn't it. Besides, G.B. Shaw is apparently responsible for that gag.

But it's a variation on the theme, to wit, that America has become a nation divided by a common tongue, in this case modern- and postmodernese. We conservatives are still proud of our plainspoken Modernese, while the left long ago abandoned this idiom for the cryptic and craptic language of postmodernism.

This being the case, it explains why we can't win arguments and why it doesn't matter that we always do. In short, you cannot defeat a postmodernist in an argument, because he is playing a different game -- just as you can't win a baseball game by playing football.

(Although some people try. I remember when my son played Shetland baseball at age six or something. A ball was hit to the third baseman and he proceeded to scamper with it toward the plate, trying to score a run.)

The left is not playing the truth game, but rather, the power game. Thus, you may bring the Knife of Truth to the game while expecting certain rules of conduct, only to endure a swift ringing of the berries:

Interestingly, the website from which I yoinked that image deploys it to illustrate the principle that THE RULES SAY I CAN CHANGE THE RULES, INCLUDING THIS RULE. Those are the rules we're talking about: the Butch Cassidy Rules of Politics.

Another name for it is Calvinball, "a game invented by Calvin in which you make the rules up as you go along." Thus, conservatives naively play x while the left cynically plays Calvinball.

Which might be part of the appeal of Mr. Trump, who plays his own loud and aggressive version of Calvinball -- not just against Republicans but against the other Calvinballers on the left.

Who are the best -- which is to say worst -- Calvinballers out there? I would say it's a three-way tie between politicians, MSM journalists, and academia. Academics work more in the shadows, so in the popular imagination it comes down to idiot journalists and amoral politicians. That Trump is happy to say Fuck You to both camps seems to give hope to the masses that we finally have a formidable Calvinbrawler on our side.

I don't see it ending well, however. It's one thing to Calvinbrawl as a tactic, but if it is not informed by truth, then it will be a hollow victory at best, just another name for losing.

This is precisely why I supported Giuliani in 2008. He is the last Calvinbrawling Conservative we've had on the national stage. Ted Cruz? I can't quite put my finger on why his style of brawling won't work.

Anyway, this does go back to the topic at hand, the Missing Object of Virtue. Again, we (or they, rather) have the fragments but have misplaced the thing itself. For the left there is no such thing, so it is a matter of course for them to pick up one of the shards and pretend it is the whole thing, for example, "a woman's right to choose."

Any talk of intrinsic rights must be grounded in natural rights theory, but there can be no natural right to kill an innocent human being. So that is a perfect example of elevating a shard to the whole. What's the word, Jeeves? Synedoche?

No sir, synedoche is not necessarily a fallacy. I believe the term you are grasping for is division -- the fallacy of division.

Hmm, let's see: "A fallacy of division occurs when one reasons logically that something true for the whole must also be true of all or some of its parts." Natural rights theory (naturally) assures a "right to choose," AKA free will. But this right cannot be abstracted from the human person without negating itself.

As always, The left's theses are trains of thought that are carefully stopped before they reach the argument that demolishes them (Dávila). This is a quite universal truthism, which is why the left must play Calvinball, for the rules of Calvinball permit one to change the rules just before the train hits the wall. You will have noticed how Obama and Hillary do this All Day Long.

Another of my favorite aphorisms: Rather than an ideological strategy, the left is a lexicographical strategy. In other words, they do not rely on logic, ideo- or otherwise.

Rather, the real strategy lies in language itself, which is constantly redefined to suit present needs. The image comes to mind of the T-1000 in Terminator 2, or of eating Jello with chopsticks, or of biting a wall.

What is the endgame of postmodern Calvinball? For Father Rose the whole thing is a "War against God, issuing in the proclamation of the reign of nothingness, which means the triumph of incoherence and absurdity, the whole plan presided over by Satan."

Remember the other day, when we alluded to Satan as the "nonlocal Object of Vice," which "can only be known via the surface structure of particular acts and beliefs. On the surface the acts may appear random and incoherent, but perhaps there is a secret order"?

As Rose points out, "Effective war against God and His Truth requires the destruction of every element of [the] Old Order," for which reason "violence is no merely incidental aspect" but "part of its essence." As they say, if you strike at God, you'd better kill him.

So it really comes down to the possibility of coherent truth knowable by man vs. an absolute relativism that seals man in ignorance and tyranny. Or just say Celestial Truth vs. Terrestrial Power, because I am out of time.