ME on the Cornerstone Speech.

as I explain, deserved to lose to the stuttering king.

First, I’m still sparring with transhumanism on BIG THINK. The new post includes a penetrating comment by our John.

And thanks to John for the most enjoyable and LONG post below. I’m getting to it.

The internet, 24 hours television and things of this sort are a goldmine for the armchair philosopher, i.e. virtual bullshitter. In the past the philosopher had folk with whom he could share the deepest of longings, or if not that, he could at least find witty repartee with others. He shared the fundamental questions otherwise unacknowledged with friends, acquaintances, fellow citizens or even passersby (both men and women). He spoke as if anyone were in potential with dialectics that someone who could provide the most profound of understandings regarding man, cosmos, or god. If not always meeting such high aims, the philosopher could at least pass the time of day. Nowadays, it seems that with interminable blogging one can speak of events in Egypt or Libya with such a faux expertise as if it were merely a particular instance of the manifold of being, albeit when one so speaks it is with an expertise colored with the language of contemporary social science. It seems everyone is a philosopher. Strange days indeed. But who is listening and why should they listen anyway?

When one had other people at hand with whom one could speak about ordinary and deep things alike, eristics (as painful as it may have been, even when done with sport, skill and good humor) could be an odd beginning for an actual friendship. In such a way of inquiry and interrogation, it was always possible to seduce another with regard to the most important of questions. Seduction was possible even if it was always necessary and proper at the end of the night to let answers remain in dispute for further discussion tomorrow. In this questioning activity, as things turned up in their natural course (no doubt, this is loaded language in some circles), different opinions and even different ways of life were able to show themselves as they were. Variety was open for thoughtful examination. In such a golden age, despite our real differences we all loved each other in our potential friendship—it was a real diversity. In and through a good conversation, one could see something that was in common—even if only in outline and at a vague distance. The astigmatic image that was revealed provided a target at which one could at least take aim.

You may say that back then we lacked mature purpose (we were playing patty cake with sand castles on the beach shore as C.S. Lewis approvingly had it), but we were willing to take an argument to its logical absurdity and admit that perhaps we were not as smart as we thought we were. For male and female alike it was an experience both chastening and liberating simultaneously. We could be, as William James put it, “tough minded” while at the same time we could also freely enjoy ourselves in our intellectual pursuits. We were serious and unserious. We could live with the paradox of competing goods in tension. We had read and took pleasure in Plato, Dante and Shakespeare. But all of this inquiry and education pointed toward something called self-knowledge, which was a good in itself even if it remained a riddle, and even if at the end of the day it was not the most authoritative good or at least it was not widely considered to be the most important good. In our naivete we recognized our responsibilities.

Given such responsibilities perhaps the pursuit of self-knowledge led us to less satisfaction than we had thought it had promised. If we found ourselves still lacking in what we wanted, it was perhaps no accident that such questions compelled us also to be open to the claims of divine revelation, and the question of what ways were accounted for outside what was called unassisted reason. Instead of the question of which revelation, it rather became a question of what it in the first place means for god to show himself as law or as a person? Perhaps lacking true friends, we ended up speaking of a who moreso than a what. If we could not answer these questions, we could nonetheless say that we were believers in the who as a person. These were not open questions—they simply defined us before whomever we thought we were (they were inherited traditions to be sure, but also inescapable ontological modes). However, these unopen questions nonetheless provided a disclosure of the truth of things that was still open to the questioning and investigation of reason. We were Thomistic enough to think that one (as much as anyone else) had reason by nature, and that such reason could come to see what was naturally right. Reason it seemed, if assiduously and rigorously followed, could not refute revelation. So the question became in what ways was revelation in accordance with reason. Did revelation of a divinity and his works—one who comported with the way human life presented itself as being in its lived experience—show itself in accordance with reason? If not, then in what ways was were they different, and what did this mean for the life worth living?

Did Christianity—in its account of pathos and agape, in its claims for faith and hope—account for the best human life? This seemed to be the reason or question for us. In this mode we were obviously influenced by Augustine’s Confessions amongst other great truth telling texts. We were restless hearts. On the other hand, back in the day, we were also open to the question concerning the ways in which reason itself may have been limited in its capacity to know the whole. We knew this sounded like Kant here (or fideism), but we still recognized that at our particular time there were no easy answers in that regard.

Today things seem to be different. Out of the past I currently find myself in the position of an armchair philosopher—one whose privileged online blogging life is apparently (if experts are to be believed) denuded of “real” experience. I am one who finds the recent random news stories instructive—even in their arbitrariness. Yes, I too have read Walter Benjamin, and I too appreciate his attempts to make the idiosyncrasy and contingency of Baudelaire’s flaneur in the modern world of mechanical production the basis of something significant beyond itself. Perhaps I am an online flaneur haunting the “arcades” of various blogs and websites, but nowadays these haunts are more virtual than mechanical. Regardless, they are infinitely repeatable and they seem to lack an “aura.” Since I have become familiar with latter day versions of California new age religiosity, I find the term “aura” redolent of pantheism and gnosticism and hence something distasteful from what I consider to be a proper understanding of human flourishing. Perhaps this recognition allows for something more open eyed, and suspicious of speech regarding auras and such. But it seems to me that there is a reality to that of which I speak.

When I think more clearly about myself I must say that I don’t claim this Baudelairean mantle. I think that in its promise of personal self-construction as subversion in perpetuity—a subversive self-remaking with no end in sight—I come to realize that it expects far too much of what could be considered a decent, let alone a flourishing life. I’m too bourgeois (in a good sense) for such high modernism in terms of the fine feelings of art for art’s sake. And why must I always subvert the good that has been so generously given to me even if it is past? Mere aestheticism and nostalgia is too meager for my desire. Such modernism presents the pursuit of happiness as an end itself (even if it leads to the bitter end), and ultimately it presents a way of life that exists at the expense of happiness simply. I still foolishly seek the latter.

In spite of this claim for happiness, I don’t offer the contrary claim to happiness in the terms of the happy-clappy talk of the contemporary “everything is okay—I’m OK, you’re OK”— mantra. Like the Benjaminian flaneur I too pull headlines from the papers and make try to make witty if not prudential observations on our troubling times. Still, I recognize the difficulty involved in claiming a larger vision of the best way of life. Consequently, speaking of specific headlines as I do is probably a silly pastime (and really has nothing to do with philosophy rightly understood), and you may properly ask—who the hell are you to speak of such things in the first place?

You correctly ask, “Who are you to say what is what?” In good egalitarian fashion I agree with the spirit of that question. But let’s at least look at one recent news story which if it were not for the internet and 24 hour TV, I might have nothing to say in general. It could be a meaningless story, but let’s take a look-see.

For some of our most ambitious and spirited youth, what is called “greco-roman” style wrestling is a great competitive sport in high school and college. It requires an immense amount of self-discipline and skill. To be successful one must keep oneself on a strict dietary regimen, one must work to stay in the best of physical shape both in terms of aerobic endurance and in terms of weight training strength. Of course, most importantly one must learn various bodily maneuvers and holds in order to pin one’s opponent to the mat. It is a rough and tumble sport that requires a willingness to make one’s own body tangle most intimately with another body in a contest of strength and dexterity. After any given heat, chafing, cuts and bruises are the norm. The object of the sport is zero sum—one wins by pinning another body to the mat. One wins and another loses, though on occasion there is a draw. Nonetheless, the point is to win, and one must have strength and skill to gain victory. It is such a physically demanding contest that one must wear special head-gear in order to avoid the grotesquery of the dreaded “cauliflower ear.” It is a sport with official rules and requirements judged by a referee. It is so popular that back in the 1980s there was a decent sports-wrestling movie—a triumph-of-the-spirit type sports movie—starring Matthew Modine and Linda Fiorentino called Vision Quest.

Wrestling is eristics of the body. In this way, it is arguable that wrestling is both a great sport, as well as a motif from which we in American life can draw larger lessons about virtue and a life of discipline dedicated to something larger than oneself.

But all of this assumes that this description of wrestling was amongst boys or men with each other. As I’m sure you are all aware this is the wrong assumption to make today. Boys and girls wrestle each other these days. This story is literally the comedy of the Thesmophorizusae. It may indicate what is just, but it abstracts from the body far too much as any reader of Allan Bloom’s commentary on Plato’s Republic would recognize. In teenage boy/girl wrestling, eros is inordinately subordinate to the agon of equal political justice between the sexes. It assumes that in high school and college, the competition and the spirited rivalry for recognition between the sexes can allegedly be resolved in a wrestling heat of bodies on the mat. I’m sure you can guess where this leads. It is a good thing that this story did not become another cause célèbre for gender equality in the popular culture, despite its mention on the morning television talk shows (I heard about it on Morning Joe while putting on my socks at 5:30 am). The story more or less disappeared after its brief mention. One hopes its disappearance as a story shows an inherent decency and common sense of contemporary Americans. But is this decency and common sense true in all areas of life? Call me a sexist, but the teenage boy/girl wrestling story surely raises questions about unemployed manliness amongst men, and its increased opportunity for employment amongst women. Or under such conditions of egalitarianism can boy/girl wrestling even be called manliness? It must be called simply “justice as fairness” in all things. I’m all for women’s rights and feminism—but wrestling? Really? What kind of veil of ignorance can cover this absurdity? It’s pretty hilarious if you think about it.

There is a good account of the story and its implications here.

I suspect that such things describe the life of youth today. It is youth understood according to the terms of current convention, but it is youth nonetheless. But young Joel Northrup knew better. He defaulted on the final heat. Somehow his hormones and habituation—a good combination of character and religion—told him there wasn’t something quite right here. However, other boys had no problem wrestling Cassie Herkelman in the earlier rounds. That must have been quite a show—especially given the fact that those boys lost to this girl wrestler. The humor is too rich!

Kay Hymowitz has a new book coming out that criticizes the ever growing number of childlike men. In movies, song and advertising, the adult teenage boy is omnipresent. This type of man is neither manly nor adult. Instead he lives his life playing video games and making pop cultural references. Cleverness, a contingent virtue for the particular age of now, shows forth as a way for the modern male to make friends and influence people. He is not simply the “sensitive new age guy” (SNAG) of the of the ‘70s and ‘80s. He’s simply an adult pre-adolscent boy. No Alan Alda sincerity here. Sincerity is for suckers—yet for the new man/boy, the writing of a memoir when one is a nobody who has done nothing seems to be a profitable enterprise nonetheless. According to Hymowitz, this is apparently the ethos of young men these days, and women will just have to learn to live with no satisfaction understood in the old fashion—or they must become wrestlers.

If young men must wrestle girls in high school (and possibly even lose), I guess I understand better the incessant playing of World of Warcraft or Guild Wars as a decent preoccupation. One must win at something!

In sum, I am confident that natural procreation will continue. Video games are surely clever diversions—they demonstrate a great amount of ingenuity and imagination in their making—but other concerns must be central by nature. The question is what kind of people will engage in this procreation? And what will they spawn? What kind of virtue is required here? Hopefully it’s the same old, same old.

But in regard to it all, there is definitely More Than This than it seems.

Locke denies, in fact, that any particular being can be reduced or defined as essentially a member of the species. And we’re the beings with enough self-consciousness or self-ownership—or a relatively stable and clear sense of who are as particular, vulnerable, free, rational, mortal (or embodied) beings—who know who we are. The idea that I have such property in myself, properly understood, is, for Zuckert, the foundation of the equality of all selves who can make that claim. My self-consciousness, and my claim, as result, of self-ownership, “leads me beyond the claim I raise for myself to recognize the like claim of others” in that respect like myself.” At the very least, we can all recognize that we can make a claim not to be “gratuitously” harmed by other selves.

Recognizing equality in freedom of beings with personal identity, however, falls short of recognizing the value of every human life. It can hardly be expected to generate, in most cases, what Sara Henary calls “an attentive, active concern for the other.”

Henary goes on to deny that “any formulation of ‘self-ownership’ claim requires that one acknowledge the legitimacy of similar claims made by others.” “Divorced,” she explains, “from any concept that might give some sense of the value of other selves, the notion of ‘self-ownership is purely self-referential.” It, in fact, “by drawing attention to my own capabilities and powers without imposing corresponding limits on my will, …risks calling forth a blatant disregard for beings and things that might present themselves as obstacles to the execution of my projects.” What’s important is my personal identity, my value or significance, and others don’t have enough inherent value—given that, for Locke, just about all value is personally acquired by free beings by transforming nature and in no sense given— for me to care for them when they get in the way of me—my assertion of my identity against an environment indifferent to my very being.

So a “strictly secular view of Locke” can’t adequately ground the moral idea of human equality, and that’s why Henry concludes that even a Lockean defense of equality can’t dispense with “a willingness to argue publicly from specifically Christian premises.” And a true defense of equality might depend on those premises being in some fundamental sense true. Locke depends, Henary says, on Christianity in a more fundamental way than Zuckert thinks, and, even if he doesn’t, we defenders of dignified equality in freedom need to do so.

So I’m almost done a chapter honoring the Zuckerts. It’s mainly about the Puritans, Marilynne Robinson, and stuff. But I’m bogged down in a last-minute intro. This is the first half, unproofed etc. Let me know what you think:

Better than anyone else, Michael Zuckert has displayed our country as a “the natural rights republic,” as the country most securely rooted in the secular, universalistic, and individualistic principles of John Locke. That’s not to say, of course, that Zuckert is some kind of libertarian new atheist in favor of dispensing with religion altogether. Because the argument that support the true principles of government, as Locke says, can be known only be a few, they must be believed by the many in any well-functioning free and democratic “regime.” In Zuckert’s particularly astute interpretation of our Declaration of Independence, what’s most important, politically, is that all citizens hold the truth of the Declaration to be self-evident, but they need not grasp their “cognitive status.”

So Zuckert’s model American Christian preachers are the “Lockean Puritans” of the eighteenth century, who transformed the Puritanical view of Christianity to harmonize it with natural rights political doctrine—political life oriented around the self-interested individual and not republican or Christian idealism. He recommends those preachers, in effect, as following the example of Locke himself, as reconfiguring biblical doctrine in light of what we can know about ourselves through unassisted reason. They taught people to believe in the revolutionary doctrine of natural rights as flowing what they believe to be true about the will of the Creator.

When American works best, Zuckert claims, our devotion to our natural rights republic receives “salutary aid from deep-flowing religious impulses.” SALUTARY, of course, is to be distinguished from TRUE. Religious impulses and their theological articulation add nothing real—or at least politically relevant—to what we can know about who we are. America works best, in other words, when religious and secular, individualistic impulses are arguments work “tensionlessly”—or don’t compromise our basically secular devotion. When they are in “disharmony and tension,” as they often seem to be today, America becomes disoriented and needlessly contentious.
The American “unique amalgam” is “so constructed” that both its indispensable religious and republican features operate in a way that doesn’t compromise its Lockean core. Christianity, so understood, ought to be our “civil theology”—or a way of getting God or the gods behind our “regime.” That’s why Zuckert emphatically dissents from Tocqueville’s view that we Americans owe anything fundamental or deeply true to the Puritans. When he quotes what Tocqueville says about the Puritans with approval, it’s the part when the Frenchman condemns their “ridiculous and tyrannical” laws. That just and severe criticism, in Zuckert’s view, occurs in the midst of Tocqueville’s abundant and unjustified praise of their political project on behalf of equality and liberty. Zuckert’s bottom line here is that the Puritans had a “presumption against liberty,” and that religious or Christian presumption explains why “their legislation has earned the censure of mankind as Puritanical.” For Zuckert, the individualistic liberal, there’s nothing positive about being a Puritan. That’s why, of course, we can easily say that part of his polemical intention is to read anything distinctively Puritanical from our authoritative political tradition, from the core beliefs that identify us all as Americans.

Zuckert presents Thomas Pangle’s views of our natural rights republic’s discontinuity with anything deeply Christian as even more extreme or less nuanced than his own—and not, of course, without reason. But even Pangle admits, Zuckert reports, that “the belief in the sanctity of all human beings as such” that somehow grounds natural rights philosophy “would seem to a legacy of the biblical social and political tradition rather than a classical one.” That would seem to mean, from Pangle’s view, that the insight into the unique irreplacability of every human person is biblical—and so not reasonable. For Pangle far more than Zuckert, it would be historicism to believe that anything that essential or foundational could not be known to Plato (and Aristotle). It’s true enough that the rights-oriented view of the sanctity of human life is one largely purged of biblical premises—but not of all of them. For Pangle, those who speak of the sacredness or infinite worth of the free individual are to some extent unreasonably parasitical on the Bible, and certainly that’s Leo Strauss’ view.

The Lockean Zuckert, surely no historicist, sometimes emphasizes how much Locke discovered that Plato and Aristotle didn’t know. And Locke, he properly reminds us, holds that “[t]he Bible in fact depicts the fundamentals of the human experience far better and to a far higher degree than any other premodern awareness”—including, of course, that of premodern or “pre-Cartesian” philosophy. From the Cartesian view of Locke and Zuckert, “the scriptural understanding is unique and ultimately ‘truer’…than pre-critical modes of awareness because, it, as opposed to those others, understands and has assimilated human freedom.”

Locke, like the Bible, “seems man differentia in terms of freedom.” And at least it’s unclear whether Descartes and Locke could have grasped that true insight without knowledge of the Bible. According to Locke, it’s freely creating man who created the freely creating God—or the opposite of what the Bible tells us. God is created in man’s image. Man, alone among the creatures, is partly free from not only nature. To say otherwise, Zuckert says in criticism of the Darwinian Larry Arnhart, is to succumb to “biologism.” Locke, in that respect, might be understood to be closer to Hegel or Heidegger than to Aristotle, and to side with the Christians against the classical thinkers concerning free personal identity. From that view, even philosophy is not learning how to die; it’s not forgetting about one’s personal needs or personal contingency and mortality.

Jefferson himself claims to have become serenely philosophical enough to have gotten over himself—to live beyond any hope or fear—but to that extent he called himself an Epicurean. He was with Locke on government and Bacon on natural science (and so in those two respects a Cartesian), but with the ancients in some sense when it came to his own deepest self-understanding. Jefferson, despite his proto-Darwinian praise of the teaching of Jesus as the perfect articulation of the instinctual moral sense, seems less Christian, in one way at least, than Locke.

Locke, it’s true, does not understand the person to be as free as a Christian does—as someone who believes that one’s personal identity is secured forever by a personal Creator. For Locke, we, in our freedom, have to secure ourselves as well we can on our own, but personal identity finally is obliterated by natural necessity. But there’s no Darwinian or probably even Aristotelian way of explaining our personal identity and our singular and at best ambiguously natural longings—including, of course, the pursuit of happiness that only quite temporarily culminates in happiness itself.

Here’s ME talking at length and very rapidly about my book (which is still available!). It’s rare that an interviewer actually read the book AND liked it for good reasons. She was great. It’s not that rare that I’m high on caffeine when giving an interview (or lecture or whatever), unfortunately.

Here’s ME appreciating Susan McWilliams’ insight into what the Lady’s words are all about.

Let me try to make the connection implied in the above title.

First off, I’m trying to mainstrem the postmodern and conservative view of designing babies at BIG THINK.

And here’s more, in response to an irate transhumanist.

And all this talk on secession–and the passions being aroused–is getting our minds off the big issues today. I don’t think we postmodern conservatives buy into the Lincoln was a tyrant who struck a mortal blow against liberty in America view favored by some libertarians.

Alexander Stephens, remember, called Jefferson Davis a tyrant for trying to do what was required to win the war for his “country” (yes, Davis, for all his flaws, called the Confederacy a country–only countries fight wars and ask for recognition from other countries), and Stephens even claimed that the South lost the war because of Davis’ despotic offenses against the rights, in particular, of the sovereign state of Georgia. That was pretty nuts–one reason among many the South lost the war was pathological parnoia about the rights of sovereign states at the expense of effective military resistance.

My postmodern objection to getting all hot and bothered about that war these days is that it feeds into what is, to my mind, the inadequate view that even Lincoln’s understanding of the moral crisis that fueled the war is enough to guide us in facing the threats to freedom and dignity these days. That’s not to say, of course, that I didn’t think Lincoln was right on slavery and on much of the true dignity of the workingman (and woman).

The best that can be said for the South’s case (and it’s not that good) is that the Framers’ attempt to divide sovereignty was bound to create a kind of partisanship that would eventually produce a civil war (see Hobbes). The impartial Tocqueville reminds us that our Framers did intend an incomplete national government and not some league of nations. But he also noticed that loyalty was flowing in the direction of the states, and he was fairly pessimistic about the future of the Union. It turns out the Union had more of a future than he speculated, but the war could have gone either way. Another thing we learn from Tocqueville is the despair of the South in being stuck with the monstrosity of race-based slavery and the nature-denying, spiritual despotism of growing ferocity it required of the masters. We might want to say the South wanted a war it would lose as the only way out. It really was a way out.

Secession, the unjustly neglected Orestes Brownson reminds us, is at the expense of the indispensable political principle of loyalty. I can keep writing about the perils of understanding citizenship too contractually, but that would take me down the often traveled (if only by me) how to keep Locke-in-the-Locke-box road.

Still, it’s imposible not to admire Bob’s good natured tenacity on behalf of what he really believes to be a gentleman’s cause.

Peter, before I address your positions defending a strong central government and your position that slavery alone is the cause of the war, allow me this analogy:

The issue at hand is similar to a walnut. The shell, surrounding the ‘meat’, is very strong and must be cracked in order to examine what’s inside. In our little debate the ‘shell’ is slavery and the ‘meat’ are those ideas that swirled about the body politic during the slave period (1787-1860): the compact theory of American government, the right of secession, the right of revolution, federal tariffs/taxes, state interposition/nullification, and states’ rights.
Of course, the idea that slavery is singularly important in the discussion goes without saying. But, the question is, is it the only reason, or even the most important reason, as a cause of the ‘late unpleasantness?’
My answer to that inquiry is simply, NO.
I reached that conclusion by stripping ‘African chattel slavery’ out of the problem. What if there had never been slaves, from Africa or anywhere else, imported into the United States? What if white South Carolinians, Georgians, Alabamians, et al had picked their own cotton and rice and cut their own tobacco?

So now we have a condition where there are no enslaved Africans.
Would that fact have settled the question of the compact theory? NO.
Would that have changed or altered or, indeed, had any effect on the question of the right of revolution and secession in the public square? NO!
Would that have stopped Yankee legislators from enacting punitive tariffs/taxes against the South? NO.
Would that have stopped Yankee legislators from transferring wealth from the South to pay for Northern ‘improvements?’ No.
Would that have changed Jefferson’s interpretation of state interposition/nullification? NO.
Consequently, federal imposition of unfair tariffs/taxes, the federal effort to limit the reserve rights of the state or to inhibit the states’ right to interpose itself between an unconstitutional federal law and the people were all, potentially, grounds for secession.

Furthermore, let us consider that the United States of America was itself founded upon secession. You know that as well as I. We might then consider that ‘secession’ is the first of American principles, for without secession from Great Britain we do not exist as a political entity, we would not enjoy our cherished freedoms, we would have no knowledge of liberty had we not seceded. Consequently, Jefferson’s ‘principles of ’98′ ‘ act to reinforce the obligation of the state to correct or to challenge a federal usurpation or misinterpretation of the Constitution, with the final corrective (should all else fail) being secession. For you to imply that Jefferson would not support secession predicated on an unjust/puntative tariff or tax or on any unjust, immoral act that threatened the loss of freedom or any usurpation by a corrupt federal regime is just not true. Please keep in mind he was willing to state in writing that secession was a possibility because of the Alien and Sedition Act, the legislation that moved him (and Madison) to write the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions in the first place.

Actually Northern state legislators were the first to enact nullification legislation, for example in nullifying the Embargo Act of 1809 (an application of Jefferson’s (Madison) Virginia and Kentucky Resolves of 1798) and was seconded by all of the New England states as well as Delaware which referred to it as a “unconstitutional usurpation of power.” When the War of 1812 broke out following the Embargo Act Connecticut officials wrote that:

(The ‘blocked’ segments are quotations from Dr. Thomas J. Dilorenzo’s essay, “The Northern States’ Rights Tradition.” available here: http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo42.html)

“…. the State of Connecticut is a FREE SOVEREIGN and INDEPENDENT State; that the United States are a confederacy of States; that we are a confederated and not a consolidated Republic. The Governor of this State is under a high and solemn obligation, “to maintain the lawful rights and privileges thereof, as a sovereign, free and independent State,” as he is “to support the Constitution of the United States,” and the obligation to support the latter imposes an additional obligation to support the former. The building cannot stand, if the pillars upon which it rests, are impaired or destroyed.”

The above quote from these learned Connecticut representative reflects an erudite understanding of Jefferson’s principles not only of ’98′ but also of the olde revolution itself. Below DiLorenzo points out that these New England officials had additional concerns about the intentions of their Southern countrymen:

“The embargo, the war, and the Louisiana Purchase incited the New England Federalist Party to begin planning to secede from the Union. Governor Griswold of Connecticut announced the reason why: “The balance of power under the present government is decidedly in favor of the Southern states . . . The extent and increasing population of those states must forever secure to them the preponderance which they now possess . . . . [New Englanders] are paying the principal part of the expenses of government” without receiving commensurate benefits. Thus, “there can be no safety to the Northern States without a separation from the confederacy” (Henry Adams, Documents Relating to New England Federalism, 1800—1815, p. 376). John C. Calhoun would make this exact same argument some two decades later in complaining about the federal “Tariff of Abominations.”"

DiLorenzo’s essay details several more instances when Northern states utilized state interposition/nullification to restrict the attempted usurpations of the federal government.

Your NO. 3, is simply wrong.
The idea of compact is grounded on the guaranteed rights of states as the fundamental constitutional political entity charged with protecting and guarding its reserved rights and the hard won liberties of her citizens. The states then, in convention, established the General Government.
The question presented is what entity shall interpret the constitutionality of federal legislation and actions. The consolidators argue that that privilege belongs to the SCOTUS. The problem, of course, is that the SCOTUS is a significant part of the general government and will be inclined by the nature of men, both good and evil, to support and defend their coevals at the expense of the states. We experience that phenomenon frequently these days.
On the other hand Calhoun and Jefferson and indeed, the Northern representatives described in Dr. DiLorenzo’s essay, understand that the final analysis must be in the hands of the people’s representatives in the sundry state legislatures. And, that long before the question of ‘secession’ is raised there is a plethora of political exigencies to exercise. The legislature of the state can communicate with the federal administration in an effort to seek redress. Failing that the state legislature can follow Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Ohio, Delaware et al in nullifying the offending federal legislation and await the reply of the general government. In all of these actions there will be expended a great deal of time; perhaps the general government will relent in its usurpations as it has done in most instances, perhaps the people of the states will relent in their objections and find redress in the response of the general government. Who can say. But, what is required of the state as the last constitutional line of defense, is the protection and safe guarding of the people’s liberties and the obtainment of God’s ‘justice,’ not the ‘justice’ of Leviathan.

I am greatly distressed that you would insult Cahoun’s intentions. He was after all a ‘national’ man who loved liberty as much as any American who ever lived. This from Calhoun’s Fort Hill Address, 26 July 1831:
“To be national has, indeed, been considered by many, even of my friends, to be my greatest political fault. With these strong feelings of attachment, I have examined with the utmost care, the bearing of the doctrine in question; and so far from anarchical, or revolutionary, I solemnly believe it to be, the only solid foundation of our system, and of the Union itself, and that the opposite doctrine, which denies to the States the right of protecting their reserved powers, and which would vest in the General Government, (it matters not what Department) the right of determining exclusively and finally the powers delegated to it, is incompatible with the sovereignty of the States, and of the Constitution itself, considered as the basis of a federal Union. As strong as this language is, it is not stronger, than that used by the illustrious Jefferson, who said, to give to the General Government the final and exclusive right to judge the powers, is to make “its discretion and not the Constitution the measure of its powers”; and that, “in all cases of compact between parties having no common Judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of the infractions, as of the mode and measure of redress.” Language cannot be more explicit; nor can higher authority be adduced.”

The issue then devolves on the ancient question, whether ours will be an absolute or constitutional government “resting ultimately on the sovereignty of the states, or on the unrestrained will of a majority; a form of government, as in all other unlimited ones, in which injustice, and violence, and force must finally prevail.”

And, because of your expressed admiration for state secession documents, this from the Georgia secessionists:

“…The material prosperity of the North was greatly dependent on the Federal Government; that of the the South not at all. In the first years of the Republic the navigating, commercial, and manufacturing interests of the North began to seek profit and aggrandizement at the expense of the agricultural interests. Even the owners of fishing smacks sought and obtained bounties for pursuing their own business (which yet continue), and $500,000 is now paid them annually out of the Treasury. The navigating interests begged for protection against foreign shipbuilders and against competition in the coasting trade. Congress granted both requests, and by prohibitory acts gave an absolute monopoly of this business to each of their interests, which they enjoy without diminution to this day. Not content with these great and unjust advantages, they have sought to throw the legitimate burden of their business as much as possible upon the public; they have succeeded in throwing the cost of light-houses, buoys, and the maintenance of their seamen upon the Treasury, and the Government now pays above $2,000,000 annually for the support of these objects. Theses interests, in connection with the commercial and manufacturing classes, have also succeeded, by means of subventions to mail steamers and the reduction in postage, in relieving their business from the payment of about $7,000,000 annually, throwing it upon the public Treasury under the name of postal deficiency. The manufacturing interests entered into the same struggle early, and has clamored steadily for Government bounties and special favors. This interest was confined mainly to the Eastern and Middle non-slave-holding States. Wielding these great States it held great power and influence, and its demands were in full proportion to its power. The manufacturers and miners wisely based their demands upon special facts and reasons rather than upon general principles, and thereby mollified much of the opposition of the opposing interest. They pleaded in their favor the infancy of their business in this country, the scarcity of labor and capital, the hostile legislation of other countries toward them, the great necessity of their fabrics in the time of war, and the necessity of high duties to pay the debt incurred in our war for independence. These reasons prevailed, and they received for many years enormous bounties by the general acquiescence of the whole country…”