Cobb

Certainty vs Hope

science is about certainty.

those who pursue science want to be certain. and they discipline themselves and their thought process to deal with the results of all experiments. they seek to prove things beyond the shadow of a doubt. this is how knowledge progresses. without knowledge there is only guesswork and superstition. 

 

guesswork and superstition are the enemy of civilization.

this is because if you rule your life through guesswork and/or superstition you assume others do as well.

if others run their lives via guesswork and superstition.

 

a. your guess is as good as mine.

b. my god is just as righteous as your god.

 

in other words everything is possible because the possible is defined NOT BY CERTAINTY but by guesswork and superstition. 

 

in a world of certainty, NOT everything is possible. AND, you can know exactly what is impossible.

 

in a world of guesswork and superstition, everything and anything is possible. 

 

in the world of guesswork and superstition, the way people make predictions is called HOPE. you make your prediction and keep your fingers crossed.

 

in the world of certainty, the way people make predictions is called THEORY. you either prove your theory or you disprove your theory.

 

you can also say that in the world of guesswork and superstition, you can also call HOPE: either SUPPLICATION or PRAYER.

 

when HOPE, SUPPLICATION and PRAYER fail to produce predicted results, you can always hope, supplicate and pray again for the same results. this is called 'keeping hope alive' also 'keeping the faith' also 'protest'. this can go on indefinitely. 

 

when THEORY fails to produce predicted results, you get rid of the disproven theory as soon as possible.

 

a disproven theory expands knowledge because it adds to the knowledge about what is impossible. 

 

a failed PRAYER, HOPE or SUPPLICATION does not expand knowledge, it merely tries the patience of those who live in the world of guesswork and superstition. so they tend to PRAY more, HOPE more and SUPPLICATE more, instead of changing direction. 

 

that is because they do not accept that anything is impossible. they do not accept any certainty or proof or disproof. they only accept that.

 

a. your guess is as good as mine.

b. my god is just as righteous as your god.

 

guesswork and superstition are the friend of revolution.

this is because dashed hopes, unrequited supplication and unanswered prayers try human patience to the breaking point.  such broken humans turn on those who they see as having their hopes, supplications and prayers fulfilled. they say the the others do not deserve what they possess. 

 

revolution allows the hopeful, prayerful supplicants to have their way with society. 

 

revolution becomes the means to the ends of HOPE, the hope that has no need for THEORY, for proof or for disproof. 

 

 

--- 

So when anyone says to 'keep hope alive' what they mean is to dismiss proof and certainty because anything is possible, you merely have to keep the faith, hope, supplicate and pray more. 

 

JS Mill: Liberty in Discovery

Reading from the Catholic Education Center, a definition of liberalism & progress:

It would be impossible to give a definition that captures (at a proper level of detail and complexity) all of the different aspects and phases of liberalism. Rather than define it, I will read a single passage from J.S. Mill’s On Liberty (1859). If this text does not capture the soul of liberalism, then I suspect that nothing will. Mill wrote that:

There is always need of persons not only to discover new truths and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new practices and set the example of more enlightened conduct and better taste and sense in human life. This cannot well be gainsaid by anybody who does not believe that the world has already attained perfection in all its ways and practices. It is true that this benefit is not capable of being rendered by everybody alike; there are but few persons, in comparison with the whole of mankind, whose experiments, if adopted by others, would be likely to be any improvement on established practice. But these few are the salt of the earth; without them, human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who introduce good things which did not before exist; it is they who keep the life in those which already exist....There is only too great a tendency in the best beliefs and practices to degenerate into the mechanical; and unless there were a succession of persons whose ever-recurring originality prevents the grounds of those beliefs and practices from becoming merely traditional...there would be no reason why civilization should not die out...[6]

This is something I understood a while back, but I never used the word 'progress'. The way in which I oppose Progressivism has nothing to do with questioning Mills premise here, but exactly to the extent which Progressives assume that the pace of government is adequate to the task - which is in my view oxymoronic. Government policy assumes, by definition, ossification of best practices into law, which we all know cannot be practically undone at any rate sufficient for the process of discovery to be sustained. Rather it makes for a sinecure for those corporate entities who, through their marketing, infantilize the population. 

Discovery is what the common man needs to exercise within the millieu of his class. His own experience is the best teacher as he discovers not only the enlightened selections of his superiors, but the alternatives to those which make his advancement a choice as opposed to a prescription. 

Notice additionally the way in which Mill shows his appreciation for the good things in life which already exist. This must be the place for conservation of classics, best done by those swift enough not to be overly impressed with novelty and change for its own sake. 

--

This is all in the context of writing skeptically of Dawson's rejection of technology, or more specifically technocracy. There too I am in agreement. But what I think neither Mill nor Dawson appreciated is the extent to which the democratization and decentralization of technology enables individual agency. That must be the gating criterion. And I then cede the conversation in principle to Richard Stallman's Four Freedoms. 

I think it is possible to generalize what Stallman is saying to all of the sorts of technology that Dawson might oppose, and that should be the test. That being the case, there is always the probability of discovery long after the inventors have died - so long as the spirit of invention and discovery is maintained. 

So today I just discovered and converged some very important concepts. It has made me an even greater proponent of Open Source, not only in software but in the context of the Force of Education. 

Four Forces

It has been some time since I've written in my section on Matters of the Spirit. And even though I have the KJV and the NIV on my Kindle, it has been a while since I've done much reading of the Bible. And no, I haven't been to church all month, nor much this season. For the grace of God I am not trying. Yet I remain engaged with matters of the spirit in my heart and mind and certainly every day am thinking about our great endeavors in the affairs of men.

I begin with a story about my girlfriend back in 1980 when Jamaica Funk was at the top of the charts. She asked me if I was afraid of Hell, and I said no. She asked me how I resisted the temptations of sin, and I made it clear to her that my relationship with God was structured as the Jesuits gave me structure, which was the evocation at all times to be Christlike. It was clear to me then that I had absolutely no difficulty in the pursuit of that moral ambition and understood that while I might fail from time to time, that my aim was right. From that, whatever righteousness I might possess would be evident to God and by his grace I would do well. I never trusted a preacher who called his flock 'saints' and invited all those who had accepted Jesus as their personal savior to stand or sit or perform some deed. In fact, I've always had a theological problem with the idea of Christ the Redeemer as Personal Savior. It seemed too immodest considering what deeds needed doing in service to His example. But I was aligned. All I ever wanted was to be good. I didn't need Heaven nor Hell. It seemed to me, a frivolous question, and by and large it still does.

Having a religious education beats a month of Sundays in church. It taught me how to think about God and morality and worldly ambition and a number of related matters. I was fortunte to have had things explicitly discussed. Today I hear mostly silence, even in all the talk about religion. Most Americans will never have what I had, which was a Catholic priest as a biology teacher and a computer science instructor who had been to Divinity School. The conflict between rationality and Christianity never entered my mind as a fundamental problem but as a philosophical debate about epistemology. But more importantly, what I came to an early understanding about my religion was that it was about the moral foundations of justice.

Everybody comes from somewhere on their way to somewhere else. Their measure of ambition often determines their speed. We are often admonished to 'remember where we came from'. Well, before I came from a Jesuit prep school, I came from a black neighborhood. More importantly I came from a family that was intellectually engaged in the Black Arts Movement. And specifically we celebrated Kwanzaa and heard extra clicks on our telephone calls in the years after 1968 when America was on fire. There is a passport photo of my mother and siblings. You see, we were prepared to leave. As it became clearer to most Americans that burning down the nation was a distinct possibility unless integration happened, there were certain Black Nationalist dreams that had to die hard as well. Our family closed down the Institute For Black Studies and went to church. My mother could never go back to the Catholic she had been. She went evangelical, in fact a rather millenarian flavor not quite to the handling of snakes, but far into faith healing, speaking in tongues and jumping Holy Ghost dynamics. I didn't take the Foursquare Church in stride, but there was the music. My father did not find it too difficult to return to his Episcopalianism. I chose LA's upscale Episcopalian slice of Christian lifestyle, that was leavened with the harder edge of my Catholic schooling. Crossover for me was relatively smooth. I had several flavors of Christian experience by the time I chose for my Confirmation. 

And so from these traditions of social justice and struggle I emerged whole and in no way confused about my moral ambition, purpose or identity. So it was easy to answer my girlfriend's question. What remains is not doubt so much as curiosity. Still, life throws us curveballs for which we are not prepared, and every once in a while I have to go back to where I came from and think my way to the present. Sometimes I backtrack, sometimes I'm smug and sometimes I don't even want to think about it. 

This afternoon, I received a note from one of my many associates in thought and spirit, David Theroux. And he asked me to consider his essay. In doing so he reviews some familiar ground implicit in what I have learned about matters of justice and liberty and what Christianity has to do with any of that. It is an area I think far too many Americans have not considered at length and I find in his essay a good provocation and framework for knowing some of what is important to know about secular humanism. I use the term with a smile because I used to mock the very concept before I was in any ways a Conservative. But let me excerpt a small piece and move forward. 

However in the Renaissance, religion became viewed as a “private” impulse, distinct from “secular” politics, economics, and science.[7] This “modern” view of religion began the decline of the church as the public, communal practice of the virtue of religio. And by the Enlightenment, John Locke had distinguished between the “outward force” of civil officials and the “inward persuasion” of religion. He believed that civil harmony required a strict division between the state, whose interests are “public,” and the church, whose interests are “private,” thereby clearing the public square for the purely secular. For Locke, the church is a “voluntary society of men,” but obedience to the state is mandatory.[8] 

There's a lot to unpack in just this paragraph, but it is I think, the central portion that must be made clear. In all things, I strongly believe that people should strive to be independent and self-reliant. I say this with as much forcefulness as my own inheritance allows me to speak as a descendant of slaves. A free man, in order to keep his freedom, must owe no debts of purpose or identity. Of those things, he must be self-possesed. What I have described autobiographically is some part of the experiences that made me just that. I am not morally indebted to a single politics, a single church, a single race, or any such singularity beyond whose gravity I have no hope to escape. And yet from every institution and experience I know that there is a singular moral law to which all of humanity is ultimately indebted and responsible. 

 To my way of looking at things, there are four primary forces in the world which leverage our aiblity to pass instituional knowledge and power. They are government, religion, education and commerce. I would like to elaborate on these and had written up another 500 words which were unfortunately lost. But the nut of the matter is that to see these forces in balance needs a philosophical recognition of which roles in human life each should take and in what proportion. The proper conservative wishes to see these balanced in such a way that government - the single institution of those four which posesses the only legitimate monopoly of coercive law and force of violence should take a minimum of autonomy from its consenting citizens such that their debts of purpose and identity remain more closely aligned with institutions they have more autonomy in controlling. In this way of looking at institutions, the separation of church and state is a necessary but only minimum requirement. All four should have overlap and interdependence but not be controlled by the others. I see Theroux's argument as a specie of that which says the four forces are out of balance.

The Stem Cell Psychosis

Every once in a while, I hear some smartass evangelical atheist try to convince people that GWBush initiated some great religious fanatic foreign and domestic policy. I keep my head of course, and mostly I have kept quiet. But it's getting a little tiresome and at this point I feel that it is necessary to kill the myth that Bush was anti-science based on his opposition to embryonic stem cell research. 

Myth: Bush was against stem cell research.
Fact: Bush was against federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. Research on existing lines of embryonic stem cells was never curtailed.

Myth: Bush opposed embryonic stem cell research because of religious reasons.
Fact: Bush opposed embryonic stem cell research for moral & ethical reasons. 

Myth: Embryonic stem cell research was promising.
Fact: It promised, but did not deliver. As of 2006, there were 76 proven therapies using adult stem cells and zero from embryonic stem cells.

Myth: We can never know what we might have gained.
Fact: The ban was reversed by Obama in 2009.

Myth: Now science can proceed.
Fact: Pluripotency in human adult stem cells was bio-engineered in 2007. The presumed reason to use embryonic stem cells was their pluripotency. 

 

Following the Morally Talented

Pops and I had one of our unending discourses last evening, and I was interested to hear his wariness of judgment. While I stayed away from the direct arguments and themes of my Peasant Theory, I did end up asking him a question about the elite vis a vis the mind of God. I had a couple ways of expressing this concern which I will now try with you. But first a little background.

He opened the discussion by telling me that he is considering remaking the Stations of the Cross into contemporary form, and asked me if I remembered whether there were 12 or 14. I hadn't thought about the Stations of the Cross in many years, but I knew beyond a doubt that the answer was 14, even though I went to the web to verify my answer. I was right. And then went searching for the music and lyrics to that song which begins 'At the Cross her station keeping' and finally found the melody on YouTube. It was difficult to find that exact melody and there were not many hits. And so I was reminded what troubled me about all the conveniences we have - and the implications of his dumbing down that Mass for the masses. 

So I began with the quote from Stephenson who put words into Leibniz' mouth, the wit of which is the following: 

“So I ventured into that library which had been closed up since the death of my father and still smelled like him. It might seem funny for me to speak of the smell, but that was the only connection I could draw at the time. For the books were all written in Latin or Greek, languages I did not know, and they treated of subjects with which I was completely unfamiliar, and they were arranged upon the shelves according to some scheme that must have been clear to my father, but to me was unknown, and would have been beyond my ken even if someone had been there to explain it to me.

“Now in the end, Monsieur Fatio, I mastered that library, but in order to do it I first had to learn Greek and Latin, and then read the books. Only when I had done these things was I finally able to do the most difficult thing of all, namely to understand the organizing principle by which my father had arranged the books on the shelves.” 

This is the point. It takes effort to understand the mind of God, but progress can be made and understanding can be gained. Dumbing it down for the masses, is this useful? This begs several Lutheran questions, but we didn't go that way, primarily because he began to argue that in the hands of man, the words, will and mind of God becomes corrupted into such a state that no matter what the man's intention it becomes a project of Man at which point the Devine is lost.

So I pointed out all of the albums we were listening to and asked him to consider musical talent. I said that if you were to find the world's most talented composer, would it raise any concern if in the entire life of that artist he never considered writing sacred music and was never inspired by God. He said it wouldn't trouble him in the least. Wow. So I put it another way.

If I found the two most morally advanced men on the planet, both studying for decades, of equal intellect and one said that he had nothing more any man could teach him, and thus should be the moral authority of the planet. The other said he too had nothing more any man could teach him but humbled himself before God thus claiming he had more to learn. Which would you follow? He said it didn't matter.

Then I took two albums out, one from Herbie Hancock and another from Lisa Lisa & Full Force. I placed them five inches apart and analogized the implication of his arguments (which I do not do full justice in this abstract). That if you looked at the most talented musician in the world and the least

My argument is that I accept that any human healthy enough to survive has enough moral acuity to survive as well. It is a natural endowment. (via Spinoza, meaning it is a gift of God). That this acuity may be improved upon and expressed as law, and that this moral law is permanent and unchanging. Christianity may have 10 Commandments, but that is as insufficiently complete as a human with 10 words in his vocabulary. That for the sake of argument there are 10,000 moral laws analagous to a 10,000 word vocabulary with which we can all acquire full literacy and understanding. 

I will have to leave it at that for the moment.

Harry's War

There is nothing I feel quite so strongly about the end of the Harry Potter series as I do about the matter of courage. The last installment feels like nothing so much as an entreaty to youth to be unafraid of death and to understand that all plans fail except those that leave your heart's direction undeflected. The end of Harry presages the end of Europe.

Surely there have been those who have taken the arc of Rowling into a more appropriate context, but to this Yank it's loud and clear. Destruction awaits us, but there is a way through it. 

I read a little graphic over at the website of the animators who are contracted with the Royal Society. It said something to the effect that success is 99% failure. All the difference is made by recognizing the 1% for what it is. Faith in the 1% chance. I am starting to make more sense of this particular sensibility. Rather like Rudyard Kipling's 'If', there is something to the the idea of acting as if failure is impossible, living 'as if'.

But it cannot be the only thing that inspires. There is much to be said about the foolishness of diehards whom fortune favors. Beware the bull of a man who doesn't actually out-maneuver you, but squishes you down. Hmm. I don't have to tell you that, unless you are alternately cowering and braying behind Voldemort. 

Watching Harry destroy the most powerful wand in the world, I get it. Seeing him drop the Resurrection Stone into the weedy floor of the darkest wood, I understand. What makes us best is when we are best without the promise of reward. It is the anti-meritocracy - and that's hard to explain and almost counter-intuitive in America, but I'll try to spell it out.

As Cobb readers know, I admire spies and priests on the predicate that they are abiding secret keepers. Rather like Snape, there is much admirable to be said about the man who doesn't, at every turn, attempt to profit on what he knows. That is the simplistic meritocracy, and what it creates is an atmosphere of high stakes volleyball. You know. Where everybody competes all the time and doesn't want *you* on their team if they can avoid it. And you get pissed and start cracking wise about how it's only volleyball. Nobody likes a smartass. But the presumption that everybody gets rewarded with wealth, power, fame, honor, etc. make everybody into a smartass. Especially those who smug wankers who win, and those jealous haters who decide that they're too smart to take that winning seriously. Big prize money, the Dosh Point, it warps the moral space-time continuum, and when that happens, well then lazy people can travel faster than light, even though the speed of light is the law.

So you have to watch out for the power of the brass ring. Hmm. Tolkein. Let me contemplate tha parallels for a moment. OK, enough. 

 

 

Whose Life Is It Anyhow?

Kevorkian is dead. Jimmy crack corn. I don't care.

But I suppose I would a bit more if I thought that many lives depended on those things that Kevorkian did. In an indirect way, we're all better off because his ethics forced us to think about the nature of things. But directly speaking, I don't miss him. 

There is a lot of that kind of attenuated concern for the elderly, and I think it is natural and appropriate for us to consider the death of the aged as less than tragic. And let us also consider the dead. I mean the billions and billions of humans who are already dead. What do we really care about them? Not much. The last time I thought about the dead billions was when the nutcase said the end of the world was near and that the dead would be raised from their graves. Dead children haunt our dreams. Dead babies wreck our lives. Dead fetuses power political movements for decades. 

So there are a couple of problems, the way I look at it. One is hard edged, the other is squishy. The hard edge question is as it ever was: do human beings have the right to make life and death decisions. Since that one is hard, let it be easy. Yes. OK fine.

The squishy problem is navigating the moral gradient of society's valuation of life. IE it's definition of tragedy. Suicide is immoral to the extent that it is a tragic waste of human life. And so it is by degrees. A heroin addict, aside from their possible predations, is tragic because they are wasting their life away. It is only when we start aggregating the statistics of waste that we get involved in our civil religion and start passing statutes and propositions. We do it for the children. Don't we always?

So I am not so inclined to determine the particular merit of any ethos' stenuous arguments for or against suicide other than their basic consistency and force of conviction. But I do say that the question of the morality of suicide begs the question of who is a proper authority to choose the value of life.

 

The Atheists' Burial Ground

..from these honored dead we take increased devotion...

My new favorite TV show is River Monsters. Now that I have a new DVR that can hold 70 hours of HD, I might just get more episodes of everything. So I'm recording the marathon for this weekend. In the last episode I watched, I watched him listen to the tale of a busload of people drowned in a plunge into a river teeming with piranas. He winced in the company of the eyewitness. He doesn't appear to be the sort of fellow, who would merely do that for the camera. In fact, one of the things I like most about the host Jeremy Wade is that he's quite genuine. Not a guy for the cameras, or for the fakery. I admire his salt.

I'm considering ignoring most of the gnu atheists and their arguments but I can't help but jab every once in a while. I probably confuse atheists with humanists because essentially the loud ones keep explaining how much more savage religious people are. I percieve loud atheists to be the ones spitting on graves and mocking the hallows. So I wonder if any bother to draw logical lines. 

I Quantum of Solace, the latest James Bond movie, Bond's seeming best pal is an ex-agent named Mathis. When he is killed, and after Bond kills the killers, Bond unceremoniously shoves his body into a dumpster. Bond's horrified date makes a remark to which Bond replies, "He wouldn't care." And his real name wasn't Mathis. I imagine atheists wouldn't care where their carbon atoms go, but I wonder how disciplined that particular lack of care would be. 

Why not desecrate atheist bodies, or better yet bury them under a Star of David for spite? Why not leave them in the open air at the crossroads for the ravens to pick? How about dumping their body overboard in the dead of night and never producing any evidence of their death outside of a hasty press release? 

I don't know how long a buried body has a right to its peace. The law is subject to regionalisms, but it is an interesting part of the law which is probably largely unexamined in perhaps the same way marriage law was before the homoactive began their plotting. There is certainly ample low hanging fruit for the Dawkins' dorks to deconstruct. 

I'm having second thoughts about criticizing the amorality of legal positivism. For all the Godless, cultureless, and clueless need some edifice upon which to justify their grubby self-interests; it might as well have the imprimatur of law. Call whatever statutory mumbo that comes out of the political sausage machine jumbo and the peasantry will salute. It creates order and passes for civilization. 

The stupid little atheist whipping boy in my head is confused about honoring the dead because he belongs to the cult of youth and  school of libertarian hands-off good will toward men. There is nothing in his universe worth sacrificing a life for, except perhaps the 'reproductive freedom' of his zipless galaxy of doable chicks. But he should know that nobody will come to his funeral if it coincides with some frothy secular event, like turn off your cell phone for an hour to save the planet day and his friends miss the tweet. His mother, poor blighter, is Eleanor Rigby. 

Obligatory Seriousness on the End of the World

Three weeks ago I was in Hollywood taking my neice on the Typical Tour and we came across the standard variety of fruits and nuts one expects to find cadging dollars from tourists. There were break dancers, chanting Krishnas, people dressed as Iron Man, Spiderman, Darth Vader and Naruto, paint can drummers and some cultists going on about the end of the world. 

It turns out that the cultists had more followers than a few, and just now I have come to discover the name of Harold Camping. Perhaps that was the man who said on the Michael Medved show yesterday that all of the sinners were going to be raised from their graves and their bones left above ground - literally billions of dead. Cultists!

It's rather coincidental then, that I have been reading Charles Stross' Laundry series and becoming more familiar with Lovecraftian fiction. It's something I've always been aware of but never been attracted to. In the latest book, The Fuller Memorandum, a similar scenario was to take place. In fact, it is one of the standard premises of the series called Case Nightmare Green. As much as Gnu Atheists like to make fun of the religious, a great deal of sci fi is equally ridiculous and unprovable. But I say all good fictions serve a purpose. Think 'War of the Worlds'. What is that but a 'scientifically plausible' Rapture? The point of Rapture, or Nuclear Winter, or Global Warming is to test the morality of people now who need to be scared into action by reckoning with their own mortality and the inevitable death of their neighbors. The point is not *when* it will happen, but *that* it could happen, especially if we sit around and do nothing to stop it. It's always the same thing, all you need is the proper nightmare scenario. Never let a good crisis go to waste.

Now the Lovecraftian makes more sense to me - helping me to reckon with that which is completely absurd and obscure. That which, left untended, could cause men to lose their minds and personalities. Like the crazy gas that the enemy of Batman let loose in that movie, there are things out there that make people go bonkers, reducing them by way of sheer horror to inert husks of their former selves. Are there such gibbering horrors loose in our world? Yes, I believe there are. You might call it 'mental illness' or even traumatic stress disorder, or religious fundamentalism, or any number of labels. But there are poisons that infect and snap the mind. What would it take for you to consider it in your interest to dress up like Soulja Boy and dance for dollars on Hollywood Boulevard? Somebody is already there, and worse.

Worse is like the mind of Assad who is having his soldiers assassinate civilians in the streets of Syria, gunning them down like feral dogs. 

It is the end of somebody's world every day. And we don't have to look for reasons beyond the stars. What kind of madness compels us to find cosmic reasons in spite of the reality of today's tyranny? 

Social Justice Under God

Here's a very nice problem that goes to the heart of one of the issues I find compelling these days. By what right are moral approbations applied from a religious / doctrinal perspective binding upon secular authorities in a democratic state?

More than 75 professors at Catholic University and other prominent Catholic colleges have written a pointed letter to Mr. Boehner saying that the Republican-supported budget he shepherded through the House of Representatives will hurt the poor, elderly and vulnerable, and therefore he has failed to uphold basic Catholic moral teaching.

“Mr. Speaker, your voting record is at variance from one of the Church’s most ancient moral teachings,” the letter says. “From the apostles to the present, the Magisterium of the Church has insisted that those in power are morally obliged to preference the needs of the poor. Your record in support of legislation to address the desperate needs of the poor is among the worst in Congress. This fundamental concern should have great urgency for Catholic policy makers. Yet, even now, you work in opposition to it.”

It brings up interesting questions about from which principles humanism and liberalism are informed. 

Recently, I listened to a seminar from a scholar named Bernard Lewis. He argued that the clash of civilizations is inevitable because only the Christian and the Muslim faiths contend that their worldview is essentially universal. Other religions do not make such universal claims. So it is the idea of a universal standard of morals and behaviors that we ultimately speak of 'human rights'. 

See the contradition? If you want your values to be universal, then you have to have some authority and infrastructure in place to defend them. This is at the center of a great number of discussions here, and I will bring up the point going forward. I call it Modernism - the presumption of the equal and immutable value of the soul.

The Redemption of Michael Franti

I didnt' want to watch Michael Franti's show at the Jazz Fest. But I had friends in the audience with cold beer and a little patch of space. The reason I didn't want to see Franti's show is because I fell out of love with his music. Falling out of love with an artist can be one of two experiences. You're either disappointed with what they have become, or you become disappointed with what you used to be. For me it was a combination of both that made much of his stuff insufferable.

In particular, I refer to the tearjerking pathos of his album 'Home' or perhaps it was the other Chocolate Supa Highway? There's something about the border of folk music and politics that unnerves me. So I don't want to hear a song about the contemplation of suicide, or getting a letter about HIV in the mail, or any song that seems to require 'fuck the police' in the lyrics. It's not that I simply disagree with the politics but the juxtaposition with such agitprop inside dance music is unnerving. In other words, Franti makes art, not just entertainment, and I don't like mixing the two.

Franti is 1/3 of the way to redemption in my eyes, but not becuase I think any differently of him, but I think he has recognized that he has to have a party show, and today he had a party show which was a very long way from the music that made him famous. Today being the final day of the Jazz Fest in New Orleans, my first time. 

Franti is a frantic figure who knows how to rock the right crowd. But I almost hesitate to call him a performer. He is not so much a performer as he is a minister, and his performance is to create an effect in his audience. The effect was effective.

I dont' like crowds. At the same time, I think very highly of the idea of having mass rituals. So in my mind, which wasn't so far from alien observation mode, I am thinking about what happens when a man on stage directs a crowd. It's different from a DJ, but less different from a political speaker at a rally. The political content of the rally is what gives me pause, and I know that Franti is not merely in the music business to make people feel good but speaks of empowerment.

Franti uses a hiphop concert formula which is tried and true, which is to get the crowd to do the work when beats and lyrics from the stage are all unsurprising and the bars begin to drag on. You know the old critique - don't ask me to say 'ho' and raise my hands in the air and jump, if the music inspires, I'll do that on my own. Franti never stops asking.

The odd bit is that when he brought a violinist (or I should say fiddle player) onto the stage, he didn't have to ask twice. Here is the border between bluegrass and hiphop and the crowd absolutely loved it. I loved it. It had a kind of energy that is rarely heard anywhere outside of Phish (I think), and I hope to hear more of that.

Franti is redeemed by his willingness and ability to rock the crowd against no particular big ideas and messages. I can see that he gets that. Using his call and response and moshing it up in the crowd, he created an excellent atmosphere. And while I was marginally annoyed by the hugs and the passing of the herb I had to decline, I enjoyed exactly what he did produce on Sunday. It was the Holy Ghost part of church and the message was Big Easy. Celebrate life. Love. Peace. All good from the folk and party to the people.

So the question is whether such a man who can and does perform alter calls and gets people to send their babies and their grandparents up onto the stage to shake their stuff or rap into the mic or air guitar with real guitar props is content to party in that non-threatening bucket. I couldn't read it on his face that he was 100% in the party moment. There was too much structure and control in the whole offering. Franti is about 6 foot five and handsome, exuding a John the Baptist vibe and moving as widely around as any 45 year old could dream of, swapping out guitars for every song.

I saw another third of Franti on stage. The party man, not the political party man. And all of the music was designed to keep the good time party rolling. It gives me a reason to refresh my consideration of Franti and Spearhead. What's going on?

Paul Tillich

Pops and I had an interesting discussion today. He struggles with the idea of the omnipotent, everpresent and omniscient God because it means that God willed the great Japanese tsunami, which is a quite disturbing matter to him.

As I discussed this, I came explain my unoriginal idea of God as the substance of the universe, which made a great deal of sense of me when I first heard of and considered the Gospel of Thomas. Paul Tillich notably says:

He deprives me of my subjectivi­ty because he is all-powerf­ul and all-knowin­g. I revolt and make him into an object, but the revolt fails and becomes desperate. God appears as the invincible tyrant, the being in contrast with whom all other beings are without freedom and subjectivi­ty. He is equated with recent tyrants who with the help of terror try to transform everything into a mere object, a thing among things, a cog in a machine they control.

He becomes the model of everything against which Existentia­lism revolted. This is the God Nietzsche said had to be killed because nobody can tolerate being made into a mere object of absolute knowledge and absolute control.

This is the deepest root of atheism. It is an atheism which is justified as the reaction against theologica­l theism and its disturbing implicatio­ns.

It is interesting to consider that this might be the deepest root of atheism, since the problem of what Tillich calls 'theological theism' is so easily understood. And if this is all Nietzsche was killing, you'd wonder what was so great about the discovery. 

I Remain Lucifer Jones

Several years ago I figured that I might be in the place I am now approaching. And there was this name: Lucifer Jones. He was someone I had to be at some point. 

It was 2007 and I couldn't believe it. Like when I turned 23 it was a number that had no meaning and yet there it was, and there I was. Not old. Not a kid. Not a man with a man's job or a purpose in life. Just ambition and energy and frustration and there was this strange plateau of 23 and I knew not what exactly to be. 

There was a me out there somewhere and then I became him ten years later. And then I worked his ass and made him do it. And then I fell off and switched gears and recovered and gained an appreciation for the state of shabby equilibrium. I became middle aged. 

All the while I was growing a spirit of sorts but I found it running off the rails of my expectations of the instituted. Now I know that institutions are even more queasy than they ever appear. Men are fortunate to bide their time in tall buildings made of stone; it makes them appear as solid as the walls they lean upon. And they appear to be bouyed up by institutions, self-same in those edifices. But they are merely ants who have managed to chomp out their neighbors or dazzle them. A lot of things can be called work. The only real work is thought and discipline, for only those two generate wisdom. Wisdom cannot be inherited, only the protection of the wise and strong can be. They'll tell you it's not the building. 

And so it is not the Church. And it is not the Market. And it is not the State. And it is not the Community. It is only the man. And something tells me I am echoing Nietzsche. I don't know yet. But I will. 

I have been afraid to be Lucifer Jones. When I went that day unbidden, trudging through the snow to place myself before monsignor's forgiveness, I felt in every way compelled. But it took 2 minutes of humiliation for me to realize that I was in awe of the building, and the little man in his wooden box was lightyears away from Father Brown. And I kept asking and looking and listening and hearing nothing but my own answers to questions the men and women I asked had not yet asked themselves. And now I realize there may be more than I ever expected who have not. So I cannot afford to be afraid to be Lucifer Jones.

I'm fighting with atheists because they are arrogant. They pretend to know life without knowing God and consider their ignorance of theology to be a strength. What is theology but philosophy for the humble? What is God but Good? So I have to question you all. Not because I need answers, not because I need proof, but because I'm still interested in hearing, and I wonder if anyone at all has something worth listening to. I already know my own answers. So I must be Lucifer Jones so you can tell me yours.

There is no question in my mind that I am a vessel of spirit. But who can define that better that me?

 

God = Good

Understanding of this equivalence in my early childhood is what makes me what I am today which is a great admirer of Christian ethics an quite enough of an Episcopalian to pass, but not interested in being either evangelistic nor passive to atheists. 

So the question was asked can atheists and theists find something to agree on. It's actually very simple; they merely need to agree that God = Good. Now comes the question of ego, which is whether any atheist or devotee can assert with certainty that they know everything any human needs to know about Good God. The failures of atheism and faith come from misapplication which is a function of arrogance. It's something atheists ought to know considering the scientistic awe at the greatness of the Universe. 

I find it interesting considering this proposition of equivalence that with respect to arrogance and overproduction that two books come to mind. The first is that by Hitchens: God is Not Great. The second is the famous business book Good to Great. In the stretch between saying that God is Good to God is Great is perhaps that fudging of the supernatural that Spinoza weighed against. Does God have to be Great, or is Good enough? Why, in fact, does God have to be so incredibly transcendent? Is not the proposed greatness of God merely the whip across our backs to get our donkey attention? Perhaps so. The summation of Good is so far and away from us. It ought to be enough for eternal inspiration in our present. But somehow we are not satisfied with that. God must be great, man must strive to understand transcendental greatness. Great becomes unimaginable, which is just enough to twist all the rest of the rules.

I invert something in this passage I read this week.

One of the books I am currently re-reading is C.S. Lewis' THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS. For those that haven't read this classic, it is a collection of letters from a senior and experienced satanic demon, Screwtape, to a junior and struggling satanic demon, Wormwood, on how best to snare and keep ensnared the souls of men; how to hold them in thrall until such souls can be harvested into Hell for all eternity.

As I was escaping from the unremitting BS flow that oozes out of the government when it comes to BS budgets yesterday, I found myself reading this passage from Chapter XV of The Screwtape Letters:

We sometimes tempt a human (say a widow or a scholar) to live in the Past. But this is of limited value, for they have some real knowledge of the past and it has a determinate nature and, to that extent, resembles eternity. It is far better to make [humans] live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time—for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism, or Communism, which fix men's affections on the Future, on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

 

All afterlife is the Future. And while I don't quite understand the author's use of 'eternity', we can surely see how the overly pious wring their hands in anticipation of a Judgment by a Great God at some point in the Future. A bit of passive aggressiveness I think. 

A Good God, the summation of Good, the concept and the entity only need to be that. Our duty, whether deist or atheist is to approach that good, remembering Cobb's Rule #11: Perfect is the enemy of Good.

Joy To The World

I read somewhere that Christmas isn't mandated by the Church as a high holiday. It's truly not a solemn occasion. If you think about that which might be a co-opted pagan celebration, this one has probably been the one that most often does not use Christian symbols. Happy Birthday Jesus doesn't quite fit so much as Happy Birthday Baby Jesus. And so the word Joy best describes what this time of year is all about. Joy to the World. 

It's not actually even a message we Christians are likely to be known for. There's always an evangelical hook in there somewhere - or for me in my blend, a Jesuit mind trick. Proper Christianity challenges your mind and soul, but in late December the challenges are more about getting a parking space and all other sorts of preparation for joyous celebration. This year we got duck. 

Right now, everything is as perfect as it gets. All the family phone calls have been made and all the news is good. People are healthy and in good spirits. Them that had no jobs, now got jobs. Some travelling has been done and old faces have been seen, warm embraces had in defiance of winter and quiet talk over hot drinks have given us another chance to pause, smiling and look down at the table for that moment when we say to ourselves nodding, "that's really good".  The confessions are done as well. People like to come clean around this time of year. According to the guy on the radio, almost nobody breaks up on Christmas Day, but starting at Black Friday if your affair is in jeopardy, be prepared to handle the truth. The truth is that we know and we admit it finally, that human beings can be awesome, and sometimes we have to just let go of our fears and tell the honest truth. We play that game when the family is in a good mood and as parents we promise to forgive confessions of mischief - we call it BOL, for blurt out loud. Blurt. That's a good and giggly word. You just can't wait to talk about everything so that you can tell your good news, and feel good and prepare for the joy. 

There's a kind of inevitability about Christmas joy. This year it was a long time coming. As it turns out, I'm between jobs and have had lots of time to think about other things, a good seven week sabbatical it turns out. Christmas couldn't sneak up on me this time; it felt like it took forever to get here. I started singing carols in public last week, and although I didn't burn a CD for the car, I did have it on the home system. The first thing I did yesterday morning was I listened to several renditions of O Holy Night. Whitney Houston, Celtic Woman, Celine Dion, Susan Boyle, Charlotte Church, Mariah Carey, Carrie Underwood, NSync, Alicia Keyes, another Mariah Carey version. Right there in bed on my iPhone via YouTube. No matter how many times I listened to it, I still love the song. I still don't know all the words, but man when they get to the 'fall on your knees' part, it just melts me when they do it right. And yeah I have to say, Mariah does it best. You know the words are coming, and it still gets you in the gut. Advent. What a wonderful word. 

We're at that family age with three teenagers. They know what they want, we know what to get them. It's wonderful watching all the bubbly subterfuge as we raid the bag of ribbons and wrapping paper. Everybody snatchs the roll of scotch tape from my desk and scampers off to their rooms to wrap another gift. We color code the sticky bows, if it's red it's mine. It seemed to take almost no time at all to get the tree and decorate it and now it's surrounded. There have been sleepovers and videogame parties. We baked cookies and made many runs to the stores. 

.and that's all I'm writing this morning...

Merry Christmas, and may your thoughts be more coherent and complete than mine. Pass the eggnog.

Dissonance & Faith

Dissonance is a keyword in the story of my life. For me, it is the experience of living the truth of the false claim that blue is not blue. It is the experience of the epistemological nightmare, of hearing people tell you after you have explained something profound with precision that you have nothing to say and are at any rate incapable of saying it. 

I have, like you, wished that I could read people's minds and that they could read mine, because I hate dissonance. So writing has become an indispensable part of my life. I have, in my adult life, always considered myself a writer - a writer for people and for machines with the emphasis on people. In every opportunity to write software for machines, I have always discounted the value. Software that doesn't engage the end-user was never interesting to me. The machine was a logical substrate. It was never my desire to escape the complications of humanity. In fact, I never grew to learn enough of the mathematical universe to appreciate the ability to get a computer to think mathematically, nor enough about any scientific discipline to feel rewarded by shaping the computing tool. What I have learned instead are matters of finance and ethics. 

Roger Ebert writes about the experience of being mute and of being blind, and then conveys a letter sent to him by someone rendered mute by surgery. Both the blog entry and the letter are longish, but I understood them implicitly. In my ethical journey, the first intellectual country was characterized by the landscape of race. What I discovered early on was how the hunger of those wanting to understand and sympathize led them to jump to whatever seemed to lead them to a proper conclusion, to forge instantaneous brotherhood at the first hint of commonality. But this kind of sentiment was never sufficient to bear the burdens of reform implicated by the scope of anti-racist politics and action. Most everything became symbolic. The dissonant supply and demand of dialog on the matters of race in America sometimes ossified over time into the kind of hostility that could be called racism. That characterizes our epistemological nightmare well, because it isn't true racism but most people do not possess the words to make this clear. They only possess the sentiments appropriate towards the ethics of anti-racism. Smarter folks substitute culture for race and welcome culture wars often to the point of the political and the politics of difference underlies a great deal of what sparks frustration in American public life. This is all dissonance to me. It is dissonance until it is crime. 

I don't believe that man is a social animal in the way many do. I think that we are evolutionarily hardwired to be constrained in our affairs to Dunbar's Number. Everything else is maintained by hegemonic forces and, of course, ignorance & incuriosity. You have your number of Facebook friends, and that's about it. You either fit the profile of the person you always wanted to be or you suffer from the ignominious underachievement. You don't need to communicate to more people, and in fact you cannot. You can only be leveraged by the impersonal, which means you will be interpreted. The French have a verb for that. Connaitre. Connaitre is for people. Savoir is for things. Both verbs mean 'to know'. When you write a program and compile it, the computer knows what you are telling it - almost instantaneously. Savoir. You, on the other hand, will be interpreted. 

You will be interpreted.

Interpretation is imprecise, and there are for humans very distinct advantages to being interpreted. For in dissonance is the ability to play both sides of the coin. Human social identity should be worn, as James Baldwin wrote, loosely like the clothes of the desert. Give a little room for the mind to shape the body. Let some ambiguity in. We don't want to live in a bot-mediated world. We want to live in a world where we have permission and license to be what we want to be, to go where we like and to behave as we please. If we strive to achieve a precise goal and redefine ourselves in pursuit of that goal it is only to ultimately attain that freedom. At least, that's my philosophy. It is about the Dosh Point. 

Next year I'll be 50. I'm slimming down and realizing that I look more like I did at 35 then at 45. I've been a bit too chubby for a bit too long. Dr. Sakurai tells me, even after I shed 20 pounds this year, that I'm too fat. He's over 80 years old, so perhaps I should listen. Do you see all of these unambiguous numbers? Why do we try to express ourselves that way? 

Dissonance is a permanent factor, and I've been thinking about the epistemological problems of the age. It's a constant itch for me since I have continually evolved my thinking and so span political, geographical, religious, class and racial lines. I've gotten to the point at which I'm convinced that I have achieved a level of mature wisdom which is the result of years of writing and thinking. I've more than done my 10,000 hours on the blog, writing for people. Now I get people. I am people. People are me. Like Chaka Khan. No, actually deeper still without the flash, like the people who wrote it. Ashford & Simpson. 

Humans have faith, but they often forget their faith in themselves, in humanity. We need to interpret each other with faith in mind. Then the nightmare dissolves. 

 

Spinoza

I have been unable to sleep lately. For one thing I've been staying up late and waking up later and extending a cycle of madness. For another I just got rid of a bad tooth after a weekend of suffering. So in a bold attempt to get some sleep, I decided to put on the most boring podcast I could think of. I made a mistake and put on Will Durant.

Will Durant is one of those names from my childhood that used to arise whenever people asked who was the smartest man in the world. Aside from the typical answer of Einstein, people used to say it was Bertrand Russell who was such a super-genius that took a genius to appreciate him. It seemed that only Will Durant was smart enough to understand Russell, whereas once the bomb was built anybody could steal the blueprints. But I've already talked about information thermodynamics...

So I put on the podcast and this time, unlike the last time I had insomnia, I actually absorbed a bit of it. And so decided to play it during the daytime as well. So now I know what the big deal about Spinoza is, and I am happy to say that I have found in Spinoza's remarks, precisely some of the same troubles I've had with lesser forms of Christianity. 

I'll boil it down thusly. If you are like me, then you simply refuse to gamble that there is no possibility for the existence of God. To put it simply God's mind is the Universe. God's law is physics. God's name is Pi. Or maybe e. Or better yet, e to the power of pi.  People struggle mightily to understand the universe, and the lazy people think such knowledge will be Revealed, in the meantime industrious people are figuring it out. It's not wrong to have faith, but the real value of faith is not found in its ability to explain the working of the world. Spinoza recognizes as do I, the false dichotomy between the natural world and God's miracles and explains religious dogma as the dumbed down version of communicating the nature of things to lazy or otherwise non-brilliant people. If God created everything, why would he need to suspend the rules of nature in order to make himself known? 'He' doesn't and he wouldn't. It's just superstition maintained for the interventions of religion. Something lazy thinkers need to believe.

There are a great number of other quotations I have forgotten, but that one is a stunner I have long believed myself, without of course, the ability to put it concisely before my encounter with Spinoza. 

Thanksgiving Haps

Thanksgiving is one of those days that is very telling in that it's also the one holiday that nobody can do for you. I have found that you really can't wish people a happy Thanksgiving, they either have something to be thankful for, know it and are given comfort by that or they don't. Every Thanksgiving wish is therefore a dual-edged sword, because you can't really evade the fact that there is nothing else to do but look to your family and assess what life has brought you. 

Christmas has been externalized to fit every different shape. You can objectify it and get through it without having to deal with its deeper implications. If you're Jewish, you probably have a tradition of eating Chinese food. If you're an atheist, or a materialist you can do the unreformed or reformed Scrooge act according to your mood without bothering to think about Christ in the Spirit of Christmas(tm). If you're a harried parent, you can get caught up in the busy work of it while getting more or less satisfaction depending on your budget and mall traffic. New Years Day, you can get your kiss at midnight and party like it's 1999, or just watch the ball drop eating cheetos in a bean bag chair in your underwear. It gets easier now that Dick Clark has finally become the ghoul he has avoided appearing in the prior century. On the Fourth of July, you don't have to call it Independence Day. On Memorial Day and Veteran's Day you're not expected to *do* anything but take the day off. They've changed President's Day and MLK to fit the schedules of ski venues, and the white sales of JC Penney. But while Black Friday gets more and more like Wall Street's triple witching hour, Thanksgiving still has that unavoidable weight and presence. You *have* to think about giving thanks and family. There's not much else you can do except be with your intimates and deal with the your measure of gratitude.

Dennis Prager and I share a definition of happiness in that we recognize that it cannot be faked. Happiness is the end result of accomplishment. It is in a three legged stool with gratitude and goodness. You cannot be happy if you are not grateful. You cannot be happy if you are not good. These are two qualities that I cannot wish for you or grant you. They are things you must accomplish for yourself. So in that way, I cannot really wish you a happy Thanksgiving, if you are not grateful and good, then you won't have happiness on this or any other day. While you might be able to fake some cheer on the other holidays, and there is something to be said for having that positive attitude because at least you are spreading cheer, Thanksgiving makes you think seriously about what you have to be happy about. 

All that sounds like an elaborate excuse for me to be stingy with my holiday greetings, and to be honest, that's how I started off. I mean I just wrote about North Korea and Neil Farage, two rather in your face bad news subjects. So I said, well so many people are wishing me a Happy Thanksgiving, oh crap I better write something. But what am I doing, and why is my Thanksgiving going to be happy no matter what people say? Aha. Happiness. 

There are not happiness chicklets dropping from heaven in my happy Thanksgiving so much as there are happenings in my life that are more or less under control that are contributing to my sense of accomplishment. Some fraction of those efforts are bearing fruit and I am grateful for that. So I will be happy, and now is the time to recognize. Every day should be the time, but today is the day to speak up and share that recognition and that means recognizing how the people around you have contributed to that sense of achievement and real accomplishment. Our better selves know this and live in the moment, recognizing real accomplishments as they happen, championing them along their curve to success and anticipating that success by spreading cheer before the fact. 

So the haps are good. I'm learning again. I'm enjoying good health, although I really need to check a few things. I'm finding ways to stay home and stay here as my kids finish high school - the most important matter of all. I'm finding satisfaction in simple things.

I'm grateful for the attention I get here and for the opportunity to share. I'm grateful that my car didn't break before I paid it off (fingers crossed, one more payment on the Transporter). I'm grateful for the backup on my files, and that I have a record of my children's early lives. I'm grateful for the good things people see in me - that I've been able to turn my obsessions into knowledge and work and that work has helped others accomplish what they desire to. I'm grateful for all of my baseball caps sitting over in that box. I'm grateful that I can afford my electric bill and that nobody has come over to my house to steal the things that use all those kilowatts. I'm grateful that my children are mine, that I possess them and that they possess me. I'm grateful for my wife, for that woman who was patient with me and that we made it work 22 years now. I'm grateful for the teachers who work hard to discipline this community's children. I'm grateful for the gifts of the intellectually generous, and for the spirit of people whose faith in humanity encourages us all. I'm grateful for my cultural inheritance - that I have music to hum to over a dinner whose ingredients we all know, speak it in a word. 

I know in every way how I have worked to make all of those things work - that I have no right to it, but that I made efforts that might not be fruitful to attract those virtuous blessings towards me and mine. It's all a part of something we all control and I know that. We do for us. We've done pretty well. So I believe we all have something accomplished. So I just ask you to look at what your work has done. 

 

 

I'm going to say something else here that I have come to understand, I think. It would be easy, and I almost did it on reflex to say 'All things work together for good for those who love the Lord'. That trips off the tongue a bit too easily. My Christian education helps me understand a great deal, but I also know that I cannot impart that education on others. If I could only speak English then I would never speak anything else. If I could only understand Christian ethics then I would speak only in that dialect. But I am beginning to know things beyond that and with any luck will be able to communicate beyond that argot. So I call attention to the spirit of God in every man even to men who do not see it as God's grace or doing. In doing so I am aiming to be consistent to the ends of faith and reason and the laws of the universe, all as one, all that is seen and unseen.  All ends of proper faith and proper reason are the same. 

And that's what's happening today. I wish you the peace you require.

Idiocracy

Mike Judge's movie is still hilarious, bleeped out as it has been for Comedy Central. With any luck, the uncut version should become a cult classic. But here's the even odder thing. I taped a version of it as it aired this past Sunday on broadcast TV which means that I had to fast-forward through the commercials. The ever-increasing irony of the idiocy of the commercials I had to scroll through was not lost on me.

 

We have been discussing the matter of the smartness and dumbness of abortion and family planning a little bit over here at Cobb, and I do connect that very directly in the same way Judge does. Yuppies such as those portrayed in the film are indeed too dainty. Of course Idiocracies are not so benign as the one in this movie. What inevitably happens when dumb people take control of failing institutions and bend them to their numbnut notions is that people too smart to fall for the idiocy game the system and build up alternate hierarchies.  

There is a slight allusion to that in the film when Rita speculates about how disgusted Einstein might have been with humanity in his day. "Maybe that's why he built the bomb." No matter how dumb people might be with regard to how to institutionalize, there will always be clever rulers. People don't forget how to flee, fight, lie and love. The machines may all break but the desires of the soul will remain and human agency will find a way.

There's no religion in Idiocracy. It makes presumptions against the human soul - that nobody will break out of the monotony and cry out to God for freedom. It presumes that corporations will remain clever enough to stupefy all of the masses and destroy history. But there is too much wisdom in faith. The human soul is too demanding and the faithful will ask questions that the stupefied would not dare, because to believe in God is to believe in the perfectibility of the soul. To believe in the soul is to have faith in revelation, and to maintain faith is to reckon with what God gives and what man must do to be worthy of God's gifts. You cannot keep faith in ignorance, and you cannot keep souls enslaved. It is, in the end, human nature to seek God's truth - and in that endless journey of faith, the continuing trial and error, understanding must finally flower. All it takes is one prophesy to come true, one element of conventional wisdom to be overturned, one small miracle to occur, and then faith is reborn. That is human nature.

Faith is misplaced a thousand ways - but we cannot deny what we are. 

Who Would Call It Genocide?

If Spence were over here on a regular basis, I'd have to ask him what he knows about research done on family formation. I imagine that's what the academics would call it - but Freakonomically - how do people hook up? What is the mating ritual? What are the expectations of sex and consequences? 

I've had a feudal streak running through my attitudes for several years for a number of reasons. One of them is that I expect to learn from the narratives of kings and royalty. It's a constant through a great deal of recorded human history, and unlike the more modern Materialism, it puts more onus on the head of the monarch. Shakespeare's tragedies are great because of what happens to individuals, not what happens to societies. They are thus instructive to individuals. My interpretation of my American heritage is that I get to be an individual, a king perhaps. So I treat my family as royalty and retain a code of honor for it as well as seek to establish relations and politics through it as a king would. I would sooner marry off a daughter to a more powerful king than have her obtain a scholarship from the government, if you can catch that drift. 

So my obtuse curiosity today goes into this controversial direction which evoke questions of chastity belts and betrothals in the context of modern arrangements which might fall under the heading of 'black culture'. My reaction is that there's a population out there that does not, but desperately needs to think of itself in royal terms, and the large number of them that are failing are piling up the abortion statistic.  Now let me come at it from the positive angle.

Yesterday as I left the house Marvin Gaye's "Got to Give It Up" in my head. I imagined in my bio-pic that there must be a scene of me learning to master the Cha-Cha to this song. The Cha-Cha is, was and will always be to my generation of black Americans a bourgie signifier of momentous import. When I think about my close friends from high school, it was something we all pretty much shared in common. We were generally from the black upper classes and when we went to party, we showed up to do this sophisticated dance to those songs for which it was appropriate. A Soul Train line was not out of the question, but it tended to be more vulgar. Straight out Pop-Locking and doing the Robot was declasse. Cool, but too much enthusiasm for such ostentation was frowned upon. Besides, it was for show-offs and the ladies didn't particularly like to get 'turned out' on the dance floor. I could unpack all of this inside baseball terminology at some later date. The point is that the Cha-Cha, not to be confused with today's vulger Cha-Cha Slide, the black equivalent of Country line dancing and heir to the disco era Hustle, was the dance for ladies and gentlemen of suave black sophistication. 

Whiteboys don't dance.

I'm not going to pretend that I'm a great sociologist here, which is why I would need somebody like Spence to fill in the blanks of what I understand implicitly about the difference between socialization rituals. The tangents of those rituals, vis a vis, what is called 'dating' and what the expectations are for meeting families, pre-marital and other sexual rules all add up to something. And while I'm not obsessed with what people do, Cobb's Rule #2 is There is Marriage and there is everything else and everything else doesn't count. I'm coming from a social context in which fidelity, chastity and modesty are prized. I'm not saying all those dudes in the big afros and polyester bellbottoms getting funky on that Soul Train line are all pimps, but I wouldn't be far off in suggesting that there's a popular pimp thread in some of today's black American music. It's correlated. And the countercultural revolution is correlated. And the sexual revolution is correlated. And all of these peasant rebellions from the chivalrous codes of the Old School are feeding those abortions. As I said, my parents and my aunts and uncles were not born in hospitals. They were born at home by midwives and relatives. That entire culture is lost - dead, gone, in one generation. Black Americans didn't used to go to hospitals for that industry now called Ob-Gyn. Now there are evident unborn millions that go in but don't come out.

In 1976 we had dancing as teens. We had not only the Cha-Cha, but slow dancing - a way to exercise some intimacy in public, to get that sliver of sexual satisfaction which is about all a modest teen can handle out there in the cultural center of gravity called the dance floor. A vertical grind was about as far as you could push the social envelope, and that was good. Kids today get blowjobs in bathrooms and can legally get all sorts of sexual swag without parental consent. Not that it didn't happen then, but it's a far, far more permissive and sexually explicit society now than it was back then. And so I wondered yesterday, listening to Marvin Gaye, wouldn't it be better if kids today could slow dance in confidence. 

There is, hidden in that simple statistic, no clue as to whether that abortion figure is going up or down. It's all too aggregated for nuance. But maybe that's the stark way we ought to look at this problem. It's not all vague and iffy like global warming. It's not subject to legal and economic chicanery like collateralized debt obligations and deficit spending. It's something families can, should and do control. 

As part of the Old School, one of the things I have learned is the limited extent of my ambit. The dangerous ambitions of the Talented Tenth and their race raising aims resulted in any number of foolish ideas being taken for granted, one being that the upper middle class could make the poor into the middle class. Another is the kind of behavioral attitude I myself employ in essays such as this when I'm not expert at all. But I've been conditioned to care and to think my small efforts can contribute to a greater understanding which leveraged by political unity can result in Progressive policy. I know better than to expect truly progressive results from such a process, but the habit dies hard, and the caring has not been sublimed. The bare fact remains out there. There are 13 millions more who might have made a proper difference. How have we gotten so pathologically Malthusian?

The Naked Lady

I broke a promise inadvertently and then somewhat purposefully. I watched an HBO show. This one stars Steve Buscemi and is full of topless women, sadistic cops and sleazy situations. One scene stands out in my mind this morning.

Jean Jacques Rousseau is a foil for my conservatism, as he stands for the more ugly end of revolution, that which is arbitrarily against human institutions in and of themselves. The romance of Rousseau is about the natural beauty of the unadorned human spirit. This morning over at First Things, RR Reno writes of Rousseau:

Here, I think, we approach deepest appeal of the bohemian mystique. Because Rousseau shamelessly reveals his sometimes “vile and despicable” actions, he shows himself to be just that: shame-less, a person free from psychological bondage to the oppressive and corrupting judgments of others. This tell-all freedom functions as a peculiarly modern form of innocence. 

Or at least it functions as a gambit to gain the moral authority of innocence, which involves invulnerability to judgment—and to do so without having to be innocent. If I write a memoir that recounts my romances with transgression in the spirit of proud announcement rather than regret, I’m demonstrating my psychological independence from social norms. I’m outwitting the judgments of others by defiantly announcing my own failures.

There was a scene in the episode of the HBO show that I was watching in which a gangster's moll is trying out new clothes. She stands naked in the mirror as an immigrant woman, newly hired, attends her. This was one of many scenes in which the characters linger overlong in what generally passes quickly in your standard vulgar entertainment. It suddenly appeared to me that the length of the scenes are an invitation for the audience to become that person for that moment which doesn't exist for any other purpose than to embody the basic titillation. 

What you can see in this still I was able to capture is the haughty attitude the woman has towards her servant. What can only be seen by watching the episode is the scene in which the moll holds her hands above her head fully naked as the servant stoops at her feet and pulls up a camisole, head bent down in shame at the crotch level of an utterly shameless woman. 

Nudity means one thing in private with oneself, another in private with a loved one. But what about nudity in front of an one considered inferior? It is a striking moment of powerful filmmaking to stage such a scene and to evoke the absolute power of one over another. It is a moment of contempt that the audience is invited to savor and one of those commodifying images of women that I find so subversive of our dignity. It is the reason I shield myself from HBO as they move their dramatic series from corruption to corruption according to their tried and true formula - the challenged kingpin surrounded by crime and perversion. This time, Atlantic City during Prohibition. 

The characters of the HBO dramatic series are all shameless and innocent by our standards. We in the audience are to understand that they live in a distant and dangerous world in which survival depends on doing dirt. There are no options for their dignity. And so we can manage to ingest all of the 'adult' situations for which their TV-MA ratings are well deserved.  All the main characters suffer little from the misery of their predicaments except for the protagonist, who must be ruthless and sensitive at once. It is by drawing attention to the existential suffering of the protagonist that these shows manage to keep the attention in the more lurid offerings. For example, there is not only the haughty nude, but there is a brutal interrogation, a gruesome surgical procedure and a scene showing the results of a lynching. 

How this has become an entertainment may or may not speak to a problem afflicting America in general. America is not necessarily in tune with HBO. But I think it's a fair assessment of the attraction to the bohemian - the romance to be had with those who are quick to flaunt social convention, and more particularly the emotion of shame. This is the creation of Hollywood that wins awards year after year, and speaks loudly about the tastes of its critical profession. 

It is my hope that this thread of shamelessness will be one of the many that may seem too big to fail at the moment but will eventually collapse. Yet we have seemingly done a good job in preparing a generation to consume that which now commonly goes by the acronym NSFW - not safe for work. There is no irony in that acronym, celebration of the bohemian is antithetical to productive work. When our need to work, which must be invested with meaning and dignity is sufficient, then we will avoid such corruptions, and with any luck we'll see back to Rousseau and find little to admire in the implications of his dirty romance.

All Prayer Is Public

All prayer is public prayer except that portion which we cannot prove exists.

It has taken me many years to humble my critical impulses and lower my head in sympathy with those engaged in public prayer. For about as long as I can remember, I refused to and would affix my eyes directly on the person praying as if they were revealing to me personally their most intimate and sincere thoughts. And so I have come to be something of a silent critic of prayer recognizing much in the ways and means people have when I have been present.

The most annoying thing about all public prayer is, of course, the demand by those attuned to the individual praying, that all other activity cease and that all focus and reverence be given to that individual - bolstered by the presumption that anyone not rapt is blasphemous. I tended to try and catch such roving eyes with my own - policing the head-bowing police as it were. I would match my righteousness against theirs anyday.

I must admit that I have never been the sort of Christian who spent much time or emotional investment in the power of prayer. The laying on of hands was always part and parcel of my early churchgoing and my skepticism was thorough. You would think that some of those bulldog faced church marms might bother to lay their own hands on their own ample chins and hips on occasion, but seemed month after month to remain unhealed.

In the end I find the epiphenomenon of prayer to be more socially significant than prayer itself. You might not get what you want from God, but Heaven help the bastards who spoil the moment of silence.

So it comes as no surprise that this is exactly what I have come to expect from those interminable discussions about the value of praying for the cancer-stricken Christopher Hitchens. It's all about the shushing noises associated with it, and whatever controversy can be ginned up by invoking the meaning and validity of prayer itself. It seems to me that if one honestly believed in prayer, then one would pray and leave it at that.

I myself have mentioned at least once, that from time to time, I will send a lightning burst of prayer to The Man Upstairs in a reverent blink of the eyes. He can of course, and without the necessity of employing encryption software, instantly verify my identity, spell and grammar check the content, and determine the true intent of what I am trying to communicate as well as why I bothered in the first place. All of the signifying I do with my hands and my head are not for the benefit of God but for the heathens and chalkline walkers around me.

But this is not prayer proper. Proper prayer invokes the spirit of Matthew 18:20. It means gripping hands in a circle and putting somebody on the spot to publicly assess and account for the emotional center of the group, and thereby dedicate whatever must come towards the greater glory and honor of His name. Prayer of this sort is instantly making church.

So I think those who have raised the question of prayer over the withering body of Christopher Hitchens are trying to erect a church and a congregation around him, one which some might hope he will soon lack the power to escape of his own volition. It is a cruel trick aimed at a man who is for the moment quite well enough to evade, and gracious enough to accept. How loud will such meta-prayer become before the righteous among us should start shushing back?

I approach this from a somewhat rude and flip angle, not because I don't respect giving thanks to God for the blessings of life or in meditative prayer. I respect proper church-making prayer as well, and am honored to take that role. People who know me, know that I know God has a sense of humor and that I invoke that in my prayerful contexts as well. But it is my character to ask rude questions of those who tend to believe they are unimpeachable. And I sense much of that arrogance in those who wish to incant their syllables in a backhanded fashion. The temptation towards triumphalism is great in those convinced that Hitchens and the rest of us are bound to meet God's judgment on terms not of our own choosing. And inherent in that prayer are such nags as we are all familiar. "Be with Christopher, O God, and strengthen him through your mercy as only you can, not these crackpot doctors. Show him who's boss, O God. Let him be as the theif at Jesus side and steal Heaven before it's too late."

There must certainly be a righteous and proper way to pray for Christopher Hitchen, as unfaithful to the meaning of his Christian name as he is. But that is not for our ears, is it?  So who are we to say exactly if and how such a prayer must go?

Death and Dishonor

"If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current money, his treasure will not defray him as he travels."
-- John Donne 

I'm still riffing off the idea of Hitchens that some civilized people must remain to civilize religions, or at the very least police them. I am not convinced, as Hitchens is, that this is a permanent matter. I observe that we simply have a poor set of self-selected clergy on the whole, and that the organization of organized religion is not quite as our regimes of say bond trading. Hitchens' Boesky is the Pope, and so it goes. 

If you ask me why I don't like Islam, it is because I don't think it scales. What is truly admirable about Islam is that it appears to me to be the kind of religion I would invent were I to live on a desert island with 1000 others. And apparently this is a sentiment shared around the globe, because Islam does a fairly fantastic job of working in tribal areas like Afghanistan. And in such tribal areas seeking to add a bit of supernatural gloss to their authority and mores, Islam accommodates such pre-civil taboos such as tyranny over women. Without much getting into it, tyranny over women is appropriate in desert island situations so long as they are the sort of women who can't do pull-ups, kill snakes or stand still when spiders crawl over their bare feet. To the extent that women don't feel compelled to manage such tasks, it falls to men, and in reciprocity men will define power in such brutally ignorant terms. That's the basic exchange when it comes to the basics, and such arrangements work in small clans and tribal situations. But I think Islam doesn't scale, and thrives best in such enclaves. But then again, so does any faith, fable, superstition, or wives tale. And for the counter-exemplary women who flip the snake over the bar, snap it in two after 10 pull ups, then squeeze the blood out of it's dead head to drown the spider on her big toe, well they tend to be one in 10,000. And in many places around the world, they get stoned.

If you read Robert Fisk's latest piece in the Independent, you will come to understand how gruesome stoning is. All the heinous details are there. 20,000 women per year are murdered for preposterous reasons around the world. 

This is the evil that men do. My point is not to suggest anyone indulge in any sort of outrage, but to toll the sad bell that reminds us that although life is precious, there are a million convolutions of logic inspiring men to forget that. And if there is anything to the universality of the defense of liberty and human rights, then there are a few good ideas that counter all those convolutions. At our best, we will fight with that in mind. 

Here in America we do have our liberty, and we also have our million convolutions and corruptions of moral logic over our million channels over the air and through the broadband. Each tiny corruption is a small piece of evil doing its work chopping away not only our virtue but our ability see the virtue of justice in action. We can watch horror movies and then just go home and watch romantic comedies to soothe them away. Americans watch the true crimes of these killings and those of every other preposterous rationale around the world as if they were nothing more than lessons and fables. We can excuse ourselves from the action of justice as if we were grossed-out teenagers at the slasher flick. Eww. Let's get outta here. So the skill of intervention atrophies. Justice is considered but not clear and present. 

I sometimes have difficulty explaining my friends why America is exceptional. It is a combination of complex interweaving threads that makes for that fabric. It's not just "we are a Christian Country". It's not just "we revere the Founder's and Original Intent". It's not just that we are a Global Policeman. It's the emergent force we can be and it is the reason men like Robert Fisk write to us in our language, alerting us to what happens out there. America is expected to do something, to act, to bring justice. Because we can. Because we must. America is a civilization, and here, like no other place, we civilize ethnics and languages and religions into a highly robust plurality. We have secured the blessings of liberty.

Our domestic liberty is our wedge of gold, and as we withdraw our forces from the world, we hoard it without coining into the money of moral intervention. The world dies without justice, in small bloody pieces. So are we in a Long War Against Terror or not?

Hitchens Outs Rauf

Once again Hitchens has swung a left hook which has landed neatly on the jaw of the surrender-monkeys. Tolerance. Hmm. Is that something only Americans are supposed to show? Is there a double or triple standard in the offing? It seems that way.

It's probably not fair for me to follow Hitchens on this argument. He's got a much higher standard for religious orthodoxy than I do, which is why he rejects it altogether. Very little of it stands to his reason. In one way, that's the best way to make sense of all religious claims, fortunately Imam Rauf is hoisted on his own petard. Without regard to whether religious tolerance is a two way street, Hitchens shows that whether you tolerate him or not, Rauf is a fundamentalist. Hitchens quotes Rauf's advice to Obama.

He should say his administration respects many of the guiding principles of the 1979 revolution—to establish a government that expresses the will of the people; a just government, based on the idea of Vilayet-i-faquih, that establishes the rule of law.

Coyly untranslated here (perhaps for "outreach" purposes), Vilayet-i-faquih is the special term promulgated by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to describe the idea that all of Iranian society is under the permanent stewardship (sometimes rendered as guardianship) of the mullahs. Under this dispensation, "the will of the people" is a meaningless expression, because "the people" are the wards and children of the clergy. It is the justification for a clerical supreme leader, whose rule is impervious to elections and who can pick and choose the candidates and, if it comes to that, the results. It is extremely controversial within Shiite Islam. (Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq, for example, does not endorse it.) As for those numerous Iranians who are not Shiites, it reminds them yet again that they are not considered to be real citizens of the Islamic Republic.

I do not find myself reassured by the fact that Imam Rauf publicly endorses the most extreme and repressive version of Muslim theocracy. The letterhead of the statement, incidentally, describes him as the Cordoba Initiative's "Founder and Visionary." Why does that not delight me, either?

So where it counts as far as I'm concerned, Rauf is an Islamist. An Islamist with the unmigitgated gall to suggest Obama should be one as well. End of debate.

A Deep Contradiction

I haven't read any of Spinoza. He has been a vague blot in my periphery until a moment ago when Hitchens caused him to move into a closer orbit by dint of his mentioning that he was excommunicated from the Jewish faith. According to Wiki, there may have been some collusion in the Roman Catholic Church to hasten that eventuality. Either way, his works were prohibited by the One True Church.

In trying to understand where theology might go, and central to the epistemological modesty of my conservatism, I have long maintained two arguments that now suddenly appear to me to be in conflict. They are the one matter which is that man's nature is fixed although his orientation to the world and his understanding of himself in the world may vary greatly. The second is that the Church, and Christianity is unique in that it updates itself to make adjustments it must in its imperfections and understanding of the world.

If it is therefore the case that Christianity gets better and mankind stays the same, then it brings into question whether or not any version of Christianity serves man's eternal soul. For if the soul is eternal and fixed, in the image of the Creator, then any Church with claims on that soul must have the method, and that method too would be fixed. (Perhaps that's what the Methodists are on about.) 

It might be argued that the Church possesses a superset of the method of it's aim with any human soul and its improvements are mere enticements to a changing population. There is thus that question of what it is the essential and minimum function of the Church. That would be what we should attend, with the understanding that the rest is all just evangelism. 

60/40? 80/20?

Some Basic Questions on Cultural Evolution

If human desire is unlimited, then only the physical limits of life itself restrain us from the desire for all.

How could we possibly know enough to want enough, and how could we learn enough to want what is good? We can only follow as far as we discover through pain and pleasure, advantage and disadvantage and that which we take as true based on some induction of faith or reason.

What we have is culture and learning. We can apply these to ourselves, our bodies and minds and senses being relatively fixed entities that navigate us through some fraction of the infinite paths through culture. What evolves through culture is the told experience of the many past wanderers - the lessons and narratives that stick. The plumber learns from the plumbers before him. The poet from prior poets. And each can build upon what culture brings and perhaps better their antecedents. 

What a slow process. And how it must disperse more slowly through the world as languages grow as populations swell as distances increase between us and through cycles of literacy and ignorance. In the end of cultural evolution what will we know? I figure we will know our limits. And we will understand the best ways and means to achieve those things that give us pain or pleasure, advantage or disadvantage in advance of having experienced it for ourselves and learned through experience.

Cultures must evolve locally. For us to have a global culture will take centuries. For there would have to evolve a process by which the pauper can experience as does the prince.

Five Things To Be

Once upon a time, between the time I was 26 and the time I was 32, I had reduced my life to four essentials. If I could get my hands on it in appreciable quantities with good quality I was going to be happy. It was a necessary simplification of my life to serve personal ends, having been a bit over altruistic at my own expense.  Those four things shouldn't surprise anyone: {Sex, Money, Music, Computers}. It turned out that I was successful in relatively short order, which gave me the satisfaction that not achieving Unity had denied me.

There were three types of unity I was trying to aid in accomplishing in those disheartening days. The first was Black Unity. That's an old story I shouldn't belabor. It was a kind of resignation I gave on my own but those attached to me wouldn't accept. Which brings to mind a particular day in the Cal State Student Union where I tried to quit one of my offices graciously only to hear from my peers that anything was better than nothing. Perhaps that was a pivotal day whose lesson I have finally learned. 

The second sort of unity I was trying to accomplish was from Mishima, the Unity of Pen and Sword. It was my way of coming to accept America on more Rightist terms than ever, but culminated in a feeling of deep betrayal over Iran-Contra. So I think it must be said in retrospect that there has probably long been a desire in me to be the Conservative that I believe myself to be today, but a failure to grasp the principles and only judge Conservatism by the actions of its self-professed adherents had stretched that road to long and bumpy proportions.

The third sort of unity I sought has been achieved for me in the ascendancy of the social status of those of us in the IT business. I have suffered as a geek since the age of 14 when I first touched and fell in love with the logic of computer programming, a logic I have failed to see in my fellow men who castigate me and my binary life into a social zero. The bit has flipped. Now I make good, if not orthodontist money. And everybody agrees that us cargo pants wearing, command line jockeys with the Bruce Willis Surrogates style goatee are way cooler than orthodontists. Unity achieved.

All of those unities required me to be outwardly focused, to negotiate social paths and find ways for them to influence me and me to influence them. Without them, I felt that the world would not and could not understand a man like me. But in 1987, I turned my back on those social things and focused on ME. I had to get my four things, and so that was all I cared about, a brilliant luxury afforded a member of an emergent middle class. 

Atop Maslow's Pyramid at last I began at some point to consider which nation of which millions were holding others back. It was difficult for me to understand what germ had poisoned the minds of any dozen cuties in New York and Boston that made them so hesitant around one as unleashed as myself. I was beyond the yoke of ghettos sentiments and detriments but found myself as Eli walking in the badlands, looking for marriage among women with baggage. But even beyond that personal desire was a yearning to understand why. One clue was offered by Marshall Blonsky whose deep understanding has still not been adequately communicated to this day. Americans were buying signs of success and signifying to each other like monkeys without any deeper comprehension of the kind of great apes they should actually be. And so at the age of 31 or so, I recognized we all needed philosophy more than we knew.

--

Yesterday afternoon I came home after a brutal week's work in which expectations went awry and I had to report my project status moving from green to yellow. But by 4:30 on Friday all things seemed to be nailed back onto the table. So I arrived at the my front door with a smile beyond the coming inspiration of Papa John's Pizza for dinner. Five things to be popped into my head along the lines of the Epicurean Edge. Along with their polar opposites they were:

• Happy v Unhappy
• Healthy v Sick
• Rich v Poor
• Beautiful v Ugly
• Wise v Foolish

And then my mind immediately started partial combinatorial gymnastics developing an ontology of types. What if you are Happy, Foolish and Ugly?  What if you are Rich, Wise and Unhappy? What if you are Sick, Poor and Happy? It's difficult to resist creating a Myers-Briggs just for these formulations, especially since it's obvious that the second combination is Dick Cheney.

But overnight I realized with some regret that these seem to lack something akin to the concept of virtue. They are things to achieve, perhaps only surface attributes of something deeper. They are things to be, rather than things to do, and it must always be about what you *do* rather than how you appear to be. So now it seems foolish in retrospect that I joked about that list with my kids while ordering the pizza. Still, as I went online and gave the pizza guy my credit card numbers which rejected twice, ironically as Bank of America was calling me on the other line, I began to panic. After all, the house note is due. Where's my money? I just used another card and discovered that I had actually just gotten my second quarter bonus (Yay Unity Three!). I walked downstairs after paying a few bills online much more happy than I had trudging up. But the virtue question was unresolved.

--

Somewhere in the middle of that period of my young adulthood I ambled across the work of Stephen L. Carter. I have two of his virtue books, Integrity and Civility. As well, I read The Emperor of Ocean Park and his Confessions of an Affirmative Action Baby. The last book, I waited entirely too long to read and I think now with a bit of regret how I might be different if I had begun to love Carter before I began to love Cornel West. West whose provocations of the prophetic drew out that road to conservatism even longer with his socialist diversions tied to religious faith. Social Justice, another unity. I could have just dealt with making me a better me - beyond my being unleashed. 

Achieving those Unities is a shared responsibility. It's difficult for me to say how much we should share or if it is reasonable to expect to achieve them. I am much more certain about the value of personal virtue. I know it is a paradox. On the one hand you cannot know what the emergent whole of a million people doing is going to be. On the other hand you cannot really know or be a self without the context of the society. But you can know what you desire, what completes you on an an individual level, and you can know what you will or will not do to achieve that. And at any moment you can know how you feel about all that. So it makes the most sense, practically speaking, to measure yourself well and know how you will deal with whatever society might be. You cannot direct and create the Unity. Best comport yourself to your best self. You'll feel the friction or lubrication of society no matter what.

--

After pizza, we watched a couple movies as the girls took Sprite's braids out. The last was Surrogates.

Ever since 'Moonlighting' I've thought Bruce Willis is my actor. Finally I've seen him play a hero less prone to action than normal in a film that should have been a touch better than it is, but was good nonetheless.

That was all the thinking I've captured on a film that illustrates a great deal about how people lose faith in themselves and put it on their surface characteristics - how people are not whom they appear to be.

We all have to be something, and we have to do a lot in personal and social contexts to meet with our own personal destinies. Today I am decidedly for looking after number one, in the best way possible. To examine one's life thoroughly and come up with a consistency and honor one can live a long life with. To put it up for inspection and to share truths about life with others. I don't have a simple list of five things to be, but that's a start. Somewhere between the poles are where we are and I think its our virtues that drive us one way or another.

Just thought I'd share that.

Christian Soldiers

What I didn't know Friday, I know now. Watch out, it's going to blow your mind. The Salvation Army is a church. 

That's right, it is a Christian denomination. They have worship services and churches and the whole nine yards. Except that the Salvation Army does such a good job of Christian Fellowship that people don't know. Think of everything you know about the Salvation Army. Is it positive? 

A Small Article of Faith

And I quote:

The word “spiritual” has no useful meaning if it does not refer to a relation to a real spirit, something from a world not our own, something supernatural, something that or someone who tells us things we do not know, judges us for our failures, and gives us ideals to strive for and maybe help in reaching them. It’s not a useful word if it means a general inclination or shape of mind or emotional pattern or set of attitudes or collection of values. There is no reason to call any of these spiritual.

The author has a point but I'm disputing it, because to fall for that point is to fall directly into the trap logicians and Hitchens would have for us. That is that the moment you cite something un-empirical, you assert a falsity that can justify anything. 

What we have is a national mood not to discriminate and it is discrimination that we are afraid of. You see, we are unable to achieve a national consensus on what proper discrimination is, what it entails and what is the right and proper way to go about it. We have given up on being selective and meritocratic in the social sphere. 

Some months ago, but still this year, I think, I was watching a video over at Sippican Cottage. I have unsubscribed to Sippican, just to cut down on the volume of reading I do - nothing to do with the quality. In that video was a lot of strange dancing. It was Pop. And somehow I managed to discover the aesthetic of Pop and what it meant to thinking people at the time. The essence that I got of it was this: Pop was a new sensibility, an artistic movement which using particular techniques would lead to intellectual and ethical discovery among the masses. I'm thinking more of the sort of thing that might be approached by Peter Coyote, and not that sort of irony-drenched kitsch of Pop Art artists like Warhol or Lichtenstein. I'm talking about the song and dance of Godspell, the bright colors in the style of Marlo Thomas. I'm talking about a soft of highbrow content that eschews unnecessary sophistication and allusion to the classics. Such an art would be anti-elitist in fact, but not in purpose. This is a good idea, I think. But I also think it got overrun by the sophisticates who were able to make it into an anti-establishment but more importantly anti-intellectual exercise. It's very difficult to present old and useful wisdom outside of all of its previously established contexts. And I'm sure that when faced with that difficulty many would be Pop creators took shortcuts. 

So it is my interpretation, incomplete as it stands, that what might have been excellent about Pop got discarded. As I think about it, the Pop world would ultimately have needed its guardians and its institutions and probably eschewed that to its own demise. I think that there was something excellent and extraordinary about Leroy Nieman and Peter Max. And perhaps the fact that they were both popularly commercialized by Burger King and 7Up respectively, added to the notion that they too would have to have some power structure behind them and such a notion could not stand. But these days, there are creative efforts bankrolled by commercialism that can certainly be considered artistic, yet there is no oeuvre aside from the excruciatingly ironic, self-defeatism that is now the predominant ethos of post-modernism. Even minimalism stands up well to the great emptiness of post-modernism. 

I bring up the good Pop because it is in that I am sensing the last vestiges of Soul and its crossover. It stood for something specific, not just assimilation but integration: two-way assimilation, assimilation with a purpose and a moral backbone. And somehow all that purpose got lost in a kind of colorblind, ethics-blind, don't ask, don't tell, don't judge, don't respect, anything goes mentality. The hard work was eschewed because then people would have to accept the possibility of rational change outside of the social sensibilities they had inherited. All good art does that, and in the 70s Pop might have done so if it had survived. Instead it went towards a kind of abstract expressionism of the individual, a million of me in the Me Generation can't be wrong. Why? Because I'm not judgmental and I won't conform to any program that is. I'm all about self-fulfillment, went the logic. And if I can find happiness in myself then the evils of society can only rise so far. It's like we were all Born Free and if we could return to the wilds of humanity without all its banks, and armies and dogmas, the world would be a better place. But all of that is anti-social. A Me Generation is anti-social. It desperately searches for a soul-mate and the nirvana of two rather than the difficult work of making a democratic society function. A democratic society requires consensus, conformity, judgment and everyday discrimination. It requires thought and choice and moral reasoning and consequential decision-making. It requires that which Fred Friendly tried to inspire. And whether that was through the artistic traditions of Western Civilization or the challenges of Pop and Soul's crossover, it was something we all decided to be too lazy and self-centered to bother with. Is it any wonder everything we call 'art' is laced with irony? Is it any wonder our spirituality cannot be religious?

Whether you choose to believe in God or not, the matter of sustaining a civil society requires the same work at bottom, and it always requires a consistent sort of moral reasoning that entails discriminations on a daily basis. And it requires that the values which guide those discriminations are made public and clear. This is something our daily politics does not have. What we have are retrenchments and recriminations. It is as if we as a nation have forgotten how to be Americans - this thing we must be in the swirl of cultures, languages and traditions our popular culture digests and poops out.

This is the challenge that stands before any atheist or secularist that lashes out at organized religion. What public institutions do we have that has enough public credibility about it and moral discrimination within it to sustain an engaged population in those commitments required of a democratic society? It is not our politics. It is not our art. It is not our sports. It is not our schools. 

The No Self

I've listened to Edmonds and Warbuton for a few weeks now - just to explore, and now something new has given me pause from their site. What if our concept of the self is wrong? What if the self is transient and what if this is natural? What if we have no essence but perhaps we keep that idea alive as a social construct or that perhaps the sense of self is something very simple, evolved because we are social animals of a certain sort.

I am keeping this in mind. On balance is the more important idea that we are created by God as purposeful beings and that without purpose, our lives have no meaning. Which is to say that the self exists only as a process of discovery of our purpose. Replace God with Truth if you are so inclined, the spectrum remains if the agency moves slightly. Self is thus the creation of self-discovery of purpose.

Hedge or Die

The most fascinating blog on the planet is Zero Hedge. It is the equivalent of a conversation about low level source code but in the world of capital markets. It is the closest to the operational minds of the traders and financial types that work The City, Wall Street, etc. that I have ever been. I thought I was getting close with Tom Keene, but baby this stuff is dynamite.

I can't parse half of it, and the volume is substantial. Fifty odd posts a day from a cat named Tyler Durden. Hmm, that name sounds familiar. You can catch the flavor of the complications, though.

When I got into computing, it was never so much about the science of it. But when I finally figured out the kind of work I expected to do - for Executive Information Systems, as it was called in the 80s, I reckoned that I was working the most sophisticated financial software anywhere except for Wall Street. What I didn't realize was how much more complex and sophisticated the financial software is for what traders and brokers and banks parse than goes on in the realm we call Enterprise Computing. It is a source of constant embarrassment for me that I'm not working with those big dogs, but I'm coming around.

There is, somewhere I intend to locate, some management package for software that tracks the life of a hedge fund. Something that allows you to create an instrument, split it into tranches, track buys and sells in and out, tracks real time mark to market (or mark to fiction) valuations and all that. That's something I want running on my Mac.

I understand that high frequency trading is one of the many corruptions of capital markets that churn money out of transaction fees and bleed investors like a swarm of vampiric gnats. But the systems that do them are not evil, the designers of such systems that make their operation integral to the profit of banks are the bloodsuckers. The levers of the real economy are not so rapidly switched, but the problem here is that systems have created vaporous value - a bps here a bps there adds up to the only kind of money these traders know how to make. That's not banking. That's not managing risk for the purpose of real business investment, that's betting on strikes and balls with more money than the gate for the baseball game. 

I'm really fascinated by how long it will be before the slanderous yet complicit oafs in the Obama administration knock heads with the opportunistic snakes on Wall Street to bloody the face of capitalism itself, which is obviously not what's being practiced at either end of the pitch. How many real industries are going to tank before we can find some bankers we can trust? Right now, nobody seems to know, although we all need to care. This is the most important question in the world.

--

Today's Zero Hedge reveals a memorandum of understanding between a private firm and the government of Greece. Apparently, Greece turned down a low interest loan (LIBOR + 125bps) in February because it insisted on having no hedges against it. You know, the kind of stuff our Senate wants to make into law - that nobody wins if somebody else fails. The Senate wants to outlaw the zero sum game for the entire US because Obama's got a grudge (that he publicly disclaims) against people who make money on Wall Street in ways he can't immediately fathom and bless. Bottom line, Greece lost out on an opportunity to get the money it needed without the austerity measures imposed by the IMF because it couldn't stomach the idea that people might bet against their ability to repay. Now when the people of Greece find out, they're going to freak. More blood in the streets, with any luck, will bring this sort of question to the next level which is what you see when people who are owed prepare themselves to whack people who default, and people who owe have decided never to pay and start saying words like 'over my dead body'.

Rights are the privilege of the strong. Liquidity is the privilege of the creditworthy. But there are times when rights are no longer defended and liquidity is simply withdrawn. These are worlds without honor and places honorable men generally avoid. The dearth of honor is spreading darkly in 2010. Pray for a movement in the light. That movement requires an honorable hedge. Otherwise, by definition, there is no exit, no quarter given. Dog eat dog.

Rude Questions About the Catholic Priesthood

I just ran across a phrase that stuck in my head which is that celibacy does not cause child abuse. It was made in the context of the latent controversy that the Catholic Church has found itself in regarding its perceived intransigence in handing over criminal perverts to the law. I also found myself listening to a rather intelligent fellow who is in command of many facts ridiculed by Adam Curry and John C Dvorak in their No Agenda podcast.

In the podcast, the man defending the Church against none other than anti-Papist 80s punk rocker Sinaed O'Connor. They got wrapped around the axle over his use of the word 'pre-pubescent'. His point being that the majority of the cases were not technically child molestation cases, rather they were homosexual rapes. He didn't use that term, I do.

For one thing, I think the gentleman defender makes an important point when he tells us that the Church has stemmed the tide - put the epidemic back in the box. There is something to it that other global institutions could learn. As he says, this was a global tragedy two decades ago and it has all but ceased. But my judgment is reserved for understanding the scope of that tragedy and the swiftness of its attenuation. 

Here's what puzzles and somewhat intrigues me. Presuming that something other than just 'evil' is what causes priests to rape, what should we assume are proximate causes? Is this kind of psychological profile available on those cases that have been prosecuted? I think it matters.

Is there a kind of down-low silence that the Church condoned? Isn't that a kind of tolerance? Let us suggest as a mind experiment that we are not talking about child molestation.

On a scale of 1 to 20 of sin according to the Catholic Church, let us put homosexual acts of any sort at 10. Let us put homosexual rape = to any other sort of rape at 13, and let us put child molestation at 15, just a few clicks shy of murder at 17, torture at 18, serial killing at 19 and genocide up at 20. This is totally a wild guess. I don't know, nor does anyone really, what the Church's Depravity Scale is, nor most anyone's for that matter. The research is incomplete.

If you born/raised homosexual and Catholic, you are in a pickle. You must know that the gratification of your sexual desire in any way is sinful. What then is the additional burden of that sin with a young man, or an adolescent if you are on the border between Hell and Purgatory no matter what? In an environment where there is no way to be 'clean' what is a little more dirt?

I'm thinking of this in the context of the opportunity the Church gives a man who is, as a homosexual, outcast from society, and I wonder if the Church interprets whatever tolerance it gives to homosexuals in the laity and the priesthood as part of its duty and if it perceives that much of this scandal is hypocrisy. What if the Catholic Church just said our homosexuals are less sinful on the whole than secular homosexuals, because since all homosexuality is sinful, at least our sinners are doing God's work. Is it blind to the distinction between extra-marital straight sex and all homosexuality? Might it not justify its lenience in the same way some people justify gay marriage?

This is another way of asking whether or not homosexual priests might be better protected in a gay friendly community given their proclivity for X, Y or Z, again relative to that community's depravity scale. 

I ask this question without prejudice to the Church or priests. Because if you say that they should be held to a higher standard, then you are admitting to the depravity of homosexuality. Again, I don't mean to suggest that a priest is not an authority figure and therefore the potential for abuse should not have greater consequences. But there surely cannot only be aggravating factors but mitigating factors as well. I suspect that there is something fundamentally different about male on male sexuality in the shadows and margins of society that is given some implicit tolerance. What are the norms of homosexual behavior in the context of extra-maritalism?  I suppose I'm also asking whether or not in our permissive society it is reasonable to find some equality or standard in the age of consent? If you distribute condoms in because you 'just know' sex is going to happen, why should we be surprised about alter boys? Is that indeed an international standard, and what should be expected of such a global institution as the Catholic Church?

Lotta questions in there. 

==

OK here's what some numbers suggest to me.  In Los Angeles and Orange Counties, 42 cases are or have gone to trial covering 150 litigants. 598 cases have been settled out of court. It's difficult to read the proper interpretation of the account from Wikipedia. But they give some sense that 22 priests were involved over 40 years. If that is indeed correct, then there seems like there can hardly be a broad case made as I suggest that the priesthood takes in homosexuals with some quid pro quo.I suppose all this speculation is indeed rude.

The Americanist

I have just discovered something wonderful, a story of church and state. The media blitz over the culpability of the Catholic Church (most certainly goosed by our old pal Hitchens) sets up a question of neoconservatism. If in America there is a separation of church and state, why should the church be responsive to the state. This is not a moral question but something of a legal / procedural question. One of the unstated assumptions about wrongdoing and resignations is that if a person X in an organization Y committed crime Z shouldn't leader Alpha resign? The problem is, of course, that any church isn't any government isn't any corporation so the entire 'organization Y' equivalence fails. 

So I want to take this tangent for a while. The analogies are too juicy. What I sense from a kneejerk is that a certain contingent of 'God Is Not Great' readers are convinced that the Catholic Church possesses WMD. 

In the meanwhile, an interesting POV

(stolen whole cloth from the ivory tower at Crooked Timber)

theAmericanist 03.31.10 at 12:14 pm

Not to get self-referential, but it seems like it might be useful to explain my monicker in this context: in the 18th century, it became necessary to create an American bishop—John Carroll. Like all consecrated bishops, he was required to condemn all heresies and heretics. Unlike others, he refused—because that would have meant that he would have been damning George Washington himself (a Mason). The Vatican let that slide for about a century.

But Carroll’s refusal began what was eventually known as “the Americanist heresy”. The American divergence from Vatican doctrine really got going in the 1850s, when Pius IX issued the Syllabus of Errors which said, among other things, that freedom of speech and religion, and the separation of Church and State, were not compatible with being a faithful Catholic. (Catholic apologists note that Pius did not claim the Syllabus was infallible doctrine; most folks figure this is a distinction without much difference.)

In mid to late 19th century America, there was a wave of Catholic immigration as well as a resurgence of the faith among foreign stock (US citizens with immigrant parents), particularly among German-Americans in the midwest. The leaders of that resurgence, notably Hecker and Orestes Brownson, didn’t emphasize certain aspects of Catholicism (e.g., Mary), but were passionate that being a good Catholic AND a patriotic American was not only possible, it was a Very Good Thing. (The Vatican wasn’t quite sure.)

One of these guys served in the Civil War, and eventually became Cardinal Gibbons, who gave us the Baltimore Catechism. (Taught Babe Ruth, too.) He was in charge of the American Church when a bunch of French knuckleheads provoked Leo XIII to investigate, and eventually condemn “Americanism”.

It’s sometimes called the phantom heresy, because neither the US Church nor the Vatican wants to recall what it meant—particularly now. In a nutshell, the Americanist heresy was the idea that civics has a moral value in itself. When I read about that, I thought: well, that’s me. Thus, my online id and alter ego.

Leo XIII condemned the Americanist heresey in 1899 by citing Church authority: civics, he said, has no moral value UNLESS it reinforces the authority of the Pope.

The thing about the Americanist heresy is that, in the end, it WON: much of the core ideas of the heresy (for example, the redefinition of “outside the Church there is no salvation” ) became Church doctrine at Vatican II, notably because of JC Murray.

So it’s central to the reactionary approach the Church has taken since Vatican II, personified by Benedict but beginning with JPII before he became Pope, when he served as the Vatican’s designated dissenter from the birth control commission (which included not only laymen, but also married women!); JPII’s dissent became the Vatican’s position on the relationship between celibate authority and sex.

The Americanist heresy doesn’t recognize the tainted Biblical idea of rendering unto Caesar (which was, after all, a defense of slavery), it acknowledges instead that secular authority in a democracy has an inherently moral power which the Church must accept. (As a Union veteran of the Civil War, Gibbons knew this keenly—the Catholic Church was the largest American denomination that did not split over slavery: nobody needed to tell Gibbons that Southern Catholics were wrong, no matter what they were told from the pulpit.)

LOL —anyway, TMI. It just seems relevant to any discussion of how and why the Vatican just didn’t order all bishops to turn all criminal priests over to the cops. (But if anybody wants to produce the play I’ve written about all this, let me know.)

My ACOG

When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life."

-John 8:12

If you look very carefully and closely at the serial numbers and other small engravings on you GI rifle scope, you might find six small characters 'JN8:12'. Pressure has been brought against the manufacturer of the ACOG scope to cease and desist with such high handed messaging. I'm certain this kind of action appeals to Jeff McMahan of Rutgers but I'm not convinced that such matters are convincing.

Crypto Christianity is cool. Well, for me, crypto-anything is cool. So I would probably defend this outside of the principle. But when we have gotten down to the point at which small inscriptions offend, something is very wrong. Is this a significant blow for the separation of Church and State, or atheist evangelism?

Another Good Group

 I got outdoors for the first time in a while. I forget, like I suppose most non-rich natives of Los Angeles do forget, that there are beautifully wild areas in close to the city. So I went, for the first time in my life, to Rustic Canyon, on an outing with the local Boy Scout troop.

Los Angeles is a city of canyons. There's Runyon Canyon just above Hollywood were trendy folks jog themselves and their dogs. I've never been there. There are Topanga, Rivas, Temescal and a dozen other canyons of better and lessor repute as far as beauty and fire danger. Rustic is just nice and remote. Well, remote for me because I live down near the water - and well most everybody lives downscale of this part of West Los Angeles. 

I've been cranking out 12 hour days in deepest darkest winter Cleveland where the temperature doesn't vary from day to night by more than 8 or 9 degrees. Out this way, the wind matters more than the sun. That's a very strange feeling. I'm accustomed to a high of 68 and a low of 46 around this time of year in LA which is about what we got this weekend. It makes us take an extra set of clothes or something and should explain much of the fashion consciousness of us Angelenos. We wear more variety of clothes because the weather demands it. So now you folks from the East can understand why San Francisco seems so cold to you. It's not cold, it's just night and it's supposed to get 20 degrees colder at night.  

At Rustic Canyon, I wore shorts and sat by a babbling brook, and watched the equestrians go by. I raked leaves, big sycamore leaves, and I watched the sky through the oaks.  I minded a passel of Scouts as they threw knives and tomahawks. I observed a parrot swerving to avoid the attention of a red tailed hawk. I munched on dried apricots and I shot a couple dozen rounds at 15 paces. 

The highlight of the afternoon was twofold. I always enjoy speaking with my friend Bob about movies and politics and this and that. I learned, from another of the dads, what it is that cats like to eat, from the perspective of catfood engineers. So there was fun, non-work oriented conversation. But the singular defining event of the day was the lost knife.

On his turn, one of the younger Scouts wound up and made his final toss of a nine inch steel knife towards the mounted stump four paces away. We all had a good chuckle as he missed the entire target and tumbled forward on the strenght of his right hand's momentum. But that moment of laughter turned out to be a misdirection worthy of Houdini, for nobody saw where the knife went.

 For the next 90 minutes, we pulled a mountain of leaves, rocks, sticks, grass and dirt from an area the size of a suburban bedroom. 17 boys and 4 men against a plot of land so small the most environmentally sensitive whackjob from Santa Monica wouldn't give it the time of day, except perhaps to park their Prius there. We raked, we shoveled, we poked and prodded. We found lizards, PVC pipe, golf balls, deer slugs, horse poop, caterpillars, sour flowers and everything but the knife. I honestly thought about how I might McGuyver my iPhone into a metal detector. It was useless; we were overcome.

I raked like a madman, working up the first sweat I can recall in months. I noticed something about everyone's work ethic including my own. I am the man who wants to be King, who turns to the man who should be and awaits the order. Hearing none, I bark out my own, heeding my own frustration and wishing everyone would work as hard as I. Sensing failure, I turn to a chuckling despair. I guess nobody wants to win so much, which is why I'm not in charge. And I retire silently to write my memoir, offering up a tasty morsel to those exacting critics like me - except I was there and you were not. It's not a flattering portrait, but there it is. Take the abstracted lesson for what it's worth - not a whole lot because what's written is only the narrative. Remind me to tell you about the dangerous falsity of narrative. I'm only recognizing it now myself, and so I have to undo 18 years. 

I sat on the edge of the firing range's platform as the target stumps were moved to new ground and enthusiasm ginned up again to continue the sport. The group split into thirds, one throwing, one hiking, one napping. I scientifically observed the pattern of missed knives as they tumbled in the area beyond the targets. I had no idea how something thrown so straight could bounce so crooked. Another metaphorical lesson learned in the wake of defeat. And yet the boys kept throwing, and improving, and thoughts of the lost knife faded.  

I left to take snapshots of the area. My target. The trees. The range. The leaves. The place itself. Rustic Canyon. As the sun stretched the shadows across the eastern hill, I observed the sunny top and the road back to Los Angeles. I had one day before I had to fly back to where I am now, 22 floors above Ontario Street. 

While we ate the sandwiches prepared for us all by the patrol leaders, we spoke briefly about Haiti and our own fate. How long would it take us to be in the clutches of nature and unable to cope? I remember my rule of threes. Three minutes without oxygen, or three days without water, or three weeks without food. That's how far off we are from the abyss. And of course we forget. I recalled for them the additional rule of risk homeostasis, thanks to Malcolm Gladwell. When we find safety in one thing, we make up for it by being more risky in something else. And this explains why people from dangerous neighborhoods don't go in for bungie jumping, and as well why pursuit of the Dosh makes one humble and attainment of the Dosh makes one rude. 

I know what kind of men I want around if and when it all goes to ruin. Today many are Boy Scouts. None of us have conquered the wild. None of us can. None of us ever will. We'll lose our tools, we'll always be humbled. But we know how to look out for each other, how to cook, how to shoot, how to keep God in our lives. We're a good group. 

Logical Optimism

Q: If there's a God who is good and all-powerful, why does He let horrendous evil in the world?

A: Because His good is so transcendent that it makes up for it.

Therefore it is reasonable to be optimistic.

I just ran across this extraordinary argument I've never heard quite put that way. I have intuited that God's good triumphs over evil even to the extent that I don't need the promise of an afterlife to follow. I took it as an article of faith at a very early age without a great deal of what I would consider religious instruction. I might even be willing to suggest that it is human nature to expect so, except that the actual atheism and religious instruction are pervasive. Still, Marilyn McCord Adams makes a compelling case. You see, if you don't believe in God, the horrendous evil problem is not the faithful's, but the non-believer's.

Now in one way, this is precisely what Hitchens decries. If you can be forgiven, if your communion with God gives you comfort, then to a certain degree you can turn irresponsibly away from the grotesque evils of the world. You might even, in extreme cases, be convinced that you can get away with perpetrating such deeds. And certainly people rationalize away those great crimes as God's will. But then to be Christopher Hitchens is to be a man of no optimism, or one quite deep into whiskey. Why? Because logically, if you don't believe in a transcendent good, then there is no reason to be optimistic if you are a victim or a perpetrator of a horror.

Now let's define horrendous evil. We're not talking about dropping your ice cream at the circus. We're talking about dropping a cluster bomb on the circus. Evil with a capital E is the sort of occurrence that you walk away from, if you can, with very deep questions about your ability to move on in life. And what's crucial to understand is that life-wrecking evil is happening all of the time. It's not just a capital H Holocaust once every century, but the great capital crimes and crimes against humanity which pollute human life on a daily basis. We know this evil continually exists in the world otherwise the initial question could be exceptionally qualified.

Adams cuts to the chase on the 'free will' answer as well. Free will as a gift is not self-justifying unless a transcendently good God who is not aloof gives it. Her example is that if a Kindergarten teacher left razor blades around the classroom, 'free will' is a lousy excuse. Such a neglectful person could never heal the wounds caused by the exercise of free will. But God, or at least the Christian God, does rehabilitate through an abiding faith in His grace. People come back from beyond the brink of despair. Jesus saves. 

I don't think anyone has such faith in psychiatry.

So is the atheist who believes only in a materialist universe kidding himself? Logically, if he is optimistic, he is kidding himself. Or perhaps by force of personality, he can just decide to be eternally optimistic in the fate of mankind no matter what. My understanding is that Kant would call that an illusion. So whose illusion is better? Call it a toss up?

Snappy Answers to Atheist Questions

I can hear in Christopher Hitchens some greater distinction between his religious foes and it is becoming evident to my ears that he understands that he cannot afford to alienate the devout by failing to distinguish between reactionaries and radicals. As one who shares his fondness for the intricacies of well-chosen phrases in English, it indicates to me that he's making significant intellectual distinctions that he might not have considered a few years ago, though it's difficult to tell through the noise of the cheerleaders.

Hitchens has managed, through his mastery of history and his witty pique, to center himself in the interminably lively debate about the existence of God, the role of religion, the duty of moral men and matters of war and peace. Such a space has quite a bit of traffic - even on YouTube. Not a bad place to be if you've got some literary skills and enough media savvy not to get squished. 

Down here among the pigs and sheep, we get similar debates and I've found something to consider at length which I haven't bothered to before. That is the religious faith and consequent moral demeanor and discipline of men of great liberal character. And I invent the phrase 'great liberal character' because I cannot make quite the epistemological fuss over scientists so much as their science. Nevertheless secular liberal foes tend to make that fuss and concurrently assert something fundamentally askew in their contemporaries as if religious duty and faith crowds out all the logic of any value in the minds of the devout.

So one must ask if such pesky skeptics have ever heard of the scientific exploits of one James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell  is one of those greats whose achievements come top in any number of surveys. He is the architect of electromagnetism without which the modern world would depend a great deal more on the sorts of devices available to Victorians. Not that I would mind so terribly, given the proximity such Maxwellian contrivances give crabby atheists to my electronic earshot.

So I shout back:

Two great British scientists dominate the intellectual landscape of electrical science, and indeed all of physics, in the nineteenth century, Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. It would be hard to imagine two more contrasting personalities.

Faraday was English; Maxwell Scottish. Faraday was the son of a poor blacksmith; Maxwell's father had inherited a substantial estate and hardly needed to practice the law in which he had been trained. Faraday had no formal education; Maxwell had the finest education available. Faraday never held a university position; Maxwell held professorships at three of the major British universities. Faraday was one of the most popular scientific lecturers of his day; Maxwell gained a poor reputation in the class-room. Faraday knew practically no formal mathematics; Maxwell was one of the finest mathematicians of his time. Faraday's research dominated electromagnetic experiments; Maxwell's electromagnetic theory. The contrasts between these men could be multiplied on and on. Yet they had one experience in common. Both were committed Christians. It is the purpose of this brief study to outline how the faith of James Clerk Maxwell and his science were combined and how they may have influenced one another.

There's likely some series of seminars such as this lovely one at MIT and elsewhere, where thoughtful Christians, for one, may revel in their passions over the false dichotomies of their foes. So have at the ammo.

Looking after my own soul takes the greater part of my effort. However, with that calm and collection I feel some obligation to share my peace. My purpose here is not to be an apologist for Christianity, nor an evangelist. Rather I am perturbed by the overconfidence of those who dismiss religious thought and seek greater control over our lives. The scientific animists are at it again, and their slavish devotion to secularity is rude and short-sighted. Plus, someday I'd like to rise about the pigeons and sparrows to soar like Hitchens, who despite his arrogance, I think is inevitably bound to make the proper distinctions.

Outside

One of the most important lessons that I learned from my father was taught to me by hiking. And when I think of the value of that lesson, the effect of the ignorance of that lesson immediately comes to mind. The lesson was that in the wilderness, you are responsible for your own survival and consequently when you are in civilization, others are responsible. 

We would go to the San Gabriel mountains, scarcely 30 miles from our house, and be totally alone. I felt that I was the master of my own destiny there. There was nothing man-made to corner me, nothing except that which I made. No social conventions except that which we constructed. No rule of law except for that which we created. I knew what it felt like to be the maker of civilization. 

The ignorance of that lesson became clear to me when, on one particular occasion, we took some [underprivileged] kids to Big Sur. I don't recall the circumstances, but it was certainly a great deal less wild and more picturesque as we descended from the road down to where we thought we might see some seals. Then suddenly some of the kids froze in fear. They had never been outside of the city. Somebody had made a strange chirping noise that triggered the fear. Keep moving I said, it's not far. I can't they replied, trembling. Why not? Jason's down there. Who? Jason. He's going to kill us.

It took some explaining to me that Jason was a character from a horror movie called Friday the 13th that I had never paid attention to, and that chirping noise was the sound effect that was employed whenever the teenagers were about to be slaughtered. The poignancy of the moment was not lost on me. I almost cried. Here were kids who were so far from being liberated by the outdoors that it was almost impossible. Their minds were captivated by nonsense. I became angry and gave a guarantee that no Hollywood slasher was going to attack. What began as a nature hike became a forced march. I would prove to them that they had too much foolishness in their heads. 

I don't know what happened in any other part of that trip. The memory has been reduced to the constant counterexample of what nature meant to me. In my mind it was a blank slate awaiting civilization or the sort characterized by Sierra Club bonhomie and Boy Scout honor. To them, it was an outdoor slaughterhouse.   

To this day, especially since I live in the World's Most Overpriced Suburb, I often think of the liberating possibilities of the outdoors. What I want, of course, is big fat broadband, ample heat and frozen meat somewhere I could live extraordinarily cheaply. Occasionally, I will find someplace on Google Earth which is stark, clean and beautiful. Occasionally I will fly over some interestingly remote place between my home and my job. I think about the few things I need, like Steve Martin in 'The Jerk'.

It's frightening to contemplate how much of the world is built up, quartered and owned in perpetuity. There are buildings in Manhattan whose upper floors I'm never going to see, even as I brush my fingers across the cornerstone at street level. That is the inside. But I get a feeling of longing when I think about those remote places I might never see. I get the feeling of wanderlust and I wonder how it might be to have a sinecure in some ancient, obscure yet relevant remote place. Have you ever wanted to live in a castle or a cathedral? Just last night I was watching 'The Man Who Would Be King' and I'm thinking about the adventure of making a civilized spot somewhere. 

The islands of Malta evoke such feelings, and that place where the Ruskies exploded the Tsar Bomba, and the Berents Sea where they lost the Kursk. And today I learned about the Scapa Flow. It's difficult to believe that nobody would know about the Orkney Islands and the fact that most of the German warships were scuttled there at the end of WW1. Warships. They all seem such an unimaginably distant and alien sort of power. In an archipelago of dozens of isles and skerries, north of forgotten, west of nowhere, in 40 meters of frigid water are the water graves of sailors. There's that lighthouse you saw in a movie once. Cliffs overlooking a nameless sea, houses, hovels and castles all made of rock, because only rock can handle the howling wind and frothy wet cold. 

I dream of outside because outside is where you could be. Eating food. Waking early or sleeping late. Where weather determines the time and a mind can connect across the distance to the greater economy. I think it might be my destiny if I can convince my wife, and somebody pays me to keyboard as I do. I will be on God's planet once again. 

Paglia on Religion

Holy smokes. Paglia sides with intelligent conservatives in the Culture Wars. And she's right. You simply must listen to this entire thing because it's something you've never heard an American atheist say. 

I find it very interesting that at this particular moment that I'm starting into my review of the Arts. And her view of Architecture is rather like mine - I see it as something we still do well. Interesting that she goes back to the filmmaking of the post WW2 era to communicate her admiration for American art, though she does it to make one particular point about the artistry of religion rather than as the greatest exemplar of contemporary art. Or does she?

Sufficient Divinity

What a surprise it is to find in Taleb the ends of certain of my thoughts. On the plane over here to snowy Cleveland I had a couple brainstorms. Here is the killer question that occupies me for the moment.

Wait.

First of all, let me give you Taleb's take on religion which is squarely in line with mine. He asserts that religious people deal better with incomplete information. And he also suggests that those who are normalized by non-religious rationality tend to be overconfident. I think his term is 'empistemic arrogance' which is squarely Conservative as in Oakeshott.

So the question that popped into my head some 36,000 feet over the midwestern US was "What is sufficiently divine?" As soon as I thought it, Martin Amis' 'The Janitor on Mars' came to mind. There is much I do not recall about the story and will not do it justice in my brief description, but the salient bits are as follows.

A robot lives several dozen miles beneath the surface of Mars and comes to the surface to speak to Earth. The Martians who built that robot were essentially wiped out in a war with an advanced civilization from beyond the Solar System hundreds of millions of years ago. Earth itself was considered a backwater, rather like the growth on a discarded sandwich, and in all of human evolution it has not developed to the level of intelligence of this robot, which is itself only a planet janitor. The janitor is surly and dismissive of human science and technology and answers all of the great scientific mysteries in his boredom, but to no avail because Earth is doomed to be destroyed as part of some bargain made by the loss of Mars millions of years before. There is nothing the human race can do in its appeal to this robot to secure its survival - the robot is merely following the orders of its creator, who themselves were destroyed by an even greater civilization.

Is such a robot sufficiently divine to be considered God? If it can singlehandedly save the Earth from destruction or destroy it, what obligation would humanity have to figure out how to get it to be merciful? If the robot promised to build a warp-drive transport that would take a continent's fill of human scum to some other bog in the heavens, how many virgins would you sacrifice?

The point of this argument is that it is only rational to consider the destruction of mankind to determine mankind's moral obligation to itself. The ultimate value of life and meaning on Earth is best determined in light of such thought experiments. I think that Taleb would argue that this is what religion has been doing, or attempting to do since its invention.

In that respect, it is a fair suggestion to say that man is the only creature that thinks about God and then consequently re-evaluates the meaning of his own life. It doesn't matter whether that God is 'God' or a robot janitor on Mars which is only some idiot fraction of the powers that be in our own galaxy. It matters that it is sufficiently divine such that in contemplation of it's powers and intentions we must consider the fate of our species.

Next time somebody tells you global warming isn't a religion, you have a new answer.

That irresistible dig is not my point however. My point is that intelligent people are making incredible excuses and evading that which established religion is in order to create yet another religion in the guise of not-religion. They are hamstrung by the fact that their god must be provable. They are trying to invent something non-divine which will justify their frameworks as proper for estimating the mankind's moral obligation to itself.

Their answer will inevitably be war.

Pray Today

Let us pray for our brothers and sisters as they go forth with courage and determination to face the forces of violence, weapons of destruction and hearts filled with hate. 

For our Commander-In-Chief,  and our political and military leaders that they may tirelessly seek peaceful settlements to international disputes; we pray to the Lord:

That the Lord may preserve the members of our Army, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard and Air Force from all harm; we pray to the Lord:

That even in war, we may keep clearly before us the defense of all human rights, especially the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; we pray to the Lord:

That the families, relatives and friends of our military members may be strengthened in this time of concern and anxiety; we pray to the Lord:

That the Lord may help families with men and women in the armed forces to cope with daily challenges in the absence of their loved ones; we pray to the Lord:

That our homeland will be preserved from violence and terrorism; we pray to the Lord:

That the nations of the world will seek to work together in harmony and peace; we pray to the Lord:

That the hearts of all men and women will be moved to pursue true peace and justice; we pray to the Lord:

That violence may be overcome by peace; that weapons of destruction be transformed into tools of justice, and hate give way to true charity; we pray to the Lord:

That grateful for and inspired by those veterans who have given their lives for our country we may bravely face the challenges ahead; we pray to the Lord:

Lord God, Almighty Father,
creator of mankind and author of peace,
as we are ever mindful of the cost paid for the liberty we possess,
we ask you to bless the members of our armed forces.
Give them courage, hope and strength.
May they ever experience your firm support, gentle love and compassionate healing.
Be their power and protector, leading them from darkness to light. 
To you be all glory, honor and praise, now and forever.

Amen.

Silas, AL

And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.
-- Matthew 6:28

Willie got straight A's, was a Jehovah's Witness and wore a hearing aide, and so even though they were archrival footballers, the boys in Silas accepted him whereas his homefolks in Butler rejected him. Willie has twenty seven stories, at least, about life two feet above ditch level, where sanity is only accepted on faith. Willie relates to the kind of situation where it's about taking all of the bullets out of the gun but one and hoping that's a mitigating circumstance when you're looking for the man who beatdown your cousin. He never had to shoot because they couldn't find him. He was hoping they wouldn't find him, but it was that close. Willie tells the tale of that redbone college girl who invited him to study in the dorm but turned out to be wearing daisy dukes and a halter top that Friday afternoon.  He's not ready for a brew yet, so the Mountain Dew was on me. 

It took 87 minutes for the chicken wings to thaw and get cooked up and so it was past midnight and the Iggles loss before I hiked back to the Marriott. I never expected to wait that long for some hot food, and I didn't expect anybody to walk up to me for any either. But I know the feeling of walking around downtown Cleveland pissed off and looking for something to eat, except Willie wasn't pissed off.

As usual, some folks will size me up to be a Que dog or an Alpha, depending on my attitude. Willie said I fit the Alpha profile when we got around to that part of the long conversation. But it took a long time for him to get past the immediate past which for my man was a hard knock life. I'm happy to fit my profile, but I get the feeling that it's hard for Willie to get other folks to deal with the fact that he's something other than an ex-crackhead. He just turned 33 and hasn't had a taste in two years. He has been a dental assistant and an auto mechanic, 'strictly blue collar' and tells tales of legendary BBQs and his fool friend Chuck who didn't realize what a good woman he had before they eventually got married and moved out West. 

Willie's a peasant of the better sort. One who doesn't pretend to be anything more and yet knows the transformative power of God. I asked him how old his father was, knowing I was ready to say something pithy about how young 33 actually is. He has three he says. the one we all have, the Heavenly Father, his biological father and the man who raised him. The man who raised him is 83. The man who keeps him putting one foot in front of the other is infinite and Willie is full of acknowledgement. The third man is available via Facebook and things are getting better, step by step. Willie is figuring a way to share his story of redemption with the knuckleheads he's accustomed to being around, especially the younger ones. It's easy to see him as that kind of counselor, just as soon as he can turn his inner conviction into inner strength, and his outer expression into one of evident socially redeeming purpose. But today Willie is a man whose good times are tainted - too tainted for funding by my interpretation of the eyes that fund. But I know something about American men that I don't think too many men bother to find out.

Unemployment is going to 13%, according to the latest experts on Bloomberg Surveillance this morning, and as Tom Keene puts it, there's something wrong with the term 'small business'. Officially, small business means less than 500 employees, and those are all the companies that are getting no bank loans these days. So there's a class of financiers in America that can't even be bothered with 'small business', so what are the chances for peasants like me and Willie? 

Take a look when you have a moment, because even the Google VW has been to Silas, Alabama. Right in the middle of town, there's not much of a town. And good kids come to big cities like Cleveland, where the regional banks are failing left and right, and sometimes it gets down to taking crack, or taking down scores, or as in the case of the Imperial Murders, just taking other people's lives and dignity. There's still not enough bandwidth to get all those stories out. They are born on the tongues of men like Willie. There are some towns that reject you for your differences, even if those differences are character strengths. There are some towns that accept you, and there are others that ignore you altogether.

Where do you go when all the things that are too big to fail actually fail? You go where things are too small to succeed but actually succeed. 

My mother is sending me Bible verses, and I know a third of the famous ones. So I'm thinking of King James, the only version I remember. This is the story of Christianity that stands when other institutions fail. This is the story of faith in mankind that transcends market fluctuations. This is a story of the power of redemption - of something that works for the peasants even when the royalty stands wealthy, illiquid and clueless. I can give it a Deist name or not, but it is the divine that resides in our souls - that thing that tells us right from wrong in all circumstances - that thing we try to suppress intellectually or self-deprecatingly. 

There's a lot of small business around this land. 

Faith vs Articles of Faith

I'm reading Christopher Hitchens' reflections on his various debates with religious authorities et al, and I think it is very tempting to confuse faithfulness with adherence to doctrine. He says:

Usually, when I ask some Calvinist whether he is really a Calvinist (in the sense, say, of believing that I will end up in hell), there is a slight reluctance to say yes, and a slight wince from his congregation. I have come to the conclusion that this has something to do with the justly famed tradition of Southern hospitality: You can't very easily invite somebody to your church and then to supper and inform him that he's marked for perdition. More to the point, though, you soon discover that many of those attending are not so sure about all the doctrines, either, just as you very swiftly find out that a vast number of Catholics don't truly believe more than about half of what their church instructs them to think.

Hitchens reminds me of the tendency for pedants to believe that everybody who is not has ample time to make philosophical sense of their world and adhere to inconsistencies because of mental lapses, incapacities or worse. And when it comes to religion, secular foes are particularly prone to this sort of error - the assumption that people buy into a coherent slate of beliefs and behaviors. It's a particularly annoying thing to do, especially if one is divorced. 

I always recall that there are social implications to Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem and that the mind rationalizes so that it doesn't halt. Human behavior isn't provable, especially not by cynics.

The Peasant Principle

Only peasants care about America. Those who are wealthy find it merely convenient. But there is a slice somewhere in the connection between that make this place extraordinary. Long live the Slice.

Something I learned late in life is that rights are the gift of the strong. That is to say the only restraint that keeps the powerful from overpowering everything is their fear of God and their willingness to abide by the law. I reconcile these to the classic motivations of honor, fear and greed by suggesting that the powerful keep those true motivations hidden and attribute their restraint to piety and legality. But we still must pay attention to those particular restraints.

The law is restrained by its own reasonableness and the competence of law enforcement. The problem is that law enforcement is always made up of us peasants, some of whom might want to become truly powerful or wealthy. The same applies to the church. The effectiveness of the church in restraint depends upon its ability to provide succor, blessing, understanding, community - all things the powerful need in common with the common man. The clergy too is made up of peasants.

American exceptionalism depends uniquely on the persistence of the Slice, those capable of and desirous of maintaining a highly competent meritocracy. The rest of us are peasants. What I'm suggesting here is that American class distinctions are overwrought and that we are over sensitive to them. A great deal of meaning is attached in our society to meaningless efforts and great distinction given to trivial differences. There are the powerful, there is the Slice, and there is the peasantry. The Slice is smaller, much smaller than the middle class. I believe it to be smaller than the upper middle class. Indeed it is a small subset of the rich and near rich. They are the people who work because they know how and because they want to, but most importantly, they enable the institutions of power.

When I speak of power, I mean the power to get you killed. I mean the power of life or death. I mean the power to make or break. I don't mean influence. The Slice has influence - the Slice are the avatars of power. The Man says 'make it so' and the Slice pushes the button. Or perhaps The Man pushes the button, but the Slice built it and explained how it works. Either way, they are the instruments, not the motivating force. And in this understanding lies something very valuable - I see it as a tool for simplicity.

Explaining what I mean by peasantry should be easy. But it's not because it is the water we swim in. They are the rules for the game we call life - it's every career path you can imagine - it's every character in every TV show we've ever watched. I have come to recognize it in facing elements of the Slice and those beyond. I get to feel the dimensions of peasantry when I think about war and when I think about life and death decisions. It is a difficult and frightening revelation to know.

I have this duality in most of the areas of my life. As a black man outsider I have engineered a place for myself in society as an insider. It was relatively easy to do, but there was no roadmap and not much friendly assistance along the way. The same thing I say about work and can say about relationships and church. I am essentially an individual, an island entire of myself, yet I volunteer and discipline myself to be a piece of the continent, a part of the mainstream. 

I don't mention this in detail to suggest that I am unique in this regard. In fact, I am saying that without question I am a peasant. But I am a questioning and articulating peasant very much aware of the feudal arrangement by which I have my liberty. I illustrate the ways I have come to recognize my position, a position I share with millions of Americans, the overwhelming majority of us. I think that somewhere in the story of The Count of Monte Cristo is an appropriate analogy. But it is on the question of the arrangements of liberty and the role of that thin Slice that I wish to direct my attention. This is my lesson going forward and captures the theme of my current writing.

Andrew Hacker wrote in his classic 'Money' that most Americans, no matter what their position in society, would be satisfied completely with a 20% raise. If you have ever played that videogame 'The Sims' you understand this implicitly. You buy a cheap chair to sleep in, you save money, study, work and spend most of your time in self-improvement to get a fluffier bed. But does the quality of your sleep improve? You eat a better brand of steak, but does your body digest its proteins any better? You buy a better car, but can you get to work any faster? Moreover can you drive a fast car, more than 175 MPH? All of our self-improvement goes to what end? It doesn't generally make us a different type of individual, it puts us in contact with a different class of peasantry. But where are the ends? Where are the borders, and exactly whom is on the other side?

As inveterate readers of Cobb know, several years ago I was involved with a venture in China. It didn't work out, but for me personally it represented touching the brass ring. It was a consummation of my life's preparation and gave me an opportunity to see myself rich. I allowed myself to think that I was on the verge of being all that I ever wanted to be - or more properly said, I would finally be rewarded for being who I am and then finally the world could see me unfettered. I didn't have to grow any longer. I would have F You Money and now the world would come to me instead. But even at that level, there are always bigger fish, there are always more significant arrangements, there are always kings over kings. After all, the deal collapsed in a firestorm of lawsuits, and when elephants fight, smaller animals get trampled.

The question peasants must ask is where is their Liege and what happens when they fight? How are we really connected to the individuals who are the ultimate expression of our values? Do we even know where to find them? Or do we just skip humanity altogether and say it's God? Presumptuous that.
Who designed your sandbox?

--

I hope to come back to this framework again and again. It is my intent to place American society in a global and historical context and separate those things that serve peasants and those that serve free men. I believe we have the opportunity to be free men. I believe that within the American meritocracy, such as it is - even in the potential absence of American world dominating power, a path can be found that leads to freedom.

Down to the Fingernails

Catholics are great. They try so hard to be righteous. They pore so deeply over their eternal souls. They obsess over sin so constantly. They attempt to be completely clean, down to the fingernails.

It's the fear. It's not the superstition of religious mystery. It is the disciplined hand of the inspired man that swings high in threat over the child's upturned eyes. There are, according to the ancients, three primary motivators of men. They are greed, glory and fear. And while there are many who pretend that their motivations are more realistic than those of the God fearing, men and women of the cloth put it plainly into the same human terms.

So I have seen Doubt, the film, at long last.

In some youthful imagining of mine there was something of Arthur Miller in every play, and so in every highbrow entertainment I expected moral edification. I expected it from LeRoi Jones. I expected it from Eugene O'Neill. I expected it from Chekov and from Achebe. I thought it was all of the stuff that educated people did in their spare time. And so I was disappointed, not in them, but in everyone else. Because if anyone dared to suggest that following God's will through the institution of the Church and at the hands of the priesthood, then certainly they must have had a better idea. So perhaps The Crucible got me on a tangent of doubt, or clouded up the firmament blocking the divine stars navigating my youth's journey. Either way there is doubt. Doubt which strengthens faith. Doubt which requires our attention and introspection, meditation and prayer. You simply can't get it from the Theatre. You simply can't get it from the Church.

You must internalize the discipline, down to your fingernails.

--

I also saw Layer Cake, the film, at long last.

Seeing it reminded me of the old men I have met, especially the ones that make me afraid. They are the capable ones. I used to think once upon a time that I could belly up to the brass rail and strike up a conversation that would lead to my edification. And I forget that most of the time I ambled home reminded of my weaknesses. There are two such men I have in mind at this very moment whose good regard I believe I have. But I am afraid to engage with them at length for fear they would hand me an assignment for which I am deadly unprepared.

Such men are only men though, and perhaps they are like stone soup. Doing nothing and being there, they make me through in the proper ingredients. Yeah. It's the fear.

--

I am drawn to conflict of the close combative style. The kind that makes you answer for yourself. It's how I was raised. Yes sir. And I grew to watch myself closely because I was watched closely. And I came to outdiscipline my own parental taskmasters, and those of my parochial school, and so on through life. In my thinking, and in my spirit. And I know that God is out there, infinite.

So the thing is to watch your soul. And wash your hands.

Karajan & Perfection

Part of the difficulty of dealing with death, and I suppose this applies particularly to Americans, is that if you haven't faced your own mortality you might come away less inclined to live. As I write this, I cannot remember the last moment I felt as if I should discipline myself to perfection. To discipline oneself to perfection is the proper attitude to life because there is such joy and inspiration in being a vessel of the perfection that is available to us. It is to submit to the highest will and thus gain orientation over one's own life and destiny. But I happened upon a biography on PBS this evening on Karajan, and it is music that is bringing me over to that kind of appreciation I once had for my own perfection.

Small perfections.

That was how I used to run my life. And I think of the short years after having read Ayn Rand and a moment in time when I was watching Jeopardy and calculating my own score as a fourth player while adjusting the others down and distinguishing Monk songs in my head, broiling New York strips and reading Moliere and falling asleep to CBS Mystery Radio. lt was the start of a new life for me in 1987, but I'd have to check my diary to be precise. I was looking to perfect myself because the order of things became apparent - I realized that I had wasted time trying to help others to do things that cannot be helped.

And I'm rather there again, because I've been saying "It's not about me", for several years.

The phrase in my head was "Civilization is where you put it." And for a young man with a vision of the digital future and quite enough nerve to assume a role in its creation, I was putting myself always up to the task. I discounted my surroundings and dedicated myself, and I was called arrogant and I liked being called arrogant. I only wanted to be clear-eyed and unafraid.

Karajan reminds me of what it must be like to be that vessel. To have such dedication to clear one's mind of clutter and to master, over all things to attain mastery and reach the point at which the answer is clear. He memorized concertos and operas and symphonies. He exerted his will to create. He dominated in order to perfect, to create a powerful harmony, to achieve an excellence. His is an expression of will I've not perceived since my appreciation of Yukio Mishima. It was Mishima who set me free to perfect in those mid 80s.

How one lives a life of compromise is a matter of inattention. It is by not having a vision that demands your perfection that you slip, human-like into your own smell. If you stay in bed long enough, you breathe less oxygen. 

Life is too long, and it is too short, not to believe in self-perfection. We are fortunate that in youth it is done for us by the simplest unsullied application to our pure and genuine ambitions. But as life becomes long and we forget it becomes longer still to reapply without world-weary cynicism. That is why there is great God-given asymmetry in the ability to perceive and to produce. For all of Karajan's great dedication and perfection to his craft it only takes us an hour to hear and appreciate. For all many years of practice and discipline any man exerts, we have only to recognize it to be made rightly inspired. And greatest yet we have only to have faith in God to build a religious perfection in ourselves. To do otherwise is to self-destruct.

I am realizing the necessity of my discipline and my aim towards perfection. From God through Beethoven through Karajan to me.

The Godless Problem

The other day I watched a science video about the surprising findings of the Hubble Telescope. It showed that there were thousands of galaxies in a corner of the sky that seemed to be empty. With 10 days concentrated focus, leaving the lens open to something that appeared dark, tiny specks of light finally appeared. These lights were further than any object previously seen by mankind's most powerful instrument for observing the universe.

I have a theory about the physicality of God which goes along a parallel a short story by Martin Amis called 'The Janitor on Mars'. My theory (which I don't actually believe) is that God is a being that lives at the center of the Sun and communicates with other gods in other stars through incalculably fast digital pulses which we read as the electromagnetic spectrum of the Sun itself. Our revelations come from the way in which some small fraction of that communication affects our brains. Every way in which we experience sunlight is spiritual and real, we really just don't know how to interpret it - yet we know it's there.

The problem with the godless is that they must experience the numinous but don't raise the implications high enough. Which is to say that they are morally ambiguous because even though they accept the premises of the ecology of physics, they don't bother to interpret any of that to be morally transcendent. So while they can accept the premise of a universe larger than ever imagined over the course of 10 days of patience, they cannot accept that expanding their concept of a god in moral significance.

The laws of nature should not allow us to think the unthinkable. Yet we do. The unthinkable might be signal or it might be noise. To assume it is only noise is to assume that the ultimate receiver has been built. That cannot be the case. Think of it this way. If you broadcast a television signal in 1850, it would only be considered noise. We know it would be imperceptible to the people of the time. How can we know with any certainty that our God is not in the Sun or perhaps beyond even the most patient scanning of the heavens?

The godless must at the very least reserve a transcendent morality as a philosophical placeholder for God, or live and die as if God were beyond the edge of the universe and His power was finite and subject to the inverse square rule.

Man's Inhumanity to Shrimp

District 9 is the best movie I've seen all year, and not one that I thought would make me cry. It didn't but it put me right on the verge of tears. 

Law is a manipulation of conscience. It is the contrivance of third parties to do your just thinking for you. It never appears as such a contrivance so clearly as when it is abused or inept. This is not the central premise of District 9, but it is clearly indicated. 

District 9 does a very good job of leaving the parallels intact as well as taking this South African story beyond the context of Apartheid. It is the story of Wikus Van Der Merwe a bureaucrat of the fictional MNU, the NGO which is charged with the care of the alien species that has descended into Johannesburg. For 20 years, the film tells us, all human social work, diplomacy and alien rights management has failed to do anything for the 'Prawn' alien race now numbering about 2 million who occupy District 9. This district itself is a slum, filmed in one of the current or former townships of Apartheid South Africa. Wikus, a young do-gooder has been selected by one of the hierarchs of MNU to be in charge of the biggest program in their history of administering the aliens, which is to evict them from their current lodgings to a relocation camp further outside of the city of Johannesburg. But he's in for the surprise of his life.

The movie describes the aliens to be disorganized, like worker bees without a queen. As such they are singularly unable to organize any resistance and do little but scavenge. They are exploited in all the typical ways by Nigerians who are the only humans who live inside District 9, but also and obviously by MNU, as Wikes clearly demonstrates as he follows the law. This law allows MNU to destroy the alien nests - to basically abort fetal aliens that grow like maggots, external to the alien bodies, in cow carcasses. Wikes describes the popping sounds of the eggs as he orders the torching of such a nest. 

In the course of his bureaucratic duty, dressed in a flack jacket and under military escort, Wikus directs his doucmentary cameraman (from whose POV we are watching), to capture this activity. He finds weapons, a strange chemistry set, young aliens, and all other sorts of illegal activity and contraband. On such a journey he is spritzed with a strange liquid as seen in the widely available previews of the movie. 

The largest secret, even unknown to Van der Merwe but not to his father in law who gave him the relocation assignment, is that there has been an MNU program to genetically experiment on the aliens and humans so that humans can operate the alien weapons which require the alien DNA. Through a series of accidents and collusions Wikes winds up being the first ever human to grow an alien arm. He is forced to use this arm to fire the alien weapons to great success, and before his body is to be dissected and donated to science (and billons of dollar of corporate and government research) he escapes. And, as you might expect, he must now survive within District 9 amongst the aliens whom only yesterday were wards of his state apparatus. 

It is altogether too easy to shoot the barrelfish of the liberal bureaucracy of the MNU which stands as an apt metaphor for the UN and its humanitarian efforts. It is rather for we the living to recognize exactly how liberty must translate for a sentient species which is incoherently disorganized and in our midst. I find myself driven to understand the conditions under which the alien ship was sent to Earth. And while the film didn't speculate, it was clear to me that these were exiles and outcasts, prisoners perhaps. For any civilization that could accomplish interstellar travel would clearly not send their best and brightest to live in a township in South Africa, which was obviously selected for its cultural and legal ability to have a strict bipolar society. 

District 10 has to be made. It simply must. The story is far too compelling for the implications not to be taken up. The difficulty presents itself in regard to the origins of this film. The collaboration between Peter Jackson and South African director Neill Blomkamp began as the combination who would make the Halo movie. As anyone with half a wit could tell you, the Halo franchise has elephantine legs, but also enough legal brambles to trip a herd. Blompkamp has an extraordinary gift for directing the sort of chaotic action of battle, but he has also created and mastered the human / alien / technology interaction in live action heretofore only achievable in videogames. Blomkamp is the director who now owns the neorealism of this emergent genre of sci-fi. And surely this is why Jackson has taken him under his wing and is now going in a different direction. The old master of the Lord of the Rings is stepping down to do Tin Tin, which is great and cool and whatnot, but Blomkamp is now the shortlisted dOOd for pwnage movies. 

Except. 

Except that Spielberg is rumored to have an interest in Halo, which could be a shame. Because Blomkamp has made the most emotionally resonant battle robot in the history of film. The alien robot suit in District 9 was so fluid and responsive that you could feel the man inside it dying through the increasingly pathetic stumbling of the machine itself. And it is not coincidental that it was a kickass battle droid only for the moments that it was controlled exteriorly by the kid alien. So yeah I want Blomkamp to be involved with the Halo movies because I know he has the right eye for the action, but we all need Spielberg to do this and wrest control of the franchise from the legal sharks at Microsoft. 

In the meantime, District 9 is an extraordinarily good and morally resonant story and a kewl movie to boot. Bravo to Blomkamp. We want more.

Islam Demystified

It occurs to me, watching this video, that there aren't many complications to Islam, and I think perhaps many who have argued against our Western culture as if it were incompatible with the nature of Islam are being simpletons. The reason I say so is that immediately I recognize a very easy parallel between the combination of postures and prayer in Islam to various positions in Asian martial arts.

My generation has taken a shine to a number of Asian cultural traditions in ways our parents have not. And it seems trivially easy for me, having grown up in California beginning adulthood in what we used to call The Pacific Rim, to have some appreciation for those traditions without any sense of alienation or threat. I consider it odd to not have a very concrete understanding of the differences between Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Phillipino. (Even though everybody fails at alllooksame.com)

It is my opinion that we are so unfamiliar with Arab culture that we don't have a safe place to put its religion. Of course I don't conflate the two, but I think an appreciation for the Middle Eastern is a necessary precondition to the sort of diplomatic comfort we have with many things Asian. I think it is our difficulty with the expression of the devout which confuses things. Speaking for myself I want another way to approach an Arab Muslim, and without the smallest cultural vocabulary, not even food, I am at a loss.

I thought about it yesterday walking my daughters on the pier, and I said out loud the same thing I always think when I see a large tank full of crabs. How hungry did the first man have to be when he pulled one of those hideous looking creatures off the bottom of the sea, to crack it open an eat the insides? The very idea is forbidden to the Halal diet, but here "it's considered a delicacy". When the Spousal Unit worked the Atlanta Olympics and went to a crash course in International Manners, she learned that showing the bottom of your feet is very insulting in the Middle East. If I remember correctly no Arab man worth a dime would ever let a dog lick his face, and quite frankly I'm down with that sentiment. If you use the 'OK' sign with your thumb and forefinger, you're calling an Arab an asshole. I can see how that makes sense too.

But looking at these simple prayers, I get it. I understand the discipline.

One cannot forget that most people on earth are tribal and feudal, and very many Muslims are, outside of the Koran, illiterate. I think of Islam, perhaps falsely, as a desert island religion, one whose central clerics have not reconciled its practices with modernity. I suggest that as a criticism not only because Catholic scholars have convinced me that Christianity has been reconciled, but also in the Information Theory sense of the scalability of a system of knowledge. Islam seems to capture more of human attention than God's grace demands. It suggests to me and overproduction of religion, which is an intrusion in modern life, but probably very useful in a tribal or feudal arrangement.

In a certain way, my daily devotions on this infernal machine take the place of the pedestrian entertainments of television and sports. I sympathize with Albert Murray's sentiment 'Literature is my religion'. I too am devoted to a lifelong pursuit of moral wisdom. But if I were not to have the collection of minds with whom I interact along this medium, I would certainly do more quiet reflection, prayer and temporal discipline. But so long as there is a world here, I will attend to its linkages, be they weak or strong. I know that the connection I feel to this online world brings out my best.

I would like to know Arabs and other Semitics as well as I know Asians, which is enough to feel at complete ease and somewhat conversant culturally. Not to prove what a cosmopolite I am, or to counter some bigotry I harbor - but for the sake of knowing something I think we will all eventually have to know in our global world, an appreciation for their themes

Paragraph 56

56. The Christian religion and other religions can offer their contribution to development only if God has a place in the public realm, specifically in regard to its cultural, social, economic, and particularly its political dimensions. The Church's social doctrine came into being in order to claim “citizenship status” for the Christian religion. Denying the right to profess one's religion in public and the right to bring the truths of faith to bear upon public life has negative consequences for true development. The exclusion of religion from the public square — and, at the other extreme, religious fundamentalism — hinders an encounter between persons and their collaboration for the progress of humanity. Public life is sapped of its motivation and politics takes on a domineering and aggressive character. Human rights risk being ignored either because they are robbed of their transcendent foundation or because personal freedom is not acknowledged. Secularism and fundamentalism exclude the possibility of fruitful dialogue and effective cooperation between reason and religious faith. Reason always stands in need of being purified by faith: this also holds true for political reason, which must not consider itself omnipotent. For its part, religion always needs to be purified by reason in order to show its authentically human face. Any breach in this dialogue comes only at an enormous price to human development.

-- Benedict XVI

This is why I am Catholic. The Church speaks to me and offers me the whole of its knowledge, embracing all of human experience, directed by the unifying voice of the Pope. It works to unite me with God recognizing that as a full human being I require more than blind acceptance and unconsidered submission. The Church intrinsically defends my freedom by recognizing all of my capacities and needs and points my way to human self-realization on it's only path - towards God.