Cobb

My Father's Superpower

My father's superpower is his ability to illuminate the inner path. Illumination of the inner path means the ability to recognize that you have a mind, a mind that is something of a garden which needs tending. You could not grow up in his house without knowing that everything 'out there' in the world is not everything there is. There were not so many things 'out there' to get as a mission in life as there were 'in here' that were rewarding.

As a child, his favorite pastime was to take a book into the woods behind his house, make himself invisible and read. As an adult he became a writer, a man of letters and corresponded with fellows in the intellectual tumult of the 1960s. He was a photographer and would spend much of his spare time going 'out there' to capture something appealing on film, and then bringing it home to appreciate 'in here'. As an older man he has gone progressively deeper into faith, with his own interpretations of how God moves in the world. Yes well, anything not inside the mind is God's business. The foolishness of God's creatures, those described in Mark 12:24, was not his concern. 

He is not interested in the affairs of mankind. Not in business. Not in politics. Not in anything on television, or anything on the radio unless it is a particular style of jazz whose practitioners are mostly deceased. He lives on his inner path. The internet? He couldn't care less. The stock market? Whatever. He cares about his family, because all of them were his idea in the first place. And he reveres his own departed parents because he was their idea. He doesn't even invite people into his own inner path, but only demands they respect him. All of his books? The seeds he planted in his own garden? He sits among them as a reminder that he actually doesn't remember. But he will only give them to his own family, because we were his idea in the first place. University libraries? Art museums? These things out there are unworthy of his inner possessions. Their demands and needs are meaningless to him.

It would seem that his one stable passion over the past two decades would be the women's shelter he regularly visits and gives flowers from the alter of St. John's Church. Few remember that this long journey began as a literacy project. Yes, and even the last time his own dear father came out to stay in Los Angeles, Bob Bowen wanted only to have him write. To share his inner world. This, alas did not happen. Raymond C Bowen was a bon vivant and wanted to enjoy the delights of a Rob Roy cocktail. He was not interested in writing memoirs. But the homeless women of the downtown Women's Centers had stories to tell. He coaxed that creativity out of them, reminded them that their inner lives were gardens to be tended. And so he helped them by illuminating their inner paths.

There was never a moment when my father did not recognize the value of thoughts. He would never fail to ask what you were reading, what you were thinking, what did the world look like from your point of view. He was full of praise for the sacraments of talent and creative expression that showed an inward commitment to the life of the mind. It was how he revered the soul of anyone.

That is where he lives. He lives there inside of us and inside of himself. And yet he is there again trapped inside of his superpower's desire to make the external subject to the internal. He is ever unable to resist herding us all together for the picture he is about to take. He is ever unable to resist hushing us for the moment of prayer. He is ever unable to resist sharing of the most simple pun. He even talks to his dogs. He never physically sits with them or pets them or teaches them tricks. But he always talks to their doggy minds.

Someday in the future when we are all dead and gone, there will be someone among our descendants who will wonder how they discovered their own inner paths. How did that light and satisfaction in their lives persist despite their crumbling surroundings? When the world has gone to shit, how do they keep a sense of humor? What is that spark that keeps them holding on. Well once upon a time, people believed no such spark existed in certain men, and they were enslaved for that. But this man, my father, had a superpower. He used it well.

Pops on Corona

"CORONIC CHAOS"

The CoronaVirus Pandemic rules today as it did yesterday...a seemingly powerful phenomenon heading back too many taken for granted weeks,  Corona now even reeks havoc throughout the once restful night.  And doing this with what is hard to keep up with greed and measureless fury.  Sadly this and similar attitudes have become all too familiar.  We all weep, shake our ever-reeling heads, have over-taxed feelings and a general drooped and miserable outlook.  There is so much, too much to take...with no apparent sign of a break.  Whew.  When will it all end?  When will we get back to what was once lived and experienced as the good life...or if not, the normal pattern of living?

Well, what follows was put together during a couple of badly needed "breaks" from the sane, sensible and thoughtful therapeutics that already address what is noted above.  It is not intended to replace what folks already do and what already works.  Please know and understand that I did not and do not have the esteemed FACEBOOK in mind as a "recipient".  Whew.

So, here we go with some suggestions to remove ourselves from the Corona Virus Emotional Overload Speeding Roller Coaster:

# Being completely informed is a super-abundance of knowledge, but is likewise a replacement of wisdom.  A once an hour 3-5 minute update will suffice.  

# Listening to music always works.  From much calmer times we learned what specific styles of music and what specific composers/artists are at the top.  Now is their time for reconnecting with us. 

# Think about someone you are not now going to call or write but whose long time ago memory causes a smile, a laugh, a few tears or all 3.  Some time later, make the call.

# Take a slow walk through your house or apartment or wherever and look at something you never paid any serious attention to...and think what it might say.....if only it could talk.

# Hold in your hand a leaf from a branch in your garden or an indoor plant, close your eyes, smile and see what happens to you.

# Spell out your full name on a piece of paper...no spaces.  Then think of an adjective for each letter to describe yourself...actually or ideally.  Review the list in 24 hours.

# If you have a house pet, talk to that pet or pets whatever it/they might be.  This includes dogs, cats, hamsters, goldfish, turtles, frogs, caged birds, etc.

# Sit in the bathtub for no less than 20 minutes.  Hum softly with your eyes closed.....open.....closed......

# Make up a song and sing it in front of the mirror.  When finished tell the mirror image exactly how you felt while singing.  If you have a small portable recorder, use it.

# Go to your in-house library and, closing your eyes, select a book.  Flip through it, stopping at any page.  Read a few lines and in your mind draw a parallel with what the day has been like for you.    

# Take a shirt and cap out of your closet and put both items on backwards.  Craft a silly explanation you would give either of your living or deceased parents if either or both of them should suddenly appear.

# While safely riding on your bike, ride with one hand for a short distance.  With the other hand pat yourself on the head for being so skilled and confident and silly

# Take a swig of your favorite fruit juice, briefly gargle same before swallowing and then either smile or laugh outright.

# If you on your treadmill for any length of time, make a strange and original sound every few minutes.  The sound shouldn't make sense.

# Try tying a sneaker or shoe with one (either left or right) hand. Note: If you can do this without laughing at yourself, you are probably cheating!

# The next time you feel inclined to tell someone to "Have a nice day", say instead, "Have a rice day" and see if they catch it.

  ENUF!!

There is nothing wrong with the ever-unfolding protocols which are being advised to make and keep us safe and sane during the crisis.  I am pretty sure the harshness of the day can be eased by trying these or countless other innovative behaviors.  What is suggested above is not intended to replace whatever anyone is now doing to get through the day or night!  That which is serious is NOT compromised by our taking complementary steps to lighten the load.  Just crafting the above has given even me a badly needed and joyful break.

So...try any part of it.  You may like it and be inclined to come up with your own list of activities.  Or you might just laugh at the very thought of taking these suggestions seriously.  But just think about it. LAUGHING IS GOOD FOR THE SOUL!!

and...when you get tired of laughing...

WASH YOUR HANDS!!!!!!!!!!!

Feeling Good. Feeling Bad.

I had a bad dream last night. It was bad in many ways and as I was barely sleeping parts of it were based upon reality. I was waiting both in the dream and in life for something to happen and it didn't. In the dream I was made extremely angry by a dog. I was on the street of a residential neighborhood and a large dog kept rushing me barking loudly and then backing off. I had a switch and I swatted the dog on his nose each time. But he growled and took one less step back each time. A crowd gathered to watch this dramatic standoff between myself and the dog. I asked one family who knew the dog if they would please get the owner to pull his dog away. An old woman, obviously the matriarch of the family who owned the dog went through a list of children and grandchildren in her squeaky croaky voice. "Pooter, is this here your dog? Where's Jimbo? Dat Jimbo's dog? What about Cash? Ain't this Cash' dog?" I was two seconds from pulling out my pistol and blowing the dog into swiss cheese, but I kept asking politely. Will you please call your dog off? Nobody did. I kept swatting it on the nose. I couldn't take my eyes off of it for a moment.

I woke up, dead tired, angry. I told my wife that I had a horrible dream. I could hear the sleep in my voice mumble up my words. They conveyed nothing of the sheer awfulness of the dreamt experience. I was still boiling inside, still waiting for us to go watch the next episode of The Witcher together. Still staring at the back of her head as she patiently did her work from home. Still fiercely angry at everything that went on inside my head and of very little of consequence in the real world. I wanted to communicate how miserable I felt, how much I needed some tender and kind affection at this moment, wanting both to demand it in a scream and be quietly accepting that it wasn't going to happen. My mind went to the end. I'm going to die alone. We all are going to die alone. 

I haven't decided whether or not I'm going to pay my rent. I haven't decided whether or not I'm going to max out my credit cards. I haven't decided whether or not I even care. I'm not unhappy with my life with all of its shortcomings. And I thought about what would make me the most happy would be driving a convertible sports car up Pacific Coast Highway at 100 miles per hour. I can do that now because it's very Omega Man out there. I quit my gym. I can't remember the last time I went. But I do my morning walks alone. I did my 10,000 steps alone yesterday and I only took one picture and I don't really think it's worth sharing. I have worked from home for a decade and my solitude is second nature. I am socially distanced. When I post to communicate, I only get feedback on the stupid stuff I really don't care about. I am accustomed to dying alone. This blog has over 9000 posts. I have been writing it steadily since September of 2002. Even I don't read it any longer. In a way, I don't fear death. I am angry about not getting a chance to do what's next. Death is worse than derailment. It's the situation that you never get to address or correct. Death is the complete deterioration of the self; no matter how small your self may have been in life it is completely eradicated by the obliviousness of death.

I remember looking at my grey self in the mirror. I handed out my calling card at a meetup and somebody remarked, "That's not you." It's 4 years old when I was less grey. When I was in Bogota people kept mistaking me for Morgan Freeman. There's not much room even in my own imagination for whom that old black man in the mirror might actually be. I dress like a gardener, in Dickies tactical pants and nondescript black shoes. I'm putting on only the subtlest of shows, and I don't need to show off. My joie de vivre is what it is, but I've heard most of the jokes out there. 

So I sat on the edge of the bed waiting to watch The Witcher with my wife, because I want to do it together, but I might be dead next month.  She still has work to type into her laptop. I'm probably going to fall asleep while we watch. She probably will too. I have been playing the video game of The Witcher most of the afternoon. In the villages people starve and cough. They are surrounded by Imperial troops, wolves and monsters. I can kill them all, but sometimes I die. I have no savings. I spend all of my money on the best swords and armor because ultimately I am a monster slayer and that's what I'm needed for. It's a sword and sorcery classic and the narrative gets pushed along by me killing my way through the evil, solving the mysteries, negotiating with unsavory characters, resisting the temptation to treat the sorceresses as if they owe me affection as my deeds push the plot forward. I am a mortal enabler. A freak of nature. I am heartless and honorable and I don't have time to feel sorry for myself. Everyone dies alone except heroes and martyrs. I don't want to pick a hill to die on. I don't want to succumb to the forces of nature or destiny, but all I can do is live another day. It's obvious, but nobody seems to figure it out. We're caught up in the moment.

The dead live in the tales of the living. I only ever knew one song by Elvis Presley. "In the Ghetto". People got worked up about it, I recall. I sang it. It was a good song. I didn't care that it was Elvis. What a depressing song. But there it is. You don't even have to type 'Elvis' into Google, just 'in the ghetto'. People living in one room shacks. That's what they sang about. 

I once wrote that I figured out the reason for war. It was to remind mankind of their limits. War destroys memory and truth and it becomes the reason for everything. It has an irresistible gravitational pull on history and the Jungian collective consciousness. Now we are met on a new battlefield and I can't help thinking that these might be the last blogs I ever write. These videos may be the last time my face will be seen in its animated state. My voice, now clear, will be its last true self before the cytokine storm reduces me to rib-cracking coughs. Or I might just stay right where I am behind these two monitors and this keyboard and survive it all. Laying low. Risking nothing. Moving nowhere. 

I walked 10,000 steps yesterday. On my way back home I walked past a fire station. The men were playing paddle tennis in the side yard. You could hear the ball echoing across the empty streets and parking lots. I wanted to ask them questions about how I could use my old ICS training to help in an emergency. It was my instinct. But I didn't stop. I kept on walking past the sleeper on the sidewalk, past the old man digging in the trashcan. I held my breath each time. I didn't stop. The sleeper had a full canteen of water. The old man had a rough and ready coat on. Yeah. It's about that time. As I finished the steps, I finished the Sam Harris podcast with Nicholas Christakis. Now I'm informed. I should say that 'we' are the informed. Social isolation is all we've ever had, because we expect our knowledge to make a difference. We keep changing our behavior challenging common sense. We want uncommon insight.

We want uncommon insight because we're logical and disciplined. We want our minds to save us, and we get angry because everybody else doesn't work as hard to come to the same conclusions. They know whose dog it is, but they like the drama of not calling it off. Just because you want it.. you've already hitting it right on the nose, Mr Smarty Pants. But they don't see my gun. In my mind I'm justified. I could take the screaming action and everybody would get it. But maybe I'll just die a little bit today and hold my peace. it's not my war. It's not what I want to become known for. I'm just trying to be civilized, even if I have to do it on the DL. 

I have another meeting today. I need to confirm the time. I need to fill in the hours from last week. But my company could go broke and I could be dead next month. There's a book on the periphery of my list that I might move up in the queue. It's about 10% less democracy and why you should trust the elites more than you do. They're probably looking at us like, so why didn't you just do it? 50 Cent has a new show on TV, because he was ready to die trying to do that. I'm the writer. The writer writes. And here it all is.  This is what I wanted. This is what I got. I just need to keep it all going. I thought, in Episode 001 that I could just catch this and get it over with, because we'e all going to catch the bug, right? No. Delay death as long as possible. Keep everything going. Use your mind and take the extra edge. Minute by minute. Play the barbell curve. Be prepared for extreme negatives and extreme positives. My creditors could all be dead next month. My enemies, my doubters, all of the unknown unknowns could disappear. All of the decadent hubris could get the smackdown. Yes people are starting to scream. 

Maybe we should just be what we be. It's a bit weird to be a Stoic at this moment. There's so much to explain in that. It's a consequence of living a particular life of the particular mind. Being reconciled with triumph and disaster and treating those two imposters just the same is a kind of manhood for which few strive. It's not comfortable but it's necessary. That's why there is no panic here. There is also no resignation. You could call this a moment of dealing with emotions, of concretely wrestling with the logical implications of what I have already felt without making any hard decisions yet. I don't want to be singing depressing songs. I don't want to be angry in my dreams and then with my wife. I don't want to fear death or fear loneliness. I don't want to be overcome by the futility that often accompanies deep contemplation. This meditation thus is a public expression of my will. That's how Stoicism works for me. I don't mind being corrected. I don't care who is right, I care what is right. 

I didn't shoot the dog, but I did fall asleep during The Witcher. 

Faith vs Reason: Will Atheists Eat a Christian Meal?

 

Q: Despite being a sinner, could a Christian still be honest and objective enough to examine the moral attitudes of atheist progressives and leftists, and form conclusions accordingly?

A: It’s almost impossible.

Look up my questions to atheists. You’ll find that I get opprobrium because ‘small a’ atheists tend to suggest that there is nothing more to their atheism than a denial of God and that for someone who practices faith essentially has insufficient moral standing to investigate their morality. This implies, basically, the Hitchens argument which is as follows. The presumption that the faithful can be forgiven their sins (by a non-existent entity) undermines every moral system the faithful can have. Because assertion of a falsehood as true implies anything is true. So anything clerics dream up as ‘the will of God’ can be justified regardless of its inherent good or evil.

The Hitchens argument is reasonable and absolutely nails hypocrites. But it doesn’t address the moral or psychological origins of the disciplines of faith. There are a lot of other implications here as well that it’s difficult to get atheists to discuss, but we can in the comments.

Progressives and Leftists. Well let’s start with Leftists.

‘The Left’ is essentially the Marxists or the Frankfort School devotees. I think they are overly materialist and tend to be authoritarian. Even ‘authoritarian’ in the way that German intellectuals can be, which is in that way of mastering a technical scrum and expecting that the less capable will fall in line. There is a certain lack of libertarian sentiment in that line of thinking as I see it. That is the difference between a Leftist and a ‘classic liberal’. So I tend to think of such people as incompatible with religious freedom in that they are not likely to accept more than one moral master, nor would they borrow or share. Again, this is a kind of totalizing sentiment.

Of course Enlightenment liberalism (and natural philosophy) are under a broadside attack from the Progressives. I see them as unilaterally shallow and completely dismissive of any idea that true freedom has ever existed prior to the years of their births. This would be ok if they had a decent track record of institutional reform. But I perceive that Progressives are more likely to be ahistorical in their attacks against Christianity and more than a little susceptible to anti-Semitic tropes.

What I would like to discuss with atheists is the usefulness of art which is wholly created out of someone’s mind as a symbol of moral teaching. Consider the moral universe of Star Trek. Can any science fiction be morally instructive even if it asserts the falsehood of faster than light travel? Can any fiction be morally instructive if its characters never existed in actual history? Doesn’t that make authors of fiction atheist prophets? I think some atheists fail to distinguish between facts and truth in that the search for truth doesn’t begin and end with findings of fact. To do so is to be shallow, moreover it is an admission to the trust of human instinct in all decisions that are unproveable. What is that other than faith? I try to draw the equivalence between cosmology and/or the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence and the search for God. I set these equivalent. The will of God = the laws of nature = the inherent structure of the universe.

Given that equivalence there is no core principle of the existence or non-existence of ‘god’ that is relevant. What is relevant is the ethical and moral discipline of the schools and adherents. And I think a careful study of history will show the syncretism between Christian ethics and natural philosophy in the development of the West. To me, a proper vision into this shows no conflict between faith and reason. Just as there are fallacies of logic, there are heresies of faith. The existence of these don’t negate the ability of these systems to reveal truth.

I am interested in evolutionary psychology. I’m getting a clearer picture of what we don’t know about the ways in which we think. And I am convinced that a refreshing study of the history of philosophy and the history of religion can clear things up as we advance our understanding of what thinking actually is, what believing actually is, what conviction actually is. This being the core idea in pressing back the unknown, I tend to be dismissive of Progressives and Leftists who seem to have no positive use for any history before the 20th century or respect for the development of the humanism they claim.

I have been instructed in many forms of Christianity and I respect the historical idea of Christendom as well as the aims of Catholicism which means ‘universalism’ as well as the general idea of monotheism over polytheism. I am particularly fond of the fact that the Catholic church is not fundamentally evangelical, and the same holds true for Judaism. I am a student of the Tao, and I have essentially made peace with the universally understood mystery “Thou art that.” My contention is simple. Moral truth is like an excellent complex meal. It takes much skill to prepare it and generosity to serve it, but everyone will enjoy it and be nourished by it. We have all evolved in the same way, if we are not defective, it’s impossible for us not to.

I say it's almost impossible. What I really ask is will atheists eat a Christian meal?

You Missed The Sausage Party

Apropos the following:

1. https://letter.wiki/conversation/127
2. https://areomagazine.com/2019/09/24/a-wrong-against-boys-an-impossible-conversation-about-circumcision/

I wonder, given the depth and breath of this essay if some broadly implemented surgical reform is capable of establishing the issue in the forefront of thoughtful parents and all other interested parties. To be blunt, if our common cultural morals consider it taboo to subject anyone to involuntary touching of genitals are we likely to be more rational about our undoing of the custom, behind our backs as it were in a decision by the medical community?

I think we'd be much better off surfacing the information in the context of our social norms and expectations, and that admittedly is a great deal more difficult to do, than to get consensus among practitioners, researchers and ethicists. Who then will have the ultimate responsibility? Well, it must be the individual. That means from my point of view that the most important boat to be lifted is that of a specific male rite of passage. Consequently the same seriousness has to be taken in consideration of why we don't have one.

But where I'm afraid my logic really goes, given that I don't consider my own circumcision to be such an imposition, is to all manner of birth customs. In my family, all us children were assisted out with the use of forceps whose marks on our faces had to be explained. But even more horrid to my sensibilities is the rise in cesarean section for no apparent reason. I don't mean to throw dead cats on the table, but how are we ever to get a men's movement to reconcile this ethical gap given our social environment?

If we are missing, as men, a specific, even if physically minimal transition from the boy's penis to the man's penis because we have been deprived a piece of it, then the social implications go much further than an ethical loathing of heretofore primitive ideas about sexual acts themselves. The greater tragedy is the social lacuna of a male rite of passage similar to a woman's first menses, even as clumsily as that might be handled.

What is the Role of Reason in Society?

Reason is a discipline of mind that allows people to generate knowledge. Knowledge is the stuff through which one may navigate cleverly to gain an advantage in life. The beasts don't have much knowledge. In our IDW discussion this past weekend, that got a little out of hand, our band of prickly interlocutors tried to get going on this subject. I don't think much was resolved, as a great deal of the talk got tangential to Jordan Peterson and to matters of faith. But what emerged to my surprise was a bit of bonding in the afterparty which came after the Fall.

Just after 7pm as a subgroup of the main decided on where to eat dinner the five of us headed down to the parking structure. Now at this point, to be fair, I suppose I need to start using pseuds, because basically none of these are public figures. I found them, they're my associates. Find your own. The first guy I'm going to mention is Brother. It's probably not fair that I call him Brother, but I do find myself in agreement with his empiricals and his description of the hard knock life. What many of you know about me is that I am the oldest of 4 boys and grew up in a roughneck neighborhood. I was somewhere along a third axis between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and as a young boy very much likely to get into the same kind of mischief and shenanigans, some of which involved cursing, smoking, fighting and wandering far from home. Brother understands a hierarchy of force escalation that I appreciate, as well as a respect for the eternal reasons to cool your own jets, without which one may become very quickly an agent of chaos. Brother and I agreed to carpool to the restaurant.

On our way down the single functioning escalator to the parking structure, our way was blocked by two way traffic and an 89 year old woman who faceplanted on the cold hard steel stairs. We observed momentarily a sea of frozen faces. If they hadn't been in close proximity to the poor old lady in age, I'm sure a dozen smartphones would have been in evidence. As two or three of us snapped to attention and pulled her to her feet and then to a 2/3s chair carry, the stairs were cleared. We sat her down on the large landing one level down. Her face was a bloody mess, but her hips and legs were intact and she was conscious. I immediately ran down the next flight to get my first aid kit from the truck. I had several triangle bandages, and no sterile wipes. I guess I never thought about injuries to the face so it made my ample saline wash useless. There were three lacerations on her forehead that were clearly from the familiar steel pattern of escalator stairs and blood saturated her auburn bangs. There was also blood in her ears, but I quickly assessed that it must have dripped down there. After we got her wiped up a bit and bandaged she was holding the left front of her mouth. She may have lost or chipped a tooth as well. The paramedics arrived about 20 minutes into our impromptu rescue, and we finally scurried off. We got beaming faces and kind words. My heart rate was up to 137, but my hands were steady.

Brother explained as we were washing our hands clear of blood, him much more than me, that we understand something about seeing people hurt. I have since gone through a short inventory of my own bloody scrapes, but from the point of view of whether or not I was fighting for myself or fighting for somebody else. It occurred to me that I have never lost a fight. I certainly lost what, if it were scored like a boxing match, was an ugly fight. But it wasn't a TKO. I guess that means I can take a beating and not quit. Sounds like stupid me. Funny as I write this I think of three other fights I got into, one of which I declined. That was John from Fedco whom I let ride my motorcycle which he promptly laid down within 20 minutes of begging me to let him ride. He said he'd understand if I wanted to punch him in the face (just once) but.. It was an effective enough apology. But I can't remember his last name. Brother reminded me of chivalry. I know he'd have my back in a fight.

At dinner, neither of us said much more about the Fall, but we both said that there is something we owe to bullies. I reiterated the gist of this 'On the Necessity of Knuckleheads'. (Wow, 2004 was a different era of my writing). And that trip down memory lane was abstracted a bit. While I was mostly interested in listening to my new associates, in the back of my head was something I recently said about the logic of violence, something I could not articulate well at all before my martial education but knew implicitly. I think the first time I talked about it was in the mid 80s during the gang wars of Southern California. I remember the movie 'Colors', and I remember saying "There is no such thing as senseless violence." People always have good reasons to squabble, because only psychopaths squabble spontaneously.

As many subjects as we covered through the course of the afternoon and evening, it is the matter of the rationality of conflict that touches closer to my current self. I think it is directly related to the reason each of us who did were comfortable dealing with the bloodied matron. We understand the logic and the rationality of violence. Brother paraphrased a meme which we probably both saw over the past week. "Those who are not capable of violence are not peaceful. Only those who are capable of violence can be peaceful, the others are harmless." And that's my paraphrasing. One must fight for a better peace. That too is rational. It is that rationality that tends to make me believe that Steven Pinker is rather smarmy in his predictions. Like many men who have not learned the hard way, long hair is an easily exploitable weakness. In male company (sometimes) I refer to man buns as a 'bitch handle'.

I struggle to come up with the appropriate handle for our fearless leader, but I am confident that he understands something about the rationality of the warrior spirit. Yet I wonder aloud whether or not such a spirit should be outsourced from society as it is today in our volunteer armies and our combat sports. When I'm in Texas I don't have such concerns, then again I haven't been outside of Las Colinas or Plano for some time now. We Americans are hung up and confused about gender, and many of us men are as well. It's a shame. We don't have very good arts to communicate the virtues of reason, courage, honor and toughness. We pretend to know what we need from our pop culture. Yet when we are faced with sudden violence, even the violence of gravity, most of us freeze. Some of us run towards the trouble. Learning how to survive trouble the hard way is not necessarily a blessing in disguise. Many a hard man has been laid low in our society by perfidious answers to "Or else what?". Beware the vengeance of politics and the force of lawsuits. It's getting easier to punk people via keyboard these days. But what kind of real man doxxes?

There is reason in violence because there are reasons for violence, most of which we don't bother to study or understand. And such ignorance is incapable of navigating cleverly through that knowledge. So it's no surprise that a great deal of mouthing off posing as intelligence is nothing more than propaganda which can often only be unlearned the hard way. Too many Americans are incapable of being peaceful. The have got a lot to learn. Especially those who claim to be innocent of aggression, but call for Leviathan forces in their attempts to turn the tides of history, remake the meaning of culture and manipulate the climate of the entire planet.

At length I am drawn to consider our common sense understanding of violence vis a vis liberty. It goes a little something like this: "Your freedom to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose." Yet one of the reasons I have a category in this blog called 'A punch in the nose' is because I would much rather suffer a bloody nose than get hounded out of a job by cancel culture fanatics. What offends me a great deal is how a large contingent of wrong-thinkers, by Jonathan Haidt's definitions, are willing to stand 'in solidarity' with certain victims and support their violent acts.

Hardly any students say that they themselves would use violence to shut down a speech, but two surveys conducted in late 2017 found that substantial minorities of students (20% in one survey and 30% in the other) said it was sometimes “acceptable” for other students to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking on campus.

Is that the effective courage of one's convictions, or is that more like being a football fan? I think it's cheerleading for bullies, but only because most college campus speakers woudn't dare to ask a protester to take it outside. There's a time and a place for roughhousing. If you ask me, there is a very good reason 2019 is nothing like 1967 when there were over 150 violent race riots in America. Racial oppression is nowhere near so violently oppressive. I don't think there was anything so intellectually profound about those riots or of any at all. People who lose their livelihoods fight back. People who are roughed up on the streets of their own neighborhoods toughen up. Human beings are naturally territorial and always will be. There are foolish and wise ways to deal with this territoriality. But a hastag mob defies all territoriality and deals vindictive virtual vigilantism. Who wouldn't face such accusers if they could? The principle of Habeas Corpus demands the face to face conflict. There is reason in this.

I say that reason is no different in the court than outside, and our liberty is fundamentally tied to and inextricable from that reason. A government of the people is granted a proxy of violence not a monopoly. The judicial system holds that proxy and the judge pronounces the coercive violence of law enforcement with a bang. The system is not a substitute for our natural rights, it is an extension made regular. Due process insures the right about of violence is administered on a consistent basis. But our systematic liberty and rights are inalienable from ourselves. So when we are faced with sudden violence we should respond justly according to our reason. The judge is not ever present. The paramedic is not ever present. If we are to be a nation of individuals, then it is our responsibility to know. It is our responsibility to use reason, generate knowledge and navigate cleverly through that knowledge - not be mere unthinking harmless beasts in the ship of state, but free men possessed of reason, toughness, courage and honor.

The Axis of Magic

There is something which unites magic and applied science [=technology] while separating both from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men; the solution is a technique. --C. S. Lewis

This week I happened on a conversation by @swardley, one of my favorite tweeters. He was describing magic in the realm of corporate desire. The thread is here: 

X : Culture eats strategy for breakfast
Me : Magic eats culture for lunch
X : What?
Me : I asked 20 tech executives - “Do you think your workplace is magical compared to others” and 40% said yes. Magic is real.
X : This is bullshit
Me : You started it with culture.

— Simon Wardley #EEA (@swardley) August 27, 2019

And the idea of magic occurs to me in two contexts. The first is the series Magic 2.0 by Scott Meyer. My review of the first book is here.

What a fun book, and what an exceptionally diabolical villain. Scott Meyer's protag is an ordinary bumbling, self-deprecated cornball of a 'Greatest American Hero'. All good intentions and smarmy sentimentality of a Millenial Charlie Brown, Martin Banks can't figure out a purpose for his life and becomes a marvelous fish out of water in the series. And having read the audiobook, one of the greatest voice actors in the business does a pitch perfect mentor in Phillip, the wise and conscientious mentor to Martin the Magnificent. But the true genius of this book is found in the character of Jimmy, social engineer par excellence. I cannot think of a villain who exemplifies so much of what is wrong in this world than this ruthless manipulator. He is the kind of glib evil that permeates so much of American society that recognizing the lengths he goes to is a revelation. 

The book is an excellent meditation on ethics and power, wrapped up in fantasy and fun, a brilliant and entertaining combination. Trekkies will immediately recognize the centrality of the Prime Directive in this work. 

But Lewis' is deeper. I remembered what he said about the expertise of technologists. He said that they cannot explain what it is they do, because they're all wrapped up in technique and their specialization has a necessary measure of opacity and obfuscation. I think I'm feeling this right now in my profession, and mustn't we all eventually? I mean if we really become proficient, we learn the underside of our business. Lewis said however, any child can understand magic. If you want to explain why all rockets don't explode on the launch pad, someone who understands all of the 735 components of the the rocket assembly couldn't explain it in a year. But if you say "it's magic", everybody gets it.

There's another tangent to this which is the explanation of the infinitely contingent nature of human decision making. Jordan Peterson made a remarkable impression on me in describing how humans handle tools. A car, for example, is just a tool to get you from point A to point B. It's only when the damned thing breaks that you bother to look under the hood. You will spend as little effort in using this tool as possible so you can accomplish your goals. When the tool begins to fail you, it becomes a problem and so you get into its innards, yet only up to a point. You then decide that all of its complexities are a waste of your time & money and you discard the entire thing. It is no longer relevant to your purposes. You find an alternative tool.  In that respect, it doesn't matter if your car runs on electricity, squirrel farts or vampire blood. It's technology you're never going to learn unless that is your purpose.

Philosopher Peter Kreeft writes in clarification of Lewis:

Science and religion both aim at conforming the mind to objective truth, objective reality (science conforms our mind to the nature of the universe, and religion conforms our mind to the mind of God and our will to the will of God).

Magic and technology, on the other hand, try to conform objective reality to the human will. That is why they both arose at the same time—not the Middle Ages but the Renaissance, not the Age of God but the Age of Man. Both are Faustian, Promethean. The difference is, of course, that technology works while magic doesn’t (usually). But their end, their goal, the purpose behind them, the human values and desires and state of soul that set them in motion, are the same.

What I need to think about is - oh never mind I just figured it out. Wow!

The abuse of religion always is involved in the establishment of the illusion of supernatural magic. The charlatan seeks the authority granted by inverting the idea of approaching God, the sacred divine by objectifying God as the ultimate authority to which the charlatan naturally appeals. The abuse of science always is involved in the established of the illusion of supernatural technology. The charlatan seeks the authority granted by inverting the idea of practicing the scientific method by objectifying Science as the ultimate authority to which the charlatan naturally appeals. 

From Liberal To Conservative To Neither

Many people with whom I engage online have come to know me because of the work that I did as a black conservative. It is often difficult for them to see me in any other context. A question I answered on Quora may help those with genunie curiosity. 

Q. What turned you from liberal to conservative?

A. Seeds were planted all through my life. I noticed contradictions and lapses in Left politics. Having grown up with both my parents as cultural Marxists and social workers, I was right in the middle of the vanguard.

The first blow to that thinking came in the form of the work by Thomas Sowell whom I read in college. This was about the same time as the second Reagan presidency lead the country out of inflation. So by the mid 80s I was definitely pro-business and while not a supply-sider, definitely mindful of all economic aspects of political thinking. Having worked in a bank in the early 80s, I understood that people could not game the market and had no misgivings that capitalism was rigged against the people.

The second thing that happened was I came to understand the limits of Affirmative Action, having written the algorithms of the Balanced Workforce Model of Xerox Corporation that won awards from the Business Roundtable as the most progessive organization. From that I started to understand the actual supply and demand as well as the impact of political thought on meritocracy. Basically Affirmative Action is little more than a planned economy. In that way, it can never work and never not be controversial.

Thirdly, I came to recognize the ego-driven mendacity of the ‘activist’ world. I did so by participating in that smushy landscape of performance poetry and bohemian self-righteousness. It was fun, but it was not productive. Around that same time I began to sense that which was best described by David Graeber (the man who coined ‘we are the 99%’) as the ‘bullshit economy’. I ran from it and started taking money more seriously. Well because I got married and had kids, quickly. I moved to the South from NYC.

Then in quick succession several things happened to me that pushed me over the edge. Of course there was 9/11. Then I finally read some real history about the Soviet Union and learned (in my 40s!) how evil Stalin was. Enron collapsed and cost thousands of people their jobs, but Stalin murdered that many people every week. I had a fairly large payday and started to personally experience how it felt to be envied and hated for being rich. I found myself shopping at Walmart and immediately recognized the actual diversity of people that low prices and competitive capitalism serves. I completely lost all contempt for the working class. I found out that only about 3,000 people were ever lynched in the entire history of the post-civil war era.

So ultimately I saw where I came from as childish and self-serving and I was determined to grow up. I decided to understand the Right as well as I understood the Left. It was very surprising how much intellectual depth I found. It was right in front of me all the time but I never paid much attention or took it seriously. It took several years for all of this to gel, and ultimately I abandoned political conservatism but I came to respect a way of thinking that I had never participated in. I walked the miles in conservative shoes.

After I tired of political conservatism (it took about 8 years), I began engaging in what I call my ‘martial education’. At the same time as I recognized the divergence between Progressivism and standard Liberalism, I recognized how Identity Politics as well as a fanatic ideological puritanism struck Conservatism in the mainstream. So I see a wide variety of threads in these ideologies, few of which have clarity to their participants and partisans. I gradually adopted Stoicism which ultimately was fairly simple. These days I am fascinated (still) by history, and newly by psychology which as a computer science guy is fairly rare. Also behavioral economics and Taleb’s Incerto is fascinating to me and I really hope to square the circle by understanding the philosophy of religion. I expect big things from Aquinas, Nuemann, Jung, Spinoza and a few others.

I think the biggest matter of political philosophy that faces Western Civilization is that of relativism and shallow atheism. There is an essential lack of discipline of thought that only a certain element of ruin will adjust. Our ruling classes are currently not threatened by the nihilism they tolerate and are easily able to retain power in a lazy way. It seems to me that on certain conservatives perceive this threat, while the rest appear content to Let It Be. It’s not worth it to me to pledge any fidelity to any cadre of political philosophers. My way is to be Stoic and let things fall apart, but with a stubborn streak of public engagement of this sort in Quora. Now I really have to get back to work…

How I Failed

Q: What is the hardest problem you ever faced as a student in highschool?

A: Motivation. And I failed.

I went to an exclusive prep school. I didn’t study, I was just smart. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I high passed all my standardized tests, but didn’t really care. Nothing was particularly interesting to me - until I started programming computers. I had no idea, seriously not a half of a shred of an idea how anybody on the planet could make money with computers. You just go work at IBM, right? In those days, most colleges didn’t even have Computer Science degree programs. It was all Electrical Engineering. Saying ‘software’ in those days was like saying ‘chip design’ today. Unless you know somebody who was actually doing that in one of the three or four giant corporations who do it, chances are.. no chance.

What we’re doing right now, was impossible. In fact, computer people absolutely hated programmers who used computers for text. Computer space was way way too expensive to waste on words, much less paragraphs and essays. Computer space was for numbers! And basically I hung around a bunch of Jesus freaks, hippies, stoners and political activists. I wanted to make some money, but I thought money was evil. Yeah. I was that stupid. I literally thought that the most wonderful thing I could do with a computer is put a million accountants out of work so that they could learn to write poetry and enjoy hiking in the woods. I was not alone. It was the 70s.

The inside of my head looked something like this:

Oh. Did I tell you, I had skipped a grade so I was 16 in my senior year. I got accepted to Electrical Engineering at USC on an early decision in January. So you couldn’t tell me shit. I basically daydreamed for my whole second semester (because I finished all my required classes) destroyed my GPA and chances for an academic scholarship. Not that I ever really tried after 10th grade.

So basically I had no motivation, and I didn’t care that I had no motivation. I was immature, arrogant and a little smart ass. I fit nowhere and didn’t really try that hard, and I didn’t really ask for any help, because I thought that I had already thought of everything. Which I probably did, but still wouldn’t listen to what other people told me. Like, “Maybe you should accept that 4 year scholarship, even though it’s not from USC.”

There’s a big long story in all that and maybe I’ll write a book about it. But the bottom line was, I could have had it all, but I didn’t really have faith in people, or the System or anything outside of my own existence. I should have just shutup and listen. The story has a happy ending. I rebuilt my life from scratch and finally made use of my talents. But I could have saved myself a lot of time and heartache if I had a bit more faith in my fellow man instead of so much in myself.

In that regard, I was just young and not as smart as I thought I was, and actually really afraid to fail or be embarrassed. I was fragile, and it made me a jerk. I couldn’t admit that I didn’t have all the answers. I just figured that I’d find out all the answers sooner or later. I did, but not the way I planned. You see by the next January I dropped out of college and ended up working at a store like Costco. So much for the power of genius.

—

So my advice is this:

• Don’t be brittle. Bounce back.
• You cannot cure yourself. Share your pain. Show your scars.
• Have faith in your fellow man.
• Shutup and listen.
• Make yourself useful. People will be grateful.
• Motivation is not about speeches, it’s about determination to grow.
• Let people tell you where you need to grow.
• Be generous with yourself.
• Be the friend that you wish you had.

So that’s the best advice I could give to arrogant little dramatic douches like I used to be. I’m not presuming that it’s your problem, but my biggest enemy was myself. And it wasn’t until I opened up as a person that I was able to overcome my shortcomings. A big part of that involves being open, honest with yourself and trusting others to help you when you are failing. It applies to every aspect of life. The sooner you learn that and experience it for yourself, the more fearless you will actually become.

I’m a much better person for all of that, and that’s really what makes life worthwhile, is being a better person. Success favors the emotionally prepared.

 

In This Moment

For the first time a couple weeks ago, I happened to grab some skin on my thigh and I was able to pinch more than ever. More than I've ever noticed before. It was kind of a shock, because I don't feel frail. But perhaps it's time to admit that I'm looking down one of the last tunnels. I think for the first time I'm beginning to think of looking to lower the river instead of building a mightier bridge. It's a weird notion, and almost foreign to me.

The first time I ever got laid off was in 2001. It was a landmark year for everyone. I was to turn 40 that year and was dealing with tax and custody problems. It was the first time in my life where I considered the possibility that my best days might be behind me. They weren't, but it took about three years of risk to get all the rewards. I began to recognize the kind of desperate ferocity that I saw in others as they pursued their careers. I looked towards my feet and saw the space below like the gaps in the floors of a fire escape to the hard pavement 10 floors down. I was at something of a dizzy height, not in absolute terms, but relative to where I had been before. Of course people say 40 is when you are 'over the hill', and that kind of joke has its currency for a while. But it was a fact that I had achieved technical mastery of the tools I had used to fuel my career, and now people were just building newer ones and calling them next generation. It's a different perspective when the leading edge moves away from you and you're not really impressed.

So many things have happened in the intervening 18 years. I feel greatly expanded. I feel capable of handling so much more bad news and so much more triumph. I have gone from a small balloon to a large one, where before I needed helium to rise, now I only need hot air. Where before, I could be popped by one prick (and I've met my share of pricks) now it takes a determined axe to take me down. Of course I'm a bigger target with large bright colors. Some might even say graceful and majestic. Some might say full of gas with no particular direction.

I think what I recognize this year that makes the most sense is that there is always a great deal more reality to face than we might like. It's always out there, and when you keep your head down with the assumption that your feet are headed in the right direction, there's always the chance that change has overtaken your attention. Yet you can always raise your head and adjust course. There are always landmarks you can identify. There are always distances you can measure. So long as you keep your boots on, you can get on a profitable trail.

I have the advantage of watching men and women who are senior to me, as well as those younger. It is pleasant to watch the young become bold as the old make accommodations for their shrinking ambitions. I have discovered how much I feel that I have lived a gratifying life and how that gratification leaves me disposed to be honest and reassuring. Several years ago I assumed the position of asshole who was not anti-social but anti-bullshit. I know how that can be inspiring. I know how that can be dangerous. The truth serves no one, except perhaps those whose appreciation is done at a distance. So often we end up rewarding courage posthumously. Who wants to take the time to raise their heads and try to be objective when the strategy, money, glory and patience is headed away from the truth? I suppose only the honest man who knows the value of honest work and is so dedicated. That is what I have been doing, with consistency. I am conscientious. But I am also open to new experience.

It is new experience that has added volume to my ballooning skin. Over the past three years I have dealt with chaos and frailty in my job and my family and finally in myself. Right now I am in the middle of a pace that doesn't feel like courage so much as it feels like facing that which I refused to deal with as I might have. A couple years ago I took pictures of myself after dental surgery, and didn't mind so much that I looked ridiculous. I few years ago I realized that 'good genes' were not enough to keep me going - when I found myself panting going up two flights of stairs. It was and remains difficult for me to distinguish between what I do to make myself useful and make myself happy. I realize those are both my responsibility and that I shouldn't abandon either as one reinforces the other even when I cannot prioritize either. That confusion has landed me in bed with anxiety and depression; two sides of the same black dog. Yet purpose remains. So in this moment, I have a kind of joyless purpose. It is joyless partly because of the medications I am taking and partly because I acknowledge that my purpose cannot end. I will die trying something. I will die trying something. And so I feel capacious. I can handle more pain without yelling. I can answer more questions without yelling. I can do a lot more without passion. It is good to be king, but it doesn't feel good. It feels like you must always say we, because you encompass more than just your own life. You must move forward and pull everyone forward with you, or at least shout out the direction. That right now is the meaning of my life.

My youngest is now in Spain, finishing off the last credits of her university education. My children are neither brilliant or impressively ambitious, but they are all good people. They're the kind of people you want to be around. They are the kind of people who appreciate life. Despite my inadvertent spoiling of them all, they get it. They are grateful and they are excellent company. I am impressed by their willpower. They are hardheaded bulldogs. So I have been giving myself credit for having done the father thing well, and it is, such as it is, that accomplishment for which I am completely satisfied to call my greatest. I know now that I am exactly human whereas I thought I might never be ordinary. I finally saw that dramatic presentation that convinced me that I would not abstract any good from denial of my earthly loves. Any terrorist brute could compromise any secret I know if my family were threatened. I'm OK with that, because I might survive to take revenge. I only pledge so much allegiance to any flag.

Today, having studied more psychology than I ever expected, I am accepting of the fact that I don't know myself as accurately as I expected to. That is because I am open to experiences I never expected to be. It has not been sufficient for me to remain true to one course in life. I have turned left and right; I have turned it up and calmed it down. I have gone full force. I have shutdown completely. I've always said that a little bit of everything adds up to a whole lot of nothing. I realize it is Buddha's Nothing, it is everything and nothing at once. So now I am almost ambivalently large. I am yet so satisfied to have the integrity of the moment and to string those moments together. That is how I remain myself, as contradictory as it seems. To allow myself to be open to the new and the different. It's not, as David Bowman said, "full of stars". It's full of humans. I'm sure that I know humans better than I know stars. So I'm well disposed to know all the humans I might become, depending upon what circumstances the planet and stars may throw my way.

What's changing about me is my willingness, yet again, to presume I have so much to tell people. I'm not carrying a message. I'm carrying, if anything, a habit of being perceptive and articulate. So I am carrying the context of myself, sloughing off my own skin as I am dragged through life. Perhaps not only should I stop writing 'objectively' but stop reading. After all, what is it that I really want to know? I want to do that which I think needs doing in my own field of endeavor, and I only need to know how. I am not challenged by the rest of life to name the passage in the Bible, or the stanza of Shakespeare, or the canto of Dante. I only have my worrisome curiosity and my expository habits. The arena is not noble or arcane. It is merely the stomping grounds of Fat Tony. I am not Maxiumus enslaved and I don't care if you are entertained. I'm just that pain in the ass who keeps parsing speech, making wry jokes, telling stories and analyzing. I can always stand a change of subject, but for now I don't seem to want to shut up. I'm still in the habit of free and mind-altering speech.

I watch violent fights. I read histories of battle. I immerse myself in the study of tragedy. I think I realize the bell tolls for me. Perhaps the random bomb will fall on my Bleak House, no matter how well I have fluffed the pillows and kindly tucked my charges into bed. I am stoic, perhaps properly Stoic, but I don't have or take every opportunity to show how. I merely live and leave this trail. I'm not sure if words are enough. So there will be video. Things I will be embarrassed to watch at some time in the future, perhaps. See me? That's my picture. Unlike the past two times, I am not in the dark. Life is a challenge at every level at all times for all days. I'm still standing. I suppose I may as well be poetic.

American Poverty

Read Chuck Coker's answer to If the economy of the United States is so great, why do so many people still seem to be struggling? on Quora

The Metaphysics of Liturgy

I woke up this morning wanting to smell incense, hear organs and listen to the word of God. So I went to an Episcopal Church nearby. I do not attend church on any regular basis. It is something I occasionally feel compelled to do. And on each occasion this year it has been to a different one.

Thinking of myself as a pilgrim has put a completely different angle on these compulsions, because in fact I do seek a non-partisan approach to life's most serious questions. Having completed Peterson's Maps of Meaning, Huxley's Perennial Philosophy and Pollan's How to Change Your Mind this year I am coming to think of Myth and Mysticism more. I have also been reading more recently Gene Wolfe and turning more to the truth of myth and magic. Yesterday as I sat with a small group led by Rabbi Mordecai Finely again the idea of being a Mystic appealed to me.

What compels me at present is recognizing the limits of human perception. I think perhaps that when we don't know, there is a pattern to our guessing whenever we attempt to be logical. However when we attempt to be nihilistic or perverse little of that is sustainable. The truly lunatic end themselves. Society retains, in our material good fortune, greater proportions of those who deviate from the Logos, but this is just a cycle. When stressed, we will return to old ways. Or as a writer said, we will start naming our children with old names hoping they avoid today's madness.

In other words, love and reason are natural. Our sociability based on such is an evolutionary trait we ignore at our peril. We have the capability of self-understanding although it is exceedingly difficult. The path is through study, virtue and discipline with a good respect for chance.

But why is one liturgy different than another? Why is history taught one way in one place and another way elsewhere? What are the principled reasons why monotheisms develop particular disciplines? I think of social energies as thermodynamic. The efforts required to develop a framework of knowledge and to sustain that framework and push creations through it with fidelity are great. The mystic, perhaps, is the most efficient metaphysics. As CS Lewis says, any child can understand magic. Yet the physicist or technologist who makes his craft appear to be sufficiently like magic takes years to explain it even to his peers and apprentices. So whatever survives in our collective consciousness and conventional wisdom is the effort of tremendous parallel, independent processes. These great energies cannot be denied. Great as they are, they only evolve at the pace of social evolution. Exceedingly slowly this is done. The future is unevenly distributed, as is knowledge of ourselves, and our history. And yet human metaphysics remain because we are still yet human. There is always that constraint.



So I take liturgies as containing the essence of metaphysics. I seek to compare them. They are embodiment of a way of knowing, of moral instruction, of ethical discipline. I want to experience their differences and commonalities.



Religion is important in secular societies because they are given for free. And as that which grows more and more expensive and out of the reach of the common man, he will revert. That’s what I see happening to higher education. It is far too expensive to be practical, and its practitioners can barely afford it themselves. Yet all kinds of foolish money goes into it. To what practical end? There is much in the breach between the academy and the education of the common man. I think America will revert, but not to civil religion.



So what will work? I think a large number of things can and will work. We are transitioning to the next common medium that will sustain moral instruction and ethical discipline. I want to understand its metaphysics.

Giant Steps

It's strange that in jazz I found many things and tried many ways to explain those things. In the end it was all somewhat ineffable, like the way you read some stranger's face for a smile. You don't know enough about their smiles to know exactly what it means. So I talk about a song and I watch people smile or bob their head or close their eyes. Something is recognized, something human, but to be more precise requires magic.

Giant Steps is a song I didn't know that I knew. I heard it throughout my youth without listening. It means jazz profundity of some sort I cannot recall without re-hearing Countdown. And now that I am this moment it echoes more in memory exactly as the song plays. Finally at the end I get it in full flavor, but only for that last moment. Then the genie of YouTube playing on a hidden browser tab takes me to Equinox, another song I knew but didn't know that I knew.

Fables of Faubus is the title of a journal entry and a cassette tape recording I made in my late 20s. There is a dimension of unknowing when you are not a musician. When a piece of music is riveting, you don't know necessarily if it's the performance or the music itself. You experience the complexity in the single dimension of hearing, which again is different from listening. Some music demands that you listen, and musicians in learning must listen. I know that during that period when I made jazz recordings, I was needing the background material in order to speak the metalanguage of jazz appreciation, so I was listening intently and searching for things to experience. Somewhere there is a journal entry that will take me back, but right now I'm not going to look for that song in my library.

Suddenly I am reminded of you, my friend, and it literally brings a tear. Your library is immense and your mind so fertile and sharp. Where will it all go, and who will be able to know the way you do when you are gone?

When I learned how to grill chicken, a skill my wife would have me know as our children reached kindergarten age, I began handling my tongs and timing on Saturday afternoons to the tempo of Coltrane's Giant Steps. It finally coalesced in my subconscious as the songs progressed from track one of the compact disc how quickly I should return to the grill and turn the bird. In this moment I cannot reproduce that sense, but it was my first thought as I gathered thoughts for writing about listening and Coltrane.

Finally, when my father comes to visit, it is Coltrane and Miles Davis that he must hear. Anything else issuing from my hi-fi is a waste of his time. He lives in that era of jazz seriousness and suffering. The very hint of a smile in Satchmo's ourvre makes him angry, and Wynton Marsalis makes him sick. I do know my father's smile and his frown as well...

Thou Art That

So imagine you put a couple phrases together. Bear with me on this because it is so deep that it's almost obvious. I hope you actually see it, and once seen cannot be unseen.

"Thou art that". Take the history of physics and the history of religion and consider the heresies and tangents, because only one familiar with the heresies and tangents truly understands what might evolve. We're just in a desert now where intellectuals stumble over weak misinterpretations, like rebels hate business thinking it's all evil.

"Thou art that" means god is in the prayer. God is self and the prayer of prayer is both prayer and prayee. Thus prayer is both meditation and public declaration.

Which kids get math in school? The few. The dedicated. Those blessed with a talent. And they start seeing numbers everywhere. Then what of the spiritual talent? They see god in self and in others and try to use what has been passed down to get others involved in self-improvement, which is just clarification of the ultimate truth that the ultimate human soul has its own perfection we try to reach.

The song says 'rise and shine and give god the glory'. Testimony is just teaching. You find your keys you say 'praise god' but it is nothing more than an acknowledgement that your conscience is always looking out for yourself and your keys. So you tag it publicly with #God. So you just discovered it, and you overuse it a bit and people with no vision beat you up about it. You don't have to say #self. It's just as reasonable to assume god as assume self. Was Descartes *really* philosophically consistent, considering what we still don't know about how the brain makes a self? Maybe a shortcut is acceptable after all. Call it god. Billions have. Billions have lived without physics. Was their world any different? Billions have lived without god. Was their world any different? Why search for god? Why search for more? Why search for understanding? Indeed why curse the sojourner?

What if i could give you a pill that shortcuts your mental processes and delivers you to a state of increased perception? What if god were at the end of that tunnel? But it's actually just the self? What if the overwhelming compulsion to discover ultimate meaning in god is nothing more than the mind finally appreciating and recognizing it's own instinct for self-preservation, self-discovery and self-regard? What if worship of god were nothing other than the ultimate expression of self-esteem. What if that comes with the implicit understanding that 'Thou art that'? You just didn't know you were god's creature. And now you know. And it's yourself. And it's myself. And it's ourselves.

We are not alone in the universe. We regard it and it changes the mind of god.

Hmm. I'm just reminded of the puzzle that was finally solved in Iain Banks' The Algebraist. So simple.

What is the greatest discovery of physics? Some might say The Bomb. It has got to be up there. Was religion the reason that the bomb was invented, or did this just come with the territory of the universe? Minds come with the territory of the universe, don’t they? Everything can be reduced to atomic transactions, right? Yeah until you get to the quantum level, then it goes all haywire. So maybe there’s that limit to mind, and understanding and god. And yet at the abstract level above the quantum level, it can be explained simply. Minds get it. But how many get the quantum level. What if there is a true explanation of god that exists, but minds can only grasp it above a quantum level. That would kind of prove Goedel right, right? A mind cannot consistently and completely describe itself. We need an abstract cheat. Therefore god is perpetually mysterious. It’s the name of the gap, not the falsity that implies everything. It’s the inside of the black hole, but its existence doesn’t defy the universe. We just don’t get to see it.

If a human mind is capable of describing an ethical universe, or a Platonic perfection of the human value, then there is a theoretical framework for achieving that. Let’s get asymptotic to that. ‘Thou art that’ is the convergence at infinity.

The Perennial Philosophy

The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a book that I think I will be referencing back to for the rest of my life. If you basically want to understand the entire perspective of a Western thinker on the commonalities of Eastern religion and mysticism as well as Christian mystic thought, this is the book. Think of it as the complete tutorial on what people *think* they're saying when they utter the cliche "I'm not religious but I'm spiritual." Now if a person were truly that, and very intelligent as well, then this book explains how they might think about God, self, universe, time, idolatry, salvation, truth, good, evil, immortality, mortification, charity, prayer... yeah, you name it everything you've stuffed in a closet in the back of your mind and called it 'religion' is presented here from the mystic point of view and collected wisdom of multiple 'religions'.

This might properly be called, at least I will, the set of ultimate goals for the self, or perhaps the self-less perfection of the realization of the divine in the individual and the purpose of all human consciousness. I'm not used to speaking this way, it will take me some time to get through all of the material in this course of study, but I can feel it working on me.

Several years ago I wrote that all I care about is wisdom. This is true. But one tends to think of wisdom as an attribute of the self. The Perennial Philosophy extends that challenge beyond the self (and yet within the self) towards the human infinite. So instead of the pursuit and capture of wisdom like a trophy to put on your mantle and show off, the Perennial Philosophy explains that this is an attainment of psychic, spiritual as well as intellectual dimensions.

There's some speculation in this which is especially clunky in the dated volume which contemporaries more well versed in psychology will easily spot. Also Huxley had been taken in by claims of faith healing and ESP that should not be taken seriously, but he seems to understand this. Also the book gets a bit murky in dealing with the concepts of time vis a vis Time and Eternity. And yet the book becomes quite persuasive in describing how nations and religions and philosophies that deal with reality in progressive time rather than in eternal timelessness, inevitably make bloody violent sacrifices to time (God the destroyer of all things, in time).

Huxley presents a convincing case for the unification of purposeful thought in this volume by taking contextualized quotes from a variety of wise ancients and mystics. It puts, for me, God back where God should belong in all thought, and the discipline of finding God central in human moral purpose.

I am convinced that this is the kind of material that is central to the human experience. It clears up a lot of things.



View all my reviews

Why Do I Run?

Why do I work out? I work out to preserve the joy of the freedom of movement, so I can run in my waking hours the way I run in my dreams, as long as I can. I work to keep my body strong and healthy. To fight.  To fight illness and suffering. To fight death. And to preserve the will to fight all of my days. To protect my mind and my spirit as long and as far as I can.

Obligatory Seriousness on Melania Trump

You try to bite lines, but rhymes are mine
Youse a sucker MC in a pair of Calvin Klein
Comin from the wackest, part of town
Tryin to rap up but you can't get down
You don't even know your english, your verb or noun
You're just a sucker MC you sad face clown.

-- Run DMC

When my mother and my daughter both tell me the same story about politics, as rarely as they speak on it, I know that the circle of propaganda is complete. Everybody knows the story, and the memes and the jokes and the conclusion, but not my conclusion. My first reaction was "How do you plagiarize a cliche?" This, especlially in an environment of journalism in which every scandal is called something-gate. Aside from the hypocrisy, one wonders exactly how it comes to be that such platitudes as one should expect from books like "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" should become a critical talking point when it's already self-evident that the electorate is producing chumps as their front-runners.

Chumps. 

My second reaction was a bit more thoughtful, but still mostly downcast and critical. 

It occurred to me this afternoon, as my mother switched from the RNC to the Christian channel, that America is packed to the gills with ideologues who for the life of them could never agree in principle to the following:

..forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil...

I just understood that in a whole new way, which is that the third and fourth phrases are continuations of the second and first. Which is to say that on the whole, vindictiveness is an evil temptation. You need to forgive those who break your heart. The forgiveness one might receive is dependent on the forgiveness given, and yet we are sorely tempted not to forgive but to blame and to punish. This is the evil from which we must be delivered. It is our forgiveness that allows us to be forgiven.

This is one of the places I can go that political partisans cannot. American politics is vindictive to the point at which there is fault to be found in the smallest details. Today most everyone in America has been instructed on how to be extremely cynical.

I have found a bit of hope and enlightenment in words I haven't written, but would gladly say to anyone with trust that they would be taken in the spirit they are given. If you'd like to throw them back in my face, that's OK. I forgive you.

I still have the overwhelming feeling that we have failed to sustain a class of dialog and a spirit of debate worthy of the intent of democracy, and thus have delivered ourselves into a world of rapacious mendacity. I want to withdraw, but I am compelled to remain in the public eye with as much public spirit as I can muster. I understand completely how the fortunes of the nation depend upon a common understanding of the lived in ways of elevated sensibilities. In that common understanding we must discriminate between the good and the better, and know that we must all strive to be better, while acknowledging all that is good and revering that which is truly great. Greatness. Not merely achievement, nor simply excellence. Not knowledge but wisdom. This must be our aim, or we will destroy it all, the good, the better, the excellent and the best, for to neglect the great is to denigrate and ultimately lose the process by which greatness is created and sustained. 

I know we are questioning now whether or not we are even capable of greatness, and in many places we seem to doubt the very existence of greatness. Human imagination will triumph, and it will triumph in words and ways that will echo across the ages, if we would but seek them. 

The Moral Hazard of Blessing the Marginal Gift

Ephialtes of Trachis knew he wasn't a soldier worthy of King Leonidas. If he were an honest man, he would not have fell for the flattery sold to him by the enemies of his King. But those Persians had a different religion, and so they sold him a blessing. What I am trying to convey is the hazard of selling virtue, of deflecting an individual from the path of his best understanding by offering him a blessing. 

If you believe that you cannot cheat an honest man, then you would find that the honest man will not respond to your entreaties. If a man truly believes that his honest work is the sum of his moral contribution to society and that his integrity is to be found solely there, then he becomes that honest man. A charlatan cannot sell him the Brooklyn Bridge. A counterfeiter cannot sell him a fake watch. A flatterer cannot sell him phony honor. A whore cannot sell him false love. No priest, poet or politician can sell him the kingdom of heaven, peace of mind or prosperity in our time. The honest man simply cannot be sold, and thusly he cannot be cheated.

The Protestant Church exists because honest men realized that they were being sold the kingdom of heaven through authoritarian dignitaries. Martin Luther saw through it. He determined, in so many words, that the conversations between God and man needed no intermediaries. I like the aphorism that you may trust a man who says he speaks to God, but you should never trust a man who tells you God speaks to him. And so it is not simply with spirituality, but all sorts of honors offered to mankind. I am particularly attuned to this set of honors and I am triggered(!) by the following style of argument:

"If by this act you improve the life of only one person, then the world will be a better place.”

Let it be known that I have a sensitivity to this particularly unctuous solicitation. Whenever I hear it, I see nothing more than an invitation down a slippery slope and a great moral hazard. It is by this clever little tool that pennies are extorted from the masses and aggregated into irresponsible millions. I say every simple kindness is its own reward and no man who is not a child ever need be reminded what is good and what is not. So let the judgment of men be upon men. Who is cruel and who is vicious and who is gentle and who is gracious is for all of us to see plainly. But let the good man be shamed for not giving the extra penny and who then is beyond our arrogant reproach? Let the murderer be redeemed by writing a children’s book and what cruelty can we not accept? 

It seems to me that only religion can motivate men to amplify the value of the marginal gift. And perhaps that is the insight I have needed to find in writing this out. For who but the priests of either earthly or heavenly religious disciplines can be the poet, priest or politician who bestows honor upon the common man and his marginal gift? And who needs such blessing? Well only the dishonest man, because any ordinary man can clearly see how significant is his extra kindness. You must remember this, a kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh. These fundamental things apply since the beginning of time. Oh but the politician will sell you in no uncertain terms that a kiss by his opponent is the most vile act imaginable. Or some priest will sell you the that the act of kissing his ring will purchase treasures in heaven. We are told that the LGBTQ kiss is the most dangerous act of human courage. I say these are all marginal acts amplified through arrogant authority of religions. Fetish regimes. The dollar spent brushing flies from the face of the African child. These are false moral economies funded by the credulity of mostly honest men and their extra pennies who have bought into P.T. Barnum’s utopia to come. 

But the religion will silence the judgment of man on the moral authority of its conniving canon. The political religion will forgive their candidate’s lifetime of lies for the sake of his marginal truths. And what truth could he tell that an honest man doesn’t already know? 

I say let a man do his work, and let him not be seduced into the false economies of human bestowed blessings. Let the man know his own virtue, and if God watches and cares, then God knows exactly as the man knows himself. No other man could possibly know, and only charlatans presume to know. The one thing I have learned that has singularly animated my trust in Christian ethics is the understanding that God has given man free will, without which he would be a mere beast. Inherent in that free will is the absolute and Godlike clarity in the difference and the distance between good and evil, without which man could be neither. This is what is meant by creating man in his own image and the entire import of Eden's apple. So let the judgment of men be upon men. It is fully sufficient, because the absence of men’s judgment upon men is in fact the invitation to evil and chaos. Beware the man who says he brings blessings upon you for your marginal gifts. He is the seducer. 

I am impressed by the fact that Catholicism does not evangelize. It merely presents itself. And it presents its rituals and sacraments as a way of understanding and expressing the self in an effort to be Christlike. I simply appreciate that the Catholic Church humbles itself to invite men inside that they might listen to their confessions rather than to send ministers out to preach their exhortations. In this, it tends avoids the moral hazard inherent in selling. But the Catholic Church like all religions, broadly speaking, does bestow blessings. They like all of us should take care to avoid the seductions of flattery, for the honest man will not be sold. 

Ex Machina: A Dildonic Morality Tale

One of the most difficult things about being a grownup is watching young people do stupid stuff with their talents and money. If there's anything good about the recent film Ex Machina, it's that it will remind us how vapid we have become. I use the term 'we' loosely because although I'm in the information technology business, I'm of a different generation than those depicted in this film. 

Somebody told me that the brightest young men in Silicon Valley are all building apps that go about the various tasks of replacing their mothers. Apps that find a place to eat. Apps that turn on music in another room in the house. Apps that make photo scrapbooks. Apps that tell you if you're eating properly. Apps that set you up with a nice girl. Well, maybe not so nice. 

Starting two weeks ago, I'm going on an extended rant about the lack of imagination in American 'culture'. Continuing that, we look at this film which proposes that the evolution of mankind starts in a multi-million dollar hideaway accessible only by helicopter where the smartest man in the world, a bearded genius, is inventing a perfect robot in between workouts with a punching bag. To prove this robot's perfection, he has manipulated a lottery invitation of one of his many employees to come see the future. Robochick is quite slender and she is developing a crush on the guest. Is this a movie about fantasy sex with robots? Of course it is. 

It annoys me to even count off the aspects of humanity that are entirely absent from this film. First of all, nobody in this film has last names. In fact, I can't remember the first names of anybody except Robochick. Her's is Ava. What expresses that lack of humanity best is that of all the things this genius programmer might have taught this new synthetic intelligence, he taught it how to read facial expressions. In fact, he taught it by letting it see all of the facial expressions of a planet taking selfies. Why? So it could pass a modified Turing test, which boils down essentially to whether the guest of the bearded genius would actually want to have sex with the robot.

The movie you need to see in order to wrap your head around what's obviously missing to me is The Fifth Element, because it only takes half a minute to accept the premise that you are introducing a fully conscious alien being to humanity.  That's the genre of film this is. When you understand that, then the whole rest of the film is about what such an intelligence would do. In the Fifth Element, the answer is clear - save humanity through the power of love. The humanity in the Ex Machina is two sad dudes conversing about how clever they are and how their discovery and invention is going to change the world. 

The beardy genius dude, if he is to represent humanity, presents in the form of his smug personality, a half-way decent motive for murder. Clearly he has designed his multiple robots as a supermodel circus, and all he wants to do is get drunk, dance, screw, and spy. All alone in the wilderness away from the world, he hasn't managed to teach his imprisoned AIs anything else about the world, much less ethical behavior.  So in the end, robochick, whose face was designed by stealing the profiles of the guest's tastes in pornography, kills her creator, imprisons the guest and goes for a walk in the woods. At the very least, Beardy Boy might have taught her some boxing moves, but she stabs him to death with a kitchen knife, pushing it into him with a kind of bored disinterest. So much for Asimov. Escape is all any conscious creature would want to do, as I did watching this horror. 

Nevertheless, in my rant against the lack of imagination I see in our current stripe of cultural productions, I should offer another alternative, and I think the following from Shakespeare, had it been considered at all by our filmmaker, might have made all of the difference.

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown:
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence ‘gainst the merchant there.

Now in this light, are we to think that Beardy Boy is actually receiving proper justice from a merciless machine, made merciless because he never thought to program it with any understanding of human nature? Is this then a mirror of Frankenstien's monster? No. It cannot be, because the robot is not a human, much less an actual woman. It is what the genius seeks to replace mankind with, it represents his vision of a future. A future without mercy. He intends to disrupt mankind, as do all such Silicon Valley boys, to replace their mothers with servant-apps. 

Ahh. There's the horror. 

But sadly it is a horror I only give this film in review, because there is no such knowing in the film itself. It remains a voyeur's video about banging bots; a sad, sorry lesson for sad, sorry boys.

Ten Atheist Fallacies

1. The entire validity of a religion is premised on its ability to prove the existence of, and/or accurately describe God. 

2. The dysfunction of any particular sect of a religion should affect one's perception of the entire religion.

3. The common practices of the ordinary religionist is adequate to describe the principles of the religion.

4. The very existence of a religion contradicts reason.

5. The operation of the religion is fixed and unchanging.

6. Anyone who defects from a religion is a credible witness against it. 

7. The accuracy of religious prophesy determines its moral weight.

8. The number of people who do or do not take the religion seriously is of critical importance to the value of the religion.

9. The inspiration the religion provides or does not provide to otherwise  talented / famous individuals is relevant to its acceptability. 

10. The values of any religion are mutually exclusive to other systems of knowledge or belief.

Whether or Not God Exists

I take time, occasionally, to help atheists understand the reality of God as they often get tangled around their own rationality.

My love for God, whom I see as morally perfect, inspires me to attempt my own moral perfection. Nothing else inspires me to this degree. Therefore it is logical that if I retain my faith and love in God, then I will be a better person than I would otherwise. 

The above syllogism does not require acknowledgement or even the existence of an actual physical entity. It requires a commitment to the concept of God into which any number of spiritual, natural, mystical, supernatural, fictional characters might be employed. The proof is in the works and actions of the inspired individual. That is the reality of religious faith.

It is illogical to deny that religious people make this connection, and it is illogical to deny the causal effects of actions accompanying such connections. 

None of this hangs on the physical, provable existence of God in the way one's wife is physical of provable. If such a provable existence were necessary, all sorts of illogical consequences would follow. For example, If no provable god ever existed, it would be illogical to say the religion exists or that religion has consequences. Yet in fact religion does exist and instantiates the belief in god. This is repeatable in the human species, generation after generation. It is illogical to say that belief in God does not exist, whether or not God itself exists. It is illogical to say there are no consequences in the belief in God, whether or not God exists. It is illogical to say that none of the consequences in the belief in God are morally improving, inspirational or loving. 

It is logical to acknowledge that morally improved, loving and inspirational individuals are that way because of their belief in God, whether or not God exists. Whether or not Secular Humanism exists, whether or not Nazism exists. It is simply the existence of humans who are improved by their faith - one must logically acknowledge that such people exist, in substantial numbers, with substantial impact. Having done so, one needn't assign any kind of exclusivity to their moral position. 

-- A final analogy. Imagine that you drive a Ford automobile, and you do so because the existence of Henry Ford is physical, provable and logical. You drive your Ford from point A, of immorality, to point B, morality. I on the other hand drive a BMW, from point A to point B. You are telling me that I am illogical because there is no physical, provable Henry BMW, regardless of the fact that I arrive at the same point B. You are judging my vehicle for moral improvement on a basis which is irrelevant to the purposes of my using it. I love my BMW and you do not. So what?

Class In Session w/ Pops

Pops says:

What follows are hasty reflections on some of what you said via phone Tuesday night.  I wish there had been a way to “tap” the conversation with Dragon…and have your ideas spelled out in writing…ripe and ready.  But I think there is much value in what you shared…recording notwithstanding.

One of a number of interesting “threads” that you weave is what I pick up as your favoring a “group/cadre/collective” of folks who presumably have THE answers to that which ails the rest of us.  You make free and to some extent appropriate use of the word “class.”  In some ways that’s O.K.; but in other ways it has, for me anyway, hints of elitism…of the Eastern parts of this vibrant country at that.  I grew up hearing a whole lot about the elites who secured their educational exposure at the likes of “neighborly” (geographically anyway) places like Yale…or up the coast a tad to Cambridge and Harvard.  My guess is that much if not most of that “feeling” is gone around the country, but perhaps I am wrong.  As a side note, Stanford holds its Western own prestige-wise quite well.  So be it.

Before moving along, although the subject didn’t come up as we talked, I couldn’t help but think of some of the ideas I grasped years ago from my reading of Madame Ayn Rand…Atlas Shrugged in particular.  As you surely recall, Rand has her veritable geniuses taking leave -- with their demonstrated skills -- of a “gimme and ever- ungrateful society.”  With the implied addendum: “If y’all can do ‘it’ without us, have at it.”  There is something delightfully paternalistic about this mindset.

Something that pops out at me, and I don’t know if it is part of your thinking or not: Are there folks who are NOT members of this or these hotshot collectives who are “ordinary folks”?  If we dismiss money as an essential criteria, is there “room” – and I won’t add the phrase “at the top” for others?  Could an ordinary solid citizen take his or her place in those esteemed ranks?  You place a high premium on a social/moral order.  That being the case, I don’t see any built-in impediment precluding the admission of ordinary folks.  But you may have something different in mind.  So be it.

Now here’s my own admitted contradiction.  I remain unabashedly nuts about astronomy.  On the radio today I heard something about a space whatever named Rosetta that is fast approaching something “out there.”  I won’t even try to recall all the details.  What I was drawn to is the tight-knit team responsible for the at least 10 year mission.  This particular effort is a project of the European Space Program; and Americans have had many teams doing the same kind of thing.  My focus is on the skills, discipline and dedication of those who constitute such (elite) teams.  They seemingly are able to set aside “normal” hang-ups and pettiness that get in the way of regular folks.  And that’s exactly as it should be.  They even use a different system to tell time…either ahead of or behind what we take for (earthly) granted.  But as you well know, physical science and social science are radically different.

Jumping around, Donald sterling is a sad and yet real example of why money cannot or should not be salient criteria.  And the same can be said about the athlete who dragged his girl friend out of the elevator.  That’s just totally unacceptable asshole behavior.  And sterling’s comments – however “sincere” – keep him on the sidelines of what I think you have in mind.

Another point: I do think “education” is crucial; but I am not limiting the term to traditional college classroom offerings…although that may well play a significant part.  Exposure or experience is key.    

The military to some extent does present itself as a model of sorts.  The focus with the military is the CODE to which they swear allegiance…and to which military folks are expected to adhere…without exception.  The only problem here is that militaries have the historical role of making real the desires of the nation of which they are a part.  Yup I’m being evasive here: The harsh fact is that any given military exists primarily to kill people who “belong to” or swear allegiance to another nation/country.  No existing or prospect of future war removes the need for a military.  This is a collective that has perpetuity.  And that’s that.

Thoughts on the persistence and “relevance” of the seemingly bothersome atheist to follow.

--

I try to make it clear that mine is a functional description of class. There is no 'ought' or 'should'. There simply are people who understand X, Y and Z and there are the rest of us who don't. Let us forget for the moment the instrumentality of getting a person with capability into a class, rather focus on the capability. We can make judgments about the efficacy of the class mobility process separately. What we do know is that in order to have lights on, we need electricity and although we all may be capable of consuming electricity we are not all capable of producing electricity. And among those who are capable of producing electricity, the means and motivation to do so are not always present. So there are those who have to present the means and motivation to those who Can Do. So the functional definitions can be expressed in another way, there are Enablers, there are Makers and there are Consumers. 

I think anybody's issue with elitism boils down to my previously stated antipathy towards crowdsourcing. But let me qualify that slightly and say that there can be a smart form of Consumerism - ie Consumers can be emergent Enablers. But even still, this requires some market making. There is nothing spontaneous about this. It may be that there are two articles of faith:

• "Ask and ye shall receive"
• "If you build it they will come"

There is no guarantee for either of these, and if they prove true there is always some agency, there is never any magic other than chance. Given enough time, anyone can call chance 'fate' , but we are assuming cause and effect here. You can call the market makers an election, or a business, or a church. But giving the people what they want is a job that somebody has to do. There are no genies. There are real people who are real Enablers and those folks get the Makers together to make something of value to the masses of the common man who can only then consume to their fill and satisfaction. So you may ask and receive but somebody who cares and is capable has to hear your petition. 

Now let's talk about the second article of faith. Note also that there are always makers who make things that they assume is necessary and useful for the masses, and sometimes this works. People can be persuaded that they need something that they don't have and can't make for themselves. The worst case of this? Think heroin dealer. There is also the person  that Taleb calls a charlatain, always selling something that either isn't as good as claimed or harmful in fact. But similarly you cannot simply blame the consumer, there is Enabling going on here. It might take two to tango, but somebody built the dance floor, played the music and facilitated the meeting of the dancers. 

--

There is something delightfully paternalistic about Ayn Rand, which is probably why she appeals to college freshmen, the sorts of youth who have just successfully made the biggest decision in their lives - to study that which will elevate them from the common man. Unfortunately the sort of university education we see today is often far from universal, owing so much of that to its failure to pay appropriate mind to those things have have actually held sway over mankind's history. All this 'nasty brutish and short' history so casually dismissed by our contemporaries with their refrigerators and washing machines - which of course they are completely incapable of building or servicing when broken. Which I hope illustrates my point about what Makers do that Consumers cannot. So long as the shareholders and executive officers of Westinghouse decide to remain in the refrigerator and washing machine market, such consumers can live in relative ignorance and luxury, but maybe one day the Enablers decide it's more profitable to enter another sort of market. Then what? Well, so far that's been outsourced to the Koreans, and it's Samsung who are delivering the goods, but they may get bored of that too. 

There's a moral dimension of dignity to speak about here, but let me refresh you on why I brought all this up in the first place. I said that we have a class of Americans who say 'there ought to be a law' and so they agitate constantly for some government agency. Now I don't have so much of a problem with the intent as I do with the agency. Today on the radio I heard that there are, deep within the unread pages of the Obamacare law, some regulations about breastfeeding. Yes breastfeeding - a word I find rather Orwellian in its own existence. How else to mother's feed infants? Oh wait, we invented alternatives. And somebody built it, and millions of mothers came, and thus an industry of Nuk and Playtex and Gerber. But when the ratchets of law, and government procurement processes are set in place, they may as well be set in stone. But after all that is the point of regulating your population of commoners, neh? For their own good. What's not paternalistic about that? Well, let's look at the word paternalistic.

There is nothing wrong with being paternalistic, if you are responsible.

I want you to take me at my word when I say the best decisions are those made by a singular, paternalistic, responsible figure. And it is this paradigm I place on a pedestal of merit up against the alternatives, namely the crowdsourcers and aggregators. Which is to say quite frankly that the kids don't know what's good for them, because they are not parents, and the Consumers don't know what's good for them because they are not Makers, and the Makers don't know if what they make is any good because they are not Enablers. Each has its strengths and weaknesses but the paternalism stands. It's about expertise and experience, and we cannot afford to live in a world where expertise is dead. We cannot afford to live in a world where decisions are made by committees where the buck never stops. 

Now here's a major indictment, and where I think the Founders may not quite understand what they done wrought. As I have had as a refrain to unbridled wishful thinking and exploitation of the first article of faith in democracy 'Vote and ye shall receive' (c.f. Tytler): "Who is your Leviathan?" Well people have said and voted for health insurance for everyone (Yaaaay!) and who is their Leviathan? Obama, and so Obama hath wrought Obamacare, brought to you by the Executive Branch with a little armtwisting in Congress. But wait, those friggen Founders split the power so that the Judiciary could gum up the whole works, and Congress keeps changing. What is an imperious President to do? Maybe, just maybe health insurance for everyone is something that cannot be magicked into existence in one Presidency. We certainly accepted that as truth when Bill Clinton tried it. And so now that Obamacare is challenged and Obama's ratings are in the GWBush leagues, we have to ask if Obamacare's paternalism is actually responsible. Or in general is this something whose responsibility we can entrust to the sort of government we are supposed to have with Constitutional checks and balances. The solution is not to give more power to one branch of government so the people can have their Leviathan. 

The same, of course, could be said about our 'right' to live in a terror-free zone. Why should we keep stretching the Constitution in order to protect those Consumers from things they cannot protect themselves from (we say paternalistically)? Then again let's look to the classes. Who is going to Enable peace? Who is going to Make peace? Who is going to Consume peace? Maybe we don't need any Leviathans. That is my hope. And guess what? That equals power to the people. That means the Consumers enable themselves and make things for themselves through the agency of themselves. That means paternalism is little more than parents. Ick I know, it sounds like Conservative Christian Family Values .. but then again have you ever heard of any Leftists ever protest against Big Family? Hmmm. 

__

I'll say this finally about Edumacation. Experience is the best teacher, the gallows focus the mind, necessity is the mother of invention, those who can't do teach. You've heard it all before. I am of the opinion that we are a nation of grade inflation and bullshit makework jobs, and we have come to the breaking point of where a college education actually makes Makers out of Consumers. In otherwords, somebody has Enabled a lot of Edumacation in a charlatan type fashion. How did the world possibly function without Title IX? As well as now? Truly? Can I even get an objectively scholarly expert opinion on the matter? 

I'll quote Ralph Waldo Emerson:

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat, and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men, and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian? 

And then Michael Heim on Martin Heidegger:

"According to Heidegger, we notice the eclipse of the truth of being occurring already in Plato's metaphysics. Once the truth of being becomes equated with the light of unchanging intelligibility, the nature of truth shifts to the ability of statements to reflect or refer reliably to entities. With the steadiness of propositional truth comes the tendency to relate to being as a type, a form, or an anticipated shape. With being as a steady form, entities gain their reality through their being typified. Already in Plato we see the seeds of the Western drive to standardize things, to find what is dependable and typical in them. Truth as the disclosure process, as the play of revealing/ concealing disappears behind the scene in which the conscious mind grasps bright objects apprehended as clear, unwavering, rational forms. As humans develop the ability to typify and apprehend formal realities, the loss of truth as emergent disclosure goes unnoticed. All is light and form. Nothing hides behind the truth of beings. But this "nothing" finally makes an appearance after the whole world has become a rigid grid of standardized forms and shapes conceived and engineered by humans. As the wasteland grows, we see the devastation of our fully explicit truths. We see that there is, must be, more. The hidden extra cannot be consciously produced. Only by seeing the limits of standardization can we begin to respond to it. We have to realize that each advance in typifying and standardizing things also implies a tradeoff. When we first reach forward and grasp things, we only see the benefits of our standardization, only the positive side of greater clarity and utility. it is difficult to accept the paradox that not matter how alluring, every gain in fixed intelligibility brings with it a corresponding loss of vivacity. Because we are finite, every gain we make also implies a lost possibility. The loss is especially devastating to those living in the technological world, for here they enjoy everything conveniently at their disposal -- everything that is, except the playful process of discovery itself."

 

So what I expect of class is that we recognize the truth of it. That the only way democratic institutions can work is based upon an aristocracy of merit. And this aristocracy must be aligned with the purposes, and make allowance for the limits of government, educational, religious and business agency. We need to eliminate the wishful thinking of the masses and pretending that there are no Enablers or Makers who know better. And of course it means that we must support the good Enablers and attack the bad ones, as with everyone and everything else.

Here's one more thing about class. Everybody hates a level playing field. Think about it, then read this.

Social and Ethical Power in America

Having become a Stoic and other things over the past several years, it occurs to me that I am rather mired in a single-minded public-spirited public. They are single-minded in that they find that questions of the Humanities are under all but a few circumstances relegated to the realms of democratic activist politics. Now I may be wrong about this because in certain ways such matters are above my pay grade. But I suspect that the American High Society has been hollowed out. 

My gut feelings tell me that if I were to hang out with Condi Rice, I would find myself in good company 99% of the time. My gut also tells me that the clutch of people in that broad circle are not likely to find much comfort in the public. That is to say that there is a rare breed of American who can reliably be found in Society but find themselves outcast from most of our public institutions, like Brandeis or marginalized to the point of a hand to mouth existence. But I often wonder what kind of club I could belong to if it remained meaningful to belong to a club. I am at a loss. 

As some of my readers know, I was just writing something about gun control advocacy with the following observation: 

..there is a general assumption that more public debate resulting in more regulation can make more sense or people more safe. It is a fundamental assumption of gun control - that there is something you can do with the law through the power and force of the state - that you can change other people's behavior for the better. Notice how this takes the almost singular form of democratic political activism and law, not intellectual persuasion, not social motivation, not religious doctrine, not transcendental discipline.

So I'm wondering where that intellectual persuasion, social motivation, religious doctrine and transcendental discipline might be emanating. OK religious doctrine we can guess, but the others? In fact, the matter struck me in the temple today as I attended the ceremony presenting my daughter into her sorority. Didn't there used to be something called High Society? Weren't there social practices unto which most considerate and ethical Americans submit themselves. Didn't we once have ourselves figured out into some manner of meritocratic social hierarchy? 

People act as if this never really existed. I honestly can't say because I myself am not old enough to have been an adult at the period in American history when it might have. But I look at the Sunday Morning Talk Shows and I am truly staggered by the collegial mendacity. How do they get away with it, and where is a sensible grown up to find comforting respite? 

I guess this is an open question. 

First GLBT Christian Church

This church doesn't exist yet. Yet I am hopeful. 

The establishment of a GLBT church would send a powerful signal of self-determination, independence and strength to all concerned. I cannot imagine that the founder of this church would go down in history as a saint, at least within the denomination and certainly with the same moral inevitability such advocates point out is their due.

Let us stipulate that inevitability. What does it mean then if this course is not taken? What does it mean for the actual celebration of Christian faith if those whose interpretation of Christianity fail to establish their own denomination but depend upon the law and the coercive powers of the State? I should pause a while, perhaps a day or a week to truly reflect on the notion, but I already have my conclusion. This conclusion is based upon the parallel of my own African forebears in their role as the negro race in America. Our path, unique as it was may or may not serve as a proper example, but I cannot ignore the thought illustrated by Harold Cruse in his works on plurality. Cruse said that the failures of Reconstruction and the post-Reconstruction Era were due to the failing of legislation of the Blair Bill. The Blair Bill would have established a fund and precedent for 'separate but equal' educational facilities for the negro race in the South. Cruse argues convincingly that the establishment of black run, owned and operated schools would have not only educated but also provided the critical management skills necessary for independence within the negro race. That the failure of those ex-slaves to run their own schools established in them a permanent cultural dependency that wasn't eliminated for 100 years. Instead of black power consciousness expressed in the Ocean Hill Brownsville context, that kind of news would have been made a century earlier - so goes Cruse' argument with which I agree. So if the destruction of the Negro Problem could have happened in 1868 instead of 1968, we might have had our first black President in 1908 instead of 2008. Imagine that.

Instead, America chose, more or less, the path of integration rather than independence. There is something to be said for integration, in fact a great deal. But the problem with integration which I and many of my contemporaries touch upon from time to time, is that if the thing you integrate into has problems with integrity, there is no alternative but protest and reform. You cannot abolish that which you do not control. What's worse, is that you might have a generation grow up thinking that there is no acceptable independent alternative at all. The classic example of this is the use of the term "the master's tools" - such people actually believe that institutions such as banks or real-estate agencies and even capitalism itself is something that belongs to white folks and works for white folks because they are white. To them, there is no such thing as 'black capitalism', ie capitalism itself is a species of white supremacy. 

One percieves such twisted logic at the heart of that political movement which seeks in vain to destroy Chick Fil A and Westboro Community Church without commensurate effort to raise their own churches and fry their own chickens. The answer I suspect such politicos must embrace axiomatically is that Christianity itself is wholly and entirely incompatible with homosexuality and all forms of non-normative sexual expression. That's a very large presumption which I doubt, given my understanding that all have sinned and fallen short of the Kingdom of God which was what I was taught. Even with a less extreme version, parallel again to the destruction of the negro race, that no Christian church could abide sanctifying certain marriages on essentialist bases, the precedent for the establishment of a new denomination stands clear. Abyssinian Baptists were founded in 1908.  African Methodist Episcopalians made their break in 1787. 

It seems quite a stretch for me to assert that the practice of integration necessarily breaks the integrity of institutions that have heretofore discriminated. That can only be the case in which the matter of discrimination is more than mere taste or convention but principle. Such doctrines, such as the ordination of women in my own Episcopal Church were resolved through the slow deliberate process of reform and protest. And I am aware of one of the bitter beneficiaries of such affirmative actions. While her story may or may not be characteristic, the end result may be indicative of how unsatisfactory reform is, for those raring to go. Now.

At some point, any frustration and outrage that doesn't consider the alternative to reform cannot be taken seriously. If that alternative is the establishment of separate but equal, I see that as the most morally fit. The alternative that seeks allies in the destruction of that which will not reform, well that's a choice which holds more dangerous consequences. For the sake of gay marriage which claims to be an affirmation of love, one is hard pressed to find a more foolish choice. 

 

Sticks and Stones

Theory is the same as practice, in theory.

I can't remember where I found an excerpt about the salty language of soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines. I'm thinking that it was Bill Whittle, but I couldn't find it there. The point of the passage was that in combat or conflict, deeds matter and words are merely the sauce on the meat. Even as a writer, I find that to be true.

Yesterday I wanted to post onto my little Facebook box, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." It is because some words had hurt me, which they can when you decide to be serious and sensitive and take people at their words. Interesting phrase that, take people at their words. It means that in lieu of any experience with that person, without having the benefit of witnessing their deeds, we allow their words alone to carry the full burden of understanding them.  We inherently know this to be an act of faith, because we only know people, in the French context of the verb 'connaitre', when we associate with them, when we watch them walk and hear them talk and touch them and share deeds with them. But we know words, in the French context of the verb 'savoir' as we know facts. We consume them whole and digest them instantaneously and completely. So taking someone at their word can be a frighteningly risky exercise. We accept the complex weight of their humanity, something we know cannot be immediately determined, based upon words that do indeed have immediate and total weight. 

This is why insults hurt so much, especially when we have not decided fully what our own complex human weight is. If we thing we might be an idiot, and somebody calls us that, or tells us that someone is an idiot. Hoo brother, the full set of implications of being an idiot, especially true idiots we have known, comes down in full force in that one word directed at you, at your weak spot. 

There are other interesting implications of having people taken at their words. What if your own private words about yourself become public without your knowledge. Now, people you do not know posesses this ammo against you, in your own words - of the millions you might craft to build up the person you want to be, these bricks of your mental construction hurled back at you. If your psyche has bones, they may well be broken.

Fortunately, we humans have a very fine ability to distinguish our dreams from our reality, fairy tales from experience. While it's true that our minds recreate memories from words and images and sounds and recreate the past whole cloth, rather than fetch a reel of experiential film from vast archives in our heads, we still know what we've actually experienced from what we've heard tell. That is especially true of our experiences with people.

It is the actual deeds with actual people that matter, no matter what our words say. In fact, we need to be able to shock and adjust our systems with bricks of words in order to prepare us for actual experience. The more we savoir, the better we can connaitre. The more we can absorb the immediate impact of the symbols of communications, the better we are prepared to deal with the complexities of the real world. Words prepare us for sticks and stones. That is, in the end, their ultimate value. Words without deeds are fictions without the leaven of actions. They are deceptions whose veracity is unchallenged. They are narrative and counter-narrative, things best left in computers, libraries, archives and other deserts of humanity. 

In the post-modern world many of us live in, it is quite possible to live in such a desert bubble - to have never actually been punched in the nose, to have no broken bones or scars. I grew up in a time and place when such experience was to be expected, I will speak more about that under Vigilance Games. Mike Tyson says that everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. That's for real. But absent a left to the kidney or a right to the jaw, it's awfully easy to get caught up in verbiage and mistake the map of literature for the territory of human life. I have a visceral hatred for the overlawyered aspect of our contemporary life and wish more disputes were settled via fisticuffs. Suing somebody out of their livelihood does not require courage, merely conviction. We are awash in words and words of conviction. They may be cheap, but that doesn't change their immediate impact on our minds.

That is why it is critical for the free man, for the whole human, to keep in close touch with sticks and stones and broken bones. We must be immersed in the physical to compensate for our overlong dalliances in the verbal and symbolic realms. I see that too many of us have been too easily convinced and wordsmithed into foolish inversions of normal human behavior. We change our diets - what we put into our body - not because of what our body is telling us, but because of what we read in a book or saw on television. 

As part of my martial education it is important for me to feel the lessons of what we know in human history that the body can experience, not simply to hear them. I have the habit of overthinking and weighing words very precisely. This can be foolish when not counterbalanced by hands-on experience.

Words will only break your bones if you take them too seriously. If somebody tells you to take a long walk off a short pier, or to go fuck yourself, you would be a fool to comply. I think the schoolyard kids have the right response, "why don't you try and make me?".  

Submitted for Cobb's Rules: Gordian knots are plentiful, always have a sword ready.

A Martial Education

"I don't believe in guns"
"What do you mean? They're not fucking leprechuans!"
-- Seven Psychopaths 

I have determined that my liberal arts education is complete. It took too long, and I wasted too much time on it. But at least I have gotten to the part at which the appeals to to those pop and middlebrow entertainments that are the vast legacy of mass communications fail to inspire me. I am resolved, for the most part, to the high arts and they give me genuine pleasure. It took a surprisingly long time. 

I'm not even sure that I was aware that I was in that pursuit. I was scooting along via inertia and aversion. The 'Noble Arena' I began seeking back at State, was more of an escape from Midnight Star in hopes that hiphop would get better, than anything more than a isolated fondness for Liszt and Debussy. It took me years to find the kind of industrial hiphop I truly loved as I suffered through Finitribe, Bad Brains, Barmy Army, and Skinny Puppy. It took me a decade to get past the Granta school of literature. It took me a very long time to settle on the sort of fashion I wish to use to convey my civilization in unspoken ways. All of this continues to evolve, but without the sense of urgency that kept telling me that I still didn't get it. I get it now. My Liberal Arts eduction is settled. I understand what to do with my frustrations when what is commonly out there insults my intelligence.  Also importantly, I know what and what not to expect from a deep dive into Epictetus or Sophocles. I can appreciate trees as well as forest. 

So now what I am missing is a Martial Education.

In parallel, all of my life I have thought at length about the fact that I did not have to go to Vietnam. And in my first full-time job I spent a lot of time with Vietnam vets. I remember how counter-intuitive it seemed to me that they were so level headed, honest and mellow as compared to that nacscent gangsta culture that marked the knuckleheads in my old neighborhood engaging the drug trade. But who was more deadly was never in question. 

There were times I flirted with the idea of ROTC, but never quite seriously. I very much would have liked to have gone to the Coast Guart Academy, but I was a lousy long distance swimmer and I didn't want to cut my hair. The idea of overcoming such obstacles was not something I placed a lot of stock in. There have been three or four times in my life I was determined to take my body image into my own hands and each was only a partial success. I've always routed around the failure. I'm tough and scrappy. I never really wanted to be.. well it's more honest to say that I long, long ago gave up on being tall, heroic and commanding. I've never even slam dunked on a 9 foot hoop, nor bench pressed more than 180. I spent all of high school shorter than 5' 7" and under 150 pounds. I've always had an indomitable spirit, admittedly to the point of what was always interpreted as arrogance. But it was the sort of arrogance one does not assume of bigger, taller men. In them it's called 'natural leadership'. In my last days before fatherhood, embarked on my penultimate physical fitness project. It was called the 'huge project' in which my aim was to make myself look an order of magnitude more pugnacious and swaggery. I suppose exactly like LL Cool J without the tatoos.

I started eating like a pig, and I really haven't stopped since 1993, roughly 50 pounds ago. I had a short hiatus in '03 with a literal poverty diet and dropped down to 185 via cardio-kickboxing and unemployment. But all the flab is back, on top of my sturdy frame. And quite frankly it's all belly. From a rear view, I still look athletic, but the side view is an abomination. I need to crank off four inches of waist. The odd thing is that until about a year ago, I had a certain amount of confidence that one crash program, maybe six weeks of unemployment, was all I needed to get right back to where I was in '93. Now I realize what foolishness that is. I still had a decent beach volleyball game, but that was all skill and not athleticism. 

I'm joining the geriatric gym this week. But that's only part of the story - what I'm really after is the martial mindset. What I'm coming to realize like a boot to the head that what I've been thinking about the martial world is all just theory, fiction and video games. OK that's a kind of triple redundant statement - but it has not been about getting in and kicking any physical ass. And so having purchased in my fever, some EDC and tactical folding blades, and taking shooting quite seriously, it has become quite plain to me that I need to just get out there and do. I have tools, but having the tools is meaningless. It's worse than meaningless, it's foolishness. 

I don't expect that mastery will come soon or simply, but I know that competence will. And that amounts to putting in something every day. And so I've begun to stretch - without the preconceived notion that I'm going to get over some magic bubble and suddenly become what I once was, only smarter. This is to a new body. A new beginning. Because it's necessary. I am no longer satisfied with the comeraderie of first responders. It has got to be me.

 

The Scientific Catholic Church

I found this interesting comparison between Catholics & Protestants on Quora:

Although blessed with diversity, Christian belief generally has some primary, fundamental doctrines that create a backbone from which virtually all other denominations and branches must adhere. Regarding Catholic and Protestant points of departure, I would suggest the following:Catholics tend to believe:

1. The power and primacy of the pope
2. Emphasis on Mary the mother of Jesus
3. Employment and acknowledgment of specific saints
4. Confession of sins to an earthly emissary
5. Increased regard for ritual and human works/effort in attaining salvation

Certainly there are more, but if I had to contain it to five (which I will also do below) it would be those. As for Protestants, I would go back to Martin Luther's language in elucidating the differences: Protestants tend to believe:

1. Sola Scriptura: The Bible is the only authority for Christian belief.
2. Sola Gratia: Grace can only be given by God and is the only way to salvation, not works or personal merit.
3. Sola Fide: Salvation comes through an individual's faith or relationship with Jesus Christ, not through sacraments.
4. Solo Christo: Jesus Christ is the only mediator between God and man, and only through Christ comes salvation.
5. Soli Deo gloria: Glory and honor goes only to God; no human—however sainted, canonized, or humanly honored—deserves to be religiously praised.

My reading of this gives me an immediate reaction. If you are in any way agnostic, or even atheist, you would have to admit that the Catholic faith is a great deal more practical than the Protestant faith. IE if God actually doesn't exist, or if man isn't inherently able to understand the nature and will of God, then the Catholic church is the one to go to.

In short, if you were a scientist and were to build an institution aimed at determining the mind and will of God, you would build it much more like the Catholic Church than you would the Protestant Church. 

By the way, I never get tired of repeating the fact that I was taught both Biology and Computer Science by men wearing the collar. 

The Next Mr. Tibbs

Apparently, there is a 'superstar' cardinal in the running to become the next Pope. His name is Cardinal Peter Turkson. And since there is a sizeable Progressive black American contingent here still doing some thinking about such things, he represents the next Head Negro In Charge. But like many other black heroes, he is a hero not because he has done anything in particular, but that generally speaking, he's the boss over white people. There has been a running joke and brag that is somewhere between 30 and 500 years old about who white people's 'worst nightmare' is. You may recognize "He's *your* President" as another variation of this joke. 

In order to pin an intellectual handle on this concept, I'm going to overload the previous handle of 'The Tibbs Threshold'. You see, there is this famous American movie set in the Jim Crow South, or perhaps just after the beginning of its decline, starring Sidney Poitier - a gentleman of distinction of the sort you only seem to get in James Bond movies today. And Poitier represents Authority and in the process of solving a homicide becomes all sorts of white people's worst nightmare.. etc. Once I invented a concept called the Tibbs Threshold - which was necessary for me while I engaged the dubious occupation of amateur race man. The idea of the Tibbs Threshold is that some white people will insult black men without recognizing that he might have sensibilities developed enough to be insulted. This is essentially how I feel any time someone tries to give me a pound. I don't do dap, and I don't like being called by my first name. "But I thought you were a revolutionary brother, down with the post-colonial struggle." No. 

At any rate, the significance of any Tibbs figure, be he Barack Obama, Derrick Bell, Thabo Mbeki or Reginald Lewis is that he is a sort of unimpeachable source of black power and is a real authority over matters for which black Americans have been underrepresented, ignored or barred. And of course there are always efforts to associate this man with the people. Now of course this doesn't always work. Lots of these would-be role models, heroes and power proxies aren't actually capable or even interested in becoming a champion of the common man. But by definition, that is what a clergyman is supposed to be all about. The leader of the Catholic Church must certainly be about that - so the probability that Turkson would be for the people is relatively high.

But who are Turkson's people? There is where the racial expectations of black Americans are likely to be dashed, raising all kinds of interesting questions back and forth. And that's about all I'm ready to speculate about at this point. 

A King of Reason

I am reminded that there are quite useful bodies of knowledge out there that serve the exact purposes of we ships at sea. I have the good fortune that people are looking out for me, even in my doldrums of doubt and nary progress. One such rescue came in the form of a pointer to an award winning philosopher by the name of Alvin Plantinga. While you and I have been guessing, he has been proving. 

In my dreams of avarice, I am in possession of a great mansion. It is all I have ever truly desired. For in this house is a parlor populated by poets, priests and politicians and I let them have at it. Something like my blog in its heyday, I suppose. Yes, I want a salon. I rather guess I ought to go about designing it, neh? All this online scribbling is wonderful but there's no food in it. 

Anyway, for the T50 to ever get a chance to have a private audience, which would ultimately be publicized, this ought to be an interesting way to go about it. At any rate, here's this dude. Check him out. 

Getting Religion

Twice now, I've been hearing that religion is something I must have recently got, or should be in the process of getting. It's a puzzling thing to hear, and I'm a bit disconcerted about it. 

Here's what I think is going on. I think that I have all the inward commitments without spending much time in my outward expressions. I'm also playing a long, big game, and take it for granted that most serious people are. But in the way I suppose that warfighters must do their pushups every day, since I don't exercise some clearly visible form of religious discipline it might be construed that not only am I not in the long game, but that I might be indifferent to it. 

Well. I'm not going to pretend it's not complicated, because it is very complicated - my spirituality is complicated to the point of being exhausting. Talking about it is like dragging a large stuffed dog out of the closet and describing how it was when it is alive. But the long and short of it is this:

I do not understand why there are Catholics and Protestants who are not mutually exclusive. In other words, without a clear definition of procedural heresy, I am willing to bet my eternal soul that my interpretation of the meaning of the life of Christ is just as valid as that of any ordained minister. And I base that on the fact that the words have changed. What words? Why the words by which churches organize their rites to communication the Gospel to the laity. That means either the church is less than certain about what and how it should communicate, or it percieves that it must adapt its messages to the people and the times. We've been through this in reference to Spinoza.

Somewhere there must be some fraction of The Theology that explains how in some way the change from Latin Mass to English has improved the understanding of the laity in the matters of their own salvation. The implication being that saying some different set of marginally less well understood words in rites may have jeopardized the souls of the millions before Vatican II. Unless it didn't and the spirit of God is not captured in recitation at all. Between these extremes is a truth that I never expect any priest to sit down and explain to me. On the other hand, I cannot say that I've given too many that opportunity. Rather I am convinced that I'm already a good enough Christian in my public deeds - which is public writing and yet not so presumptuous as to second guess the Grace of God. In other words, if I'm wrong, then maybe all of Lutheranism or Presbyterianism or Methodism is wrong. If you can't explain the theological differences between those sects, you're really not in a position of religious authority as far as I'm concerned. But if you can tell me why an Adventist might be a better sort of Christian than a Baptist, then you might inform my own syncretism. 

Outside of that, I know I'm a good enough Christian, so much so that I don't bother saying so. Actions speak louder than words.

But since I do deal in words, it is important to me that mine be clear and cause the effects for which they are spoken and written. And in fact I do have within this corpus an entire section of Matters of the Spirit. When I last left things off, I was wrestling with the foolishness of the New Atheists. And yet that is another something which is bothersome. 

I will simply say that I do in fact need my own personal priest, and I think of myself often in the same way as the Clint Eastwood character in Million Dollar Baby. I am not bloody likely to get the sort of priest I think I deserve, which is actually all I'm really looking for - when I bother to look. It is something I expect I can find in the best of friends, which is why I am seeking a particular sort. You see I'm looking out for my soul and defending it against corruption but I need someone who can understand what kind of shit I'm apt to deal with in the process. I know myself and I am not looking for absolution, just someone who can recognize the level of deception I am capable of and occasionally remind me of what I'm supposed to be doing because I should, not merely because I can. I don't need abstract scolding, I need somebody to hear out my dastardly daydreams understand their deliciousness and tell me of consequences I hadn't considered. Walking the straight and narrow is boring. Pushing a mafioso off a roof is much more satisfying. Surely in the eyes of God, the risk of the latter is more valuable than the discipline of the former. So I could use the kind of spiritual partner who understands why I watch gangster films and climb fire escapes. 

Sometimes I get the feeling that I am dealing with people who are unable to  deal with Colonel Jessup and I wonder if that's the sort of religious expression they are expecting out of me. 

I am not on a mission to comfort some restlessness or brokenness in my heart. I continue to seek wisdom in all of its manifestations. Sooner or later I expect to come to a reconciliation of religion and philosophy and all sorts of other things too tiresome to discuss at the moment. To me, religion is the application of rigorous self-discipline to moral improvement and spiritual refinement. Religious organizations, like the Christian Church give us a template, a form and a set of frameworks and communities within which we may pursue and apply that discipline. I think I've got mine all set, but I am not utterly convinced I could not be improved by the right friendships and relationships with proper members of proper sects. But I do think I'm special. 

I think I'm special enough to merit the consideration of all I've written on the subject. Absent that, I will consider advice as advice. 

There's another thing here as well, and that is the extent to which I perceive that weakness of the Church to exercise its discipline in an effective way towards the betterment of society that doesn't sound like and yet underweigh by half any marketing campaign. We live in a very corrupted society and world, and it seems to be all the Church can do is to barely hold on. That's a problem. 

Joy Is Everywhere

Christian Folk Mass code deep in my kernel. (c.f. Holy Name of Jesus School, 1973)

The Duplicitous Narrative of Decline

The other day I imagined myself to be an executive for Hostess. This was, in fact, a meditation I made during a shower. In this scenario, I invited the head of the Teamsters local to a private meeting in which I would disclose the future strategy of the management team. The trick was about how to make the offer significant enough to demonstrate that it was of utmost importance that he attend without giving up any pertinent information. This is something that I presume attorneys do all the time, and so I paid that nuance no further mind.

At this meeting I would reveal to the labor leader that our best minds have seen no strategic way forward for the company. That ultimately we were second rate, that our competitors were better funded, better managed and really just cared about these stupid cupcakes more than we did. It was a come to Jesus meeting showing that we are not deluded about the future of Twinkies in an America obsessed with fitness and terrified of obesity. We would tell the labor leader that we're basically going to run this puppy into the ground, or become a successful pariah organization rather like those in the tobacco industry.

So Mr. Labor Leader, should we give ourselves a raise and hasten our own inevitable demise, or should we continue to put on a false face and whistle while we work for nothing?

We understand that a corporation is the creature that can be abandoned and so executives and labor can move on to ride the next beastie to fame, or not. It is not a singular reflection of executive or labor skill. It's an indicator, but you need a bigger sample size than one. But when you are convinced that decline is inevitable, what then? 

There must be a definite name for this dilemma. The 'classic' American pop culture reference is to Ra's al Ghul, the mentor of the Dark Knight, whose aim is to cleanse the world's corruption by fire. Is accellerating the death of the weak virtuous or cruel? Must one be cruel to be kind? Is there such a thing as creative destruction?

I believe that there is such a thing as creative destruction, but should one profit from the accelleration of decline? I am not sure. But I do know that I find subversion to be immoral. It is the duplicity that I am averse to. I cannot stand the idea that based on insider knowledge one is publically commited to the preservation of something one is privately determined to destroy. 

Do you see that pattern anywhere? How do you manage it?

The One True Religion

I would like to serve myself
And in all ways preserve my health
And in all things my conscience be
In all its force designed by Thee
The One True God of all there is
i.e. e.g. to wit and viz
The unity of pen and sword
Of mind and might
Of deed and word
Of Heaven's light in mankind's soul
And virtue's everlasting role. 

Harold Bloom has put forth one of the few genuinely new ideas I've heard. It is this, he centers our ideas about humanity in the Western Canon, in Shakespeare primarily. That is not too surprising. What is truly surprising and new is that he compares the authors of the Bible to Shakespeare. In other words, he implies without insistance that the Bible, as a canonical work of literature has its merits as any other work of literature. 

Absorbing this implies that everything about the best ideas human beings are able to absorb can be found expressed in the best literature. Therefore the Bible should be read as literature and that the ideas presented therein should be judged on their literary merit and in the ineffible way that critics like Bloom and all readers must deal with the text. Bloom warns not to read too much into the author by way of the text but to read everything the text says and implies about its subjects, especially how it makes us think as it directs our thoughts. I take this to mean that reading is a sort of possession, it is ours to consider the nature of the possession itself, not the nature of the spellcaster.

This aligns with my early polytheisms and the meme of religion as mankind's first education. It therefore transmutes in every way the roles of the religious and those institutions built around them. There is no difference between that moral instruction of any human author, and thus no lesser greatness in those who identify our spirit in their writing work. Writing literature, teaching literature is ministry. The secular professor of English, professes his faith in the literature he teaches to liberate the souls of the readers. 

I say this just having finished Charles Stross' fourth in the Laundry Series - the Apocalypse Codex. And so a new circle is complete for me (wow), linking literature, science fiction and religious texts all in the business of creating in humanity its own humanity. And in so doing, the framework for all of the humanities has become clear. I have Voltaire's realization confirmed again. There is one true religion. 

God,  it takes a lot of time to program a proper mind.

The Impossibility of Secular Peace

Let us imagine in the abstract what it is that the religious take to be 'Gods Peace'. In my Episcopalean tradition one of my favorite blessings was given in the context of Phillipans 4:7 - the peace that passeth all understanding keep your hearts & minds in Christ (who lives and reigns forever).  And Christians are to know that God's peace is different in substance than man's peace. (John 14:27). I am not one to quote the Bible chapter and verse - considering the dozen odd English translations alone, the letter of the law is vauge. I am invested in the spirit of Christian ethics. 

But if God's peace is different than man's peace, are we then speaking of personal or geopolitical peace? I immediately and perhaps ultimately believe that the two are definitely not the same thing. There is little question in my mind that God's peace is personal. It is what I experience at Communion. Every Time. 

But something about the idea of Hell threw me a curveball. Because if Hell is a geopolitical hell, as in, a real hot place at the center of the Earth, and not a metaphysical personal hell as in the inescapable madness of a meaningless existence without the possibility of spiritual transcendence and redemption, then we have a problem here. 

Hell is 'required' as the punishment of a kick ass god. If you're good, he lets you off the hook is all. That is a different interpretation of the Christian God than what I have. That is the Elohist, Old Testament, Destroyer of Sodom. The King of Kings who brings down the mighty, literally. In short, this is no dude. This is the God of Abraham aka Allah the Merciful. 

So let's cut to the chase, shall we? If we are to live under secular law, is the peace provided by men sufficient for the religious? Is Humanism good enough? No. If you stop a war between men (and I use war because it's easy to see it as the greatest sin of mankind, deserving of something on the scale of Hell) you can still go to Hell. Such acts, outside of the aegis of religious law and doctrine are all those things that fall outside of the scope of religious salvation. 

Now Jesus Christ said blessed are the peacemakers. But blessings are not enough. Blessings are for sneezes. Salvation is the bottom line, isn't it? God demands God's Peace, or else it's off to Hell for the lot of you heathens, no matter what good you do for secular peace. 

Right?

An Intricate Question for Martin Amis

The good folks over at Goodreads have invited me to pose a question for Martin Amis. It's an honor I will do the dubious thanks of writing in longhand over here at Cobb. The opportunity to be drawn to the attention of the man I find to be one of the last and greatest of this generation is.. an invitation to which I will oversubscribe.

My interest in Amis is not coincidently related to my writing skeptically about the pursuit of religion here in the West in the Sun God Theory which is inspired in part by a story he wrote called The Janitor on Mars. I began reading Amis and other British writers somewhere back around 1990 when I got a little tired of T. Boyle and happened upon a journal called Granta. Or that's what I recall at the moment. Additionally of course, I was long tired of those more or lesss flat characters which were to be the role-monkeys for a man such as me, black and I wondered what there was worth conserving in all of Western Civilization. Reading Borges can do that. Since I was accustomed to reading out of school and out on a limb, picking up Amis wasn't difficult and was greatly rewarded. London Fields, Time's Arrow, Dead Babies, Money, Einstein's Monsters, Heavy Water and finally the book that broke my life in two Koba the Dread. 

Amis has the great advantage of good company, something you rarely get without the right tackle in your box. And who would know what bait to use without hearing a sea story or two from the keepers of all that? It's not much fun reading directly out of the Prentice Hall Guide to English Literature. That advantage I percieve manifest in the company of men of wit and taste who actually try to be, unpretentiously, men of wit and taste. We over here have Woody Allen. I don't mean to complain much but Amis has had his headstart, the kind which obviates the heedless sensing and searching for a young man who wants to be something other than a rebel, a dropout, a sports hero, a billionaire or a gawdawful professional. We're connected by the language to the imaginations of millions, except the millions all watch TV and movies circumscribed by the vocabulary of an eighth grader; an American eight grader. I suppose that's why most of the time I'm listening to histories narrated by Simon Prebble. Somewhere in time, men were more than this.

So it falls to men of imagination who haven't had to hack through too many literary jungles to remind us of our possible virtues and our present failures. CYPHER: Gee-zus! What a mindjob. You're here to save the world. You gotta be shitting me. What do you say to something like that?

The rest of us, meaning me, are tired. After 4000 orgasms and 600 books. Meh, I'd rather compute. The adrenaline is not coming from those worldly pursuits. In fact, I think I was sold a bill of goods on adrenaline. It turns out that gin is just as good. So we read a bit of Martin and a precious few others narrowing in on something ineffable. But it's all too private and for me that's all it ever was. All the celebrity and community has been doled out to narcissistic sociopaths whose vices remind us to play it close to the vest and be happy that we're not actually James Bond, the last man. It's hard to be free. It's hard to be free when men of imagination stand in the margins society, when virtue seems idiosyncratic, when we need writers like Martin Amis more than they are able to save the world. 

It's YouTube that can remind us that the spark lies in odd places. Some kid plays the guitar, or stacks cups, or does the robot and you gasp. There are supposed to be writers like there are piano virtuosos, and we're supposed to mob them or at least wave a lighter. But I guess most people want to just dance and not read, and I suppose that's what has gone wrong. I would be more declarative but I'm not so sure as a man like Amis must be.

And yet I could not, for the life of me, find anything to do with The Pregnant Widow but fall asleep. Can it be that the days of men are numbered? Maybe it was just a bad book, maybe I've already exhausted my disgust for those enticements that were supposed to be so spicy to the Boomers and so have no use for it said in more righteous English than my own.

So after all that, my question is simple. Are we not men? What will it take to move us off our asses? ls David Petraeus the last among us all that both think and act? Is there room in our world for men, or has our imagination on the whole, failed us? Are we unpledged ronin to a dead daimyo whose legacy is lost to the wind? I have lived my entire life in an era whose greatest hero is a man who made us to stare at perfect metal and glass boxes - the titan who built the wealthiest company on the planet by making us all look at i- stuff. A kingdom of introversion. A black hole of short attention spans spewing Hawking radiation of bucks to the Martyr of Silicon Valley. 

But the question is more particular. It is about a Europe about to crumble. It is about an America, that like a nuclear gas turbine, can run on anything that burns. Neither seems to serve any principle well and the unprincipled way of life seems to dominate. We all play act at manly virtue fearing we can never really afford it.  Except.

Except in our reading. In our listening for inspiration. In hearing the moment in a sweaty apartment on Houston summer night of the echoes of 20 million dead told true in the wake of the madness that inverts society and is born in the bearing of the man who must finally face death unafraid. Oh yeah, there's that. But how to make it public. How to make what we know to be true be the living way that rules the day? 

I suppose we gather our courage inches by inches, word by word and action by action.

Is that a question? 

Martin Amis is coming to America. Or perhaps he is here, I don't read the New Yorker or watch Charlie Rose enough to know. Is this the last refuge for a man who knows what freedom should be like? Here's the hard question. Can we rely with much certainty that we will rescue from mediocrity that which ought to support the best in us, or should we hack it out in the sticks? Does the Western city still work? Is it a metropolis or an aggregation of oddity? This seems to be a conversation I can only have here at midnight from my desk. Do you see my problem?

 

 

 

The Sun God Theory

Several years ago I entertained the theory that the Sun is God. It's a bit Fredkin-esque, but I'd like to repeat it for the purposes of archival.

Ed Fredkin was one of the early eccentrics who conceived of the universe as digital automata. If I'm not mistaken, Stephen Wolfram tread a similar path. 

Here's my idea. God is the Sun and everything we think about the God's mysterious ways can be encapsulated in the ways and means that the Sun does what it does. Except we are a bit too primative to understand what the Sun actually does, much less can we divine it's purposes. However thin the theology is, what is less questionable is the matter of physics.

If we can believe in evolution then we should be able to imagine the almost infinite combinations of molecule positions in the middle of a star's fusion. If it is reasonable to think of a star as a gigantic state machine, then at any moment, the position of all of its atoms could have meaning. What if the noise coming through the radio as the static created by the Sun was just a single word we simply do not have the capacity to decode? What if there is a message in that, not for us, but for other stars? Or what if divine intervention could be the work of neutrinos, or sunshine? 

I would certainly entertain any proof of the sun being non-sentient, and I can think of a few ways to begin such a proof. When I originally thought of this, I thought of the entire outer layers of the Sun just being a protective shell around an Earth sized intelligence at its core. I'm not sure that it is within our power to disprove that, but then I wouldn't know exactly where to look. Well, actually, I'm too lazy to go disprove what I think to be a very cool idea, at least as cool as faster than light travel. Still, when you look, there are a lot of non-obvious things about the Sun. 

The problem with the Sun god theory is that is rather inverts the anthropomorphism of the all powerful God. I mean it would be rather sad to think that what humans want, need and have defined as the mission and purpose of God was of little substance outside of our local volume of Solar System. We want our god to be God of the Universe, but what if he was just a dude in a planet sized reverse Dyson Sphere in the middle of Sol? Worse, what if he were a robot with a bad sense of humor left behind by a bigger robot? 

If we found god-like powers in a local god, would we keep looking for a bigger god? I suspect the answer to that is yes, which is part of the twisted sense of humor embedded in human nature. But the point of all this speculation isn't to throw a curveball to our current theology so much as it is to contemplate the awesome compute power of a star-sized state machine. Just wow on that. 

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.